He also noticed the windows were deep-seated, confirming his initial impression that the manor was built by ramming moist earth down hard between frames and then letting it air-cure, what some called pisé. The natural texture of well-made rammed-earth pisé was like a coarse porous stone, often with the impress of the framing still visible, but the interior here was smoothly plastered and the outside whitewashed. One of the advantages of the material was that it was no great trouble to make it as thick as you wanted; at this second-story level it was over a yard through. They had fittings for steel shutters, too, and the wall surround on the window wasn’t square, it was beveled in. That would let you step up to a slit in the shutter and shoot an arrow or crossbow bolt through it easily at any angle under full protection.

Uh-huh, he noted. Wall all around the manor gardens, too. Nothing to a siege train or field catapults, say twelve-pounders, or even just regular troops with assault ladders, but you could put the whole village in here for a while and stand off bandits or a casual raid easy. Rammed earth’s not quite as strong as concrete, but it’s more than halfway there once it’s had time to cure and it’s a lot cheaper and easier to come by. Good stuff, as long as you can keep too much water off it.

They passed more people stripping and bundling and crating things outside, turning what had been a big rambling comfortable house into an empty shell, and dodged a string of eight men with a long rolled-up rug or major tapestry. He found the sight oddly melancholy. One of the crew working at removal was the girl who’d brought them their tea.

“Taking stuff up to the castle?” he said, as she passed with a big basket full of linens.

“Oh, no, my lord. The castle’s much too crowded with more important things. This is all going up into the mountains.”

The gazebo court turned out to be part of the gardens at the rear of the house, which covered several acres. The gazebo part was a long arched wooden trellis, overgrown with a great sheet of green vine thickly starred with trumpet-shaped crimson flowers; the table was underneath. The rest of the gardens were a spectacular blaze of flower beds and blue oaks, copper beeches and poplars, with the odd stretch of lawn. Terraces and wandering paths paved with basalt blocks stepped down from the higher terrace the house was built on, with water channels running down stonelined troughs to a swimming pool not far away. The leaves of espaliered fruit trees shimmered green against the whitewashed surface of the perimeter walls, alternating with fragrant deep blue Chinese clematis twined through trellises.