In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,113
accept it if the crown and sceptre were handed to her at Westminster. Certainly not at the cost of a bloody civil war.
Eduard had held his silence at Amboise because he saw no point in giving William the Marshal any reason not to free her. He had agreed to using the marshal’s niece as a shield because at the time, he could have cared less whom he had to use or whose life he had to place at risk in order to win Eleanor’s freedom.
Now, suddenly, it was not so easy. Now he found himself caring very much what happened to Ariel de Clare. It did not change anything between them. It could not, for she was still betrothed to a prince of Wales and he was still bound by his honour to deliver her to her groom. But it did mean he could not afford to make any more mistakes. He had made a large one here tonight, allowing his lust to override his logic.
It was a mistake that could not be repeated.
It could not … for all their sakes.
Corfe Castle, Purbeck
Chapter 15
If there was a bleaker, more sinister castle in all of King John’s realm, a mortal man could not have envisioned it. Viewed from outside the sheer escarpment walls, the castle seemed always to be in darkness, for there were no windows, no lights in any chambers of any towers that rose above the height of the battlements. It sat in a solid, dark mass on the skyline above the village of Corfe—itself a small and sulky compilation of cottages that clung to either side of the single roadway as if they were poised for a hasty retreat.
There was a church in the village, and an inn. There was no fairground, however, and naught but a brief widening in the road to call the main square. Fierce winds constantly buffeted the steep hill on which the castle stood and the resultant low howl, which grew louder at nightfall, sent most of the village inhabitants scurrying off the street before dusk and kept them huddled by their fires until dawn.
Nighttime at Corfe was a time for whispers and clanking chains. It was the time for bloodied, shuffling feet and wagon wheels stumbling over cobbles, creaking for lack of grease and nerve. Few brave souls crept to their windows to see who the king’s ire had put into chains. It was healthier not to know, or to see the faces and perhaps be haunted by the lingering images of wide, vacant eyes.
One such foolhardy lout had been wakened out of a fitful sleep on an early autumn night, and had counted on the stubs of his fingers three rattling cartloads of prisoners. The fourth had won enough of his curiosity to send him crabbing to the door and to open it a crack for spying. He had been in time to see the fifth loaded cart teeter past with its cargo of half-starved, filthy knights, bound in chains, garbed in the rags and shredded remnants of their former Breton finery.
Whispers the next day told him the poor sullens he had seen were the twenty-four knights captured at Mirebeau with the brave, if misguided, Prince Arthur. They had been sent to Corfe Castle wearing the same chains that had been bolted onto them at their capture, there to await the king’s pleasure. Over the course of the next fortnight it became obvious, by the shrouded, emaciated bodies carried down to the churchyard for burial, it had been his pleasure to starve them to death. Not one bite of food had they been given. Not one drop of water. The eve the last one perished, the winds swept up from hell, moaning and swirling around the towers the whole night long, the evil spirits so loud and so gorged on rotted flesh, a guard was driven mad by the sound and flung himself off the castle ramparts.
Madness was no strange occurrence to the residents of Corfe. The garrison was stocked with the dregs of the king’s army—misfits and brutes who sucked suet and ale all day long, who kept whores naked and crouched between their thighs from dusk till dawn, who thought nothing of heaving their filthy, sweaty bodies over the screams of the women prisoners —and there were many—whenever the mood or the itch took them. Men and women alike screamed from the confines of their small, dank cells.