King's Fool Read Free

taken. “There be master’s manor at last,” Hodge told me as we turned aside towards the large farm buildings, and looking through the main gateway I saw that delectable house with its stonework and latticed windows bathed in the pink light of sunset.
    I remember little of that first evening save that I was treated kindly and given food, and that almost before swallowing the last mouthful I must have thrown myself down thankfully to sleep beside the embers of the stockman’s kitchen fire.
    It was a good life, a bustling kind of life, at Neston, lived among people too fully occupied by the numerous branches of their master’s business to have time for petty meannesses. In the employ of a prosperous merchant farmer who is as zealous about the quality of the wheat and wool he trades to Flanders as he is about the rich silks and spices which his ships bring back from Venice there are a dozen ways in which a young man who is not work-shy can make himself useful and get on. Particularly if he has sufficient enthusiasm and imagination to see his own small piece of work as something that will help to enlarge his world. Even counting sheep as they were passed through the shearing dip, which was all I was called upon to do at first, I felt remotely connected with the foreign ports to which the woollen cloth would ultimately go. Later in the summer, making out bills of lading at some quiet desk from which I could see the strings of pack-horses being laden, I could almost hear the wind in the rigging of the ship to whose hold the bales of merchandise would be lowered at some East Anglian port. Coming from a sleepy village, I found each day exciting, and experienced a new sense of elation because almost anything might happen on the morrow.
    At first I had been shy and often homesick, and tired out with farm work too heavy for my frame. It was then that Father Thayne, the village priest, was so good to me. More than once he invited me into his house where, finding that I could read Latin, he allowed me to browse among his meagre store of books. I think it must have been he who reminded Jordan that a more clerkly occupation had been promised me. And once, when he must have seen the tears in my eyes, he took me up to the Manor because he had remembered—or invented—a bit of carpentry that was needed to the bracket of the chapel hour-glass. He left me there, and while I was struggling with it—perhaps by his invention, too—a girl of about my own age came in, carrying a bowl of fragrant buds from the rose garden. I guessed that she must be Master Fermor’s only unmarried daughter Joanna whom I had heard my work-mates speak of as “the young mistress.” She paused, surprised at finding me there, so that I saw her that first time standing framed in the archway of the open door with the morning sunlight making a radiance about her head.I thought her more beautiful than any stained-glass angel in the windows of Wenlock Priory, and I think so still.
    “Are you the young man my father brought back from Shrop-shire in poor Cob Woodman’s place?” she asked, coming into the cool shadow of the chapel.
    I stepped down from the bench I had been standing on and stood before her, hammer in hand and very conscious of my wind-tousled hair and stained farm clothes. “Yes, milady,” I said, not knowing how else to address her.
    “Then you must be a long way from home. I trust you are settling into our busy ways?” she said, with an air of responsibility which sat oddly upon her slender youth.
    “Everyone has been very kind,” I answered stiffly.
    She tilted her golden head a little on one side as though catching some unexpected gentleness in my speech, just as the priest had done. “Father Thayne spoke to me about you yesterday,” she said, regarding me with less conventional concern and more personal interest. “He thought you were homesick. Are you wishing very much that you could leave us and go back there?”
    I was sure then that