Eliwys, Imeyne, and Rosemund have comparatively clean faces, but they don’t wash their hands, even after emptying the chamberpot, and the idea of washing the dishes or changing the flock in the mattresses has yet to be invented. By rights, they should all have long since died of infection, but, except for scurvy and a lot of bad teeth, everyone seems to be in good health. Even Agnes’s knee is healing nicely. She comes to show me the scab every day. And her silver buckle, and her wooden knight, and poor, over-loved Blackie.
She is a treasure trove of information, most of it volunteered without my even asking. Rosemund is “in her thirteenth year,” which means she’s twelve, and the room they’ve been tending me in is her bower. It’s hard to imagine she’s of marriagable age, and thus has a private “maiden’s bower,” but girls were frequently married at thirteen and fourteen in the 1300’s. Eliwys can scarcely have been older than that when she married. Agnes also told me she has three older brothers, all of whom stayed in Bath with their father.
The bell in the southwest is Swindone. Agnes can name all the bells by the sound of their ringing. The distant one that always rings first is the Osney bell, the forerunner of Great Tom. The double bells are at Courcy, where Sir Bloet lives, and the two closest are Witenie and Esthcote. That means I’m close to Skendgate. It has the ash trees, it’s about the right size, and the church is in the right place. The dig’s church didn’t have a bell tower, but Ms. Montoya may simply not have found it yet. Unfortunately, the name of the village is the one thing Agnes hasn’t known.
She did know where Gawyn was. She told me he was out hunting my attackers, “And when he finds them, he will slay them with his sword. Like that,” she said, demonstrating with Blackie. I’m not certain the things she tells me can always be depended upon. She told me King Edward is in France, and that Father Roche saw the devil, dressed all in black and riding on a black stallion.
This last is possible. (That Father Roche told her that, not that he saw the devil.) The line between the spiritual world and the physical wasn’t clearly drawn until the Renaissance, and the contemps routinely saw visions of angels, the Last Judgment, the Virgin Mary.
Lady Imeyne complains constantly about how ignorant and illiterate and incompetent Father Roche is. She is still trying to convince Eliwys to send Gawyn to Osney to fetch a monk. When I asked her if she would send for him so he could pray with me (I decided that request couldn’t possibly be considered “over– bold”), she gave me a half-hour recital of how he had forgotten part of the
Village-level priests in the 1300’s were merely peasants who’d been taught the mass by rote and a smattering of Latin. Everyone smells about the same to me, but the nobility viewed their serfs as a different species altogether, and I’m sure it offends Imeyne’s aristocratic soul to have to tell her confession to this “villein!”
He’s no doubt as superstitious and illiterate as she claims. But he’s not incompetent. He held my hand when I was dying. He told me not to be afraid. And I wasn’t.
I’m feeling better by leaps and bounds. This afternoon I sat up for half an hour, and tonight I went downstairs for supper. Lady Eliwys brought me a brown wadmal kirtle and mustard-colored surcote to wear, and a sort of kerchief to cover my chopped-off hair (not a wimple and coif, so Eliwys must still think I’m a maiden, in spite of all Imeyne’s talk about “daltrisses”) I don’t know if my clothes were inappropriate or simply too nice to be worn for everyday, Eliwys didn’t say anything. She and Imeyne helped me dress. I wanted to ask if I could wash before I put my new clothes on, but I’m afraid of doing anything that will make Imeyne more suspicious.
She watched me fasten my points and tie my shoes as it was, and kept a sharp eye on me all through dinner. I sat between the girls and shared a trencher with them. The steward was relegated to the very end of the table, and Maisry was nowhere to be seen. According to Mr. Latimer, the parish priest ate at the lord’s table, but Lady Imeyne probably doesn’t like Father Roche’s table manners either.
We had meat, I think venison, and bread. The venison tasted of cinnamon, salt and lack of refrigeration and the bread was stone-hard, but it was better than porridge, and I don’t think I made any mistakes in table manners.
Though I’m certain I must be making mistakes all the time, and that’s why Lady Imeyne is so suspicious of me. My clothes, my hands, probably my sentence structure, is slightly (or not so slightly) off, and it all combines to make me seem foreign, peculiar—suspicious.
