With the help of women from Wincanton the Less, Herrard Great Hall felt clean at last; or, rather, that part of the building Anne wished to inhabit had been well scrubbed with ashes and river sand and all the walls whitewashed with lime they had made themselves from crushed and burned shells (the sea was not far distant) and powdered white clay, a seam of which ran in the bank of their own river. New rushes, too, had been cut and their fragrant smell flowed through the building like a sweet green tide.
Slowly, slowly, order was appearing out of chaos in Anne’s domain: her house, her lands. The first thing she had done, after feasting those who lived in Wincanton the Less, was to consult the head man of the village, Long Will, to find out who needed food. And as the recent history of the hamlet was recited to her in answering that question, Anne had become more and more angry.
When she had gone into exile, Edward Plantagenet had promised that her lands would be well run by agents of the Crown. It seemed that promise had been kept for the first two years, but increasingly, as the country had fallen into the chaos of war, men had abandoned their long-unpaid posts and gone home. The Westminster-appointed reeve who had managed Anne’s lands vanished one summer morning. The rumor was he’d gone back to his family in London when the fighting became desperate before the king’s flight.
That was all the people of Wincanton the Less heard—that, and rumors of war. And though the villagers saw no actual fighting, the occasional noise of battle and the screams of dying men and horses muttered like thunder in the distance. Even the traveling tinkers, reliable seasonal distributors of news, had failed to return with the swallows. The village was left alone by the world.
This last year had been disastrous. The weather had turned cold and wet with late and early frosts at each end of the growing season. A murrain had passed through the cattle and even the precious house pigs had died of the pest before they could be slaughtered, so there’d been little laid away ahead of an unusually hard winter—not even the usual bit of salt pork or sacks of root vegetables. Then sweating sickness had visited the village. Babies and the old had died, and now a spring drought had withered the fragile wheat planted before winter clamped the land. The hamlet was barely surviving.
Anne made up her mind. She had coin money hoarded from Brugge and some of her store, quickly spent in Taunton, bought wheat and twenty-five meat sheep, some with precious lambs afoot. There were also two cows, alarmingly shaggy, with wide horns. They were in milk and heavily pregnant. Anne bought a saddle horse for herself in Taunton also. A real horse, a big, strong, spirited mare with a deep chest and straight legs, not a lady’s palfrey. She called her Morganne.
Wat, the last of the men who’d accompanied Anne from Blessing House, delayed going back to his master in London and it was he who drove the sheep to the village and delivered the sacks of wheat as well. The cows would be walked there the next morning by their previous owner. “Your lady says to kill what sheep you need now and keep the rest to breed from. The cows, when they come, are for you all, and for the children especially. And if someone will show me where the mill is, we can get this corn ground. I’m to take some back to the Hall, but again the rest is for you.”
There was utter silence. Then the cottars, Meggan included, danced and shouted and screamed. Tonight there would be another feast—the first in the village itself for many, many years. Eat? They would eat until the fat ran down their chins and their bellies hurt from overstuffing. And that was what they did.
Anne smiled. The wind brought her the smell of roasting meat. And, standing on the battlements of the Hall, she saw the smoke from the fires rising up from among the huddle of buildings in the valley below. If she strained to listen, she could hear them shouting too. Her people. Happiness, ecstasy, and terror all found the same voice in extremis. Anne furled her cloak about her body as she turned away. She was glad to feed her people, it was her duty. She was happy for their happiness too. In the end, it took little enough to change the life of a man or a woman. Or a child.
She shivered. The joy on the valley floor below was poignant and she was surprised how deeply she was affected by it. When had she herself last felt such joy? She closed her eyes and tried to block the knowledge, the truth, but there was no point in lying to herself. Edward Plantagenet: for all the suffering he had brought into her life, he was her joy. Would she ever see him again? And, if she had the choice, what would she do?
Darkness had settled on the valley and she could no longer see the shapes of the village houses. The shadows crept up around Herrard Great Hall. Soon she would go down to her lighted kitchen and sit companionably with her child, her mother, and Wat. Perhaps she would embroider by the fire, or spin.
Deborah, with Wat’s help, had set up a weaving frame and both women were determined that by the time the next winter came, the walls of the Hall would be brightened by hangings and the beds would have new covers and blankets. Work was good, it kept her from thinking too much, but, sometimes, Anne despaired. Was this how her days and nights would play out, now and into the future?
Perhaps it was, and perhaps, in the end, that was for the best. A quiet life, lived among her own people, bringing up the boy in her mother’s house and away, far away, from the dangerous, noisy world. The world of courts and intrigue and war. And kings…