Merry served Robert Burnell some of the sweet red wine he had brought from the king. She smiled when she filled Garron’s wooden cup, one of the dozen sent by the queen. He handed her the soap. “I heard you muttering about not having any soap. I have only this one sliver left.”
She gave him a lovely white-toothed smile that charmed and warmed him to his belly, had she but known it. She’d seen him washing at the well that day and envied that soap. He shrugged. “I learned in Moorish Spain that I preferred being clean to having fleas crawling in my hair.”
She took the precious sliver from him and stared upon it as if it were a royal jewel. He laughed. “Perhaps you can use a recipe that smells like this does. I bought this soap in Marseilles. I was told they blend in lavender with the olive oil and ash.”
“My father once gave me soap from Marseilles—” Her voice fell off the cliff. “Oh dear.” She quickly sniffed the sliver of soap. “I can smell the lavender. I will try, but I don’t know where I can find lavender. Mayhap there is some rosemary, hmmm, I must think on this, my lord.”
Please don’t ask, please don’t ask— Of course he was brimming with questions, but in the end, thank all God’s angels, he only nodded.
“I will adjust my list for what we still must purchase when we travel to Winthorpe—it will be much shorter now, thanks to the king.”
“It is good your father taught you to write.”
She nodded, for indeed, her father had had her educated. She remembered the hours spent with Father Kustus, who begrudged her every moment, believing his task to be a waste of his time. A memory came back: her father speaking to their priest, telling him Merry’s mother would be furious when she heard, and he’d laughed. Why, she wondered now as she had many many times in her eighteen years, had her beautiful mother hated both her and her father? She shook it off. “You can trust me, my lord. Do not worry.”
Trust her about what, specifically? She was an obvious liar. He opened his mouth, only to shut it again when one of his men approached him with a question, and he was distracted.
Merry continued to serve food throughout the day in the great hall for anyone who was hungry, which everyone was. Sir Lyle’s men brought in more deer, pheasant, and grouse to go with the piles of baked fish.
When everyone was called in for dinner, the planks were once again filled with roasted meat and fish, and from the queen, stewed carrots and onions, and piles of dried fruit.
Everyone looked up when Gilpin called out from the huge open doorway, “Behold what our men have wrought!”
Four men carried in a new trestle table and two benches. A loud cheer went up, even though those cheering wouldn’t have the privilege of sitting at the trestle table.
It was a feast.
Once again, most everyone ate on planks set upon the piled stones, and everyone rejoiced. Merry saw Sir Lyle looking around the great hall, his expression bemused. Then he met her eyes and stilled. Merry saw something change in his eyes. What? She didn’t know. He seated himself at one end of the trestle table, and he looked at her again. A brow went up when she didn’t join Garron, but sat beside Miggins, cross-legged on the stone floor. Had he believed her Garron’s wife? Now did he believe her Garron’s leman, low-born and thus not worthy to sit beside him? And obviously, not worthy of Sir Lyle’s notice or respect.
Merry looked at all the wonderful food and realized she
wasn’t hungry. She was simply too tired, too excited, too pleased with everyone and everything. She didn’t remember ever feeling like this before in her life. Naturally she’d overseen the women’s work at Valcourt, but everyone knew what to do and did it willingly. They’d all trained her and loved her and protected her since she was the little mistress.
But not here, not at Wareham. This was a revelation. For the first time in her life she was truly needed. When she looked at Garron sitting at the new trestle table, chewing on a thick slab of venison, nodding at something Robert Burnell said, she knew she’d never felt anything like this either. Here was a man to trust, a man to admire. And so very young. She had never questioned her father’s exquisite control, and she now realized that Garron of Kersey, Earl of Wareham, had control as well. Like her father, she knew violence ran deep in him as it did in most men, but she knew he would never unleash it until it was necessary, as it had been when he’d saved her in the forest.
Garron swallowed some stewed vegetables and glanced up to see Merry leaning against Miggins’s scrawny shoulder, sound asleep. He frowned. He should have insisted she sit with him after all she’d accomplished, but Burnell hadn’t stopped talking, all of it advice, supposedly from the king, though Garron knew it was from Burnell himself. He drank the sweet wine and let the overwhelming responsibility of what he now faced fall quiet in his mind, at least for a while.
Burnell found himself wondering yet again how a priest’s bastard had managed to gain such loyalty. He chewed on some carrots. “I see the girl sits with the servants. I suppose it is fitting.”
It wasn’t fitting, Garron thought, but exactly why it wasn’t, he couldn’t say. “Mayhap she sits with the servants because she fears we will belch at all her good food.”
Burnell didn’t laugh, for he was not a man of humorous parts. He ate a mouthful of soft black bread. “A priest’s byblow. It is amazing how well your people accept her, even do as she bids them, and none of them appears to want to shun her or kill her.”
Garron nodded.
Burnell then wondered where he would sleep this night. It did not look promising. Perhaps Garron expected him to wrap himself in a blanket and sleep atop this table, here in the great hall, with dozens of people snoring all night around him. Not a soothing thought.
Garron stood and raised his cup high. Soon all conversation fell away and there was silence in the vast hall. He shouted, “Our thanks to the King of England. Long may Edward the First rule our great proud land!”
Cheering filled the great hall. Since there weren’t wooden cups for everyone, those without pretended to salute the king and themselves, and passed around a wooden dipper filled with ale.
Merry, awakened by all the cheering, realized she had to add more wooden cups to her list. And ale, she thought, she knew how to make ale. She took her sip when the wooden dipper passed to her. She’d make better ale than this.
Garron raised his cup again. “We will survive. We will rebuild. We will become strong once again and then we will find and kill our enemy, this Black Demon. I also plan to travel to Winthorpe and buy every cup in the town!”
More cheering, and laughter now, and Merry, pleased with him, smiled and drank deep when the wooden dipper was passed to her again.
Burnell said to Garron, “I have decided it is my duty to visit your two holdings with you, my lord, Furly and Radstock.”