King's Fool Read Free Page A

the good man, knowing her to be young and kind, had manoeuvred our meeting, and blessed him for it.And surprised myself by saying vehemently, “I have no real home, and would not leave here for anything!”
    She laughed at my unexpected vehemence, her carefully assumed role of chatelaine broken up by merriment. Then, as though suddenly remembering the consecrated place in which we stood, she turned to the small carved statue of our Lady and set down her flowers at its foot. Crossing herself, she knelt in prayer, and, thinking she had forgotten my existence, I laid down my tools for later use and tip-toed to the door so as not to disturb her. Coming out from dimness into the sunny manor courtyard, I almost tripped over her deerhound bitch, and sat down on the chapel steps to fondle the lovely, cream-coloured creature while I waited. To my surprise, when her mistress joined us, she had not forgotten our brief conversation. “What did you mean just now when you said you had no real home?” she asked.
    I scrambled to my feet while Blanchette, the hound, gathered up her graceful limbs more leisurely.
    I felt the shamed blood burn my face for so angling for her feminine sympathy. “I lied,” I said, almost sullenly. “I have always had a home with good food and books and music, and a father who kept me far better fettled than I deserved. It is only that—none of these benefits seem to make a real home if one has no mother.” Half smiling, I raised my eyes to hers. “But that must sound foolishness to you.”
    “To me ?” The words were full of reproach and pained surprise; and suddenly I remembered Jordan telling me the very first evening I arrived that Master Fermor was but recently widowed, and how the stockman’s wife had complained that the maidservants were growing pert and out-of-hand because there was no chatelaine. No one but Mistress Joanna and a spinster relative who had always lived with them. But I must have been too sleepy to take in what they said. “Forgive me,” I stammered foolishly. “I have thought of you only as the daughter of a fine house.…”
    “And do you imagine that griefs are not felt in fine houses?” she asked angrily. She had been trying to take her mother’s place, to show a kindly interest in her father’s servants, and I had behaved like a clumsy, heartless dolt. I had thrown away the comfort of her sweet kindness which Father Thayne had wished for me. What mattered far more, I must have hurt her. But before I slunk away she turned and laid a hand, light as a petal, on my bare brown arm. “Do not be unhappy,” she said softly. “I know what it is to be lonely. I offered a prayer for you just now, to our Lady.”
    She had prayed for me, though she did not even know my name. After that there was no more homesickness. Lying in the attic which I now shared with some of the house servants, long after their bawdy gossip had turned into healthy snores, I felt the cool touch of her fingers on my flesh. During the day-time I watched for a glimpse of her, walking on the terrace or riding out of the gates, and instead of finishing up my food with the farm-workers in the great kitchen I would hover by the opening of the serving screens to catch a glimpse of her at board. Because she had seemed to care I felt myself bound to Neston Manor and challenged to do well in her father’s service.I often worked on by candle-light at dull account books as if on me alone, an insignificant clerk, depended the weal of the Fermor family, even discovering a fault or two in my dishonest predecessor’s untidy reckoning. Although Jordan grudged me the intimacy of estate affairs which such work entailed, he was no scholar himself, and had the good sense to realise that by relying on me more and more he was left freer for the over-seeing of more important business. When our master came home from a visit to his other property in East Anglia I secretly hoped that he would commend me, but beyond a kindly word