“Did you get a prize?” Rosamund queried her nursemaid.
“The marble,” Maybel admitted.
“No! No!” the little girl cried. “That means your life will be lonely, Maybel!”
“Well, it ain’t been lonely yet,” Maybel replied with a chortle. “I got you to look after, and I got my Edmund. It’s all a bunch of tomfoolery anyway.”
Escorted by her husband, Rosamund went from the hall out into the early evening to pass out crisp apples from a woven willow basket to her tenants who were gathered about the All Hallows’ Eve fire on the hillside. Apples at this time of year were considered good fortune. Rosamund’s fruit was accepted with curtsies and bows and thanks from the people of Friarsgate.
The following day was All Saints’, and a feast was held to honor all of the saints, known and unknown. On November second, All Souls’ Day was celebrated. The Friarsgate children went singing—a-souling—from door to door, and were rewarded with “soul cakes,” a small sweet oatcake with bits of apple in it. On the ninth day of the month Rosamund surprised her husband with a small feast to celebrate his natal day. She also presented him with a silver broach decorated with a black agate that had belonged to her father and her grandfather.
Hugh looked down at the broach nestled in its wrapping of delicate blue wool cloth. He had never in all his life—not once in his sixty years—been gifted with anything. He looked down at the girl who was now his wife, and his eyes shone with tears. “Why, Rosamund,” he said, his voice tight in his throat, “I have never received anything as fine as this.” Bending, he kissed her rosy cheek. “Thank you, wife.”
“Oh, I am so glad that you liked it,” she responded. “Maybel said you would. ’Tis for your cloak, Hugh. ’Twill look so fine!”
Two days later they celebrated Martinmas with roast goose. On the twenty-fifth of November St. Catherine’s Day was observed with cathern cakes, which were shaped like wheels, and lamb’s wool, a frothy drink that was served from a cathern bowl. Afterward circle dances were danced in the hall. The harvest was long gathered in, and many of the ewes and she-cattle were ripening with young to be born in the next few months.
The Christmas season came beginning with the first day of the twelve to follow on the eve of Christ’s Mass. It was the happiest time Rosamund could ever remember in all her life. There was no word from her uncle Henry. In the hall a huge Yule log burned night and day. Mistletoe and greens were hung along with branches of holly. There were twelve candelabrums all burning by Twelfth Night. Twelve dishes were served at each meal. There was a wassailing for each day, and sweet foods were especially popular. There was frumenty, humble pie, mince pie, and pudding, but Rosamund’s favorites were Yule dolls, which were made of gingerbread.
Rosamund’s gift to each tenant family was that they might hunt rabbits each Saturday for the winter months. Since it had been a good harvest, her stone granaries were full, and she would also be able to feed the Friarsgate folk during the cold weather. Grain was distributed once monthly to be taken to the miller and ground into flour. In her own cellars were baskets of onions, apples, and pears, and carrots and beets were hung from the cellar rafters.
January fifth was the last day of the Christmas feast, known as Twelfth Night. Rosamund and Hugh were entertained in the hall that night by six dancers from the village dressed up as oxen complete with horns and bells. When they had finished their amusement, Rosamund chose one among them as the “best beast.” Giggling, she placed upon its horn a hard oat cake in the shape of a doughnut. The best beast then tried to shake off his reward while Rosamund and Hugh debated heatedly over whether the cake would fall before or behind the dancer. Finally the cake flew up off the beast’s horn and onto the table before the young mistress of Friarsgate. Rosamund burst out laughing, and clapped.
“Bravo!” she cried as the oxen danced from the hall.
The meal finished, the lord and lady of Friarsgate arose with their goblets and went outside into the clear cold night. Above them in the black sky the stars twinkled silver, blue, and red. Before the house stood a great gnarled oak with branches that spread themselves out in all directions. It was said to have been there before the building was constructed over two hundred years ago. Their cups contained cider, and they had with them three small pieces of seedcake. Rosamund and Hugh toasted the ancient tree, and then they each ate a single piece of cake, offering the other two bits to the tree. Then they circled the tree, singing an ancient tune and pouring the remainder of the cider onto the tree’s knobby roots that lay upon the surface of the hard earth.
“This is the best Twelfth Night I have ever had!” Rosamund declared happily.
“Yes,” Hugh agreed as he walked with his young wife back into the hall, “it has been for me also, lass.”
Now the winter months were here. Rosamund set about to learn how to read and write. With infinite patience, Hugh, himself, taught her, making the letters with a piece of charcoal upon a scrap of parchment. She was, to his surprise, left-handed, which was, of course, very unusual. Following his lead she carefully copied the letters over and over again, speaking aloud their names. She was very serious in her endeavors, and quickly became a good student. Within a month she knew her alphabet by heart and could write each letter neatly. Next he taught her to write her name. She was fascinated when she first saw it, the letters spread out upon the worn parchment. She swiftly began to learn how to write other words, and by late winter she was beginning to read.
“I fear she will outstrip me,” Hugh told Edmund. “She is very intelligent. By summer she will read better than you or I.”
“Then teach her—we shall do it together—how to do her sums, so she may know how we keep her accounts,” Edmund said. Then he chuckled. “Henry will not be happy when he learns this.”
“He can do nothing,” Hugh replied. “I am Rosamund’s husband. Under the law I am responsible for her behavior and her lands. We both know he chose me because he wanted to keep the child safe from other families’ offers of marriage until he can wed her to his own son after I am gone.”
“The older she gets the more difficult she will be to manage,” Edmund remarked. “She is much like her father. I see it even now.”
The hillsides began to grow green with the spring. The lambing had yielded a goodly crop of new sheep. Rosamund’s herds had also increased with several young heifers and two young bulls. One would be kept for breeding purposes, and the other sold. Over the winter months the houses of Friarsgate’s tenants had been repaired by their occupants. Roofs had been patched, and chimneys had been resealed. Now it was time for the fields to be plowed so that grain and vegetables might be planted.
On the last day of April Rosamund’s seventh birthday was celebrated by her husband, her uncle Edmund, and Maybel. She delighted them all by her enthusiasm over her gifts. From Maybel an embroidered girdle of green silk decorated with gold thread. Her uncle Edmund presented Rosamund with a leather-bound ledger of blank pages to do her sums, along with a small sharpened goose quill with which to write. Hugh, however, gave his wife a pair of doeskin gloves trimmed with rabbit fur that he had made himself, and a sheer lawn veil for her head that he had bought from the first peddler of the spring.
The crops were planted, and the fields were already green when Henry Bolton arrived at Friarsgate for the first time since he had left the previous autumn. He came with a long face to tell them that his good wife, the lady Agnes, had been delivered of a puny daughter on the feast of St. Julia. The child was with a wet nurse, for Agnes Bolton had died of childbed fever shortly after her daughter’s birth. He and Hugh sat together in the hall that evening.
“Rosamund appears in good health,” Henry Bolton said. His niece had greeted him dutifully, and then after the meal politely requested permission from her husband to retire.
“She is a sturdy child,” Hugh replied.
“She seems to favor you,” Henry noted.
“I am like a grandfather to her,” Hugh murmured.
“You do not spoil her, I hope. You used the rod on her?” Henry peered closely at the older man.
“It has not been necessary... to date,” Hugh said. “She is a good child, and obedient. If she should prove otherwise, I will remedy the situation, I assure you, Henry Bolton.”
