Silk and Stone by Dinah Dean

Author:Dinah Dean [Dean, Dinah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cover & Page

Chapter Eleven

Now that the growing season had started in earnest, there were fewer passers-by to stop and talk to Elys as she worked by the window, for everyone was out in the great fields, hoeing and weeding, picking up stones, pursuing swarms of bees, shearing sheep, sorting the fleeces, and all the other manifold tasks of getting a living from the land, which occupied every man, woman and child in the peasant families.

With fewer interruptions and longer hours of daylight, the embroidery advanced rapidly, but Elys was free to think as she worked, to worry and to puzzle. Her conscience still troubled her occasionally about her refusal to enter the convent, but she had made an arrangement with herself that if she found a husband, she would accept that her decision had been right, and if not — well, no doubt the convent would still accept her, however belatedly, for she had a talent to offer to add to the dowry which the nuns had already received.

Her worrying was mostly to do with the problem of finding a husband, for in noble families such matters were always arranged by the lady’s parents or guardians, but she could not imagine Matthew entering the marriage-market on her behalf, especially as she would bring no dowry, save what she earned with her needle. Besides, however much she refused to allow herself to think about it, Aylwin’s odd behaviour on Mayday still disturbed her deeply, and, unless she was very careful, she tended to find herself remembering his kisses and pondering over why he had bought her a fairing. It even entered her mind, one wet morning, when the screen was up at the window to keep out the rain and she could not distract herself by looking out, that it would be very pleasant to be married to Aylwin, who appreciated her skill with a needle, and travel about with him wherever his work took him. She would make her own contribution to their finances, and he would kiss and caress her. . . It was a tantalising picture which she forced herself to dismiss from her mind, because had he not said he was married to his work?

As the days lengthened, she took to working in the evening, and had the first half of the cope finished by early June. Father Warmand came to see it before she took it off the frame, bringing Father Brian and Father Antony with him, and they were full of praise for her work. She received another payment from the sacristan, which made her carefully-hidden bag of savings bulge very satisfactorily.

When the second piece of silk had been stretched on the frame, she painted the outline for the other half of the cope on it, carefully allowing for the centre seam and matching the meeting points all the way up the middle. The completion of the coney was the most difficult, and that was put in place in the silence of deep concentration, but Aylwin came

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