Dodd was sitting glumly in the cell recently vacated by Bangtail, looking at the neat pile of turds in the corner. He had worn out his fury kicking the stout door and now his toes were sore as well as his stomach and his face and he hadn’t had breakfast.
The rattle of keys did not make him look up, since he expected it was Lowther come to gloat.
‘Wake up, Dodd,’ snapped his wife’s voice, ‘unless ye want to bide there until your hanging.’
‘Lowther’s put one of his men at the gate,’ said Lady Widdrington, ‘but Lady Scrope tells me there’s another way out of the castle, some secret passage to the Tile Tower.’
This was the first Dodd had heard of it, but he supposed it wasn’t the kind of thing generally bandied around. Lady Widdrington put a purse into his hand, and when he got into the passage, he found his wife had piled his jack and sword and helmet into a corner. He drank the ale from the bottle she handed him and gave her a kiss.
‘We haven’t much time,’ said Lady Scrope. ‘My husband says he’s got an ague and won’t do anything, and Lowther’s got the whole castle locked up tight.’
‘It’s too late to stop the Grahams getting to Netherby even on foot,’ said Dodd gloomily.
Janet was helping him into his jack, Lady Widdrington handed him his helmet and sword, even Lady Scrope was helping with the lacings. It was an extraordinary situation to be in.
‘I know that,’ said Lady Widdrington impatiently. ‘All we can do now is stop Bothwell from hanging him when he finds out.’
‘How can we do that?’ asked Dodd. ‘He’s an unchancy bastard to meddle with, that Earl and I dinna...’
They seemingly had a plan. Surrounding him with their skirts and selves, and with one of Lady Scrope’s velvet cloaks over his head, they simply walked him quickly round to the empty inside of the keep, through the servants’ quarters and to the place in the wall where the well was enclosed, supplying independent water to all the keep. Janet unbolted and pulled down the shutter.
‘Through there,’ said Lady Scrope.
‘What?’ asked Dodd, appalled.
‘If you climb through the gap,’ said Lady Scrope brightly, ‘and feel about with your feet, you’ll find the rungs of a ladder set into the wall. Climb down until you find another hole in the wall on the opposite side. That’s the entrance to the tunnel that goes to the Tile Tower.’
Dodd peered through the hole, which was black and smelled very wet and mouldy.
‘Christ Jesus,’ he said. To his surprise, no one told him not to swear. He would have thought there would be a chorus.
‘When you get to the Tile Tower,’ continued Elizabeth Widdrington coldly, ‘it’s up to you how you get out of the city, but I doubt Lowther knows of this since it’s knowledge passed from Warden to Warden. So he’ll expect you to try for the gate. I’ll have Bangtail try and make the attempt, and no doubt he’ll wind up in here which will serve him right.’
‘What for?’
‘For existing,’ said Janet.
Dodd wasn’t sure if it had been Bangtail who punched him in the kidneys when he was arguing with the Grahams about being locked up in his own jail, but wasn’t inclined to give anybody the benefit of the doubt.
‘What then?’ he asked. ‘If it’s too late to warn Carey to be out of Netherby and Scrope willna move, what can I do?’
They told him. He hated the sound of it, but he had to agree there didn’t seem anything else to be done. Lady Widdrington gave him one of Carey’s rings in case he needed to produce proof. Janet produced a rope which she passed around his middle and then kissed his face.
‘God keep you, husband,’ she said.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Dodd, blinking at the hole he was supposed to climb through. Would his shoulders go, or would he be left stuck and kicking? He poked his head through, eased his shoulders, and found that with some wriggling, they fitted. Some bits of stone slipped and fell: there was an awfully long wait, it seemed, before the splash. The place was pitch black. He spread his arms wide, feeling about, and sure enough there were rungs in the wall a little to the side.
Pulling back with long streaks of mould on his back and chest, he found a lantern being lit by Elizabeth Widdrington. As he was about to snarl he couldn’t be expected to do anything without light, he was nonplussed by this. They really expected him to do it.
Oh God, what would they do if he refused? He looked at their soft white faces, set like saints’ faces in an unreformed church, and decided he didn’t want to find out. And besides, he wouldn’t put it past Janet to go herself, she was in such a rage and what she would say to him afterwards, he hated to think. A short life and a miserable one, whatever I do, thought Henry Dodd glumly.
He brought up a stool, climbed on it, poked his shoulders through again and felt for the rungs of the ladder. The first one he found and tested for its strength, promptly came out of the wall at one side.
‘The mortar’s rotten,’ he said, thinking maybe he could survive Janet’s fury.
‘Get on with it,’ hissed Lady Widdrington, ‘someone’s coming.’
It was all very well for her, she wasn’t risking her neck in some horrible deep well... The second rung seemed firm enough to take his weight. He swallowed hard, got a grip on it with both hands and heaved himself through the little hole, the sword on his belt catching and scraping.
Almost at once, Lady Widdrington put the lantern on the ledge and fitted the shutter back in the hole. He heard the bolts going home as he hung by his hands from the top rung. That was when he thought of taking off his jack, sword and helmet and lowering them down on the rope, but it was too late to do it. Scrabbling desperately with his toes for one below him, he thought that all except the top rungs had fallen out, but at last he found a foothold and could distribute his weight.
He passed the end of the rope round the top rung and felt down gingerly for the next rung. That one held, he went down a little further, gasping a bit with fear. The rung after that was rotten but the three below it were firm enough.
It might have taken him two minutes or half an hour to climb down to the little ledge he could dimly see in the light of the lantern above. He couldn’t bring it with him, he didn’t have the hands. Once on the ledge he got his breath back and looked about. There were some rotten wooden boards propped up against the wall, and then he saw the opening of the tunnel on the other side, just as Lady Widdrington had said.
It wasn’t badly planned, he thought to distract himself as he inched round the ledge towards it. Any besiegers who found the passage would have to reverse what he was doing to get in and it would be a simple matter for the defenders to drop things down on them from above and knock them off. And the ledge was deliberately made too narrow to stand and use a bow. God, it was narrow, and the well was still too deep to see the water. And then, if the garrison wanted to use the passage to make a foray, or get food, they would have control of the well shaft and they could put down planks across the yawning hold so it wasn’t so dangerous.
Dodd crouched down by the opening, put his head into it and banged his nose on something metal. Cursing and feeling with his hand, he discovered an iron grille, firmly set in the rock.
‘Oh Christ, it’s been blocked up...’
Sense told him otherwise. If the passage was to be blocked up, they would have done it properly with bricks and mortar; this was a defence. Which meant it could be lifted, perhaps like a portcullis. The light from the lantern high above him was guttering, but he couldn’t bring himself to climb and fetch it and trim the wick. Somewhere by the opening there had to be a... His hand fell onto a lever, and he pulled it down. It was stuck.
‘Come on,’ he muttered, wrenching at it. At last it creaked and groaned and the iron grille lifted a little. Just like a portcullis. Sweating freely and feeling sick from the smell of mould, Dodd pulled at the lever again, heard a crunching of gears as the ratchet within the mechanism caught its teeth, and the iron grille lifted up a little higher, and then suddenly something worked and it pulled right out of the way. There were long sharp spikes along the bottom.
Terrified of being spitted like an animal in a trap, Dodd looked around for something to wedge it with, pulled one of the rotten planks towards him and jammed it in the groove.
The passage was tiny and slimy and horrible. He didn’t want to go in. On the other hand, he couldn’t climb back up either.
