CHAPTER ONE

 

Contagion 1094

 

 

‘Not far now,’ said Richard’s voice close beside him. ‘Over the top of the hill and we’ll be able to see it. Just hold on. Swithin…’

‘I’ve got him,’ said the man-at-arms from Ralph’s other side. There were just the two of them with Ralph now. Brian of Little Dene and some other Fallowdene men had been there but they had ridden on ahead. Ralph, however, could ride no faster than a walk. He nodded but did not speak because of the raw, dark-red pain in his throat and chest. Only willpower kept his aching body in the saddle. He supposed he would survive the rest of the journey. He had survived so long already that there seemed no particular reason to stop. The world had shrunk to the pain which he carried like an extra saddlebag, the sweats and shivers which ran through him like waves, the desire to drift ... he felt the movement of his horse, the steadying pressure of Swithin’s arm, the supporting thrust of pommel and cantle against his back and belly, as if they were being reported to him rather than experienced.

He was drowsing again, when Richard exclaimed: ‘Hearthsmoke!’ He raised his heavy eyes and saw a white chalk track winding down into a valley. His swimming senses took in the fields that spread up the hillsides under a rolling grey sky, the habitations further down where there were trees, and he saw the hearthsmoke for himself, blowing about in an irritable, unsummery wind. It was many years since his first and hitherto his only visit to Fallowdene, but he recognised the place. A thought occurred to him. He whispered with difficulty: ‘Put me in the barn. I’ll bring the infection. Shouldn’t be near people.’

Richard said grimly: ‘I think it’s a bit late to worry, in spite of the hearthsmoke. The hay should have been cut. I can only think of one reason why it hasn’t been. Come on!’

The horses moved forward. For what seemed a new eternity, he rolled with his mount’s stride and the huddle of roofs below did not noticeably come nearer. But at last they were passing through the palisade gate, and the hall, its thatched eaves sweeping to the ground, was in front of them. The horses, blessedly, halted.

Then Alice was there, running out with her sleeves rolled up and her hands covered in flour, crying Richard’s name and then simply crying, standing there and weeping as though something had given way inside her.

Richard was down, embracing her. Swithin’s hands were reaching up. Ralph slid, or sagged, out of the saddle into them and was steadied to the ground. Richard had turned to help. He was being carried indoors. There was a pallet. He was lying down, still, quiet, no more jolting horse-movements. His clothes were being eased off. He was being given water to drink; someone was supporting his head. He was being allowed to lie back. He slept.

Of old Dame Editha, who had been at Fallowdene since before Wulfhild came, all that could be seen was a shrivelled chalky face and a hump, oddly small, under the squirrel-skin rug. At rare intervals, she drew a grating breath. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ said Richard. Still unwashed after his journey, without as much as a mouthful of food inside him, he had come straight to the bedside. Alice stood beside him. He had left her pregnant. He hadn’t asked the outcome because he could see for himself that there was no child in this thin, pale woman whose grubby clothes hung on her so slackly. She should have been six months on by now. ‘Editha,’ he said. ‘It’s like the end of an era.’

Wulfhild was sitting by the bed. ‘She’s had the last rites. I heard you come into the yard but I couldn’t leave her, not Editha. But she’s not the only one.’

‘I know. Alice has told me.’ He had scarcely taken it in. ‘All Swithin’s family?’ he said questioningly. ‘Gerda and Rollo and Swithin’s half-brothers? Asa and Crooked Elfrida?’

‘Yes. But not Maud, God be praised. I lit so many candles and prayed so hard, and I was heard,’ said Alice. ‘And Ufi’s all right. His wife’s gone but his son is pulling through. So is Oger Shepherd. Gunnor and Harold have got it but we think they may come through as well. They’re in the hall. I got over it. But I lost…’

‘Twins,’ said Wulfhild harshly. ‘It was twins.’

I had the plague,’ said Alice sharply. ‘It’s a miracle I survived both!

Wulfhild turned away her head with a movement which said pity you did but she did not speak. Richard looked at his wife in horror. He was not an imaginative man but once in a while some incident or phrase would find its way to some sensitive place inside him. He knew, from seeing Ralph, how painful this disease was. Alice, miscarrying in that condition, must have been drowned in agony. But at the sight of his appalled face, she gave him her familiar, self-contained little smile and with a dispassionate courage that staggered him said: ‘Now you’re home, we can try again. I’d like to.’

He said: ‘Alice!’ on a gasp of admiration and love and stood there looking at her through a long moment of silence and reaffirmation. Into that silence, tersely, Wulfhild said: ‘She’s gone.’

They turned to Editha. The rough, intermittent breathing had ceased. The silence now had a new quality, the stillness which emanates from a habitation no longer tenanted.

‘Father Bruno’s over at Withysham. Their chaplain died. Bruno’s replacing him till a new man comes,’ said Alice. ‘He’ll be back tomorrow, though. He comes and goes between here and there. He can… can bury Editha. Thanks be to God, he’s stayed healthy himself.’

‘So’ve I. You don’t thank God for that, I notice,’ Wulfhild muttered.

‘Mother, you always were as tough as an old soldier,’ said Richard hastily. ‘Is the sickness at Withysham, then? How are Blanche and Sybil? Dear God, are they…?’

‘Blanche had it lightly and recovered,’ said Alice. ‘Tch. Sybil as far as I know is perfectly well and according to Father Bruno, all the little girls who aren’t ill either have been running wild with Sybil as their leader.’ She could not keep the disapproval out of her voice.

Richard let out a sigh of relief. ‘We’re a strong family. We get that from you, Mother. Abbess Edgiva, your sister, is well too, I take it?’ Wulfhild nodded. ‘Good. Good. It’s bad enough but it could have been… they’re all dead over at Beechtrees; we came that way. They’re our nearest neighbour and when I found what I did find there, I thought… what about Little Dene? Brian came back ahead of us but we bypassed it ourselves. Have you seen him, or anyone from there?’

Wulfhild was closing Editha’s eyes. Her own were dry but distant. He knew she was remembering times long past, before he was born. ‘It’s there as well, what do you expect? Bruno told us. He goes everywhere. I’ll say this for him, he’s tireless in his work even if he is a busybody. But we’ve no recent news. Brian hasn’t been here. All gone at Beechtrees, eh?’ Her face remembered the past again. The lord of Beechtrees had once tried to get possession of Fallowdene. ‘I won’t go so far as to say I’m sorry about that,’ said Wulfhild.

Alice, who had tightened her mouth at the word busybody, said: ‘That was your friend Ralph des Aix you brought back with you, wasn’t it? He’s very ill, too.’

‘Ralph des Aix?’ Wulfhild turned from drawing the rug over Editha’s face. ‘You brought him back with you? How is it you’re here, anyway? Thought you were bound for Normandy. Time was you wouldn’t have had to go to wars overseas, but all that seems to be forgotten nowadays.’

‘I had to bring Ralph,’ Richard said. ‘It’s bringing you more trouble and I’m sorry, but it was that or leave him on the beach at Hastings. As to why I’m here, we didn’t sail. The old custom was upheld after all. Nobody sailed. The whole undertaking just dissolved into the air. There was a big muster at Hastings, reinforcements for Normandy. That man Flambard was there, the one who revalued all the land.

‘Someone’ll kill him for that one day,’ said Wulfhild, forgot about impressing Alice, and spat.

‘Well, they haven’t killed him yet. He was getting us all checked off on a great tally list, and collecting our forty days’ subsistence money into the common coffer, in the usual way. Then when all the money was in, he announced that the embarkation was off and we could all go home. Without the subsistence money.’

‘Clever,’ remarked Wulfhild sourly.

‘We didn’t think so. Ralph hadn’t a penny left. He couldn’t even find a lodging. There’s an odd thing,’ Richard said. ‘When we got to Hastings, there wasn’t a ship to be seen. I don’t think we were ever meant to sail. It was a revenue-raising trick from the start. Ralph said, before he got too ill to talk, that it was the sort of thing to expect from Flambard. He knows Flambard personally, as it happens.’

‘And the king too,’ said Wulfhild with a sniff. ‘We hear the gossip, even here. Ufi goes to Chichester to the Shire Court and gets news in plenty, and there were some minstrels round once, while you were away, singing the latest tales from London and Winchester and very interesting they were too. Knows the king very well indeed, your Sir Ralph des Aix, or so we gather. A regular close friend to King Rufus, isn’t he?’ It was hardly a question, and her disapproval of the answer came across to Richard like a blow.

‘He’s also a friend of mine,’ he said repressively. ‘I hope to God we can pull him through. And I expect him to be made welcome,’ he added, meeting his mother’s eyes warningly.

‘If we’re to pull any of them through, there’s work to do,’ said Alice. She turned towards the shape on the bed, crossed herself and stood a moment in silent prayer before moving to the door. ‘I was making bread. The ones who are getting better are very hungry.’

‘Mighty quick you were to seize Editha’s job, the minute she took to her bed,’ said Wulfhild.

‘Tch. The bread’s got to be made,’ said Alice shortly, and went out.

Ralph tossed and coughed for three days and nights. But his slender olive-skinned body was strong. He was delirious only once. Then, certain gossip he had heard at Hastings, and the newly brusque attitude towards him of men who had once been carefully polite, came together with the last sermon he had heard preached by Father Ilger at Minstead. Lately, Ilger had taken to prophesying the end of the world, attributing this threatened disaster to the unregenerate sinfulness of mankind at large, with the superstitions of his own flock, and the latest news from the Holy Land about the heathen’s unchecked rampagings (‘Infidel prayers on the very site of Christ’s birth, and pilgrims kidnapped for slaves!’) in particular.

He dreamed, improbably, that he and Rufus were fighting the infidel in a desert, only the sun was so hot and their throats so choked with sand that they could barely breathe or lift their swords. Then Rufus turned into an infidel himself and Walter Tirel, another infidel, joined him and Ralph was fighting them both. A sandstorm – he had never seen either a desert or a sandstorm but Father Ilger apparently had and had described them in one of his sermons – rose and he was lost in a hot, strangling darkness. He woke to find a priest with pale blue eyes and a high polished forehead tipping goats’ milk into his mouth and saying: ‘No, the world is not about to end. Drink this.’ He drank and slept again and this time did not dream.

The next day his skin was cool and his throat and chest were easing. He managed to stagger groggily to the communal chamber pot and to take in what was happening around him.

He was one of several ill people who occupied pallets at one end of the hall. Its normal life continued at the other. Food was brought by Richard’s wife Alice. She looked as frail as a dandelion seed, much more so than when he had first met her, but she worked all day and after dark too, tending the sick, feeding the poultry, baking and sewing. Her mother-in-law still bullied her, as Ralph remembered from the past, but these days Alice turned the edge of the older woman’s tongue by a calm courtesy and at times, Ralph thought with weak amusement, a deliberately deaf ear.

On the third day, after sleeping late, he woke to find a household squabble in progress.

‘You and your stupid plants!’ Wulfhild was banging her stick on the floor to emphasise her words and there were angry tears in her remarkable, almond-shaped blue eyes. They gave her face, and her anger, considerable potency. They had been the first thing about her that Ralph noticed when he came alone to Fallowdene and introduced himself. He had been admiring them, in fact, on the occasion only two days after that when he had suddenly seen from their expression that she did not like him. Their wrath, however, was this time directed at Richard. ‘Why did you not put that ground down to rye as I told you? Then this wouldn’t have happened. I told you, but no, you must leave it open because you’ll want it in the autumn for those silly crocuses and now what have we got? Hemlock, that’s what we’ve got! Five cows lost and their calves and haven’t we had trouble enough what with bad harvests and disease? Must you make more? This is your fault!’ She rounded on Alice. ‘You brought those daft plants here. Bad luck, that’s what you are, you useless mewling thing…’

‘Useless, am I? Dear saints, what would you call useful, I wonder? I work and work but nothing’s ever enough for you: what would be enough I can’t imagine! And I didn’t bring those plants here. It was arranged between my father and Richard and they knew what they were doing, I’ve no doubt.’

‘I certainly know what I’m doing. Let Alice alone, Mother. My daft plants as you call them will prove their worth one day.’

‘Like her? Five years and more, and just one girl child to show for it. Those plants should be dug up and burned.’

‘I had the choice originally between those plants and a mark of gold and I picked the plants because in the end they’ll be worth it, wait and see.’

‘A mark of gold!’ Wulfhild screeched. Ralph thought that Richard looked slightly shamefaced, as though wishing he hadn’t said that. It had clearly come as news to his mother. ‘You passed up a mark of gold for those… those…!’

‘Yes, I did, and I do know what I’m doing.’ Richard stopped, eyes focused on distance, visibly thinking. ‘We’ll have to buy more cattle, of course…’

‘What with?’ enquired Wulfhild. ‘All the coin we’ve got is for tax money.’

‘We’ve the mares we used Hammerfoot with, and two batches of colts, two- and three-year-olds. We can sell them off. The trees we felled last year can be sold now. I’d meant to let them season a little longer but again, never mind. Ufi can ride to Chichester and look for buyers for both horses and timber. He can try shipyards for the timber. We’ll dispose of half of it and hold the rest. What a good thing, Mother,’ said Richard with a grin, ‘that I didn’t let you cut it at the time of my marriage. It’s there to rescue us now.’

‘You throw that in my face?’ Wulfhild shouted. She had lost a number of teeth and spittle appeared at the corners of her mouth when she was upset. It appeared now.

‘I’m not throwing it at you,’ said Richard serenely. ‘Just pointing out that it’s worth trusting my judgement on occasion.’ Wulfhild scowled. On his pallet, Ralph found himself inclined to laugh. Alice was gazing at her husband in admiration. ‘You’re so resourceful,’ she said. And then put it into French and for the first time gave Richard the name that in years to come was always to be his. ‘De-brouillard!’

The dispute passed although Wulfhild remained sullen for two days. Ralph, the onlooker, watched with interest. He had sensed very quickly that Wulfhild was a dragon because she had a treasure to guard and that its name was Fallowdene, and he understood that, for the Tun was a treasure to him, in the same way. Wulfhild quite evidently still disliked him, but he did not reciprocate this. He admired her.

He graduated to joining the household at table and took to observing his surroundings, more keenly than he had on his previous visit. Chenna’s Tun was a poor place compared with this, he knew, but in time he might improve it and if so Fallowdene would be his standard. But much better harvests would have to come before he could buy tapestries or carved furniture like Richard’s.

Presently, with Richard, he went shakily out into the sun to look at the weed-grown place where the hemlock had sprung up to kill the cattle. The weedy stretch occupied about half of a patch fifty yards wide and a hundred yards long, along the lower edge and round the corner of the ryefield. The other half contained the strange crocus-like growths of which Wulfhild had spoken so disparagingly. ‘What are they, Richard?’

Richard told him. Ralph shook a puzzled head, ‘We had it in food sometimes at court when I first came there. At La Fleche too. But I believe it can’t be got now. If you’re looking for markets, I can tell you who to contact at Westminster.’

‘Can you? That would be useful.’

‘Anything I can do to repay what you’ve done for me! I wouldn’t have lived through this but for you. You’ll be getting that hay in any day, won’t you? I’ll give you a hand there too.’

‘You’re not strong enough yet.’

‘I can try.’

Richard said: ‘We actually did very little for you. We kept you warm and gave you things to drink. You did the rest. It was more than just the illness, wasn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’ He heard his voice turn defensive. Richard heard it too. ‘I don’t mean to pry,’ he said pacifically. ‘Forgive me. But…’

‘Me and the king? That’s what you meant, isn’t it? You’ve known all along, I suppose. Well, of course. Everyone did. When did you first find out?’

‘Very shortly after you joined the hunt staff. There was gossip, you know. I was still at court with de Warenne’s men and we didn’t keep apart; we mixed with the house-hold knights attached to the king. But I’ve never commented, have I? I’ve never felt entitled to. I always assumed that you hadn’t much choice, not with Rufus. And it would all have got mixed up with the kind of admiration that most men feel for him anyway.’ Ralph, recognising the perceptiveness of this, blinked and the angry blood subsided from his face. ‘Only now,’ said Richard, ‘…am I wrong? ... I think you’ve been grieving.’

Ralph let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘I’m sorry too. I had no right to use that tone to you, after all you’ve done. But the whole court knows how things are now, the whole bloody army knows and now there’s you as well and can you imagine how it feels to stand here and… and talk about it? It’s over. He’s got someone else – that Frenchman who was with the envoys from Normandy. Tirel. They were all laughing at me at Hastings.’

‘I’m not laughing. I said, I think you’ve been grieving. But you’re coming out of it now, aren’t you? Making the crossing?’

Ralph stared at him, astonished and relieved by the quality of this friendship he had formed. He was not aware that it closely resembled the friendship which had been between his father and Richard’s grandfather. They had neither of them been overly critical of other men’s behaviour. As a result, Brand of Fallowdene had found himself in exile, and Peter Longshanks had unhesitatingly followed him.

‘How did you know?’ he asked Richard now. ‘It is like that. I have to change from Ralph des Aix the king’s friend, into Ralph of Chenna’s Tun. Change back in a way. I’m not by nature ... I mean, I don’t dislike girls. I hope in due course to marry and have children for the Tun. Only Rufus is such a man that…’he lost his thread and started again. ‘The illness – yes, it’s as though it’s burned something out of me. Did I babble when I was feverish?’

‘Only once and it wouldn’t have meant much except to someone who knew already, like me.’

‘About the haymaking…’ said Ralph.

The malady had attacked the throat and chest and those who died had mostly choked through lung congestion. Physical effort, forcing one to draw air deep into the lungs, found whatever phlegm still lingered, and induced coughing. It was good to be using one’s muscles again, and to feel the sun on one’s back. But at his first attempt, half an hour was enough to make Ralph pause from scything in order to cough, and Richard said: ‘I told you so. Forget the hay. Go back to the hall.’

He shouldered his scythe and made his way slowly down the hill, marvelling at the way in which short distances grew longer when you were unwell. The hay meadow was all at once as big as a sea, the downs a mighty wave of chalk and grass about to break over him. Suddenly, fields and downs and the palisade ahead began to whirl and he sat down heavily on the grass beside the path.

He rested his forehead on his knees and closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was because something was snuffling at his hair. The something was an amiable-looking skewbald horse and standing beside it, holding the bridle, was the priest, Bruno, who was looking down at Ralph with an anxious air. Behind Bruno, someone else was dismounting from the back of a pony. ‘We saw you stop and sit down,’ Bruno said. ‘You’ve been trying to scythe hay, I suppose. It’s too soon. We’ve had others relapse through trying to work before they’re ready.’

‘Is he ill?’ The priest’s companion came forward. It was a girl, wrapped in a light cloak and hood. ‘Oh, it’s someone I don’t know. Are you one of Richard’s friends?’ Her questions were inquisitive but her voice was kind and the small hand she laid on his arm was gentle. Bruno, with astonishing violence, struck it aside.

‘Let him alone. The abbey was full of ailing nuns and did you trouble yourself with them? Take the horses to the stable!’ The child’s face quivered. She was little more than a child, Ralph saw. She was studying him with a candid curiosity and her eyes were amazing, set on a trace of a slant like those of a hawk but in colour an intense azure blue. They reminded him of something. He searched his memory for it and then realised that they were like Wulfhild’s eyes. This was how Wulfhild had looked, perhaps, when she was young. Only this child surely had a beauty that old Wulfhild had never had. Those fine brows, the delicacy of the cheekbone and nose and that taut bud of a mouth had never been hers.

Then who…?

Then he knew. ‘You don’t think you’ve ever seen me before but I believe you have,’ he said. ‘You’re Sybil, aren’t you? Sir Richard’s sister. You were here the last time I came.’ And had been whisked away shortly afterwards, sent to Withysham Abbey for misbehaviour. He had been sorry for her, he recalled.

‘I’ve just fetched her back from Withysham,’ said Bruno shortly. ‘There’s sickness there and no one’s capable of looking after her. She’s been getting into mischief. Did you hear me, Sybil? Take the horses. Messire Ralph, take my arm.’ He could walk only slowly and by the time Bruno had steered him into the hall, Sybil was already there. She was being simultaneously folded in Wulfhild’s arms (astounding, that the ageing Wulfhild could be this young thing’s mother), and berated by Alice who in shrill tones was demanding to know what Sybil was doing back in Fallowdene. Quite clearly, neither Bruno nor Alice was pleased to see her.

He let Bruno guide him to his pallet and lay down, closing his eyes. There was, however, no hope of falling asleep. For the second time since he came here, family dispute sizzled through the air around him like forked lightning. Bruno, having seen his patient comfortable, had plunged headfirst into the storm and was now declaring loudly that Sybil was a naughty and mischievous child and that the Withysham nuns had begged him to remove her because she did nothing but ‘lead the others into trouble and even out of the abbey grounds. Instead of caring for the sick as you should, Sybil. Old enough to marry and as thoughtless as when you were seven. It’s disgraceful!’

‘You and Alice are always against the child. Not a good word to say for her but what harm’s she ever done? She likes to play and what’s wrong with that?’ That was Wulfhild, bristling in defence of her lastbom.

Alice and Bruno, in duet, cut across her. ‘…irreverent and irresponsible…’

‘…Withysham’s no place for her any longer; they’ve no idea how to manage her…’

‘…a changeling, in my opinion. She just isn’t like other children…’

‘…and she’s a bad influence on other children, the nuns say…’

‘I’m not, I’m not!’ That was Sybil herself, raising her voice in a wail. ‘I’m not a changeling, I’m not a bad influence, it isn’t fair! Why are you so unkind?’ The last phrase was directed at Bruno. Ralph, opening his eyes, saw Sybil, sobbing within the curve of her mother’s arm, make a gesture of appeal towards Bruno. It was rewarded with an expression of extreme disgust. What in the world had the poor child done at Withysham to warrant that, Ralph wondered?

Someone must have sent for Richard, for he now strode in, still carrying his scythe. ‘What’s this? Sybil back again? Why, may I ask, Bruno?’

Bruno once more launched into a recital of Sybil’s misdoings, the nuns’ inability to control her, and her lamentable failure to make herself useful when useful hands were needed.

‘Well, there’s one thing,’ said Wulfhild, with a glance of mingled spite and triumph at Alice, ‘they won’t have her back from what Father Bruno says, so she’ll have to stop here, where she ought to have been all the time. You can’t live happily away from Fallowdene, can you, poppet? Nor could I, and I couldn’t put up with being shut in an abbey, either. If she’d been allowed to stay here in the first place, under my eye…’

‘She’d have run even wilder than she has already,’ said Alice, ‘and all this talk about she can’t live happily away from home is utter nonsense. You encourage her in it just to annoy me, Mother, but you never think what harm you might do to her, making her believe such a thing. Tch. What if one day she has to live somewhere else? What if young Brian gets on in the world? Fie may want to take her anywhere! You never know. If he marries her at all, considering how ill-behaved she is,’ Alice added grimly.

‘Alice is right,’ said Richard firmly. ‘Sybil is still in need of training. She must be better prepared for marriage than she is now, that’s certain.’

‘If I may offer an opinion…?’ said Bruno. ‘By all means,’ said Richard.

‘I think you should get that marriage made,’ said Bruno. ‘She will then be the responsibility of Little Dene instead of Fallowdene and I think marriage could steady her. Sir Brian and his son have both recovered from the sickness; it would be possible to proceed.’

‘I agree,’ said Alice with vigour.

‘She’s very young,’ said Richard doubtfully.

His mother, unexpectedly, supported Bruno and Alice. ‘No, it might be best. She’s grown-up enough. So was I at her age. It would get her away from you two,’ she added venomously to Bruno and Alice, ‘and without sending her out of the valley.’

‘Very well,’ Richard nodded. ‘So be it. Meanwhile, she’s to be kept busy. Alice, set Sybil to baking this minute. Mother, if I find Sybil anywhere but in this hall and occupied when I come back from the hayfield, she’ll be sorry. And it’s to be the same, all day and every day, till the wedding. You hear, Sybil? And now I’m getting back to the hay.’

‘I’ll help,’ said Bruno, and picking up Ralph’s discarded scythe, went out with Richard. Clamour immediately broke out again.

‘Richard’s her brother and even he won’t stand up for her. And I know who is to blame for that, my lady, oh yes!’

‘He has her interests at heart if only you’d see it,’ retorted Alice, and pulling Sybil away from her mother, hustled her towards the kitchen.

‘Much you care about her one way or another. You just want to prove you can make my son dance to your music!’ Wulfhild shrieked after her.

‘I could say the same of you, only he doesn’t dance to yours,’ replied Alice over her shoulder.

It was a great pity, Ralph thought. That lovely child could not possibly be as bad as Alice and Bruno appeared to think. The recital of her misdeeds at Withysham sounded as trivial as the peccadilloes which had sent her there in the first place. Some nonsense about telling tales of Herne Huntsman, to other children in the church, wasn’t it? Repeating a tale that he himself had told her, in fact. She had been a taking little girl, then as now, and he had enjoyed, one lazy summer afternoon, sitting beside her while they watched sheep being sheared, and telling her stories to amuse her.

He thought that it was true, that Wulfhild and Alice were using her now in a private feud, turning her into a symbol of domination like a sceptre or a chain of office. Whoever controlled Sybil’s treatment, controlled this hall.

Poor little thing. Better for her if she were married soon and out of this house.

It took him by surprise, when his stomach suddenly twisted in tenderness and rage on her behalf and an unspeakable spasm of jealousy for the boy who would be her husband.