Rebecca had looked for some such visit, and glanced up from dusting the china dogs on the chimney-shelf. “Not yet. But what is that to you?”
“He followed the pedlar’s girl into the cave, they tell me, and neither will come back, I fear.”
“Well, there’s still me and the brindled cat left, and we’ll see to Logie. Tell Garsykes from me, you basket-weaving trollop, that I’ll comb ’em with the thick end of a besom if they try their pranks.”
Nita could make nothing of the woman, so hard, so unmoved by the Master’s fate. “Have you no fear?”
“Aye, for such as you, once my fingers get about you. You’d best be gone.”
Nita tarried only for one last shaft before she fled from the other’s truculence. “The Master’s gone. And old Rebecca’s wits have gone. It’s the rarest day that Garsykes ever saw.”
“Maybe,” muttered Rebecca, as she got to her dusting again.
She knew how, after their safe return from the cave, Hardcastle had left Causleen in her care while he went up the moonlit road to join Shepherd Brant in his waiting for the Logie yeomen to return from market. She knew how he had probed under their lazy tribute-giving by plain recital of what had happened in the cave, and had pledged them to guard Logie whenever he himself had need to tide abroad.
And now the Master had ridden over-hill to Skipton, on an errand that she guessed; and Causleen herself lay in the room above, in a dead sleep of weariness that was saving life and reason after the hell she had passed through in the cavern.
“You’re the one spoil-sport among us, my brindled cat,” she snapped, as Jonah mewed about her skirts. “I loved old Storm myself; but he’s gone, and you can’t mew him back.”