“Aye, I love you,” he whispered into her flesh. “I will never love another.”
Eyes closed, trying to catch her breath, Ellowyn could only smile.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The dream wasback, picking up where it had left off.
She had no idea what her grandfather was pointing at. Through the rain and mist, all she could see was mud and dead bodies. Even this far away from that horrid, smoking castle, the bodies were thick. So many dead.
Her heart was pounding in her throat, her hand on her belly as the child kicked. The kicking was becoming painful, in fact, and she rubbed at her belly as she tried to see what her grandfather was pointing at.
“There, Wynny,” he said. “Do you not see him there?”
She was frantic as she tried to determine what he was talking about. There was something in the distance to catch her attention, something deep and dark and ugly. She could feel it. She wanted to know what he was pointing at but then again, she didn’t want to know.
“Who is it, Papa?” she cried.
Her grandfather simply pointed, his handsome face edged with sadness.
“Go to him, Wynny. You must save him.”
Frustrated, terrified, she began to cry. The baby kicked, painfully, and she cried harder. But she could see something through the rain and mist beneath the trees in the distance. It was a man in armor, lying beneath the canopy. There was blood all around him, the color of a ruby. In an otherwise black and white and gray landscape, it was the only spot of gruesome color.
She tried to move towards him but the mud had become a great sucking cauldron, refusing to let her move. She clawed at it, scratching her way towards the man lying beneath the trees. The hands of the dead began to sprout up through the mud, grabbing at her, clutching at her.
She screamed.
*
During those firstfew days of the duke’s return to Guildford, the servants, soldiers, and knights would be hard-pressed for an answer when asked who the more stern taskmaster was– the duke or his wife. Popular opinion was leaning towards the formidable and lovely Lady de Russe as she took over the castle like a conquering hero.
The evening they took possession of the castle and keep, Brandt had sent four soldiers to assist his wife in making the keep habitable to her standards, which wasn’t a simple or quick task. Ellowyn had very high standards. The first thing she did was set a giant iron pot to boiling in the kitchen yard and asked the soldiers to find some lye. A search of the entire castle didn’t turn up a trace of it, so Ellowyn set forth making some. She’d seen the women at Erith make it dozens of times so she understood the simple process. In order to effectively clean, she had to have lye.
One of the soldiers found her an old wine barrel, which she had propped up on some stones so that it was off the ground. Then, she had the soldiers put rocks all over the bottom of the barrel and covered the rocks with a thin layer of hay before making a hole near the base and plugging it up with another rock.
With all of that done, she had them make a fire of oak. The hard wood burned long and low, so it wasn’t until the nextmorning that they had the desired ash from the burning. While waiting for the oak to burn down, Brandt had tried to talk her into sleeping on the dirty bed but she wouldn’t touch it, so he fashioned a pallet for them on the floor of the chamber and they slept on that. His first night back at his castle had him sleeping on the cold, hard floor, but he didn’t mind. As long as he had Ellowyn in his arms, he was a content man. However, she didn’t sleep very well at all. She had cried and muttered all night in her sleep.
At dawn the next day, Ellowyn made no mention of her restless night. She was more concerned with her chores. The oak wood had burned away overnight and she had her pile of ashes, so she had the men scoop up the white flakes and pour them into the barrel along with gallons of rainwater. The white mix blended, settled, and sat for three days while Brandt and the other men went about their business, watching Lady de Russe’s mysterious experiment carefully. Ellowyn, too, went about her business of doing what she could to clean up the keep but everything was really dependent upon the lye she was making. It would be the key ingredient to the clean keep of her standards.
At the end of the third day, Ellowyn took an egg from the chicken coop and, opening the barrel, cracked the egg into the murky water. Brandt, Dylan, Stefan, and her four helpers watched curiously as the egg floated on the top and Ellowyn declared her satisfaction. The lye was sufficiently leeched. Unplugging the hole at the bottom of the barrel, she had her assistants fill buckets with the white stuff, now ready to be used.
The giant iron pot was filled with water again and put to a boil along with a bucketful of the white lye concoction. The bed linens were all thrown into the pot and the massive bed was broken down, brought outside, and scrubbed with lye.
Meanwhile, Ellowyn and one of the soldiers went inside and began scrubbing the floors and walls down with the lye. WhenBrandt caught sight of his lovely wife on her knees, scrubbing like a washer woman, he sent Stefan into the village to acquire servant women to do the dirty work. He had promised her, after all, and the truth was that it had slipped his mind until he saw her on the floor with a horse bristle brush in her hands. Then, he was fired into action.
Stefan returned with four women by the evening, a widow and her three daughters, and Ellowyn was thrilled. She had already managed to scrub most of the bedchamber but was happy to turn it over to someone else. While two of the daughters got to work finishing the master’s bower, Ellowyn spoke to the old widow, Miss Maude, and discovered that she was mostly deaf but seemingly very willing to work and very knowledgeable. Ellowyn put the old woman to work with the now-boiled bed linens while the third daughter, a surprisingly attractive red-head, started to work on scrubbing down the solar.
The keep was lit up with torches that the soldiers had ignited when the sun began to set. The narrow windows of the keep made it a fairly dark place, even in broad daylight, so there were a variety of wall sconces for the torches and black soot on the walls above them. Satisfied that her new worker women were proceeding nicely with their tasks, Ellowyn went in search of her husband.
Descending the long and edgy stairs that led down the motte and into the bailey, she headed for the great hall. It was nearing suppertime and she could smell the roasting meat.
A few soldiers and male servants were already in the hall, milling about. It was a long and slender room with a greatly angled thatched roof and a massive fireplace built of stone against the southern wall. The chimney wasn’t in good repair so smoke seeped into the room, clouding up near the ceiling. Twolong, well-used tables filled the room, each one of them seating at least thirty men.
Ellowyn hadn’t really made it into the feasting hall since her arrival because she and Brandt had taken their meals in the keep, and she hadn’t much been out of the big stone structure. But now, she looked about with interest as an old male servant put fresh bread upon the feasting table. It was brown bread, coarse, but there was plenty of it. Ellowyn got the man’s attention.
“Have you seen the duke?” she asked.
The old man was very old and very tiny. He shook his head. “Nay, my lady,” he replied. “He has not been here.”
