Half-Tom augmented the small company of minstrels by playing at hide-and-seek with the grim reaper, making rude gestures and taunts to the macabre figure, who chased him around the hall with his scythe. The peasants hooted with laughter. Here was a chance to make death the butt of their jokes for a change. At the other end of the hall, the lute player strolled along the long table and strummed. Kathryn could not hear his song above the raucous laughter and applause for the contortionist and the reaper. And just as well, the music of the lute only made her think of Colin and she didn’t have time for that now.
Simpson came late to the feast, entering well after the banquet had begun. An insult to the workers. An insult to her. He sat down, silent, sulking, nursing his cup. As steward he was entitled to wine, but Kathryn had watered it well, both for economy and for prudence. From the way he swaggered into the hall, she judged that this was not his first cup of the day. After the last course, the raffyolys, patties of chopped pork and spices, had been served, he progressed on unsteady legs to the dais, and laying the bag of coins, the quarter-day rents, in front of her, mumbled with slurred speech that the accounting was inside the bag.
“It’s short,” he muttered. “The villeins plead the king’s poll tax.”
She weighed it in her hands and sighed. It felt light, and she was sure if she read the accounting she would find more promises than coin. She would have to take her rent in chickens and eggs and vegetables from the small garden the crofters scratched out in the dust beside their huts.
She laid the bag beside her trencher and stood and gave the required toast to the harvest and its lord. But at the conclusion of the salute, the hall remained silent. The yeomen did not lift their voices in hurrahs.
A few men at the other end began to beat the table with their fists in a steady rhythm. The pounding rippled down the board until the sound filled the hall and echoed in her head.
“Largesse, largesse. We demand largesse.” The cadence began low and rose to a crescendo.
Hardly the response she’d expected. They were a greedy lot. Did they think to rob a poor widow? She would not stand for such insolence. She stiffened her back, raised her hand.
The chanting stopped.
“Where’s the gratitude you owe for the largesse already given? Twice I gave Harvest Lord extra pence to augment your wages.”
One, emboldened by drink, stood up and shouted back at her, “Harvest Lord gave us nothing. He promised largesse at harvest home.”
A chorus of agreement and the chanting and the pounding began again.
Largesse. Largesse.
Kathryn glared down at Simpson who, still seated, stared into his cup. “What’s the meaning of this, Simpson? What did you do with the extra coin?”
The pounding was deafening.
Largesse. Largesse.
He looked up, not at her but past her, and shrugged. “I had to use it to hire extra hands.”
“The harvest was late. And there are no more than the usual number here.”
“Some quit and moved on.”
They were shouting above the din when, abruptly, the pounding stopped. A hush fell over the hall. No one moved except the hooded lute player, who had stopped strumming and was walking toward the dais. Was he about to ask for more money, too? The room suddenly felt very close. She clutched the edge of the table for support. This was the last straw. The steward’s perfidy knew no bounds.
“You are a thief and a liar, Simpson.” She said it loudly enough for all in the hall to hear.
He just sneered at her.
“I’ll suffer your insolence and your calumny no longer. The meanest serf of Blackingham is worth more than you. And I’ll not have you on Blackingham land any longer. If you are still on manor property tomorrow, I’ll have you whipped.”
There was absolute silence. At the other end of the dais the priest coughed discreetly. The only other sound in the room was the endless chorus of the summer crickets from outside.
Simpson’s drunken laugh rose high and shrill, hanging in the pregnant silence. “And where, your ladyship, will you find a man to do the whipping?”
She swept her arm out in a gesture meant to gather the workers to her, an encompassing gesture, allowing her gaze to sweep across the tables, willing them to take her side. “These men from whom you’ve stolen will show their loyalty to their lady.”
But there was no chorus of support. The peasants looked from one to the other as if not knowing whom to believe, trusting neither.
“Good men.” Kathryn stood as she addressed them. The smoke and heat in the hall made her dizzy, but she steeled herself for what she had to do. “You have worked hard for Blackingham Manor. I value your service. I hold your loyalty in greatest esteem, and I’ll see that you receive the largesse this greedy steward has stolen from you. Come to the gate tomorrow at prime. For tonight—”
“More promises,” a few muttered, but there was a scattering of applause and a cry of “Let her finish.”
Encouraged, she held up her hand for silence and continued. “For tonight, enjoy the feast our kitchens have prepared for you.” And she motioned for the cellarer to pour another round of cider. “Enjoy the entertainment that you have earned.”
Half-Tom and the reaper began again to mime their macabre antics. One or two in the hall still muttered complaints, but the solidarity was broken, the gathering temporarily appeased.
As Kathryn was wondering where the extra coin was to come from—she would demand it of Simpson; she’d just proved she still had some authority—the lute player approached the dais.
“My lady.”
That voice. A trick of memory?
The lute player bowed before her as he threw back his hood. The pale skin of his bald head was startling in its whiteness. She had a flash of memory: a mother’s hand, her hand, washing such a hairless pate, caressing the shape of each skull bone. But before she could even draw out that vision full-blown, the young lute player looked up at her. Jasmine’s eyes stared back at her.
She stumbled down from the dais and crushed him to her.
He returned her embrace, but it felt different somehow, more restrained. He had grown. It was the muscled shoulders of a man that she embraced.
“Colin! Oh, well come, my son, well come.” She wiped tears from her eyes when she held him out at arm’s length to drink in his face.
“You’ve grown. More a man. Less a boy,” she said. “What have you done to your beautiful hair?”
“An act of propitiation,” he said, not smiling. His voice was deeper, too.
She waited for him to say more, but he did not explain.
“Why are you on the dais alone?” he asked. “Where’s Alfred? And the illuminator? ”
A familiar grief threatened her joy.
“You do not ask about the illuminator’s daughter. Why do you not ask about Rose?” Just a touch of condemnation, a hint of bitterness crept in.
“Has something happened? Have they left?”
She sighed. “Much has happened, Colin. Your leaving was only the beginning.” She instantly regretted the sound of recrimination in her voice. The fault had been hers alone. She must not chase him away again. She patted his hand. “I’ve much to tell you, but it must wait until after this business with Simpson is complete. It is good that you’ve come. He will be less truculent when he sees I’m not a woman alone.”
She turned to continue her confrontation with the steward, but his seat was empty. The bag of receipts was gone too.
After the feast of harvest home ended and the revelers had all staggered to their beds—the hovels, cots, stable, even the occasional ditch where they slept—Kathryn instructed Colin to come to her chamber. The trials of the evening had worn her down, but she knew what she had to tell Colin would not wait for daybreak.
They sat at a small table in the corner of the room where she had sometimes supped with Finn, the two of them alone in her chamber, enjoying the intimacy of a shared meal. But she could not t
hink about that now. It was her son who sat with her, and she had to think carefully about what words she would say.
“It was foolishness, you know, your leaving. You’ve come home to stay, I hope.”
“Aye, Mother, I’ve come home to stay. I found I am not suited for the life of a monk, after all.”
He had changed. The shaved head was unnerving—she mourned the loss of his beautiful hair, and the blue eyes had lost some of their innocence, replaced by a burning, restless brilliance.
“You’ve been traveling with the players since you left?”
“Most of the time. Did you get my letters?”
“Letters? Only one. And I had no way to answer, or I would have told you already what I have to tell you now.” How to begin? She offered him a glass of wine. He declined. She took a drink. “Fortune has not been kind to Blackingham since you left, Colin. As I told you, your leaving was the beginning.”
Then she told him about Alfred leaving, about Finn’s arrest, about the baby, and finally, about Rose’s death. He listened to all in silence. He did not interrupt her with questions or laments, even when she paused in expectation, and when, at the last, she reached across the table to clasp his hand, he withdrew it.
“Rose is dead, then.” He said it flatly. His eyes clouded, and his Adam’s apple worked as he swallowed hard. She longed to fold him in her arms, but knew he would not welcome it. This was not her gentle Colin who, as a child, had once enraged his father because he cried over a nest of dead hatchlings a fox had robbed.
“I am sorry” was all he said, dry-eyed. He stared past her into the middle distance, but she knew he was not studying the tapestries hanging on her chamber walls. Neither did she see the pain she’d expected—no tears, just a hard, unwavering gaze. “I will pray for her soul,” he said. His voice held no quiver of emotion. “I’ve met a man named John Ball, Mother. He opened my eyes to many things.”
Surely, to hide his grief so easily, this was not her Colin but some changeling child.
“What kind of things?” she said, thinking that he was shutting her out, did not want her to know how much he had loved Rose, would not let her see his pain or his guilt. A silly child, hiding his guilt from his mother.
“About the Church,” he said.
“About the Church?”
He nodded eagerly, his voice no longer flat. “About the way the priests and bishops have enslaved the poor in ignorance, how they abuse them, how they steal from them to fill their abbeys with gold and their coffers with silver.”
He was animated, now, his eyes bright, almost fevered. He’s overcome with grief, she thought, just talking to keep it away.
“I’ve learned other things, too, in my travels.” He stood up and began to pace the chamber. “The troubadours have a song they sing about Adam and Eve. How there was no servant, no gentleman in the Garden of Eden. John Ball says God did not ordain this social order. God loves us all equally. The nobleman is no greater than the gentleman, the gentleman no greater than the peasant. Don’t you see, Mother? This notion of a Divine Order that puts one man over another is all wrong. In the sight of God we are all the same!”
Her son was turning into a heretic before her eyes. He was raving, like the Lollard preachers who roamed the countryside.
“Colin, you have a daughter. Don’t you want to see her?”
He dropped his head into his hands, rubbed his face impatiently, almost angrily, as if to scrub the skin away. He made a little sucking noise with his breath. Here it comes, she thought. Now he will cry, and he can start to mend his sorrows. But when he looked up at her, his eyes were dry and his mouth was set firm and determined. “There will be time for that later,” he said. “Tonight, I must prepare. Tomorrow, I’m going out to preach at the Aylsham crossroads. The harvest is ripe, Mother, don’t you see? There’s so little time.”
And so one of Kathryn sons had come home. But not really.
TWENTY-SIX
Courteous he was, lowly and serviceable, and carved before his father at the table.
—GEOFFREY CHAUCER,
THE CANTERBURY TALES
(14TH CENTURY)
Colin had been home for two months when the invitation came bearing the ducal crest and promising a fortnight of feasting at Framlingham Castle. Kathryn’s first thought was to decline the Yuletide celebration from the duke of Norwich “honoring Sir Guy de Fontaigne upon receiving the Noble Order of the Garter.” She had neither the finery nor the spirit for such a protracted festival, and wondered how came the widow of a lesser knight to be on the guest list. The castle was in Suffolk, at least a two-, maybe a three-day journey in the heart of winter. She had no gentlewoman to attend her and no armored soldiers to protect her, and she could hardly take Colin with her the way he was behaving.
He spent his days preaching in the crossroads and marketplaces, anyplace a crowd gathered. He showed no interest in his daughter. Even his lute gathered dust on a peg in the great hall. He has replaced melody with rant and love with obsession, she thought, as she half-listened to his harangues on the evils of the Divine Order, the cruelty of the nobility, the abuses of the clergy. The names of John Ball and Wycliffe were so often on his lips, they might have been the words to the rosary. No, she could not bring her youngest son into noble company. To do so would only place him and Blackingham in peril. Not that he cared aught for Blackingham, either. Some nights he didn’t come home at all. On those nights Kathryn, driven from her bed by wakefulness, found comfort in rocking Jasmine into the night, long after the child slumbered. “What will happen to you, little one? What will happen to us all?” In those long, sleepless nights, she would think of the anchoress and her promise that all will be well. “I don’t see how, sweeting. I don’t see how,” she would whisper to the sleeping child.
How did one in her precarious position dare refuse the invitation of a duke? She could plead some womanly illness to avoid a difficult journey— which, if truth be told, she dreaded less than the pretense of honoring a man whom she loathed. When her mind pictured Sir Guy de Fontaigne, what she saw first was the cruel curve of his mouth. There had been no misreading the gloating in his predator’s smile the night he’d arrested Finn. So the question was not how to refuse but if she dared refuse. Sighing, she laid the invitation aside. But there was a chance she might see Alfred. After all, he was squire to Sir Guy. One of many, but still …
She opened her clothing chest and rummaged through it, shaking out her newest gown.
Two days later, the sheriff’s messenger came. Sir Guy would be honored if Lady Kathryn would travel under his banner of protection. He would send a carriage and an escort for her on Christmas Eve. The message was left in the great hall. The messenger had not even waited for a reply.
Kathryn traveled with the sheriff’s retinue, but in a private carriage provided for her and her attendant. She’d had no choice but to bring Glynis, though the silly goose of a girl spent all of her time peeking between the curtains, hoping for some attention from man or boy. At least, she had nimble fingers when it came to dressing Kathryn’s hair, though her styles tended toward elaborate braids, not something a widow who did not want to call attention to herself should wear.
“My lady, it’s all so exciting. Such pretty banners. And grand steeds. All trotting three abreast behind us.”
And a man mounted on every one of them, Kathryn thought. “Close the curtain, Glynis,” she said. “You’re letting in the chill. My hands are blue with cold already.”
At night they camped. Kathryn hardly slept at all the first night. She lay awake listening to night sounds: the creaking of the carriage on its wooden wheels, night-calling birds, and once she thought she heard a pack of wolves howling. Tonight, she hoped, would be better, but her head had already begun to ache from breathing the smoke from the campfires.
The soldier who delivered supper to her carriage lingered, flirting with Glynis. But to Kathryn’s relief. Sir Guy did not impose his company. The joint of meat held little in
terest for her, but she chewed a heel of bread and welcomed the short purple twilight, welcomed the cessation of the carriage’s bumping and groaning across the frozen ruts. As on the night before, she slept badly, waking several times to worry about Jasmine. She heard Glynis sneak out—an urgent call of nature or some amorous assignation with a soldier?—and she heard her sneak in minutes, hours, eons, later.
In the morning, they broke camp in a pearly dawn mist. When Glynis came back from emptying the slops, she told Kathryn she thought she’d seen “Master Alfred” among the men.
“Are you sure, Glynis?” Kathryn had searched and asked among the sheriff’s squires and soldiers when they first set out.
“Aye, milady. He was not close up, but I’d know that noble head anywhere.”
Kathryn, drawing her hooded cape tighter, grateful for its squirrel-lined warmth, lifted the tapestry curtain. “Show me,” she said.
Glynis pointed through the mist to a clump of men huddled around a fire. They broke their fast with hunks of hard cheese and passed around a skin of ale. There was no redheaded Dane among them.
They arrived at Framlingham just as the watery sun reached its apex. The keep was imposing with its concentric curtain wall of stone, its ramparts and gatehouse. It was a military fortress. All of Blackingham Hall could fit in the bailey, Kathryn thought, as they passed through the portcullis. Large as it was, though, the yard was still crowded with bright tents and pavilions, their colorful banners curling in a brisk wind. Liveried servants in bright silks of red and blue and green bustled about, shouting to be heard over the creaking wheels and yapping dogs and clopping horses. Curtained wagons, like the conveyance that carried Kathryn, were pulled into corners before campfires. Each had its own cord of wood stacked high beside it. The wood to stoke the fires over a fortnight would denude a sizable forest.
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