Traitor in the Ice by K. J. Maitland

Author:K. J. Maitland [Maitland, K. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2022-03-31T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-four

THE SHARP RETORT woke me instantly and I found myself on my feet and crouching low before I was fully awake. For a moment I thought I was back on the battlefield in Ireland, until my senses kicked in and I realised I was in the darkened hallway of the house. There was a second bang, louder even than the first, and the door to the gentlemen’s chamber was flung open. Holt staggered out, stumbling as if he’d been shot, but he was only dizzy from waking so suddenly.

‘What’s happening? Are we being raided?’

‘No, Master Holt, all is well,’ I said soothingly, steering him back through the door. ‘It is only more trees exploding in the frost.’

Most nights since the freeze began, we’d heard the sharp cracks and booms in the silence as distant trees burst and great branches sheared off, but it was tearing the nerves of the priests to shreds. Holt, suddenly aware that he was standing barefoot in a freezing passageway clad only in a nightshirt, shivered violently as I ushered him back to his bed. Santi too had struggled out of bed and was standing by the window, peering out anxiously. Bray had slept through both the noise and the alarm of his brothers, and was still snoring peacefully: I suspected that the quantity of wine he had drunk the evening before had sent him so solidly asleep that not even cannon fire would have roused him. But I didn’t blame him for that; without it, the horrors of prison come creeping back like tormenting bedbugs in the darkness.

I lay down again in the corridor and burrowed back beneath my cold blanket to snatch a few more hours of sleep. But I couldn’t get warm. I turned over, wrapping the blanket tighter. A pale flash in the darkness caught my eye. Someone was creeping softly down the staircase at the far end of the passageway. I could see nothing of them, only the tiny distant candle flame as the figure descended, and then I caught a muffled clang and a dull thump of wood knocked against wood.

I rose as quietly as I could and, with the blanket still swathed around me, I edged along the passageway, carefully avoiding the places where I knew the boards squeaked. But by the time I reached the staircase, whoever had been descending them had passed out of sight around the bend, leaving only the momentary ghost-glow of the light they carried, until that too was swallowed up by the darkness. But something else still lingered, the unmistakable stench of a shit pail. I’d emptied enough of those this past month to recognise that particular fragrance anywhere. No one would empty a piss pail in the middle of the night, especially in this freeze, unless . . . unless it came from the chamber of someone whose presence in the house was being kept a secret even from loyal servants.

EACH NEW DAWN seemed to bring a greater intensity of cold.

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