Page 9 of The Duke's Price
But the warning was unnecessary, for the bats, if there were any there, left them alone. As they walked on, Ruth could see a lighter triangle ahead of them, growing larger by the moment, and when Madre Katerina covered her lamp, it was the cave’s entrance. The prioress, too, closed the cover of her lamp, so they walked in shadows through the rest of the cave.
They stepped out onto a shelf of rock half way up a hill. The sun was behind the mountains and the early stars were out, though the western sky was still aglow. They had gone down one hill and up another, so they looked across a valley at the town walls, with the castle looming above the town.
“Goodbye, Monteluz,” Bella said quietly. “I shall return.”
“May it be so, God willing,” said Madre Katerina. “Our path lies above us, my daughters. We have a long climb before we dare light the lamps again. Let us begin.”
They passed over the ridge and down the other side before the moon rose, and with the two lamps once more lit, they travelled far into the night. At last, as the sun rose, Madre Katerina called a halt at what appeared to be a small shepherd’s hut built against the rock face. “We shall rest for a while, my daughters. This valley leads to the Path of the Wolves. We shall leave after we have slept. By nightfall, we shall be beyond the borders of Las Estrellas.”
The prioress led the way inside, and one woman after another disappeared into a hut that looked as if it would be a squeeze for two. Bella exclaimed as it was her turn. “So that is how…?”
A moment later and Ruth followed, and understood Bella’s surprise. The hut had been built to hide a cave that openedbeyond its entrance into a cathedral of a cavern, which must have had openings to the outside, for it was not entirely dark.
The nuns, who must have been told what to expect, were unrolling blankets at a camp site on one side of the cavern, and soon Bella and Ruth had a blanket roll each. Bella seemed to drop to sleep as soon as she settled in the spot allotted to her. Nothing kept Ruth from doing likewise—not worry about the future, not the hard ground, not the sounds made as others settled, not even the ache of muscles unaccustomed to quite so much clambering up and down mountain slopes.
When she woke, it was to the disorientation of not being in a familiar place. Not in a bed, either. Ah yes. She and Bella were in a cavern under the mountains that surrounded Valle de Las Estrellas, with ten nuns. And the sound that had awoken her was the murmur of voices—three men in low-voiced conversation near the entrance.
No. She recognised one of the voices. That was Madre Katerina. In the half-light, Ruth did not recognise the other two. Had they been found? Surely the good mother was not selling them out. Ruth felt for her knife. She had unstrapped it, sheath and all, from her ankle before she went to sleep, and fallen asleep with her hand on it. Ah yes. There it was.
Her movement must have attracted Madre Katerina’s attention, for the nun came over to her and said, in a whisper, “Are you awake, Miss Henwood? I want you to meet your guide.”
Once upon a time,in his innocent youth, Perry had enjoyed walking in the countryside. Those days were long past, but even if he had retained the taste, this was not walking but scrambling along—and sometimes off—mountain paths not wide enough fora goat. It bore no resemblance to a stroll, even a vigorous stroll, in green and pleasant England.
Homesick, Richport?Oh, how his friends would mock!
“Not far to go now,excellensia,” said his guide, for perhaps the tenth time this hour. Perry and Walter, his valet, had parted from the rest of Perry’s men just outside of the main pass from the Valle de las Estrellas, at around the time he would normally be eating breakfast. Even if he had wanted to leave Walter, his old friend and companion would not have gone. They had been together since Walter was a young man, and Perry a boy, blessedly barefoot, escaping from the restrictions of his tutors and other keepers.
They had been up before dawn to leave the castle. “It is a three-day trip to Barcelona,” Perry had explained to Carlos. “At least. We must be on the road as soon as we can.” Carlos had been unflatteringly happy to see him go.
Perry had ordered horses, or perhaps a couple of the nimble-footed little mountain donkeys, to be waiting for him and Walter with the guide, but apparently the path to the pass for which they were aiming was unsafe for equines. And so, he and his valet trudged, climbed, and clambered in the wake of the guide, who was not even breathing heavily on the frequent stops he commanded because, “You English are not used to our mountains.”
It was humiliating how necessary Perry found these halts, even if he would have liked to pretend they were just for Walter’s sake. His valet was ten year’s Perry’s senior, which made the man—oh lowering thought—fifty-four on his next birthday.
“How are you coping, Walter?”
“I’ll just about do, sir,” said Walter, which was as close to a complaint as Walter would ever come.
“Is there a problem,excellensia?” the guide asked. Perry and Walter had been speaking English, so Perry repeated theirexchange in Spanish for the guide. “I asked my friend how he was, and he said he was well.”
“See that rock, sirs? The one that looks like a wolf’s head.” The guide pointed along the ravine they were currently skirting, and sure enough, Perry could see the rock he meant.
“That is at the opening to the pass. We shall be there in one hour…” he made a rocking motion with one hand—which Perry took to be a visual metaphor for ‘maybe’ or ‘more-or-less’. “Then we shall rest for a while,” the guide continued. “The meeting point is further up. The pass divides, with one fork coming down here into Spain. The other is the one we want. It leads to France.”
“Well then,” said Walter, getting to his feet. “sooner begun is sooner done.”
It was evening—the evening of the third day—by the time they reached the so-called wolf’s head—actually, it had looked more and more like one as the viewing angle changed. Tomorrow, they were to meet Miss Henwood and the princess. Tonight, they would camp here on the hillside, and without the comforts that Perry usually took for granted.
“What a feeble creature you have become,” he scolded himself. “A night without a bath or a feather bed is not going to kill you.”
As it was, however, his inability to sleep owed nothing to the discomfort of the ground. The wolves started their chorus not long after the sun set, and the three men sat listening with their backs to a rock, feeding the fire in front of them one stick at a time to keep it burning.
The howling moved from place to place, but never approached near enough to raise their wariness to outright fear.
A couple of hours after full dark, just as the moon rose, they heard sounds of movement. Broken twigs. The soft shiftof stones underfoot. A whispered curse set all of Perry’s senses alive. Miss Henwood!
The voice that announced the new arrivals was not hers. “Fernando?”
Their guide replied, “Mateo, is that you?”
