In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,116

that the gloomy gray sky had given way to a wind-tossed black one. He had watched lights wink on in the village, but the castle walls remained dark and oppressive. No sign of torchlight or candlelight showed along the walls, and only the faintest hint of a dull glow rising above the baileys suggested there was any life at all within.

It had not been a day of blessings thus far. Why should he have expected Corfe to be anything less than an unassailable stronghold? Henry de Clare had warned him. He had, in the past two days since their arrival in England, sketched pictures in the sand, built replicas with stones and twigs, given a detailed accounting of the number of times armies had tried and failed to breach the castle walls. Armies, he had said, equipped with mangonels and battering rams, and catapults capable of throwing huge stones into and over the walls. King John had not chosen this castle by whim or fancy to house the prisoners he wanted least to escape. He had chosen it because no one ever had escaped. The guards were handpicked and had no use for bribes. The townspeople were too terrified of shadows in the windows at night to even speak to strangers who were just passing through.

Eduard had studied the land and the castle. He had observed the battlements from every conceivable angle and approach, and he had watched for traffic at the main gates, hoping to learn who was admitted and how frequently.

No one had crossed the draw all day.

The towers, walls, and baileys formed a roughly triangular configuration on the dome of a bald hill that overlooked the sea. The main entrance was through two sets of gates, each with their own drawbridges and flanking barbican towers. A man could possibly make it uninvited through the first set of outer gates, only to be trapped between the outer and inner portcullises. It was the sole entrance wide enough to admit horse-drawn wagons or carts and Eduard could envision the process of checks and double checks, watched all the while by crossbowmen and guards standing on sentry walks above.

Another tower guarded the north and west corner of the inner bailey and was protected by a portcullis and forebuilding. Here was where any foot traffic passed between the inner and outer walls, but of that too, there was very little. To judge by the speed at which the door opened and the departing visitor was ejected, and the slowness by which anyone was admitted, the castle guard was under a strict rule of no unecessary admissions.

No surprise, since their walls imprisoned the only person who could threaten the king’s possession of the crown.

There had to be other ways in and out of the castle, of course. Eduard just hadn’t found them. He judged it possible to raise a ladder to a section of the wall and clamber over it between patrols of the guards on sentry, but a sixty-foot ladder took time to build and would be difficult to conceal when there was not a tree or bush within a mile radius of the barren dome on which the castle stood.

A rope and hook could afford a man an alternative means of gaining the top of the wall, but again, there was sixty feet of height at the lowest point and he had not met an arm yet with enough accuracy to toss a grapple over a stone lip on the first throw. More than one attempt, ringing off the stone, would be sure to attract attention and again, there was nowhere to hide.

He had once heard of a man loading himself on a catapult and, in desperation, hurling himself up and over the walls of an impregnable castle. It was when Eduard also remembered the man had had his brains crushed to berry juice when he impacted on a stone cistern that he left the perch he had been occupying for the hours he had sat staring at the solid dark mass on the horizon.

The road to the village ran straight through the market square and climbed toward the main gates. The village church faced the outer war towers as if it had been deliberately placed there to ward off evil. The solitary inn was at the eastern corner of the square and even though it was still relatively early—only an hour or two past Vespers—the streets were deserted, and most windows were shuttered against the dread mysteries of the