Mark made no answer except to say, ‘You know where you’re sleeping, cousin. Have you unpacked your things?’
‘I shall do so now. I haven’t had time before.’
At the door of her room, Cicely dropped a mocking curtsey and blew us both a kiss. At least, I hoped that it was for both of us, but I could not help suspecting that it was really aimed at me.
I ignored her and followed Mark Gildersleeve into the adjoining bedchamber. It was a pleasant apartment. Its window-shutters were still set wide to the warm, scented darkness, and while Mark lit the wicks of two horn-paned lanterns, I was able to make out that the window itself overlooked the back of the kitchen and Dorabella’s stable. I was also able to determine the bulky, black shape of the neighbouring house.
Turning back into the room, I noticed a substantial clothes chest against one wall, and a good-sized oaken cupboard carved with a pattern of acanthus leaves standing in a corner. The bed, with its blue damask coverlet and rubbed velvet curtains of almost the same colour, dominated the chamber, but it was the bed-head which caught and held my gaze. It was built higher and deeper than most others I’d seen, and between the two bedposts, also decorated with acanthus leaves, were set a variety of small drawers and cupboards.
Mark, who was sitting on the chest pulling off his boots, saw me staring. ‘It was my father’s bed,’ he said, ‘and his father’s and grandfather’s before that.’ He went on in a deliberately flattened tone: ‘He left it to my brother in his will. “To my son Peter, my second-best bed.” This is my half, nearest the wall. You’ll have to take the other.’
I had not realized until that moment that when Dame Joan spoke of the brothers sharing a room, she also meant that they shared a bed. It was a common enough practice and should not have dismayed me as it did, but for some reason I could not fathom I did not relish sleeping with Mark Gildersleeve, and I was relieved to see that a large feather bolster divided the mattress in two.
‘What will happen when Peter and Mistress Cicely are wed?’ I enquired, and was favoured with a wintry smile.
‘Rather, what would have happened, don’t you mean?’ Mark countered. ‘The answer is that I should have been banished to the chamber which my cousin is occupying at present, while she took my place in here. But do you truly believe that they will ever be married now?’
I clambered into bed, having stripped down to my undergarments, and lay back against the pillows, linking my hands behind my head. ‘You feel there’s no hope then of Peter still being alive?’
Mark closed the window, extinguished both lanterns and climbed in beside me. ‘Do you?’ he asked bluntly.
The darkness was absolute, thick and clinging like a fog, the heat suffocating, and I found it difficult to breathe. My heart beat wildly, and it needed all my will-power not to leap out and reopen the shutters. But I forced myself to remain outwardly calm, and gradually the sense of panic faded.
‘Well, do you?’ he demanded, irritated by my silence.
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘No, I don’t think I do.’
* * *
Given the close, fetid atmosphere of the room, it was inevitable that, when I did at last fall asleep, I should dream.
As a child I suffered from frequent nightmares, but as I had grown older these were replaced by normal, if unusually vivid, dreams. My mother, to annoy me, had always insisted that they were due to overeating, but I could never bring myself to admit that this was true, and certainly some of them had an almost prophetic quality. Tonight, I dreamt I was standing on that same ridge of ground upon which I had stood that afternoon, where Abel Fairchild had been last Friday, looking down on the roof of the shepherd’s hut below me. Away to my right, on the very lowest slopes of that part of the Mendip Hills, I could make out the Pennards’ house. Someone was descending from the copse into the lower hollow, but his face was averted from me. I knew, however, without being told, that it was Peter Gildersleeve. Then, with the suddenness that one experiences only in dreams, I was standing outside the hut, staring in through the window. But I could see no one inside, although I felt certain that I was not alone. I started to walk round and round the building, searching frantically for this other person, the sweat pouring down my body. And at that moment, a hand reached out and grabbed my shoulder …
‘Wake up, man! Wake up! You’re tossing and turning and groaning fit to wake the whole house!’ Mark was sitting up in bed trying furiously to rouse me, his fingers digging into the top of my arm.
I propped myself up on one elbow, knuckling my eyes with the opposite hand. I realized that I was indeed sweating profusely on account of the heat of the room, so, still somewhat dazed, I pushed back the bed-coverings, swung my feet to the floor and groped my way to the window to fling wide the shutters.
The night air poured in to bathe my hot face, gratefully upturned to the starlit sky and the pale, cold radiance of a three-quarter moon. I stayed thus for several seconds, before a flicker of movement caught my eye, making me turn my head sharply in the direction of Dorabella’s stall.
‘What is it? What have you seen?’ Mark hissed from behind me, and I realized that he, too, had left the bed and followed me over to the window.
‘I thought I saw someone move, over by the stable, but … no, I can’t see anything now. It must have been my imagination.’
‘Let me look!’ He elbowed me aside, leaning as far as he safely could out of the open casement until, at last, he drew his head and shoulders back into the room. ‘Everything seems quiet to me.’
‘I’m probably still half asleep,’ I apologized. ‘The room’s so hot and stuffy. I’ve been dreaming.’
‘So I gathered.’ His tone was dry. ‘You were moaning loud enough to wake the dead.’
‘I’m not used to sleeping so confined.’ But my explanation fell on deaf ears. Mark was busy with thoughts of his own.
‘Stay here,’ he ordered abruptly, pulling on a woollen bed-gown and pushing his feet into a pair of flat leather slippers. ‘I’m just going to make sure that no one’s out there.’
‘Let me come as well,’ I urged, ‘in case there’s any danger.’
‘No.’ His tone brooked no argument. ‘Two of us creeping about the house in the small hours of the morning are more likely to rouse the women, and they’re sufficiently disturbed by this business already.’
I was a guest in his home, and was therefore forced to accede to his wishes, so I had to content myself with resuming my watch at the open window and trying to oversee his safety as best I could from there. After a few moments, during which he must have let himself out through the street door, I saw him turn the right-hand corner of the house and walk towards Dorabella’s stable, which stood alongside the pump and the privy. The mare gave a soft whinny of recognition as he approached, then was silent again. Mark merged with the shadow thrown by the rear wall of the kitchen and vanished behind her stall, his passage marked only by a faint ripple of blackness.
The time seemed endless before he reappeared, but in reality I suppose it was no more than two or three minutes. He glanced up and shook his head, a gesture he repeated, along with a shrug of his shoulders, when he joined me once more in the bedchamber.
‘You were mistaken,’ he said. ‘There’s no one there. You must have dreamt it.’
He insisted on closing the shutters again in spite of my protests, and we both climbed back into bed, the thick feather bolster between us. However, I could tell by his restless tossing as he tried to find a comfortable position that he was now as wide awake as I was.
I rolled on to my back and asked, ‘What do you think your brother was doing on the Pennards’ land?’
‘We buy our sheepskins from them.’ Mark heaved himself over on to his left side so that he was facing me. ‘What’s so strange about that?’
‘But he didn’t go to the house to find Anthony Pennard or either of the sons. Not if we can trust the testimony of Mistress Pennard and the maids, that is.’