by Alison Adare
So she left it, although she well knew that it had been part of the Protector’s bargain with him. If she baulks … will that tell against him? She feared it would.
If Lady Modron had known her as a woman, Janet might have tried gentle inquiry, but Steward Jack Cooper had no reason to speak to her on such personal terms. Modron still sat beside Tom at the table each evening, still poured his wine with her own hand — Janet could only conclude the delay was due to delicacy rather than reluctance — either on her part or on his. Or both.
At least he spent part of each day in her company, as a young man wooing a lady should do.
Janet could do nothing about Tom’s success or otherwise pressing his suit with Lady Modron, so she set herself to the things she could do. She spent time in the stables and kennels, until the small, solid horses and the great, muscular dogs of Brinday recognized her as a friend. Weather-beaten Lew ab Owen, she flattered herself, also began to see her as a friend. Their conversations were necessarily limited by the difference in language, but he watched her check hooves and rub ears, or stand fast as the dogs came out of the kennel in a seething brown and brindle mass to swarm around her. She fancied there came to be more than mere politeness in his smile. She was glad of it: the condition of the animals and their accommodation told her he was good at his job. She watched him as he watched her, and saw that as hard and calloused as his hands were, they were always gentle when they touched an animal. Though he could snap a command that made the mastiffs drop to their bellies on the instant, his voice never rose above an even, quiet tone. Never once did Janet see him direct so much as a cuff towards one of the creatures in his care.
Janet also sat with Davith ap Owelth in his office by the great hall as he sorted through the complaints and disagreements of Brinday’s tenants, Father Donnic murmuring a translation in her ear. Some arguments were simple, like a disagreement whether the man who owned a dog which had sired a litter on someone else’s bitch was entitled to two of the puppies or only the best of the litter. Others seemed to trace back to agreements and rights several generations ago, and Janet found herself completely lost as both Davith and Donnic listened with seeming understanding to the rights and wrongs of them.
With his broad shoulders and shock of unruly black hair, Davith looked more like a law-breaker than a law-giver, but he seemed to have infinite patience for the problems brought to him to solve. He spoke little, and slowly, but what he did say was closely listened to and well-received. Janet could tell — from what she saw on their faces as well as what Donnic told her they said — that Brinday’s tenants seemed generally satisfied with Davith’s decisions, or at least, accepted them with resignation when they did not go their way.
At other times, Janet followed Davith around the manor as he kept a watchful eye on the servants at their work, counted their dwindling stores with a grim expression, decided which repairs Owen the blacksmith must do first and which could wait. Davith decided when the roofs of the servants’ houses and the stables should be re-thatched, and which tenants would help Braelyn with the first garden planting, and whether the pig-boy should be set apprentice to Owen or not. He always looked to Janet for her approval when he made a decision, scrupulously polite and correct, but they both knew it was a mere formality.
It was a great relief that the people of Brinday seemed to be law-abiding, and no-one came to report a crime that would necessitate holding a court. Although she was confident enough now of her knowledge of the King’s law to be able to give a good enough account of herself in charge of a trial, she suspected that foreign ways still ran counter to what the locals would expect and want — and she knew very well that although she was Steward Cooper, it was to the quiet man sitting next to her the tenants would look.
As well, Janet walked the walls of Brinday with Glyn ap Evan, who made no allowance for the stick she still used and led the way over crumbling battlements without slowing down. On more than one occasion, as she fought to keep her footing, Janet wondered if he was trying to kill her. Certainly, the master of guard regarded her with no hint of friendliness. When he spoke, which was rarely, he made no concession to her limited vocabulary, leaving her struggling in the wake of the conversation as she struggled behind him around the walls. Her own halting efforts at speech were more often than not met with blank incomprehension.
If they’d shared a language, she might have told him a few of her stories from the army — the funnier ones, at least. They might have served as the first planks in a bridge between herself and this dour man, a tentative understanding that beneath their differences they were both soldiers.
But even if they’d been able to understand each other fluently, Janet couldn’t have said, look, we’re on the same side here even if she’d had the words for it, because of course, for Glyn they weren’t. The gaps in the battlements troubled Janet with thoughts of the future, but Glyn remembered them being made, and remembered them being made by the siege machines of the father of the king who’d sent Sir Thomas, and thus his steward Jack Cooper, to Brinday.
The men of Brinday had fought to stay free of the Crown, and lost, and lived under the yoke of that loss. Now they found themselves with one of the enemy set over them. Some, like Lew, might be willing to accept Tom, though Janet suspected that it was as Lady Modron’s future husband they accepted him. Others, like Glyn, would be harder to win.
If they can be won at all.
Chapter 5
Janet could limp about without her stick by the time lambing was coming to an end. She made a point of hobbling out to the lambing pens with short, solid Cadog one night, holding the lantern high as he knelt by a struggling ewe, reaching inside her in an effort to guide the lamb within to life.
The finer points of helping a sheep struggling to birth its lamb were beyond her, but watching the ewe strain and bleat as Cadog delicately drew first one small foreleg forward, then the other, she could guess that the ewe could not have managed on her own.
And then the lamb slid free. It did not seem to be breathing. The ewe turned and began nuzzling and licking her offspring, chewing at the caul still wrapping it. Janet moved to help her, but Cadog stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Wait,” he said.
And the lamb moved and gave a tiny sound.
Janet burned to ask Cadog if all lambs were born dead, if all ewes had the power to lick their young to life, or if she had just seen a miracle. In the dim yellow glow of the lantern, his seamed face seemed unsurprised, so perhaps this was just a curiosity of nature. After all, bear cubs are born shapeless, and their mother licks them into shape, or so Tom swears.
Another lamb followed the first, this time without any need for Cadog’s help, and was licked and nibbled by the ewe in the same manner.
This time, the magic did not work. The lamb stayed limp and dead, and after a little while its mother abandoned the effort and turned back to her first-born, now discovering it had legs although not, on the evidence, understanding what they were for.
Cadog picked up the dead lamb and jerked his head to tell Janet to follow him away from the pens. Once they had gone quite some distance, he drew his knife and quickly and expertly skinned the lamb. Leaving the body where it lay, he went back to the pens, this time to one that held only lambs. Selecting one, he lifted it from the pen, held it between his legs, and tied the skin of the dead lamb over it like a cloak.
Back with the ewe who had just given birth, he put the new lamb down next to her. She sniffed at it, and then began to nuzzle and lick it. The lamb, however, had other things on its mind, and within a few moments was nursing busily, little tail flicking enthusiastically. Janet leaned on the fence of the pen beside Cadog and watched, despite the cold, until the first lamb too had gained its wobbly feet and was nursing beside its new sibling.
Janet wished heartily it was as easy to get the people of Brinday to accept her and Tom. Dress him up in the old lord’s clothes, let them smell him over … She laughed a little at the thought of Glyn and Lew
, Davith and Braelyn, circling Tom, sniffing suspiciously.
Next to her, Cadog gave her an inquiring glance. Janet shrugged, unable to explain the joke even if she’d thought he would find it funny. She pointed instead to the lamb now curled at its adoptive mother’s feet, stomach round with milk. “Good,” she said, on a face-splitting yawn.
Cadog nodded, and patted her arm. “Good.”
~o~
Joke though it was, the thought still circled back to Janet, on the edge of sleep, or as she was inspecting the kitchen stores, or kneeling in the church: the stranger lamb, dressed in a familiar skin, accepted by the ewe as her own. With it came Donnic’s words, on the day of their arrival. Did you and your lord lose a bet?
Tom had brought fine enough clothes with him, though few: they were of the latest fashion of the court, and the short doublets did show off his well-turned legs to full advantage. They were quite different, though, from the long tunics all the men here wore indoors and out, from their loose trousers and sheepskin coats.
After dinner one night, Janet found her steps taking her to the wardrobe.
Kneeling by the chests that held old Lord Brinday’s clothes, she lifted out tunic after tunic. They were of far better quality than those worn by the tenants, or by Davith and the others: wool, but very close-woven with barely a nap. Even by candle-light, the colors were rich, deep russet browns and greens. The embroidery that coiled around collar and sleeve was in patterns Janet had never seen, unmistakably foreign. She touched the tiny stitches. Fine work. She knew very well how long it would have taken, how the eyes of the needlewoman would have burned with weariness as she bent over the cloth.
She shook a few out, judging the size. The old lord had not been as tall as Tom, it seemed, but he’d been as wide across the shoulders or more. The trousers were impossible, but the tunics would do well enough, if a little shorter than the locals wore their own.
Choosing, not the finest, but one that was very fine all the same, Janet folded it carefully over her arm and carried it upstairs to Tom’s suite of rooms for their nightly chess game.
For once, he had not set up the pieces, but sat staring into the flickering flames in the fireplace. Whatever he saw there, it was very far away: Janet had to speak his name twice before he started, and turned.
His gaze lit on the cloth folded over her arm. “What do you have there?”
“A new suit for you,” Janet said. She came into the circle of light cast by the candles on the mantel and shook the tunic out.
He eyed it dubiously. “I seem to recall my grandfather wearing something like that.”
“It was old Lord Brinday’s, I think.”
“You’d have me dress in dead men’s clothes?”
Janet snorted. “Only the gentry can be so choosy, Tom. Most of the country, most of the world, wears a dead man’s or dead woman’s clothes and are glad of the warmth. Have you not noticed we’re very far from the height of fashion, here? Every time you walk into the great hall, you announce yourself a stranger, a foreigner, and one with no intention of changing your ways to suit the locals.”
“I’m not here to change my ways,” Tom said. “I’m here to change theirs.”
Janet dropped into the chair opposite him, the tunic puddled in her lap. “Tom, you can break a horse to serve you, but it’ll take a hard hand on the reins to keep it in check ever after. Or you can coax it to carry you, and it’ll go into a hail of cannonballs at the touch of your heel.”
The corner of his mouth twitched up a little. “Are the people of Brinday the horse in this story? Or am I?”
She shook out the tunic again. “The wardrobe’s full of these. Perhaps there’s been no money for the lord to keep current with modern fashion, but there are plenty of needlewomen here who could have altered these if that’s the case. This is what the people here expect to see their lord wearing, Tom. If they see you in them, there’s at least some part of them who will see their lord, for all you’re head and shoulders above them.” And fair as sunlight, in a country that hasn’t seen hair that color since the King’s father, and thus has no reason to regard it fondly.
Slowly, he leaned forward and took the tunic from her. “So they’ll like me better, dressed like this?”
“Can it hurt?”
“And will she like me better?” he asked, almost inaudibly.
Janet had tried to raise the topic of Lady Modron with him, and been rebuffed, but now her only thought was Oh, this is so much not a conversation I want to have with this man. She had thought herself resigned to the idea of him marrying, had persuaded herself that she would be happy if that marriage brought happiness and love. Still, the low note to his voice, a man grieved by affections unreturned, struck her with a shock like the hard blow of a sword against her own. “Perhaps.” She took a deep breath. His future — and mine — turns on that marriage. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it does!” He flung out of the chair, dumping the tunic carelessly to the floor. Janet scrambled to keep it from the hearth as he strode across the room. “I won’t take an unwilling woman to wife.”
She looked up at him, his face all odd shadows from the firelight, from the angle. “She’s not unwilling, Tom. She agreed to it before you even got here.”
“Because she had no choice,” Tom said. “Because the Protector would have set someone here regardless, and she could marry as he bid or be turned out of her home.”
“It can’t have been a shock to her,” Janet pointed out. “Marrying as they’re bid is the usual lot of women, well-born ones at least. If they’re lucky, they’re bid somewhere that’s pleasing to them. And you’re — ” Janet studied his face, for longer than she needed to, because here was an excuse to look her fill. The hint of blond stubble on his cheeks, slightly darker than the gold of his hair; the old scar at his sculpted temple; the warm amber of his eyes. “Fine. Pleasing enough, I’d say.” She got to her feet. “Not some hunched old man with bad teeth, which could have been her lot.”
His voice was almost inaudible. “I’ve got nothing to offer her. I come here only to take. To take her birthright, her father’s land.”
That he could think, that Lady Modron could have let him think, that his hand and heart in marriage was nothing, that he was nothing, was almost more than Janet could stand. I will kick her high-born backside from here to the Protector’s door if she’s unkind to him. “Is that what she’s said to you?”
He sighed. “No. She’s not … she’s not like that. She wouldn’t be cruel. She’s courteous and attentive. But no more than any lady would be to a guest in her house.”
“Well,” Janet said, thinking of what she’d seen at the dinner table, “you’re courteous and attentive, but no more than any knight would be to a lady. Perhaps she’s waiting for you to …” She searched her memory for what noble-folk did. “Carry her favor in a tourney. Write her a ballad.”
“A tourney in Brinday?” Tom said incredulously.
“Christ’s blood, Tom, I don’t know! Whatever knights are supposed to do when wooing.”
“Worship from afar, mostly,” he said dryly. “In the poems, anyway. Declare myself dying for love of her. Heroic deeds in her name comes in there somewhere. I could battle a particularly ferocious sheep, I suppose.”
Janet snorted. “And write a poem about it? I’m not sure your lady’s sense of humor is sufficient to appreciate it.” A declaration of love, on the other hand … Tom would make a very pretty show of it, without a doubt, gazing into her eyes with warm devotion. I have loved you in silence but now I must speak, perhaps he’d say. I want only to be near you. You are the reason my heart beats … Janet realized she had been silent too long. “Well, give her some flowers or something.” She paused. “I’ll pick the flowers. You’ll give them to her. If —” She jabbed one finger at his chest. “You’ll allow me to have some of those clothes downstairs altered to fit you, and wear them.”
A flicker of humor in his eyes. “All right. I’ll sacrifice
my sartorial dignity, if you insist.”
Janet folded the tunic carefully, and sat back down in her chair. “Many’s the man who’d sacrifice far more for a manor holding and a sweet-faced bride. If you think to make me sorry for you, think on. Now. Are you going to dazzle me once more with your proficiency at this blasted game? Or will you let me win for once?”
“Now how would you enjoy it if I allowed you to beat me? Jealousy does not become you, Jack.”
And how well I know it. Any reply caught in her throat.
“Jack.” Tom touched her shoulder as he passed her chair on his way to his own. “You’re a good friend. Better than I deserve.”
She managed to smile, and say lightly, “We both know that.”
~o~
With warmer weather bringing shoots of green in the fields, Janet thought it might be time to see for herself what there was in Braelyn’s garden that might end up in Tom’s food. It did not take her long to walk from the gate to the stone wall protecting the garden from wandering sheep. Further down the same path lay the huddle of houses that made up the village, just visible from where she stood. Brinday’s graveyard was a decent distance further up the hill. Even from here, Janet could see that it was not small, though the population of Brinday was small. Generation on generation will be laid there, no doubt more than a few of them in the same grave, husbands and wives, parents and children, descendants laid with the bones of their ancestors. Old Lord Brinday would lie there, probably a little apart from the others, and his wife.
Among the stones, sheep grazed, a lamb frisked away from its mother and back again to butt her flank hungrily. Janet thought perhaps that the generations of shepherds who slept beneath the rich green grass waiting for the resurrection on judgment day heard the bleats above them, the sound comforting them in their long dreaming. She wondered suddenly whether sheep or cattle grazed above the deep pits across the water where the army dead lay tumbled. Mark, she remembered, had been the child of a city, as Janet was. Did Mark lie restless, missing the familiar noises of wheels on cobbles, of baker boys crying their wares and children who’d escaped their mothers for a little while shouting and laughing as they kicked a ball of knotted rags?