by Alison Adare
At least there was plenty of food. Janet hoped that spoke to the state of the kitchen’s supplies, but feared it might be an excess laid on in welcome that would see them all on short rations later.
Tom half rose to his feet as Janet swung herself further into the room on her crutches, and gestured to the seat on his left. “I knew nothing would keep you from a meal,” he said. “Lady Modron, may I introduce to you Jack Cooper, to be steward of Brinday.”
Janet made her way to the chair, bowed awkwardly to Lady Modron opposite her, and lowered herself down carefully as Father Donnic took a seat further down the table with three other men who, Janet guessed, were the most important of Brinday’s officials.
“I’m told I’ll have to do much of my stewarding from a chair for a few days.”
“It’s amazing you are alive to sit in a chair,” Modron said, and though Janet, remembering the great jaws snapping in her face, was inclined to agree, something in the way the other woman said it rankled. “That great beast killed three men this winter.”
“He’ll trouble Brinday no longer,” Tom said. “How’s your leg, Jack?”
“Sore, but less so.” She inclined her head to Lady Modron. “I have your woman Braelyn to thank for that.”
“She is not one of my women.” Modron paused, and then smiled, almost as if she had decided to. “That is, she lives in the village. Many of Brinday’s tenants go to her with their ills.”
“For medicine?” Janet asked. “Or for some small charm or other, perhaps?”
Tom frowned, and opened his mouth to speak, but Modron didn’t give him the chance. “If that’s the case, none will say so. And we are a good, god-fearing people here, Steward Cooper.”
“You’ll find Jack will believe any old wives’ tale he hears,” Tom said. “Jack — let me introduce you. Lew Abowen, master of horse and hounds, and marshal. Davith Apowelth, bailiff and reeve. Glyn Apevan, master of guard, porter, constable and watchman. And Father Donnic you know.”
Not just the important officials. All of them. Makes sense, in a small manor with few staff. Janet nodded to each of the men in turn, committing their roles to memory. Lew, lean and brown, would be in charge of anything that needed transport, whether by horseback or cart. Broad-shouldered Davith would deal with the tenants, from taxes to small matters of justice to any work they owed their lord. And Glyn, with his bald head and twice-broken nose, looked the very part of a man in charge of a castle’s defense. “What does the ‘ap’ mean?” she asked.
“Son,” Donnic supplied. “Lew’s father was Owen.”
“So his son would be something Aplew?”
“Die,” Donnic said, nodding. Janet blinked, and Donnic went on, “His son is Die ap Lew.” Lew looked from one to the other, and Donnic spoke to him in the local language.
Lew nodded. “Lew ab Owen,” he said with careful emphasis.
“I’m pleased to meet you all,” Janet said, “Lew ab Owen, Davith ap Owelth, Glyn ap Evan. I’ll be depending on your patience as I find my feet here.” She glanced down at her leg. “Eventually.”
That got a smile, at least from Lew, when Donnic translated it. Lady Modron said something, and the smile vanished, all three men nodding. “I told them not to bother you until you’re fully well,” Modron said to Janet.
“I may well be bothering them long before that,” Janet said mildly. She took her knife from her belt and speared a slice of meat from the nearest platter. If that’s what she really said.
Then she was ashamed of herself, and reached for the carrots to avoid meeting Modron’s gaze. Just because she’s pretty — and going to marry Tom.
Still. I’d better learn some of the language here as quickly as possible.
“But thank you,” she said, looking back at Lady Modron. “How do I say that, in the language here? Thank you?”
It was a liquid slur without enough consonants and it took her most of the dinner to get it close enough that Davith and Lew stopped laughing at her, but when the meal was finished and they took their leave, Lew and Davith both said gravely and slowly Thank you to her, so Janet felt the laughter was a price worth paying.
~o~
Janet’s leg healed slowly. For a few days, it was the best she could do to limp out to the steps and sit, hood pulled up against the rain, watching the life of Brinday play out in the bailey in front of her. Brinday was no castle, to have inner or outer wards and from her vantage point Janet could see every point of it. As well as the buildings she’d identified on her arrival, there was also the blacksmith tucked in a little askew by the church — and doing triple duty as wain-and-wheelwright.
Father Donnic sat with her, when his duties in the church allowed, answering her questions as best he could, translating on the rare occasions anyone approached her, and trying not to laugh at her efforts to learn a few more of the local words. As well as thank you, she mastered please, quickly, wait and clean, before moving on to crucial nouns like food, horse and water and the all-important terms good and bad. She made no progress, however, on picking individual words out of the flowing melody of sentences when people spoke to her.
Donnic sketched the map of Brinday for her with his fingertip, an invisible chart written on the air. He explained it again and again until Janet had it clear in her head: the fort, the one near and four more distant villages, the land shaped like a triangle with impassable crags on two sides and their one aging neighbor, Lew ab Gerwyn, on the other. One of his daughters, Tegan, was here in Brinday as one of Lady Modron’s ladies. She was not young either, Janet gleaned from Donnic’s comments, the last of five daughters whose father’s wealth had not extended to dowering all of them.
“Why not a nunnery, then?” Janet asked Donnic, and the priest’s narrow face creased in a smile.
“Chastity, perhaps she’d find no great burden. Poverty, well, that she’s plenty of now. But obedience?” He shook his head. “She is her father’s daughter, for all they hate the sight of each other.”
“So we’ve no need to expect our neighbor to ride over for a visit, I take it,” Janet said dryly.
Donnic laughed. “No. Although you’d not have to fear that under any circumstances, these days. Lew ab Gerwyn was never the most sociable of men, and these days he finds riding hard.”
“Should Tom, Sir Thomas, visit him? I don’t known the customs here, to know what’s expected.”
“He might extend an invitation after the harvest,” Donnic said. “I’d not go without one. And it would be as well if Sir Thomas had at least a little of our language, when he went. He won’t find anyone under Lew ab Gerwyn’s roof who speaks his own.”
Janet turned to look at him. “How is it that you do?” she asked. “Were you sent to …” She tried to remember what education priests had. “The university?”
“No, no,” Donnic said. “I had my learning from Father Hugh down in Neeth, that’s where I was born. He was one of you. And I had a little already, it’s not so uncommon down there as it is up here. With the port and the market and the castle.”
“Do you miss it?” Janet asked.
“It’s God’s purpose I’m here, and I’m content,” the priest said firmly, but his gaze was on the distant hills, and Janet fancied that he saw heaving green waves instead of white-flecked crags, and heard gulls squabbling instead of the steady patter of the rain.
Over the next few days Janet learned, too, the patterns of life in Brinday, governed by seasons with new names: lambing, which they were in the middle of, shearing, up-pasture and down — as well as the more familiar spring and autumn plantings and the harvest. Donnic told her that the winter rye crop had been all but lost to the fierce winter, and they all pinned their hopes on a good harvest from the spring planting. He warned her, too, that when she was able to manage the stairs down to the storerooms by the kitchen, she’d find little to gladden her heart. Janet learned too the less-than-joyful news that there was so little currency locally that Tom would have to take his taxes in wool, to
add to whatever profit came from the manor’s own flock. Mutton was, understandably, a staple of the lord’s table, supplemented at this time of year by whatever was hunted and whichever of the hens had stopped laying — and the kitchen garden, outside the walls and under Braelyn’s care.
Janet thought about the implications of a witch growing the food that ended up on the lord’s table, and felt cold. But my leg is a little better each day. Braelyn had done her no harm, and she’d had every chance. That might mean she was honest, for a witch.
Or biding her time.
After that, Janet scrutinized the food at table more carefully, making sure to help herself to every dish before Tom did. He shot her a glance when he noticed, the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth betraying his amusement.
She shrugged, and kept doing it.
Braelyn lived a little way from the fort in the huddle of houses that made up the nearest village, like most of the tenants whose labor was largely outside the walls, in the fields and with the flocks. She came daily to the fort to tend Janet’s leg, and there was undoubtedly virtue in her salves and poultices. To Janet’s great relief, she did not seem to find anything strange in Janet exposing only so much of herself as needed to give Braelyn access to the wounds.
The general modesty of the local people, and the greater privacy afforded by Janet’s new station in life, made her life much easier. The jakes were shared, set at the outside walls to let the contents fall down to a pit below, but there were not so few of them or so many people in Brinday that Janet had to be overly afraid of an interruption at an inopportune moment. She avoided the communal bathroom down near the kitchen, but washed as best she could at the basin in her room each evening. She pretended to shave there too, before carefully rubbing a little ash and burnt wood crushed to powder onto her chin and cheeks. Even after Davith gave her the great ring of keys that as steward she was now the keeper of, and she had found the one that worked the lock on her door, she slept in her shirt and breeches with her breasts still bound as she had in the army. And she still felt much safer when she’d risen in the morning and gotten herself fully dressed to join Tom and the others for the morning meal.
Modron did not join them in the great hall in the mornings to break her fast, preferring to take her morning meal in her chambers with her ladies, Aneria, Lynn and Tegan. Each day, after Tom had finished talking over the day ahead with Janet and, as language increasingly permitted, with Davith and Lew and Glyn, he’d wait upon Lady Modron in her chamber.
Janet would watch him go and tell herself not to mind. However many hours he spent with Lady Modron, he would still start each day over thin sheep’s milk and pottage with Janet, debating whether or not to try and find the money to hire a master mason for the repairs to the walls or to trust in the experience of the local men, smiling in satisfaction at the count of lambs safely born, frowning at the news that the spring grains were not yet in the ground.
And he would still end it sitting by the fire in her room, reading from his book on local law and telling her what she needed to know about the rights and wrongs of inheritance and property in their new home.
Much of it was familiar, but some of it was very strange. Marriage seemed to be treated far more lightly here, for one thing, with wedded couples able to abandon their vows. And if they should do so, a woman kept what she had brought to the marriage, and if more than seven years had passed since the wedding, she was entitled to more besides — to half of all.
“Does that apply to land?” she asked Tom.
“No,” Tom said.
“So if Lady Modron throws you out of her bedchamber after seven years, she has only a claim on your personal property — and you’d have one on hers, and I’d guess she’s richer than you, by those rings and bracelets she wears.” Janet paused. “Have you thought any further on when you’ll wed her?”
“When she’s willing,” Tom said shortly.
Aye, and that will be the end of evenings like these.
But she’d still be the friend who knew exactly what he meant when he said that day in the village south of Forminey, who he trusted to guard his back in this foreign place, who had the right to call the lord of Brinday whoreson.
Still see him every day, still be the one he’d rely on to see to the fortifications and count the taxes and solve the tenants’ problems before they grew large enough to need the attention of their lord.
Still understand the man knighted on the field, who’d taken Nightfoot straight into the heart of an enemy charge when he saw one of his men about to be trampled into the mud, better than any soft-handed, delicate lady ever could.
~o~
By the time Janet could walk with just one stick, the rains had eased. A gentle, steady breeze from the hills dried the mud in the courtyard and the manor was suddenly festooned with draperies and carpets hung out to air after the winter. Everyone who could be spared from the lambing was at the plow and the harrow, hard labor without oxen. Even Tom took his turn.
Once the rye seed was in the ground, Tom rode out on Nightfoot with Lew and a handful of local men mounted on the small, sturdy horses of the area, hoping to bring what remained of the wolf pack to bay. They came back without seeing trace of them, but with Janet’s horse Masie, muddy and peeved at being abandoned but unharmed.
“Lew says they had no trouble with wolves before that big brute started leading the pack,” Tom told Janet over dinner. “So it may be the others have gone further into wild country, now he’s dead.” At her startled glance at his sudden fluency, he explained, “That is, Owen ap Davith, who spent two years in the south as a lad, told me that’s what Lew said, with a great deal of dumbshow and considerable repetition.”
“Will they go to the high pastures?” Janet asked, thinking of the flocks to be driven up there after lambing, all their livelihood. She leaned over to look down the table at Lew and said carefully in his language, “Please, Lew ap Owen. Bad … dog. Up-pastures?”
He said something she didn’t understand, repeated it at her look of incomprehension and then gave an eerily accurate imitation of the howl that had chilled her blood in the dark. By the fire, the hounds jumped up, and then settled again at Lew’s sharp command, though their ears were still pricked.
“Oh,” Janet said. “Wolf. Wolf up-pastures?”
“No,” he assured her, speaking slowly and clearly. “Dog up-pastures. Good dog. Many good dog.”
“Thank you,” Janet said, reassured, and he gave her another of his broad smiles, raised his cup to her, and drank.
“You speak very well,” Lady Modron said with faint surprise.
“I speak terribly,” Janet said frankly. “And I understand almost nothing. But if there’s a fire, being able to shout quick, water will come in handy.”
Heads came up around the table, and Lady Modron said something in a reassuring tone. Reaching for the jug of local honey wine to refill Tom’s cup, she smiled at Janet. “You had better also learn the words for just practicing, Steward Cooper.”
“Yes,” Janet said, feeling rather foolish. “Sorry.” She cleared her throat, tried a word she’d learned the day before. “Sorry.”
Davith spoke, slowly and deliberately as the bailiff and reeve did everything slowly and deliberately. “He said,” Father Donnic started, “that —”
“An old local proverb,” Lady Modron said smoothly. “About wolves, and shepherd lads.”
“And false alarms?” Tom said, smiling.
“And false alarms.”
Janet felt her cheeks flame, and said nothing at all for the rest of the meal.
~o~
Her increased mobility gave Janet greater ability to familiarize herself with Brinday. It was far smaller than her initial impression: the corridors grew shorter as walking them grew less painful.
Lady Modron and her ladies lived in a suite of rooms near the great hall, above the kitchens. Beside, in fact, the room Cadog and Braelyn had taken Janet to that first day, which was not as she
had thought the room that was to be her quarters, but one set aside for guests.
Once she could manage the stairs, her own quarters were in the tower, below Tom’s. Smaller, of course, just one narrow room on a floor that also included the armory and the wardrobe. Far less well appointed as well, but with a chair where she could sit before the fire and a lock she could turn so she could dress and wash and use the chamberpot without fear of interruption.
She didn’t use the chair for sitting by the fire. Most nights, after the evening meal was over, she found herself in Tom’s rooms, sitting by his fire. Talking over what she’d learned about the workings of Brinday that day, about the smallness of the local horses and the need to find money to bring in stronger breeding stock, the impressive size of Lew’s hounds … and always, inevitably, about the poverty of Brinday, the paucity of their stores, and the desperate need for a good autumn harvest to see them through the winter.
Tom had found a chess-set somewhere in the manor, and he taught Janet the rules — and then trounced her soundly as they talked. Fair revenge for all those card-games I won, back in the army. As the candles guttered and the number of pieces on her side of the board dwindled, he talked sometimes of his fears: never knowing whether the words conveyed to him were in fact the words spoken by the people he was now sworn to protect, fearing that his failure here would bring consequences for his family …
He never spoke of Lady Modron. At first Janet assumed it was because she’d agreed to the marriage long before Tom rode through the gates, and he had no doubts of her. As the weeks wore on, though, and there was no sign of a wedding, she began to think that it was in fact precisely doubts that bound his tongue.
One night, her king tipped onto his side, their cups empty, she ventured to broach the topic. “So, you’ll be a married man soon.”
“Soon enough,” Tom said shortly, a set to his jaw that forbade further inquiry.