XXVIII

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the Feast of Epiphany when Christ was revealed to the Magi as the Son of God, we had a feast indeed. It seemed that the entire town had been invited, and we had to have a couple of extra cooks in from Verneuil: Master Hugh, and Gilbert Mimizan, the pastryman.

The steward had finally been told by Juliana that the game was up and he had better stop lining his pockets or he would be arraigned for theft at the next assizes, and likely strung up by his scrawny neck. He went white and buckled, and then he buckled to. Supplies for the feast came from as far away as Paris. The town bakers worked for us night and day on the eve of the feast.

The hall was ready: the minstrels were in the gallery and the wine, ale and bread were on the tables – apart from the top table where the wine was waiting in a huge, ornately worked silver jug. The jug featured, in relief, the fate of Acteon, who was turned into a deer and hunted by Artemis and her maidens and was a gift from the Duke to his daughter, to remind her of him, she told me later, being hunted by everyone.

Three hundred people now took their places. I have never seen so much food in all my life, not even at Mortagne where my father enjoyed the pleasures of the table, lusty old beggar. Juliana had surpassed herself. All the while, the minstrels played on their organistra and lyras, and a recorder came in from somewhere; and all the while we chattered away like the geese we were so busy eating. At the end, you would not have thought anyone would feel like dancing, but some did. Others simply slumped at the table. So there was more music, and then Eliphas did a magic show, extracting strings of sausages from the Chaplain’s cassock. Juliana went upstairs with the little girls, who were happily exhausted, and I slipped out a little later to meet her, unnoticed except by Fulk. And then there were games of forfeit again, which we returned to, and at last a storyteller round the fire with ghost stories and tales of love and war. And then, all at once, in the middle of all this, there was an apparition.

It was a figure wild of eye, lank of hair, pasty of face, big of belly, bandy of leg, with a mouth that opened and shut like a gurnard’s.

‘What the devil’s going on?’ it said.

You’ve guessed it. It was Eustace, risen from his bed and looking worse than Lazarus.

‘Who gave permission for all this?’ he asked, groaning and holding his head.

‘I did,’ said Juliana.

He could not think of an answer to that.

‘Well … well …’ he said, and then he passed out.

‘Take him back to bed,’ she ordered. ‘I know him. He’ll be up tomorrow.’

And that was the end of the best Christmas we ever had at Breteuil or would ever have anywhere again.