Elizabeth Chadwick - Shields of Pride

She swallowed and controlled both her temper and her patience. ‘It is obvious what you must do. Write to the constable in Nottingham and Conan at Rushcliffe, telling them to come at once. You are responsible for giving sealed parchments to messengers and Ralf will have had much to send out today. It will not be hard to include another two.’

Fulbert gulped.

Linnet watched him wring his fat hands and wondered how he managed to create such wonderful, delicate script. Somewhere there had to be a hidden wellspring. ‘Yes or no?’ she said fiercely as he continued to mumble and scrutinize his feet.

‘Mistress, I will do my best.’ He darted her a look from beneath his brows and sidled towards the door.

Linnet’s heart plummeted. The man was a coward; she could read his intention clearly in his eyes. ‘God grant you forgiveness, for I will not!’ she hissed, her voice shaking and then, hearing herself, she compressed her lips. Jesu, I sound like Agnes de Rocher, she thought. What if I become like her? And she knew that at noon tomorrow, if Joscelin died, she would not care what she became.

Torch in hand, Ralf wound his way down into the bowels of the keep. The guards he encountered saluted him, their eyes shifting. The authority to command them was now his, but while his father still clung to life it was incomplete. And what he intended to do tomorrow did not meet with unanimous approval.

Ralf responded to the sidelong looks with an air of supreme indifference but, behind his mask, he was irritated by their uncertainty. Indeed, they made him feel tense, for their attitude unsettled his own view of himself as being utterly in control. Once his father and Joscelin were out of the way, he told himself, everything would come right. The black bitterness would leave him and he would be healed.

He moved through the undercroft, the heat from the torch searing his face as he passed barrels, casks and bins of supplies, until he came to the cells. Behind stoutly barred doors set with small iron grilles for observation of the prisoners, Joscelin’s men were being held captive together with those of his father’s soldiers who had objected to his taking command of Arnsby. Keeping guard were two Flemish mercenaries he had borrowed from Robert Ferrers. Although unmannerly and rough, they at least seemed to know how to use their weapons, which half of their countrymen didn’t, and they did as they were instructed without demur.

Finally, at the very end of the undercroft where the shadows were deepest, Ralf came to the bolted trap covering the mouth of the oubliette. He stood upon the door with its wrought-iron bandings, his legs planted wide, and imagined Joscelin twenty feet below him, staring up into the pitch blackness. The oubliette was a deep, windowless pit. Originally it had been constructed with the dual purpose of storing roots and confining difficult prisoners in hope of demoralizing them into submission. Underground seepage, however, meant that there was always six inches of murky sludge lying in the bottom of the pit and the roots were far better stored in the main undercroft. It was still, however, used occasionally for prisoners. A couple of days standing ankle-deep in cold water without food usually subdued the most stubborn captives - if they did not die of the lung fever first.

Ralf quivered. He could feel Joscelin’s presence as if the two of them were bound together by an umbilical cord. The temptation to open the trap and peer inside was almost unbearable. What was Joscelin doing? What was he feeling, knowing that in the morning he was going to die?

Ralf’s mind wandered back to a hot summer’s day when he was on the brink of adolescence. Joscelin had been fifteen then, big-boned and gawky with a voice like a cracked cup. Ralf remembered baiting him, taunting and teasing, following him round, refusing to leave him alone. In the end, Joscelin’s temper had snapped and he had turned upon his tormentor. Ralf had been injured but he had made far more of a fuss than his wounds warranted. Enough for their father to administer Joscelin a sound thrashing. Ralf could still taste the triumph of that day. At the time, he had thought it worth every bruise.

Of course, it had not lasted. Joscelin had run away, their father had blamed Ralf for it and the deception had come home to roost with a vengeance. Old fool. The torch sputtered and resin hissed at Ralf’s feet. He considered tomorrow’s revenge and through the triumph felt a disturbing frisson as he imagined Joscelin kicking at the end of a rope. A desperate need to see the thing accomplished warred with a feeling of utter revulsion. A small voice inside him was crying that he would never be free of Joscelin, whatever he did.

The torch was growing heavy and making his arm tremble. ‘Damn you!’ he snarled into the darkness and, turning on his heel, strode back towards light and company.

In the hall, he noticed that the scribe had returned from his visit to the latrine and was busy with his quill once more. He set his torch in an empty wall sconce and went over to the man.

‘How soon will you be finished?’ He braced his thin fingers on the trestle and leaned over the parchments.

‘Soon, my lord, v-very soon.’

Ralf eyed Fulbert’s trembling hand and then the script. That at least appeared neat and flowing even if its creator was a gibbering wreck. Well, he needed the man for now but he could soon and easily replace him. Scribes were ten a half-penny in Nottingham. ‘Make haste,’ he said. ‘And have the messengers ride out immediately you have finished.’

‘Yes, lord.’ Fulbert swallowed bulbously. Then his gaze settled beyond Ralf’s shoulder. Turning, Ralf saw Father Hubert standing to one side, his expression grim and his hands toying with a silver cross hanging on a cord from his belt.

‘Sir William is dead,’ announced the priest. ‘I think you should come to your mother’s chamber, my lord. He had some sort of seizure in his last moments and assaulted the lady Agnes. She is asking for you.’

Ralf looked down and gently opened the fists he had clenched on hearing Father Hubert’s news. So now he was indeed ‘my lord’ and no one in the keep to gainsay his will. ‘Tell her I will come as soon as I can,’ he said, and felt a black desolation overshadowing his triumph.

Stomach rolling with fear, Fulbert finished working on the missives that Ralf had commanded him to write, sealing them in hot wax with the ring the young man had pulled from his father’s finger in the courtyard. His hands shook as he set all except two to one side. He paused to try and think but was horribly aware of time slipping away with each moment he procrastinated. He had a choice to make and make it now he must. He imagined Judgement Day with his sins on one side of the scales and his good deeds on the other. He remembered Lady Linnet’s accusing grey eyes. Then he thought of the fires of hell and came face-to-face with his own cowardice.

In trembling haste his hands went to the leaves of clean vellum at his left-hand side. He folded deftly, attached seals, scrawled salutations, but the pages were entirely blank. These he gave out to the messengers who were to ride to Robert Ferrers of Derby and the men of Leicester’s and Norfolk’s mesnie. The two letters most recently written, he gave to the men with the best horses. Fortunately for his quaking knees, Fulbert was not questioned. It was only polite custom that the king’s representative in Nottingham be informed of a baronial death, and if Lord Ralf wanted letters delivered to Rushcliffe then that was his own business.

When the last horseman had clattered out of the postern gate onto the road, Fulbert returned to his lectern, and screwing up the letters he had written on Ralf’s behalf summoning the rebels to Arnsby he tossed them in the great hearth. As soon as he was sure that they had been consumed by the flames, he went to rouse his wife and children and pack his belongings for another move.

In his prison, Joscelin stared upward and listened to the footsteps recede. Not even a glint of light betrayed the whereabouts of the trapdoor but he had felt Ralf’s presence above him. He had almost cried out, wanting to reason with his brother, but the thought of Ralf’s mocking smile had kept him silent. He knew no amount of reasoning would alter his brother’s decision. Ralf had thought it out this time, had taken rapid advantage of the situation and manipulated it well.

Joscelin had witnessed enough hangings to know what would happen. If the angle was right and the rope did not snag against the keep wall, death would be instantaneous as the force of the fall snapped his neck. If not, it would be a slow, strangling fight for air, flesh swelling and discolouring, bowels and bladder voiding their contents. Either way, there was only death and indignity at the end.

He wondered if Ralf would force Linnet to watch. The thought ripped through him like a knife and he wrenched himself around in the darkness and splashed through the cold mud until the wall brought him up short and he struck it with bruising force, then slumped with a groan of frustration. Every breath he took was invaded by the smell of mould and damp - like earth clinging to a corpse. Shaking with cold, he considered taking his own life so that when Ralf came to drag him out to the gallows tomorrow, he would be cheated of his final victory. He could dash himself against the wall until he knocked himself unconscious and drowned in the sludge at his feet. Or he could cut the veins in his wrists with the sharp notch on his belt. His breathing calmed while he considered the enormity of such a move. Ralf would still have won but not on the terms he desired.

Joscelin knew he would be damned forever if he took his own life, but then he could spend eternity in pursuit of Ralf. Slowly he put his hand upon his belt and unlatched it, rubbing his thumb over the notch of the buckle. Above him, at the trapdoor, he heard movement again, the gritty scuffling of footsteps and the sound of something heavy being dropped on the trap. He ran the leather through his hands, to and fro, and stared aloft, licking his lips. The heavy bolts on top of the trap were being stealthily drawn back. Was it morning already? His gut churned. Surely not. Perhaps Ralf was easing his conscience by offering him the comfort of a priest before they took him out to the gibbet.

The trap opened. Joscelin saw the dull glimmer of a small candle and the dark bulk of a lone human figure. It made no sound, save to grunt as it worked busily at something above. And then a thick hempen rope snaked down towards him and dangled to a halt at his collarbone.

For one horrible moment Joscelin thought that they had come to hang him here and now in the oubliette - swiftly in the dark, without witnesses - but his common sense soon reasserted itself. If they were going to hang him now they would have brought a ladder and more lights. And there would have been guards to restrain him while the noose was placed around his neck. Whoever had cast down the rope meant him well.

Breathing lightly, gazing upwards, he listened hard and thought he heard soft footfalls walking away. The trap remained open, and the rope ceased to quiver and hung straight down before his face. All was silent except for the drip-drip of water down the walls. In the faint light from above he could see the gleam of wet stone and the pale vapour of his breath. He latched the belt around his waist again and rubbed his palms upon his tunic, for they were suddenly slick with cold sweat. It was a long climb to the top of the oubliette, and if he fell from a height his body would be broken, for there was not enough water in the base of the pit to absorb his fall. But since the alternative was death, what did it matter?

He crossed himself, murmured a plea to God, then he leaped, setting his hands upon the rope and winding his feet around it. The tough hemp fibres burned his hands as he struggled upwards like a caterpillar on a stem. Hot pain lanced up his arms as, hand over hand, knees and thighs inching and gripping, he progressed towards the dull light of the trapdoor, knowing that at any moment he might be discovered.

By the time he hauled himself over the edge, his palms were blistered raw. Every muscle was screaming and there was a red mist before his eyes. He was horribly aware that he was making too much noise in his efforts to breathe, that he was easy, conspicuous prey. He crawled to his knees, panting hard, trying to keep quiet.