12 - Nine Men Dancing by Kate Sedley

Author:Kate Sedley [Sedley, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: tpl, rt
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
Published: 2013-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Not for Ned Rawbone the servants’ entrance and the kitchen quarters. Supporting Tom between us, we walked round to the front of the house and went in by the door to the great hall, where our appearance was met with a flurry of women’s skirts and an outpouring of feminine concern.

‘Tom! What’s happened? Are you badly hurt?’ That was Petronelle.

‘Stupid boy! You haven’t been in yet another fight, have you? Sweet heaven! What a fool!’ But Dame Jacquetta’s anxious looks belied the harshness of her words. ‘Sit in my chair by the fire.’

The housekeeper said nothing, but tuttutted loudly and hurried away to the sideboard to pour a mazer of wine.

Her presence in the hall was explained as soon as I saw that Nathaniel Rawbone was seated in the chair facing his sister’s, on the opposite side of the hearth. He had removed his shoes and hose, and a bowl of water and a bottle of salve lay on a footstool alongside him. Elvina Merryman was evidently in the process of bathing and anointing his badly chilblained feet.

As Ned and I tenderly lowered Tom into Dame Jacquetta’s abandoned armchair, Nathaniel took one look at his younger son and let out a roar.

‘You quarrelsome young idiot! Who have you been laying into this time, eh? Answer me this minute, sir!’

‘Leave him be, Father,’ Ned advised quietly. ‘He’s taken enough punishment these last three days, without you yelling at him. And he wasn’t laying into anybody, as Master Chapman here will confirm. Lambert Miller set about Tom.’

The housekeeper came back with a tray on which reposed three beakers of wine, handing one to each of the Rawbone brothers and one to me. I savoured mine slowly, hoping that no one would realize that it was far too fine a vintage to be wasted on an itinerant pedlar. But they were all too preoccupied to give it a moment’s thought, the women fussing over Tom, and Nathaniel listening with a scowling countenance to Ned’s account of the day’s events as far as he knew them.

While Ned was speaking, the twins entered through the front door, their young faces healthily aglow from the cold and the wind, shedding their good frieze cloaks for their mother to pick up and tidy away, rubbing their hands and shouldering their way to the fire. They would have plunged immediately into an account of their afternoon’s activities, but were hushed by the simple expedient of their grandfather striking them across the buttocks with the stick he kept propped against his chair.

‘Silence!’ he yelled. ‘Your father’s talking!’

Hercules crouched, shivering, between my feet. I wondered if Nathaniel ever spoke in a moderate tone of voice.

While Ned finished his story, I took stock of the eldest and the two youngest members of the Rawbone family. The latter, Jocelyn and Christopher, were pretty much what I imagined fourteen-year-old boys to be all over the world, in any age and time: self-centred, self-absorbed, loutish young puppies, constantly on the lookout – at least, if they followed my example – for the chance to bed a girl.

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