’They tell strange things of the stables there, mistress Rees:  know you aught of them?’

’Strange things, master?  They tell nought but good of the stables that tell the truth.  As to the armoury, now—­well it is not for such as mother Rees to tell tales out of school.’

’What I heard, and wanted to ask thee about, mother, was that they are under ground.  Thinkest thou horses can fare well under ground?  Thou knowest a horse as well as a dog, mother.’

Ere she replied, the old woman took her cake from the griddle, and laid it on a wooden platter, then caught up a three-legged stool, set it down by Richard, seated herself at his knee, and assumed the look of mystery wherewith she was in the habit of garnishing every bit of knowledge, real or fancied, which it pleased her to communicate.

‘Hear me, and hold thy peace, master Richard Heywood,’ she said.  ’As good horses as ever stamped in Redware stables go down into Raglan vaults; but yet they eat their oats and their barley, and when they lift their heads they look out to the ends of the world.  Whether it be by the skill of the mason or of such as the hidden art of my lord Herbert knows best how to compel, let them say that list to make foes where it were safer to have friends.  But this I am free to tell thee—­that in the pitched court, betwixt the antechamber to my lord’s parlour that hath its windows to the moat, and the great bay window of the hall that looks into that court, there goeth a descent, as it seemeth of stairs only; but to him that knoweth how to pull a certain tricker, as of an harquebus or musquetoon, the whole thing turneth around, and straightway from a stair passeth into an easy matter of a sloping way by the which horses go up and down.  And Thomas he telleth me also that at the further end of the vaults to which it leads, the which vaults pass under the marquis’s oak parlour, and under all the breadth of the fountain court, as they do call the other court of the castle, thou wilt come to a great iron door in the foundations of one of the towers, in which my lord hath contrived stabling for a hundred and more horses, and that, mark my words, my son, not in any vault or underground dungeon, but in the uppermost chamber of all.’

‘And how do they get up there, mother?’ asked Richard, who listened with all his ears.

’Why, they go round and round, and ever the rounder the higher, as a fly might crawl up a corkscrew.  And there is a stair also in the same screw, as it were, my Thomas do tell me, by which the people of the house do go up and down, and know nothing of the way for the horses within, neither of the stalls at the top of the tower, where they stand and see the country.  Yet do they often marvel at the sounds of their hoofs, and their harness, and their cries, and their chumping of their corn.  And that is how Raglan can send forth so many horseman for the use of the king.  But alack, master Heywood! is it for a wise woman like myself to forget that thou art of the other part, and that these are secrets of state which scarce another in the castle but my son Thomas knoweth aught concerning!  What will become of me that I have told them to a Heywood, being, as is well known, myself no more of a royalist than another?’