“I would welcome a priest again,” Edmund said. “There are several marriages that need to be celebrated, and quite a number of bairns in need of baptizing.”
“But a Scot?”Henry said again.
Edmund pierced his youngest brother with a fierce look. “Richard says that this priest is a good man for Friarsgate. When was our brother ever disloyal to the Boltons, Henry?”
“I will welcome Father Mata,” Rosamund interjected quietly.
“He shall be sent, niece,” Richard told her with a small smile.
Rosamund now turned to her uncle Henry. “I have my work to do, uncle. There is seed to be distributed this morning, and I must supervise. I wish you a safe journey home. You will remember me to your good wife and my little cousins.” Then she looked directly at Henry the younger. “Good-bye, boy,” she said, and hurried from the hall.
“I’m glad I don’t have to marryher,” Henry the younger said. Then he continued shoveling hot oat stirabout into his mouth.
“Shut up, you lackwit!”his father shouted savagely, and his fingers closing about the cup that had been placed before him, he gulped down the wine in it, but he did not, as Rosamund had promised, feel any better.
Chapter 4
Owein Meredith was surprised to learn that while his young hostess was hardly educated to court standards, she was learned in many other ways. She would never, he thought to himself, be truly happy anywhere but at Friarsgate. Rosamund Bolton had become an integral part of the manor. Despite her youth she was looked up to by her tenants and her workers. In this, her uncle Edmund and her late husband Hugh Cabot had been successful. Once Henry Bolton had gone, everything done on the manor was done in Rosamund’s name only, thus reinforcing her position as Friarsgate’s heiress.
From the spring on Owein had watched, fascinated, as she oversaw every facet of the manor’s varied life. Friarsgate was practically entirely self-supporting. Several varieties of grain, vegetables, and fruits were grown. It was Rosamund who determined which fields would be tilled and which would lie fallow. It was she who set the schedule for pruning the orchards. Cattle were raised for milk and meat, for sale or for barter. At Hugh’s suggestion Rosamund grew interested in raising horses. But it was the sheep that gave Friarsgate its greatest source of wealth, for Friarsgate wool was highly prized.
The manor possessed a small mill with a resident miller. There was a small church and a priest’s house that was now swept out, to be prepared in anticipation of Father Mata’s arrival. There were meadows and pastures for the cattle, the horses, and the sheep. There were woodlands, common pastureland, and common woodlands where Rosamund’s people might hunt and fish or graze their own livestock. Most of Friarsgate’s people had once been serfs, but Rosamund’s grandfather had freed them. While a few families had departed Friarsgate to seek their fortunes, most had remained to be treated as free men and women.
Friarsgate was not the holding of a great family, but it was considered a very large manor and its young mistress an heiress of value. Its land was well-watered and always lush. Rosamund learned to move her flocks and herds so her acreage did not become overgrazed and barren. It had never been a poor place. Over the past few years they had become very prosperous. Not one family among its peasants was without a cow, or some pigs, or poultry. And while free to make most of their own decisions, the men and women of Friarsgate were fiercely loyal to the Boltons, going even so far as to give them three days a week of labor, as they had in days of old. The free men and women of Friarsgate also had their own strips of field as their serf ancestors once had. Here they raised their own produce to feed their families and sold what was excess. And it was in the manor court that Rosamund, with Hugh and Edmund’s guidance, had learned to settle disputes among her people.
Owein Meredith, raised among the powerful, had forgotten that such manors as Friarsgate still existed. His childhood, prior to entering the household of Jasper Tudor, was a memory mostly forgotten, if he indeed remembered it at all. And so as the summer progressed he watched in fascination as Rosamund went about her duties as mistress of this prosperous manor with such seeming ease that she almost made it appear simple. But that he knew it wasn’t. Early each afternoon after the main meal of the day had been served and eaten, he schooled the king’s new ward, teaching her French and proper Latin, the kind spoken and written in the court.
It was difficult for her, he saw, as foreign tongues were not easy for Rosamund, but she struggled to learn with such a fierce determination that he was forced to admire her. The only women he had admired prior were the king’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of Richmond, who was known asthe Venerable Margaret; and the king’s wife, Elizabeth of York. These were women of a certain age and vast experience, yet this young girl put him in mind of them both. Like the queen, she was dutiful and gentle. Like the Venerable Margaret, she was determined and loyal. Owein Meredith found himself worrying how a country girl like Rosamund, born without a great name or powerful relations, was going to fit in at the court of King Henry VII. And then it dawned upon him that other than delivering her to her guardian, he was not responsible for Rosamund Bolton.
The summer was drawing to an end. Lammas came and with it the harvest. Lammas was a holiday in which bread played the chief role. At sunrise Rosamund exited the house with a dish of crumbs she had made by breaking up one quarter of a year-old loaf. She scattered it for the birds. Her tenants were all invited into the hall for a meal, most of the dishes consisting of bread or flour. There was a piggling stuffed with bread, nuts, cheese, eggs, and spices; entrails—a sheep’s stomach stuffed with bread, vegetables, eggs, cheese, and pork; mortrews—a meat dish made with beef, eggs, and bread crumbs; barley bannocks—a bread made from barley, flour, salt, and buttermilk; a large wheel of cheese, and frumenty pudding made from wheat and milk, spiced with cinnamon. Lamb’s wool, a spicy cider with floating apples, was also served.
And when everyone had eaten their fill the games began. Outside the men played a game in a meadow that involved kicking a stuffed sheep’s bladder about from one end of the field to the other. There was an archery contest. Then men shot long bows at straw butts that had been set up in front of the house. The winner was presented with a large mug of ale. And as the afternoon wore on they returned to the hall where the married women played a game called Bringing Home the Bacon. Each in her turn was given a negative and hypothetical situation that involved her husband. It was up to each woman to negate this unfavorable state and turn it into something positive. The wife who could accomplish this while amusing her listeners was declared the winner and rewarded with a blue silk ribbon. At day’s end everyone was presented with a small baked loaf made from the newly harvested grain. They departed to their homes with the loaves, each of which had a lit candle embedded in it.
The day after Lammastide Owein spoke with Rosamund about their departure. “You must consider a date for our leaving, my lady,” he said. They had been sitting in the hall practicing her French, and he spoke to her in that language.
She looked up startled, and so he knew that she had comprehended his words, but she said, “I am not certain of what you said, Owein Meredith. Please speak to me in our own good English tongue.”
“You are a little fraud,” he gently teased her, still in French. “You understand me quite well, Rosamund.”
“I don’t!” she cried, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, realizing that her answer had confirmed his suspicions. “The day after Michaelmas,” she said in English.
“That is almost two full months, Rosamund,” he told her.
“You said the king did not need you back, sir. That you were not important. Neither am I. The king but fulfills a debt to Hugh Cabot. Why should we have to go at all?”
“Because if we do not your uncle may petition the king to regain custody of you, Rosamund,” he explained quietly. “Such a petition might not even be seen by the king, but rather one of his secretaries, who would squeeze monies from your uncle in exchange for his cooperation. Voila! Your wardship would once again be in the hands of Henry Bolton, and Henry the younger would be your spouse. If this is what you truly want, then I shall return south, tell the king, and it shall be done. But if you choose to honor your husband’s wishes for your future, you will cease being afraid of the unknown, and come with me.” The hazel-green eyes looked directly at her, questioningly.
“But Michaelmas is when I rehire my servants for the coming year and pay them,” she half-whispered.
“Edmund will do it,” he said. “September first, Rosamund.”
“It is too soon!” Her amber eyes began to fill with tears.
Owein Meredith gritted his teeth and hardened his heart against her female wiles. Women, he had learned, always wept when they wanted their own way. “Nay, it is not. It gives you almost a full month to pack your belongings and delegate your authority to Edmund and the others. You have known this day was coming. I have been here almost four months, Rosamund. I have been gone from court for almost five. It is time. Think of Maybel. She, too, must prepare. She leaves her husband in your service.”
“I have rarely been off my own lands in all my life,” Rosamund told him, and he nodded, understanding. “I am not really afraid, but I am not a girl who welcomes adventure, sir.”
He chuckled. “There is little adventure in a journey between Friarsgate and the king’s court, Rosamund. And for you there will be little, if any adventure, in the queen’s household. You will be assigned certain duties, and your days will be filled with them. It will not, I fear, be very exciting for you. The only difference is that you will not be the mistress there.”
