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me down the cold, draughty stairwell to the base of the keep. There he began to tug at a ring on one of the damp sandstone flags. After a great deal of effort, he managed to raise it on to its side. In the flickering torchlight, I saw a wooden ladder going down into the darkness. Lord Berkeley, tightly gripping his torch, descended and I followed a little more carefully. The cell was really an underground cave and I saw there were signs that it had once been occupied. Sconces to hold rushlights rusted on the wall and a rotting mass of straw in a far corner probably once served as a bed. Berkeley explained that when the cell was occupied, the ladder was taken up and the flagstone replaced while small slits in the floor above ensured the prisoner did not suffocate. As I inspected this place of abomination, flickering and dancing in the light of the torch, I silently prayed for the king who must have crouched there before dying in unspeakable agony. The place stank of mildew and the sickly sweetness of decay. I felt as if I was in some antechamber of hell and was only too grateful to get out. I courteously declined Lord Berkeley’s invitation to dinner and, pleading fatigue, I was shown to a small chamber above the great hall. There, I tried to analyse what I had learnt but my tired brain kept returning to that evil, dark pit until I dropped into a fitful sleep.
    The next morning Berkeley showed me the muniment room and the castle account rolls for the years 1326 and 1327. The hour-candles he lit for me had burnt two of their rings before I finished what proved to be a futile search. There was no record of Edward II’s being dependent on the supplies of Berkeley Castle after 21 July, 1327. In fact, the records corroborated my findings in London, for there was a roll of receipts which tabled the amounts the Exchequer had sent to Berkeley, as well as their date of issue. The list was identical to the one I had drawn up in London and I noticed with despair that the last sum sent from London was twenty shillings on 21 July, 1327. For a while, I wondered if the present Lord Berkeley could help me solve the mystery. But if his accounts could not help and he was only a lad of 16 when Edward II was murdered, I realized my questions would achieve little except to publicize my secret suspicions.
    I left the muniment room and joined Lord Berkeley in the great hall. My disappointment must have been evident but he was too courteous to pry and promised that as soon as I had eaten, his steward, Edmund Novile, would escort me to Gloucester to visit the royal tomb. Novile had been born in the Berkeley demesne and had risen through the domestic ranks to the position of chief steward, a rare achievement for a mere commoner. We left the castle after midday. A watery sun gleamed and glistened on the overnight snow which covered the countryside. As we let our horses amble along the track winding down to Gloucester, Novile forgot his shyness towards a stranger from the great city, and soon became loquacious, a mood I furthered with a mixture of subtle flattery and generous swigs from the wine-skin I carried.
    He assured me, his wine-laden breath rising in puffs, that he had been at Berkeley during the late king’s imprisonment and was glad when the dreadful business was over. “The castle,” he explained, “had crawled with Mortimer’s wild Welshmen while Guerney and the little hunchback, Ockle, had ruled like cocks in a barnyard. They had refused everyone entry to the base of the keep and threatened death to anyone who tried to enter it, especially after the Dunheved escapade.”
    I asked him how that band had managed to penetrate so deeply into the castle, but Novile muttered something about a surprise attack in the dead of night. Somehow, I received the distinct impression that he was sorry Dunheved had failed.
    “You know,” he added, wiping his mouth after another generous helping from my wine-skin, “that attack was a mysterious affair.