union.
Nevertheless I forced myself to rise, softly and soundlessly, from the bed and reach for the dirty shift and kirtle that I had discarded before supper. The borrowed gown from which John had hurriedly unlaced me lay on the floor among the jumble of his doublet and hose and I almost stumbled over them as I searched for my riding boots. Carrying them I turned the key cautiously in the lock, holding my breath as it scrunched over the cogs and wheels, but I heard no stirring from the bed. As I had hoped, the outer chamber was empty and the door to the stairway open. I paused at the foot of the stair to slide my feet into my boots and thread the laces. I could hear rats scuttling about in the straw and I could not face crossing the byre barefoot. The horses snuffled and shifted on their feet, dozing like the guard propped up on a sheaf of straw against the wall. Everything now depended on what I found when I opened the heavy oaken gates; if the yett had been lowered, escape from the tower would be impossible.
To Aycliffe Tower
Cuthbert
In the trees behind Brancepeth church the ground dropped away into the same deep, narrow dene on which the castle stood. Feeling my way in the dappled moonlight, I led my horse to the edge where I found a useful thicket of bushes to tie him to while I ventured hand over foot down the steep side, clinging to roots and saplings. Within minutes I reached secure footing on a sloping gravel path dug into the dene wall. I climbed, guessing it would lead to the sally gate of the castle mentioned by my drinking companion. Where the ground levelled out, sure enough, I caught sight of the moon’s glare reflected off a high expanse of the castle curtain, and at its base, flush with the stone wall, a small archway, defended by an overhead turret and sealed by a studded wooden door, just large enough to allow a mounted man to pass through.
Keeping within the shadow of the bushes, I turned and retraced my steps, for the path ended at the castle. The archway had been newly built, the door thick. Following the beck downstream towards the River Wear, I deduced that it would provide a discreet and direct route to the Bishop of Durham’s hunting lodge at Auckland, on the edge of Spennymoor: this had lately been developed into a military fortification, with a large bailey to accommodate troops mustering for the defence of the Scottish marches. The bishop had appointed Sir John Neville as its constable, but I asked myself if Sir John would have taken Cicely to such a busy place.
As a young squire in my father’s retinue, on the last of his annual tours of his northern manors, I remember hearing of a particularly poor and remote peel tower a few miles south of Auckland which struggled to wrest five pounds in annual revenue from woefully undernourished villeins. I wracked my brains for the name of the manor. The only thing I could remember of any relevance was that when the old earl’s will was revealed, Hal Neville had remarked that ‘the peel in the bog’ was one manor he was more than happy for the new earl to keep. Instinct told me that this might be where Cicely had been taken and, after all, it was my instincts that Lady Joan had encouraged me to employ in her daughter’s aid.
I collected my horse and followed the beck as far as the River Wear while the moon rose high in the sky, its bright light flooding over uneven moorland covered with large areas of gorse and dead bracken. Fast-moving shadows cast by scudding clouds did not hamper my progress south. I carefully avoided the small hamlets and fortified farms on the route, because on such moonlit nights lookouts would be posted for reivers, and I did not want to be sighted and apprehended as one of their ilk. But most of the country between Brancepeth and Richmond, thirty miles to the south, was Neville territory, and familiar to me; its manors were now distributed piecemeal between the two branches of the family. Lady Joan had, on occasion, detailed me to represent her in settling the feuds and disputes between tenants arising from this complicated division of property. So although I could not remember the name of the peel in the bog, I did have a rough idea of where it was located.
When I eventually spotted the tower, poking up like a lone tooth from a fetid maw of flat, moss-covered marsh, I faced the problem of approaching it without either being seen or swallowed in its mire. There was something truly ghastly about the way the moonlight glinted off the surrounding expanse of innocent-looking moss and reeds, concealing the lurking presence of a bottomless bog beneath; when I tried to urge him on, my horse snorted and danced on the spot, flatly refusing to take one step onto such unstable ground.
Common sense told me there had to be a safe path or else how did its inhabitants reach the tower? For nearly an hour I rode around the edge of the morass, trusting my horse’s instinct not to venture onto dangerous terrain, but I could find no evidence of a marked route. I contemplated leaving my horse and trying to navigate the bog on foot but as the moon dropped in the heavens I realized I would be taking a foolish and possibly fatal risk, particularly in the dark. There was no option but to wait until sunrise.
As a squire I had spent months with the marcher scouts, a troop of hard-bitten, border-reared fighting men recruited for their intimate knowledge of the wild lands between Scotland and England and their ability to move secretly through them on their dale-trotter ponies. They could survive for weeks patrolling their section of the march, living off the land and avoiding human contact whilst observing all movement of men and animals without detection. I admired their skills and I would now apply all I had learned of them. I hobbled my horse in an overgrown spinney. My stomach made sharp protest at its lack of nourishment but I silenced it with a long swig from the wineskin slung from my saddle, rolled myself in my campaign blanket and lay down to gather what sleep I could in the undergrowth.
The unmistakable sound of a hue and cry roused me a couple of hours later. Shouting, the long wail of a hunting horn and the answering sounding of hounds ripped through the veil of sleep and jerked me to my feet, sleeve dagger at the ready. Dawn had mottled the eastern sky in shades of red, pink and grey and my horse’s head was up, ears pricked. I crept to the edge of the spinney for a cautious search but could see no movement from the section of bog within my view. Nevertheless the sinister sounding of horn and hounds and the shouts of men in pursuit were loud to my left. I decided that being mounted would give me an advantage in a tight situation, and better visibility. In a matter of moments I had tacked up my horse and was heading out of the spinney.
The reason for all the noise quickly became evident: a mud-streaked figure was struggling at the edge of the bog, only yards from firm ground but caught thigh deep in wet mud and unable to reach safety. It was Cicely, almost unrecognizable, covered in mud, exhausted and clearly terrified, her face twisted into a desperate snarl as she rocked herself to free one foot or the other from the clinging ooze. The hue and cry was close by, any moment it would be here and what I assumed was a break for freedom would be brought to an end, or, more terribly, she would fall flat into the watery mud and disappear beneath its surface.
‘Do not move!’ I shouted, spurring my horse forward and galloping as near to her as the horse would go. ‘It is me, Cuthbert. I will get you out. Wait.’
I jumped from the saddle, commanded my horse to stand and ripped my blanket from the restraint of its buckling.
‘Oh, Cuddy, thank God it is you!’ Cicely’s eyes were enormous with fright in her mud-daubed face. ‘Quick! The dogs are coming.’
‘Yes, Cis, I can hear them.’ Turning briefly, I caught sight of a man on the path pushing sticks into the ground as a companion behind him hauled on the taut leashes of two scent-hounds in full voice. I took aim and threw out the blanket. ‘Here, catch this.’
One corner landed near her hand and she grabbed it like a drowning sailor might grab a life-line. ‘Do not let go, Cis! Lie down, I’m going to pull you out,’ I said urgently.
The Cicely I knew might have quibbled at falling face down in a bog but luckily she wasted no time in clutching two sides of the blanket in a white-knuckled grip and throwing herself horizontal, face down in the soggy blanket. Immediately there was less suction drag on the cloth and I managed to haul her swiftly towards me until I could hold her hands and heave her, drenched and panting, onto the firm ground.
I could see she was about to speak and I growled at her.