She called for Maisry, and when she didn’t come went out across the courtyard to the kitchen and fetched him a cup of hot ale. When she came in with it, Maisry was on the bench beside Roche, holding her tangled, filthy hair back with her hand, and Roche was putting goose grease on her ear. As soon as she saw Kivrin she clapped her hand to her ear, probably undoing all the good of Roche’s treatment, and scuttled out.
“Agnes’s knee is better,” Kivrin told him. “The swelling has gone down, and a new scab is forming.”
He didn’t seem surprised, and she wondered if she’d been mistaken, if it hadn’t been blood poisoning at all.
During the night the rain turned to snow. “They will not come,” Lady Eliwys said the next morning, sounding relieved.
Kivrin had to agree with her. It had snowed nearly thirty centimeters in the night, and it was still coming down steadily. Even Imeyne seemed resigned to their not coming, though she kept on with the preparations, bringing down pewter trenchers from the loft and shouting for Maisry.
Around noon the snow stopped abruptly, and by two it had begun to clear, and Eliwys ordered everyone into their good clothes. Kivrin dressed the girls, surprised at the fanciness of their silk shifts. Agnes had a dark red velvet kirtle to wear over hers and her silver buckle, and Rosemund’s leaf-green kirtle had long, split sleeves and a low bodice that showed the embroidery on her yellow shift. Nothing had been said to Kivrin about what she should wear, but after she had taken the girls’ hair out of braids and brushed it over their shoulders, Agnes said, “You must put on your blue,” and got her dress out of the chest at the foot of the bed. It looked less out-of-place among the girls’ finery, but the weave was still too fine, the color too blue.
She didn’t know what she should do about her hair. Unmarried girls wore their hair unbound on festive occasions, held back by a fillet or a ribbon, but her hair was too short for that, and only married women covered their hair. She couldn’t just leave it uncovered—the chopped off hair looked terrible.
Apparently Eliwys agreed. When Kivrin brought the girls back downstairs, she bit her lip and sent Maisry up to the loft room to fetch a thin, nearly transparent veil which she fastened with Kivrin’s fillet halfway back on her head so that her front hair showed, but the ragged cut ends were hidden.
Eliwys’s nervousness seemed to have returned with the improving weather. She started when Maisry came in from outside and then cuffed her for getting mud on the floor. She suddenly thought of a dozen things that weren’t ready and found fault with everyone. When Lady Imeyne said for the dozenth time, “If we had gone to Courcy…” Eliwys nearly snapped her head off.
Kivrin had thought it was a bad idea to dress Agnes before the last possible minute, and by mid-afternoon, the little girl’s embroidered sleeves were grubby and she had spilled flour all down one side of the velvet skirt.
By late afternoon, Gawyn had still not returned, everyone’s nerves were at the snapping point, and Maisry’s ears were bright red. When Lady Imeyne told Kivrin to take six beeswax candles to Father Roche, she was delighted with the chance to get the girls out of the house.
“Tell him they must last through both the masses,” Imeyne said irritably, “and poor masses will they be for our Lord’s birth. We should have gone to Courcy.”
Kivrin got Agnes into her cloak and called Rosemund, and they walked across to the church. Roche wasn’t there. A large yellowish candle with bands marked on it sat in the middle of the altar, unlit. He would light it at sunset and use it to keep track of the hours till midnight. On his knees in the icy church.
He wasn’t in his house either. Kivrin left the candles on the table. On the way back across the green, they saw Roche’s donkey by the lychgate licking the snow.
“We forgot to feed the animals,” Agnes said.
“Feed the animals?” Kivrin asked warily, thinking of their clothes.
“It is Christmas Eve,” Agnes said. “Fed you not the animals at home?”
“She remembers not,” Rosemund said. “On Christmas Eve, we feed the animals in honor of our Lord that he was born in a stable.”
“Do you not remember naught of Christmas then?” Agnes asked.
“A little,” Kivrin said, thinking of Oxford on Christmas Eve, of the shops in Carfax decorated with plastic evergreens and laser lights and jammed with last-minute shoppers, the High full of bicycles, and Magdalen Tower showing dimly through the snow.
“First they ring the bells and then you get to eat and then mass and then the Yule log,” Agnes said.
“You have turned it all about,” Rosemund said. “First we light the Yule log and then we go to mass.”
“
