Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Summer 1446
Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Summer
THEY GUIDE AND push me past the remains of what was once a great cathedral, its roof half-destroyed by old sieges, partly rebuilt as a castle inside the holy walls.
It is surrounded by a defensive half wall of blood-red stone, dark in the fading light.
We don’t enter the main castle but they force me past it to a nearby square tower and throw open the door.
Ahead of me is a guardroom, lit by torches, with two men on guard at the door.
A stone spiral staircase ahead circles upwards.
‘Go on up,’ Glegg says, raising a torch.
I put one icy hand on the central stone column, worn to a shine, and one on the cold wall and stumble up the stairs, my wet cloak and gown dragging against my weak legs.
Glegg raises the torch, and I see an open door before me. ‘Your rooms,’ he says.
On the threshold is a pair of twigs roughly tied into a crucifix, lying on a line of yellow gorse blooms. I hesitate. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s to stop the Good People coming in,’ he says. His expression tells me nothing: whether he thinks this is a superstition held by ignorant fools or a reasonable precaution. ‘Can you step over it? If you’re cursed, you can’t step over it.’
Contemptuously, I let my wet gown sweep across the flowers as I walk over the cross into a square room with wood shutters blocking the arrow-slit windows.
There is a cold fireplace stacked with kindling and blocks of black peat, a table and a chair, metal sconces on the wall for torches, and a candlestick on the table.
I have a sudden memory of my first bare room as a maid-ofhonour at Westminster Palace, when I saw a signature carved into the sandstone and thought, in my young confidence, that I would never be a prisoner.
‘The maid’ll attend you,’ Glegg says shortly. ‘And when you go to bed, be sure to leave the bedroom door open so that the guards can see you when they check from the doorway.’
‘Common men may not look at me in my bed!’
He does not answer; he goes to the door.
‘Wait,’ I order him. I am soaked through, dripping seawater on the stone floor.
But it is as if I have not spoken. He closes the door on me, the bottom of the door scraping against the stone threshold, and leaves me in the shadowy room, with the wind whistling through the arrow slits and the sea pounding the cliff outside with a thump, each wave like a huge hammer.
The woman comes, rumpled and indignant; she was carried over the water by one of the guards.
She kneels to the fireplace and lights the fire from her torch and puts it in a bracket, then takes a spill to the candles on the table.
I have forgotten her name, if I was ever told it at Castle Rushen, but when I ask, she just frowns and shakes her head.
I take it that she is a Stanley woman, coerced into serving me and ordered not to speak.
I don’t care – as a stranger here, she is of no use to me anyway.
‘Get some firewood,’ I order. ‘It’s no good like that.’
She throws me a cold mutinous glance but does not answer.
There is a knock on the door and the sound of one key turning and then another.
They bring in my chest of clothes and put it at the foot of the bed in my bedroom.
It is a bleak little bedroom with nothing more than a bed and, in the corner, a garderobe: a stone shelf set in the outer wall of the castle, the hole dropping sheer into the sea below, too small for anyone to squeeze out.
This room too has an arrow-slit window with a wooden shutter.
The only way out of the two rooms is through the locked door to the winding stair which climbs up to the room above, where the guards live, or down to the guardhouse and the locked door.
Someone has carved their initials into the red sandstone under the arrow-slit window: T de B and a series of lines.
I suppose T de B was the prisoner here before me, who slept in this rope bed and shitted out of the garderobe hole.
I don’t trouble myself to count the lines he drew – more than two hundred, I think.
I don’t want to think about him or whether the lines are days or weeks.
At any rate, he either died here or was released; he cannot have escaped.
I tell the woman to unpack a dry robe and a sheet for me to dry myself.
I strip off my wet clothes and leave them in a heap on the floor.
I wrap myself in a robe and then a dry cape on top.
She ignores the wet clothing on the floor and goes into the privy chamber room and knocks on the door for her release.
I hear them come up the stairs, open the peephole, stare at her, and then unlock and open itfor her.
I hear her wooden clogs clattering down the stone stairs and the challenge and her reply at the outer door.
I stand before the fire and think: what next?
I am like a chained dog here; do I get supper or service or company?
Then I hear another shout from outside as they admit the woman again and slam the outer door behind her.
She climbs the stairs with one of the guards, who unlocks the door, looks in at me, and locks the door on us both.
She is holding a wooden tray with my drink and dinner, and she puts it down on the table without a word.
There is a flask of wine with a pewter cup, a trencher of barley bread heaped with mottrews – a paste of meat and eggs – and a second trencher piled with mutton chops.
I am so hungry that my belly growls, but I stand at the fireside until she has laid the table and when she looks at me, I tell her: ‘Remove the tray, set the chair, and step back.’
I see a flare of irritation, but she does as I order, and that obedience gives me more pleasure than the food – which is good.
I let her stand and watch me eat, and when I have finished – and eaten one trencher of bread – I say: ‘You can lay out my nightgown and turn down the bed and take my clothes for drying at the kitchen fire if there’s no laundry room, and then go. ’
She responds to my tone of command; she even bobs a curtsey from habit and goes into the little bedroom.
I hear the lid of my clothes chest bang, and I smile to myself.
Someone has ordered her to serve me, and however little she likes the place, I have at least one person to obey me.
I will teach her to do what I wish, to be a maid and not a gaoler.
She looks insolently at me as she knocks on the door for her release.
‘Goodnight,’ I say to her. The guard peers through the spyhole and unlocks the door.
She bobs a curtsey and goes out. He locks the door on me, and I hear them go down the stairs together and the opening and locking of the outer door.
Though it is getting dark outside, there is no twilight stillness.
The constant eerie whistle of the wind whines like a chained dog; the sea roars without ceasing, and the thump of the bigger waves on the cliffs below shakes the building.
Overhead, I hear every clumsy step on the wooden floor of the guardroom.
Down below, the men on watch strike the bell every half hour, more chimes each time, like a ship at sea.
Now, they ring for the end of the second dog watch – eight bells at eight in the evening, and there is a renewed clatter of boots going down the stone stair past my locked door as the watch changes.
The guards who are released open the outside door with a bang and go to the kitchen in the main fort to eat their dinner.
One of the new watch comes up the stairs and slides open the spyhole in the door to see that I am still there and have not turned into a cat nor flown out of the window as a raven.
I ignore him completely: no common man may look at me in my private room.
I keep my eyes on the glowing fire, as if I am deaf and blind to the staring spyhole, and when it clicks shut, I put another sod of peat on top of the glowing embers to keep the fire on overnight and go to my bedchamber.
I wake every time I hear the increasing chimes of the bell, and when it chimes eight at midnight, I hear the clatter of the change of the guard and then the creak of the spyhole opening.
I turn over in bed so that my back is towards it, but I am humiliated that they can look at me, like a common woman in bed, huddled under the covers, as if I was not born to sleep under a rich tester, shielded by embroidered curtains, with a privy chamber, a presence chamber, a great hall, and a bolted door with guards to stand between me and common people like them.
OVER THE NEXT few days, I learn the routine and layout of the castle by listening at my door and peering sideways from my arrow-slit windows.
They never let me out, they never speak to me, but I know all about them.
Some of the guards are Stanley men, English-speaking and sworn to Stanley’s service.
They come and go from Lancashire and the Stanley heartlands on quarterly rotations.
They hate serving on Peel Island and hate me for burdening them with a prisoner to guard.
As time goes on, I might find someone who resents me a little less than the others, but nobody stays for more than three months.
Anyone I win to my cause will be off the island and going home to Liverpool in weeks.