“Aye, uncle, God speed you and protect you,” Rosamund echoed. Then she stood watching as he rode away from Friarsgate, slipping her hand into Hugh’s as she did. “If he but knew,” she said softly.
“But he will not, until it is too late,” Hugh answered her.
Rosamund nodded in agreement. “Nay, he will not,” she replied.
Chapter 2
During the few years that followed Rosamund grew from a charming little girl into a gangling young girl, who sometimes seemed to be all legs and flying hair. They saw Henry Bolton but once in all that time. He brought his new wife, Mavis, a buxom girl of sixteen with careful eyes, to meet his niece. Mavis thanked the heiress to Friarsgate for the soap as she openly admired Rosamund’s house and lands.
“Henry says our son will be your husband one day,” she boldly told the younger girl. “This is a fine inheritance for him.”
“Are you with child?” Rosamund inquired with apparent innocence.
Mavis giggled. “I ought to be considering how active a bed partner your uncle is, but you would not know of such things being a child yet.”
“Perhaps you will have a daughter,” Rosamund said. “My poor aunt Agnes did, you know.” She smiled sweetly.
“God and his Blessed Mother forbid it!” Mavis cried, crossing herself. “Your uncle wants sons. I will light as many candles as I must to gain my husband’s wishes. You are a wicked girl to suggest I have daughters. Perhaps you put the evil eye on your uncle’s first wife and caused her death.”
“Do not be silly,” Rosamund responded. “I never saw my aunt again from the day she departed Friarsgate. Besides, I liked her.” This Mavis had fewer brains than a milk cow, Rosamund decided. “Tell me, if you know, what has happened to my cousin, Julia?”
“When she is weaned from the farmer’s wife’s teat, she will go to St. Margaret’s Convent, where she will be raised to become a nun,” Mavis said. “I don’t want to raise another woman’s daughter. Besides, the convent will take a smaller dower portion than any man would. Your aunt Agnes was no great beauty. Henry says the bairn favors her.”
“It is comforting to know my cousin is safe,” Rosamund remarked dryly. How sad that her poor little cousin should be disposed of so easily and so callously. She knew that Henry Bolton would have done the same to her had it not been for Friarsgate.
Rosamund was relieved when Mavis and her uncle departed. In the next three years the news came with monotonous regularity that Mavis delivered first one son, then a second, and finally a third. Her fourth child was a daughter, and after that they heard no more of Mavis Bolton’s fecundity. Her uncle did not visit. She was left to wonder about her cousins. They were probably, she decided, blond, blue-eyed blobs very much like their mother. The eldest of them, called Henry after his father, was supposed to be her future husband.As if I could wed with a four-year-old,Rosamund thought.Why, I am practically twelve!
She could now read anything they put before her. She wrote with a beautiful hand as she transcribed the figures into her account books. She knew how to purchase supplies, the few they did not grow or make themselves at Friarsgate. She had learned exactly what they needed to survive comfortably. She was beginning to bargain for her holding when she, Hugh, and Edmund went to the cattle and sheep markets in the nearby town. She had a keen eye for horseflesh, and had even begun to breed animals for later sale.
Rosamund also took an interest in her great flocks of sheep. Unlike many farms that sold their raw wool to brokers, Friarsgate kept theirs. After the animals were sheared, the wool was washed, dried, combed, and carded twice in order to make the wool extra fine, and hence more valuable in the marketplaces of York and London. Next the wool was dyed. There was a lovely golden brown, a fine red, and a green, but Friarsgate wool was known for an exquisite blue color that no one else seemed capable of duplicating. It was unique to Rosamund’s estate, and highly prized. As mistress of Friarsgate the formula for Friarsgate Blue was entrusted to Rosamund by her uncle Edmund. It was his gift to her upon her tenth birthday, when he told her that she was old enough to know. But it was important that the secret remain with her alone, until she felt it could be passed on to the next heir, or heiress, to Friarsgate.
Rosamund nodded somberly, understanding the importance of what Edmund was imparting to her. “I may share my knowledge with no one?” she asked quietly.
“No one,” Edmund repeated.
“How do we get our colors so clear and bright, uncle?” she asked him. “I have seen other wools, and they are not at all as fine as ours are. How is it done? Is it the formula for the dyes?”
Edmund chuckled. “We set the colors with sheep urine, lass,” he told her, grinning. “That is the secret of the blue color, too. It is darker in the dye vat, but once we move it into the pee, it turns that fabled color so highly prized.”
Rosamund laughed, too. It was so simple, and an absolutely delicious secret. She wished briefly that she might share the secret with Hugh, but she knew she would not.
Once the wool was dyed it was distributed among the cottages to be spun on the looms kept in a separate room in each weaver’s home. This kept the wool from being impregnated by smoke, or food odors, or heat, which might turn the delicate colors. The long strands of the wool were woven into an extra-fine cloth that was highly prized and greatly sought after. The shorter bits were turned to a fine felt.
Rosamund learned all of the processes, and she was very proud of her knowledge. Hugh and Edmund were proud of her, too. The child who they both treasured was growing into a young woman whose passion for knowledge could not be quenched. It disturbed them that they had nothing more to teach her.
The winter before her thirteenth birthday Hugh Cabot fell ill with an ague. He was slow to recover. It was that spring that Henry Bolton chose to pay a visit to Friarsgate. It was the first he had made in several years. He was accompanied by his eldest son, five-year-old Henry. The oddly coincidental timing of his visit made Rosamund suspicious that she had a spy among her servants.
“Find out,” she curtly instructed her uncle Edmund.
Henry Bolton eyed his niece critically. She was tall, and no longer had a childish look about her. “How old are you now, girl?” he demanded, noting how her blue wool gown with its long tight sleeves clung to newly budding breasts. She was ripening, he considered nervously.
“You are most welcome to Friarsgate,uncle,” Rosamund swept him a rather elegant curtsy. “I shall be thirteen in a few weeks.” She waved her hand gracefully. “Come into the hall for some refreshment.” Then, turning, she led the way, her blue skirts swinging behind her as she walked. “And how is my aunt?” she inquired politely. “Doll, bring wine for my uncle and cider for his little lad,” she ordered a serving woman.
“I am to be your husband, girl!” the little boy announced loudly. He was small, Rosamund thought, for a child of five. He had his mother’s blond hair and bovine look. There was nothing, she thought, that was Bolton about him, but perhaps the set of his jaw, reminded her strongly of her uncle Henry.
“My name is Rosamund. I am your cousin, and I already have a husband,” she told him, looking down at him.
“Who lies dying,” the boy said boldly. “You and Friarsgate are to be mine,girl.” He stood, legs apart, glaring at her.
