Page 87 of Mesmerized

Elwena hugged her son to her for a long moment, then spoke quietly and firmly to him. He nodded solemnly, tears streaming down his face, and Elwena hugged him again and kissed him. Alys came over and took his hand, and he stepped away from his mother.

Alys bent down to the other woman and handed Elwena her own dagger. She could not leave the woman without some protection, and Elwena’s dagger had snapped off in the arm of the soldier. Elwena’s fingers gripped the hilt, and she offered Alys a small smile.

“Take the candle,” Elwena said, nodding toward the stool. “’Tis dark in there.”

Lighting the candle was a difficulty, for there was no lit candle or burning fire in the room. But John sheathed his sword and picked up one of the longer rushes and carefully slid it between the wooden door and its frame, low to the ground, so that it reached the outer side of the door and caught the flame burning there. Then he pulled it back with even greater care and dipped it into the bowl, lighting the crude candle. He turned to Elwena.

“We are ready.”

“See that stone?” Elwena pointed to the wall across the room from her. “The fifth one up from the floor? It is smaller than the others. Pull it out.”

John did as she said, edging his fingers into the cracks around the rock and wiggling it out. To his surprise, it came easily, and inside the hole was a lever. He reached in and turned it, and there was a click.

“Now push the wall to your left—low—and it will go out. Just put the rock back in its place and when you get on the stairs, shove the door closed. No one will know the door’s there.”

He reached down and pushed, and, amazingly, the heavy stone slid back and to the side, leaving them a small opening. He replaced the small rock in its hole, covering the lever. Then he crawled through the opening, finding a set of stairs curving downward, so narrow that his shoulders brushed both sides.

Alys turned and said, “Goodbye, Elwena.”

Elwena nodded. “God speed, my lady.”

Alys guided the boy through the door, then crawled in after him. They slid the door closed and started down the stairs. The light of the candle was little enough in the gloom of the staircase, and they moved carefully down the steps. The stairs seemed to go on forever, an endless, curving path of uneven stone.

But at last they reached the bottom and stood before the blank stone wall. There was a lever set into this wall, also, and, taking a breath, John lifted it. With a click, the door unlatched, and John inserted his fingers into the crack between the stones and pulled back. The door slid open easily.

Cautiously, John eased his head out, then the rest of his body. He motioned for Alys and the boy to follow. She did so, clutching Guy’s hand tightly.

It was still day. It amazed her. It seemed as if so much time had passed that it should have been night. But it was only late afternoon, the sun casting long shadows across the bailey. The scene was chaotic. There were fires dotting the courtyard—sheds burning and stacks of hay, whether set by carelessness or pitch-flame arrows or for sheer perversity, she was not sure. The storage shed had been broken open and the tuns of wine rolled out. Soldiers, obviously having partaken of the contents, staggered around, shouting and laughing boisterously as they carried out other goods from the shed. There were no longer screams around the castle. The battle, it seemed, was over, except above them in the tower.

There were people about, but they paid no attention to them. John wrapped his hand around Alys’s arm and strode off purposefully, dragging Alys with him as if she were a captive. The boy, his hand firmly in Alys’s skirts, trotted with them. They looked neither to left nor right, and Alys kept her head down.

They did not pause until they reached the shelter of one of the sheds that lay in front of the castle wall. Protected by the shed on one side and the wall on the other, they stopped and looked around. No one, it seemed, had noticed their progress or, if they had, they had paid no attention to it. With John wearing Surton’s mark, it seemed that no one questioned them.

“We shall slip along the wall here and out the rear gate,” he whispered to her. “If anyone should stop us, I’ll silence him quick enough. All right?”

Alys nodded. She looked up at the tower. There was smoke billowing out of the small window. It seemed far too much for the burning door to be creating. And in that instant she knew what Elwena had done. She had said she would take care of the soldier’s face, and now Alys realized that she had meant to burn it. She must have pushed the rushes against the door and set them on fire, and soon the rushes, the pallet, the enemy soldier, all of the room, would have been on fire, everything burning but the stone.

Alys had not thought of it at the time, but now she saw that Elwena’s black hair would have given her away as the woman who had run across the great hall, not the lady of the castle who had fought her way up the stairs. She had doubtless decided to set the room ablaze in order to conceal her identity and that of the soldier. Alys shivered at the thought and hoped that the smoke had overcome her, or that Elwena had plunged her own dagger into her heart before the fire took her.

John nudged Alys, and she nodded. He took off along the wall, moving swiftly through the lengthening shadows. No one stopped them or even seemed to notice them. They reached the door in the wall, standing wide open. No one guarded it, and they slipped through it and out into the field beyond. They ran then, John picking up the boy and carrying him.

They ran across the field and into the woods beyond, escaping to a new life.

Chapter Seventeen

SLOWLY THE SCENE DISINTEGRATED, as if turning into smoke, and once more Stephen and Olivia were standing beside a bed, the golden rosary between their locked hands.

Dazed, Olivia lifted her eyes from their joined hands and looked at Stephen. He was staring at her with the same sort of amazement as she was certain was on her face.

“Did you—”

“Was that—”

They spoke at once and stopped together. Olivia let out a shaky little chuckle. She sat down on the chair behind her, feeling rather weak.

“Are you all right?” Stephen bent over her solicitously.

“I—I’m not sure. Did we just see what it seemed we saw?”