Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,138

have returned with the improving weather. She started when Maisry came in from outside and then cuffed her for getting mud on the floor. She suddenly thought of a dozen things that weren’t ready and found fault with everyone. When Lady Imeyne said for the dozenth time, “If we had gone to Courcy …” Eliwys nearly snapped her head off.

Kivrin had thought it was a bad idea to dress Agnes before the last possible minute, and by midafternoon the little girl’s, embroidered sleeves were grubby and she had spilled flour all down one side of the velvet skirt.

By late afternoon Gawyn had still not returned, everyone’s nerves were at the snapping point, and Maisry’s ears were bright red. When Lady Imeyne told Kivrin to take six beeswax candles to Father Roche, she was delighted with the chance to get the girls out of the house.

“Tell him they must last through both the masses,” Imeyne said irritably, “and poor masses will they be for our Lord’s birth. We should have gone to Courcy.”

Kivrin got Agnes into her cloak and called Rosemund, and they walked across to the church. Roche wasn’t there. A large yellowish candle with bands marked on it sat in the middle of the altar, unlit. He would light it at sunset and use it to keep track of the hours till midnight. On his knees in the icy church.

He wasn’t in his house either. Kivrin left the candles on the table. On the way back across the green, they saw Roche’s donkey by the lychgate licking the snow.

“We forgot to feed the animals,” Agnes said.

“Feed the animals?” Kivrin asked warily, thinking of their clothes.

“It is Christmas Eve,” Agnes said. “Fed you not the animals at home?”

“She remembers not,” Rosemund said. “On Christmas Eve we feed the animals in honor of our Lord that he was born in a stable.”

“Do you remember naught of Christmas then?” Agnes asked.

“A little,” Kivrin said, thinking of Oxford on Christmas Eve, of the shops in Carfax decorated with plastene evergreens and laser lights and jammed with last-minute shoppers, the High full of bicycles, and Magdalen Tower showing dimly through the snow.

“First they ring the bells and then you get to eat and then mass and then the Yule log,” Agnes said.

“You have turned it all about,” Rosemund said. “First we light the Yule log and then we go to mass.”

“First the bells,” Agnes said, glaring at Rosemund, “and then mass.”

They went to the barn for a sack of oats and some hay and took them across to the stable to feed the horses. Gringolet wasn’t among them, which meant Gawyn still wasn’t back. She must speak with him as soon as he returned. The rendezvous was less than a week away, and she still had no idea where the drop was. And with Lord Guillaume coming, everything might change.

Eliwys had only put off doing anything with her till her husband came, and she had told the girls again this morning she expected him today. He might decide to take Kivrin to Oxford, or London, to look for her family, or Sir Bloet might offer to take her back with them to Courcy. She had to talk to him soon. But with guests here, it would be much easier to catch him alone, and in all the bustle and busyness of Christmas, she might even get him to show her the place.

Kivrin dawdled as long as she could with the horses, hoping Gawyn might come back, but Agnes got bored and wanted to go feed corn to the chickens. Kivrin suggested they go feed the steward’s cow.

“It is not our cow,” Rosemund snapped.

“She helped me on that day when I was ill,” Kivrin said, thinking of how she had leaned against the cow’s bony back the day she tried to find the drop. “I would thank her for her kindness.”

They went past the pen where the pigs had lately been, and Agnes said, “Poor piglings. I would have fed them an apple.”

“The sky to the north darkens again,” Rosemund said. “I think they will not come.”

“Ay, but they will,” Agnes said. “Sir Bloet has promised me a trinket.”

The steward’s cow was in almost the same place Kivrin had found it, behind the second to the last hut, eating what was left of the same blackening pea vines.

“Good Christmas, Lady Cow,” Agnes said, holding a handful of hay a good meter from the cow’s mouth.

“They speak only at midnight,” Rosemund said.

“I would come see them