Knight Rupert: IV

Chapter IV.

From their castle-walls a man may see
The mountains far away.
-Hilaire Belloc

THE FOLLOWING morning dawned calm and blue, for the storm had spent itself in the night and left, as storms generally do, fair weather behind it. Sophia had been quite worn out by her long journey and slept late. When she awoke and found the sun so high in the sky, she was surprised that no one had come to call her and wondered whether she ought to go downstairs on her own. She waited for several minutes but, hearing no sound in the castle but the crowing of the chickens in the courtyard, she dressed in a fresh frock and opened the little door.
She first went down a little flight of four steps which led down from the tower. After that there was a narrow door which opened into a long corridor.
It was a queer corridor. At the end of it was one tall, narrow window through which the morning sunlight shone in. Down two sides were doors in the wall: three on one side and two on the other. Some of the doors were wide, some were narrow, and one was so small that it looked as if it must have belonged to a cupboard. The corridor was full of odd things—broken chairs, old chests, a hat-tree, and in one corner a rusty battle-axe. On the walls hung old tapestries so faded that Sophia could not tell what the pictures on them were meant to be of.
Sophia went down this corridor, gazing around her at all the odd things and at the end of it, by the long window, she found a staircase leading downwards. She went down it and it led her into another corridor, but this one was wider and the ceiling was higher. There were doors along the wall—all shut—and more odd pieces of furniture and old weapons. The castle had a smell that old houses generally have—a smell of old furniture and old books and old things in general.
Not a soul was in sight and except for the crowing of the chickens outside everything was as silent and still as if the castle had been deserted for many years. But there were two dusty pairs of boots in the hallway and, as Sophia stopped to inspect them, she thought she heard a muffled snore from behind one of the doors which they stood beside.
In the daylight the castle did not seem so frightening, but it was very strange and mysterious still. It felt to Sophia like an enchanted castle and everything in it seemed to be waiting for something—perhaps for someone to come and break a spell. Sophia felt almost as if she had gotten into one of her story-books.
She could not remember the way she had come the night before when she had followed the woman because everything had become mixed up in the dark and now that she could see things, it seemed a different castle entirely. There were many doors and windows and passages that she had had no idea were there when she had come up last night. The corridors ran into each other confusingly, or else stopped dead against a stone wall. Sophia ran into several of these dead-ends and the only comforting thing about them was that there was almost always a window in the wall, sometimes looking out on a courtyard within the castle walls, and sometimes out to the outside of the castle where mulberry trees bumped green-budded branches on the glass.
She had gone down two more staircases—the last one quite wide and slightly curved with a stone ballistrade—and opened a door at the end of a long, wide, windowed passage before she at last found herself in the great hall.
It was deserted like the rest of the castle. The fire on the hearth had burnt out and the trestle table was bare except for some crumbs and wine-stains. Sophia walked to the further end of the hall which had been so dark the night before. The windows at that end pierced the outer wall of the castle and so were narrow and had bars in them to keep out invaders in the old days when castles used to be stormed. The windows along the side of the room looked out into some sort of garden, for green vines hung over them, shutting off much of the sunshine and keeping the room in a sort of twilight even during the daytime.
Sophia found among the weapons and elk heads several portraits hanging on the walls. They seemed, by the clothes which the people in them wore, to be very old. One was much older than the rest, for the man in it was in armour and carried a lance. Because it was so old, or perhaps because it had once hung in a very smoky place, the knight had grown very dark and had black shadows beneath his brows. His hair was black, his beard was black, and his eyes so black and shining that they startled Sophia. He looked stern and cruel, and—oddly enough—rather sorry for looking so. Sophia gazed at him in wonder until a door suddenly opened at the other end of the room.
It was the door to the kitchen and the servant Jacob entered with a broom. He spied Sophia and, though he did not say anything, he gave her a look which said, ‘What are you doing here?’
Sophia crossed the room to him.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘may I have some breakfast? I’m dreadfully hungry.’
Jacob said nothing save, ‘Where’s Gertruda?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sophia.
‘Come along, then,’ he said and led her into the kitchen.
There was a pot of porridge warming by the fire and he took some in a bowl and gave it to Sophia with a wooden cup of milk. A black cat jumped up on the table and tried to put its nose into the cup, but Jacob caught it by its scruff and put it out by a door into the courtyard. He took up his broom once more and went into the hall to finish his sweeping and Sophia, who didn’t want to be left alone, took her bowl in one hand and her cup in the other and followed him.
He paid her no mind and only went on with his sweeping as if she weren’t there at all. He seemed to be thinking about something else. There were a great many questions Sophia wanted to ask but she didn’t know how to begin, or even if he would answer her if she asked them.
‘My name is Sophia,’ she began at last, because she didn’t know what else to say.
He was so surprised by this that he looked up from his sweeping and stared at her. But all he said was, ‘Is it?’ and went back to his work.
‘Am I going to live here?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
‘Do you live here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Like what?’
‘This castle. Is it a nice place to live?’
He looked as if he didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s a good enough place,’ he replied slowly. ‘There’s many worse. I don’t live here because I like it.’
‘Why do you?’
‘Never mind why.’
Sophia was silent for a little while after this, but at last she could not help asking another question.
‘Who was it sent for me?’
‘I suppose you’ll be told if they want you to know,’ was the mysterious answer.
‘Is it someone who lives here?’
‘Nobody lives here but the servants.’
Sophia was very confused, but she dared not ask him any more about that subject. She tried another.
‘Is the man with the scars on his face still here?’
‘Who?’ asked Jacob, turning again to look at her.
‘The man who brought me from England.’
‘Oh, you mean Muncaster. He left this morning. When you’re finished with your breakfast you can put the dishes on the kitchen table.’
Sophia fell silent and finished her porridge. When she had done as Jacob had instructed, she came back into the hall.
‘Where in the castle am I allowed to go?’ she asked.
‘You can go wherever you like, provided it’s inside the castle,’ he replied.
‘Thank you,’ said Sophia.
She didn’t want to stay any longer in the keep. It was too quiet and gloomy, so she went out through the kitchen door into the stable yard. She hoped she might find the cat.
The sunlight filled the courtyard and felt wondrously warm to her after being so long in the cold stone keep. A flock of chickens, yellow and brown and speckled, ran about pecking in the dust and two horses stood in the stalls, eating hay and brushing their tails at the flies. Everything was neat and tidy, except where a few wisps of hay that had blown from the haystacks. In the centre of the courtyard was a round well, very narrow and very deep, and when Sophia looked down into it the water far away at the bottom like a silver penny.
Beside the stables was a square stone watchtower. Sophia would have liked to explore it but the door was fast locked. In the wall between the tower and the keep there was a postern gate but it was also locked and a heavy bolt was drawn across it.
Sophia wandered out through an archway on the opposite side which led into another courtyard a little larger than the first. This was the courtyard Sophia had come into the night before with the strange man. On the far side of it was the great gateway through which they had entered the castle. The two leaves of the gate were now locked and barred and Sophia realised that Jacob was right and that she was allowed anywhere inside the castle, but she was not allowed out. She was a prisoner.
The big oaken door of the keep, which seemed to be the front door, stood opposite the gate, by the archway Sophia had just come through. Next to it ran a wall, but Sophia knew it was not the outer wall of the castle, for she could see a square stone tower beyond it like the one in the stable yard. She thought there might be a garden inside, for she could see bits of green leaves peeping over the top. At one end of the wall there was a door.
‘It’s sure to be locked,’ said Sophia to herself.
But it was not locked. The latch lifted easily and she went in.
It was indeed a garden, but it was rather a disappointment otherwise. The leaves belonged to several rose trees but there were no roses to be seen, nor any other kind of flower. Although the rest of the castle was kept so neat, it seemed that no one ever tidied up here at all. There was a fountain in the centre of the garden but it had dried up and was covered with moss and lichens. The whole place had an air of desolation about it.
The garden had a wall on three sides and on the fourth side was the castle keep. In the keep’s wall were three tall windows and Sophia saw that they were the outsides of the windows she had seen in the hall that morning and that the vines growing over them were more roses.
‘I suppose whoever planted the garden must have been very fond of roses,’ said Sophia. ‘It’s a pity that none of them are blooming now.’
It was a great pity, for the vines climbed all over that side of the keep and if they had bloomed, it would have been a glorious mass of flowers.
In one corner of the garden stood the square stone watchtower which Sophia had seen from the other side of the wall. The door was locked like so many of the others, but the bolt was so rusted that it came off entirely when Sophia shook it and the door opened with a dusty-sounding creak.
Inside, the tower was full of cobwebs and piles of dust that had once been mouse nests. In one corner a ladder stood against the wall, leading up to the second level and Sophia, who wasn’t afraid of mice or spiders, climbed it. The upper part was where soldiers once stood to defend the castle in olden days, but there had been no need for soldiers for years and years and the tower had been left to fall into disrepair. The roof of the tower was dilapidated and falling in and the blue sky shone in through several large holes. There were wasps’ nests on the underside of the shingles, but they, like the rest of the castle, were deserted and forgotten.
There were four loopholes in the upper part of the tower—one in each wall—for archers to shoot from. They were very narrow, but they were just wide enough for Sophia to put her head through and look out. She looked out of the one which faced westwards and saw above her the low eaves of the watchtower roof, on either corner of which were two rainspouts shaped like gargoyle heads, their mouths issuing dead leaves and moss. Below her lay a low, grassy bank and beyond that a small meadow full of flowers that ran up to a shady wood.
‘Sophia!’
It was the first time Sophia had heard her name spoken since she had left Mrs. Huxley’s. It was strange how warm and familiar her own name sounded to her. The great empty castle had given her such a lost feeling that it almost seemed as if she had left the little girl Sophia behind somewhere and she was someone else entirely.
But her name made it all right again. She scrambled down the ladder and ran through the garden into the courtyard where she found the woman-servant Gertruda looking for her.
‘Here I am,’ she said. ‘I was in the garden.’
The woman looked startled, as if she were not used to calling that part of the castle by the word ‘garden’, but quickly recovering herself she said,
‘You are going to learn to do some tasks so that you will not be so great a burden.’
‘I’d like to,’ said Sophia. She had often helped Mrs. Huxley with the housework, for in a boarding house there is always a great deal to do.
Gertruda led Sophia into the stable yard and showed her where to find corn for the chickens, how to draw water from the well for the horses, and how to search for eggs among the piles of hay and the thatching of the stable roof.
‘You’re not afraid of them, are you?’ asked Gertruda, who seemed rather surprised to see Sophia climb up the side of the stall and perch on the back of one of the horses.
‘I like them,’ said Sophia. ‘I know how to ride, too. What makes them grow long hair on the backs of their necks?’
‘I don’t know. What does it matter?’
‘Is it to hold on by?’
‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so. Why do you ask me?’
‘There isn’t anyone else to ask but Jacob and he doesn’t talk.’
‘Humph!’
‘Whose horses are they?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Won’t you answer any questions at all?’ asked Sophia.
‘No,’ said Gertruda shortly and went into the kitchen.
It was noon by that time and although her breakfast had been late, it seemed to Sophia as if she had had it a very long time ago. She followed Gertruda into the kitchen and found Jacob getting dinner for two men who sat in the hall. The men wore tall boots and military uniforms and one of them, like Muncaster, had many scars on his face. They were doing justice to the meal and playing at cards at the same time. Gertruda took her dinner at the table in the kitchen (Jacob had already had his) and Sophia sat across from her with a plate of bread and butter.
Jacob had left the door between the two rooms open so that he might go in and out as he did his work, and Sophia could overhear what the men said as they talked together.
‘It’ll be a long day, I’d say, Stefan,’ said Bastein.
‘So it will be,’ said Stefan (whose last name was Demerov). ‘Nothing to do but sit about and twiddle our thumbs. If only we could get away from this confounded castle!’
‘Perhaps we could take a jaunt this afternoon. Nothing could happen in a few hours.’
‘What would the count say to that?’ asked Jacob, who was waiting on them.
‘Ah, this place gives me the creeps,’ said Demerov. ‘What’s the count worried about, anyhow, that he wants us to guard this old ruin?’
‘He has his own reasons, you may be sure,’ said Bastein. ‘He’s not one to take chances.’
‘Not as long as the trouble falls to someone else, he doesn’t. I wonder what he thinks could happen?’
‘Maybe he knows something we don’t.’
‘Who knows? That man is a like black pit for having something in him and no one ever knowing it.’
Sophia had heard the count mentioned several times now, and began to wonder if he could possibly be the one who had sent for her.—And if he had, what did he want her for?
She helped to clear up the kitchen after dinner, setting the food away in the buttery and sweeping up the crumbs with the besom. The cat had managed to get back inside and sat on the bench by the wall, washing its dinner off of its face. Sophia, watching it, suddenly remembered her pigeon and ran up to the little tower room with a piece of bread for it. The pigeon was not at all upset at having been forgotten the entire morning and perched on the window-sill, pecking bits from the bread and making contented bird noises.
Sophia set herself to unpacking her trunk. Mrs. Huxley had taught her to always be neat and tidy and Sophia liked putting things in order. As she took out her belongings, she found things that Mrs. Huxley had packed in the trunk as presents—a coloured glass bottle, several crocheted tidies, an embroidered scarf, a picture in a wooden frame, scented soaps, and a wash towel with Sophia’s initial in the corner.
For a moment Sophia felt quite homesick. It seemed a very long time since she had last seen Mrs. Huxley and her other friends, and there was no one who was friendly to her here. Besides, the castle was so different from what she had imagined her new home would be like! But she was determined to be happy despite her surroundings, and sang a little song to cheer herself up. It was a song she had sung often in England:

There is not in this wide world a valley so sweet
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.
Oh, the last rays of feeling and life shall depart
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart.

And the next minute she was really cheered up, for as she arranged her books on the window-sill nearest the bed, she saw such a lovely sight that she paused, rested her elbows on the wide stone sill, and gazed through the open window out over the glorious view beyond.
The land spread out on every side and because the little tower was at the very top of the castle, Sophia could see in all directions at once. To the east lay the great river she had seen from the mountain pass, placidly winding between its steep banks. It was silvery-green now, but Sophia thought she would always imagine it all pearly with the sunset colours as she had first seen it. On the far side of the river was a deep forest of pines and fir trees that stretched away as far as she could see. Southwards were fields of wheat and rye with a few small cottages and thatched stables between them. Among them wound the white road on its way to the capital city whose spires showed faintly over the treetops several miles away to the south.
To the west and north were the lofty sky-coloured mountains over which Sophia had come on her journey. She could see the little notch in the mountains where the road came through. At the foot of the mountains and partly up their sides were thick forests, broken up sometimes by meadows or rockslides, or places where foresters had cut down the trees. A brook came rushing down between two wooded hills and joined the river just above the castle. A cloud of rooks flew out of the forest nearby and a bird in the mulberry trees beneath the tower began to sing.
Sophia had often thought that there was no place in the world so beautiful as her old home in the countryside in England, but now she knew that even that was not so lovely as this place. She almost felt it was wrong to think so, for she thought that one ought to love best the place he was born in. The truth was that her father had been born here and that he had always loved the little country of Waldovia best of all the countries in the world. That was the reason (though she didn’t know it) why Sophia felt that she had come home at last.
She wanted to go out and explore the wood just across the little meadow outside the castle. It looked wondrously mysterious and she could see that the meadow was full of flowers.
‘But it’s no use,’ she said, ‘for I can’t get out.’

* * *