ess’s clothes?”
“If you keep my secret and give me some gowns, I will set everything to rights. I was mistress of my father’s keep until he died. It is bigger than Wareham.”
“Hmmm, there is much to ponder here. Ye’re but a little mite of a girl—”
“I’m not a little mite, I’m a big mite, and I’m not young, I am just turned eighteen.”
“Yer a baby mite compared to me. Ye can fix things here? Ye really can do it, Merry?”
“I can do it.”
Old Miggins thought and thought and scratched her elbow again, and finally she nodded. “If ye fail, ye fail. What difference? Come wi’ me.” Merry followed Miggins and a thin, hollow-eyed woman named Lisle up the curving stone stairs to the bedchambers. Lisle said, “I was Lady Anne’s personal servant. I kept her things safe. When the Black Demon came, I hid everything.”
8
When they walked into the lord’s large bedchamber, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The huge lord’s bed was smashed into kindling. The chest that had sat at its foot was in shards, the clothes pulled out and shredded. The stone floors were bare.
“There was once a beautiful tapestry on that far wall,” Miggins said, pointing. “The Demon’s men didn’t destroy it, jest took it along with the rugs. Lord Garron’s grandmother wove the tapestry.”
“Greed got the better of them.”
Lisle nodded at Merry. “’Tis so.” She sighed, and walked straight to the window that had once held a pane of valuable glass. Chill morning air poured into the room. “Be careful,” Lisle called out as she gingerly walked over the stone floor. “There are shards everywhere.”
“I wonder why the Demon didn’t take the glass,” Merry said. “It is very wasteful of him to break it.”
Miggins said, “Probably one of the louts with him smashed it before he could be stopped. We had two large glass windows, one in here and one in the chapel. I’ll wager that one’s shattered too. Lisle, has anyone been to the chapel?”
“Tupper found poor Father Adal’s body amid the wreckage of the altar, run through his chest with a sword. The beautiful altar, carved nearly two hundred years ago by the first lord, the Demon smashed it to splinters. No one else has gone to the chapel since, no one has any faith left. Do ye know, I dusted that altar for seventeen years. I ask you, how can a man destroy an altar?”
“The Black Demon,” Miggins said. “He bain’t afraid of anything or anyone, God included.”
After seeing the wreckage of Wareham, Merry had to agree.
“Here,” Lisle said, knelt down, swept away shards of glass with her strong hand, and gently pried up one of the stones against the wall.
Merry fell to her knees beside Lisle to lean over a hole two feet deep and two feet wide. Folded neatly within were gowns and shifts, a tangled flow of ribbons, even three pairs of slippers, all sadly out of fashion now, but who cared about that? She knew pointed slippers were now worn at Queen Eleanor’s court in London, and these toes were rounded, but they were finely cut leather, covered with red velvet, a bit faded, darned here and there, but again, it didn’t matter, they were beautiful.
Lisle picked the clothes out of the hole and handed them to Merry. “They’re sound enough still.” She stuck her hand into the slippers. “Lady Anne had big feet.”
Merry sat on the floor, pulled off the filthy boots, and slipped them on, tied the ribbons around her ankles. She grinned up at Lisle and Miggins. “I have big feet too. They are perfect. Thank you, Lisle.”
“Now a shift and a gown.”
The shifts were well-tended, but Lady Anne had been shorter than she was and they came only to her knees. As for the gowns, there were four. Merry chose the oldest, a green wool, shiny from many brushings, that came only to her ankles. Who cared?
“I didn’t see any stockings else I would have stuffed them into the hidey hole as well. I wonder what happened to them?”
“No matter,” Merry said, and pulled off her cap and began to straighten her braid.
“Allow me,” Lisle said, and began to twine the matching green ribbon through the thick braid.
Miggins stood back and looked her up and down. “What a fine little mistress ye are, Merry. That’s right, Lisle, make her look a lady, wipe those dirt smudges off her pretty face. The finer she looks, the faster all the people will look to her and obey her.”
Merry certainly hoped so. Before they left the wrecked bedchamber, Merry lifted her eyes upward and thanked Lady Anne for her bounty. As for the boy’s clothes, let Lisle burn them.
“Thank you both. Please, Lisle, Miggins, there is so much to do, please do not ask for explanations just yet. Father Adal, how old was he?”
“Not a young man, but he had a head of hair left,” Lisle said, “and usually a pleasing breath.”