no fear of travelling alone. "Too poor to be robbed, too old to be raped," she joked. The truth was that she was too tough for either. And she carried a long knife.
She walked across the drawbridge at Earlscastle on a hot July day. On the battlements of the gatehouse a rook stood like a sentry, the sun glinting off his glossy black feathers. He cawed a warning at her. It sounded like: "Go, go!" She had escaped the plague once, of course; but that might have been luck: she was risking her life by coming here.
The scene in the lower compound was normal, if a little quiet. A woodcutter was unloading a cart full of firewood outside the bakehouse, and a groom was unsaddling a dusty horse in front of the stables, but there was no great bustle of activity. She noticed a small group of men and women outside the west entrance of the little church, and crossed the baked-earth ground to investigate. "Plague victims inside," a maidservant said in answer to her inquiry.
She stepped through the door, feeling dread like a cold lump in her heart.
Ten or twelve straw mattresses were lined up on the floor so that the occupants could face the altar, just as in a hospital. About half the patients seemed to be children. There were three grown men. Gwenda scanned their faces fearfully.
None of them was Sam.
She knelt down and said a prayer of thanks.
Outside, she approached the woman she had spoken to earlier. "I'm looking for Sam from Wigleigh," she said. "He's a new squire."
The woman pointed to the bridge leading to the inner compound. "Try the keep."
Gwenda took the route indicated. A sentry at the bridge ignored her. She climbed the steps to the keep.
The great hall was dark and cool. A big dog slept on the cold stones of the fireplace. There were benches around the walls and a pair of large armchairs at the far end of the room. Gwenda noticed that there were no cushions, no upholstered seats and no wall hangings. She deduced that Lady Philippa spent little time here and took no interest in the furnishings.
Sam was sitting near a window with three younger men. The parts of a suit of armour were laid out on the floor in front of them, arranged in order from faceplate to greaves. Each of the men was cleaning a piece. Sam was rubbing the breastplate with a smooth pebble, trying to remove rust.
She stood watching him for a moment. He wore new clothes in the red-and-black livery of the earl of Shiring. The colours suited his dark good looks. He seemed to be at ease, talking in a desultory way with the others while they all worked. He appeared healthy and well fed. It was what Gwenda had hoped for, but all the same she suffered a perverse pang of disappointment that he was doing so well without her.
He glanced up and saw her. His face registered surprise, then pleasure, then amusement. "Lads," he said, "I am the oldest among you, and you may think I'm capable of looking after myself, but it's not so. My mother follows me everywhere to make sure I'm all right."
They saw her and laughed. Sam put down his work and came over. Mother and son sat on a bench in a corner near the staircase that led to the upstairs rooms. "I'm having a wonderful time," Sam said. "Everyone plays games here most days. We go hunting and hawking, we have wrestling matches and contests of horsemanship, and we play football. I've learned so much! It's a bit embarrassing to be grouped with these adolescents all the time, but I can put up with that. I just have to master the skill of using a sword and shield while riding a horse at the same time."
He was already speaking differently, she noticed. He was losing the slow rhythms of village speech. And he used French words for 'hawking' and 'horsemanship'. He was becoming assimilated into the life of the nobility.
"What about the work?" she said. "It can't be all play."
"Yes, there's plenty of work." He gestured at the others cleaning the armour. "But it's easy by comparison with ploughing and harrowing."
He asked about his brother, and she told him all the news from home: Davey's madder had regenerated, they had dug up the roots, Davey was still involved with Amabel, no one had fallen sick of the plague yet. While they were talking,