King's Fool Read Free Page B

in passing and an enquiry as to whether Jordan found me satisfactory he took no particular notice of me. And, as I have often confessed to Father Thayne, I am one of those miserable sinners who hunger to be noticed. I need to bolster up my inadequacy with applause, as stronger men need breath.
    Although I was now living in the Manor itself it was, quite naturally, the bailiff who took the books to his master’s room and the bailiff who discussed profits and prices, and it was not long before I suspected that he must have passed off all those hardly-laboured- over columns of figures as his own. But, fume as I might, I dared say nothing.
    Always careful for others, Mistress Joanna must have sensed my depression. “Is my father pleased with you?” she asked, one sunny morning, as I forestalled her groom at the mounting block to hold her stirrup.
    “How should I know when he has scarcely spoken to me since he employed me?” I answered ungraciously, without raising my head.
    “If you employed as many people as he does or had as many important concerns on your mind you might understand,” she said sharply, and beckoning to her tardy groom she wheeled her mare so that the mud from her fresh heels splashed me in the face.
    The well-merited rebuke kept me in gloom all morning but next day I learned from Jordan that a ship was in from Venice bringing some of our merchandise and Master Fermor was off to Norwich almost immediately. And scarcely had I sat down to my work next morning before Mistress Emotte, the stern, middle-aged aunt who had been nurse to all the Fermor children and who was now in some sort housekeeper, poked her horse-like face in at the window where we worked. “Master Jordan,” she called, “the young mistress wants you to spare her that new young clerk who works for you. She has all the household lists to make out for her father’s ordering while in Norwich, and as usual all laid on inexperienced young shoulders on the spur of the moment.”
    “You mean young Somers here?” temporised Jordan, loath to let me go on a busy morning.
    The woman’s hawk eyes swivelled round upon me, obviously disapproving of what they saw. “I have no notion what his name is,” she said tartly, “nor what sort of use he is likely to be to her. But my mistress has taken the fancy to employ him.”
    So I gathered up pen and paper and followed the gaunt, straight-backed old lady to a kind of store-room between the buttery and the kitchen. Sun shone through a small, open casement and outside in the herb garden thrushes were singing, and there was Mistress Joanna, looking very young and rather flushed and harassed, with an assortment of food-stuffs laid out on a great table before her and the head cook at her side. “Scarcely enough honey to last the winter, do you think, Diggory?” she was saying, in business-like tones ridiculously like her father’s. “We had better order some of that sugar from one of the Italian merchants. How much do you use in a week?”
    “Brown sugar for the wassail bowl at Christmas,” Mistress Emotte reminded her.
    They began earnestly discussing first this commodity and then that, and Mistress Joanna waved a hand in my direction without looking round. “Write down the quantities as I say them,” she directed. “And when you have a moment count those jars of mulberry preserve on that shelf.”
    I had thought her to be lily-handed, never realising the responsibilities that the chatelaine of a large manor has to shoulder. A household of twenty or so to be fed, not counting the farmhands, the visitors, the merchants and their clerks who came on business, our own pack-horse drivers, the grooms and the village poor. And the unspeakable, inhospitable shame of running out of anything not grown on the estate which could not be replenished without sending to Northampton, or Norwich perhaps, or even London.
    “Some more of those spices with which the Master likes me to dress his meat,” Diggory was