The Rose Demon

was feared as a warlock as well as a brigand. He showed no mercy to either. According to legend, he immured both Maude and her lover in the walls of the north tower. They say their ghosts, or some other presence, haunts there. It’s a frightening place: strange blue lights have been seen, terrible cries heard, candlelight but no candles. Footfalls but no one walks and a terrible moaning, as if some soul is in the last agonies.’

    ‘Did you see all this?’ Matthias asked.

    ‘At first I thought it was children’s tittle-tattle. One night, however, I was on the north tower - me and two other lads, archers from Barnsdale: good, true Yorkshiremen, thick in the arm and thick in the head. I tell you this, after that night, they didn’t accept life for what it was. We were on the tower wondering if the Scots were going to show us their bare arses. Then we heard it, a sound like a wolf howling on the stairs below. We unbolted the trapdoor but it wouldn’t move.’ Vane slurped from the wineskin. ‘We thought someone was playing a joke. There was a crack in the trapdoor. One of my lads looked through it. He saw a face staring up at him: yellow with age, crumbling teeth, eyes like molten coins, lips which bubbled blood. He was so terrified that if we hadn’t restrained him, he would have thrown himself over the parapet. The howling began again and the trapdoor began to lift. All three of us flung ourselves on it, praying to every saint we knew. A terrible smell seeped out, like that of corpses piled high on a battlefield. A voice whispered like a wind. We caught the words: “Let me through, let me through, let me kiss the stars once more!”

    ‘The trapdoor moved, as if an army were pushing beneath it. A hand came out, the nails scored, skin like cracked leather. I didn’t know if we were dreaming, but by then I knew it wasn’t some joke by one of the garrison.’ Vane wiped the sweat from his face as he recalled the nightmare. ‘We thought the rest of the garrison must surely have heard the clamour and our screams but the tower is high.’ Vane sighed. ‘I nearly died that night of fright but the second lad, Ralph, he was blessed with common sense. Whatever was in that tower broke off trying to get at us for a while. Ralph took his bow and, using flames from the beacon, loosed fire arrows into the air. The Constable at the time, Hubert Swayne, raised the alarm. Soldiers came up.’ Vane leant closer. ‘Do you know something, Matthias? They heard nothing; they detected nothing except for a terrible smell of corruption on the stairs. That was the last time guards were ever set on the north tower. Since then I have had my soul shriven twice a year. I take the Sacraments and, when I hear these clever jacks say there’s no God in Heaven, I can at least tell them that there’s a devil in Hell.’ He drank some wine. ‘A new constable’s at Barnwick, Humphrey Bearsden. He’s a good soldier, tight-lipped but kind-hearted.’

    ‘Anyone else I should know?’

    ‘Well, Father Hubert, the chaplain, I think he’s still there. He knows about the north tower. He’s a very holy man. Oh yes, and there’s Bearsden’s sergeant-at-arms, a Scotsman, at least by birth, Malcolm Vattier, a burly brute but one of the best swordsmen I have ever met. Anyway, do you know what I saw today?’

    Vane, to lessen the tension, talked about the different wild flowers he had glimpsed. Matthias listened. He had taken a liking to this rough, grizzled soldier’s fascination with the beauty of the cowslip and how it could be distinguished from the false oxlip. Or his insistence that bog pimpernel and bethany, if grown properly, could be used for wounds and scratches.

    Matthias looked up at the starlit sky and watched a shooting star, a flash of light charging across the heavens. Vane was just about to describe the virtues of St John’s wort when there was a stir amongst the sentries: shouts and cries to someone to stop and proclaim himself. Vane sprang to his feet, wrapping his war belt on.

    ‘It’s all right,’ one of the soldiers called.

    An old man, his hood pushed back, stepped into the firelight. Thin-faced, his skin lined and seamed, mere tufts of hair on his almost bald head but the owner of a luxuriant white beard and moustache. He had good stout boots and the robe he wore was serge cloth, bound round the waist by a rope through which a long Welsh stabbing dagger was pushed. In one hand he carried a thick staff, in