The prioress inclined her head in gracious thanks. She was the daughter of a Saxon knight, proud of her lineage, and most anxious that the royal messenger should not think them ill-bred for all that they came from such an insignificant convent.
Long Will was not thinking of the prioress, he was looking at Katherine. Sunlight, now glinting through the fog which hung above the Swale, gave him his first good view of her. A tasty wench, he thought, cocking a practised eye at the face beneath the green hood.
He noted large grey eyes fringed by dark lashes; and two glossy burnished braids, near thick as his wrist, and so long that they swung against the horse's croup, while the loose tendrils, dark red as an autumn oak leaf, clung to a broad white forehead. That one wouldn't have to pluck back her hair to broaden her brow like the court ladies. Nor would she have to rub lead paste on her face. The girl's skin was milky smooth with a rose flush on the cheek-bones - and no blemishes. Her full mouth was wider than the pouting lips admired at court, yet it beckoned a lustiness any man would find challenging, as did the flare of her nostrils and the cleft in her round chin.
She'd be a fine wench for bed-sport, once she'd learned a bit, Long Will thought, as he walked along beside the white cob and stared at Katherine. Ay - she was exceeding fair, though as yet somewhat thin and small-bosomed. If only her teeth were good. Missing or rotted teeth spoiled many a beauty. He determined to make her smile.
"Have ye visited the fine new castle, damoiselle?" he asked pointing to the north where the crenellated towers of Queenborough loomed against the clearing sky.
"Certainly not," cut in the prioress. "I've permitted none of my house to go near the castle, swarming as it has been with lecherous men - workmen and soldiers - and but three miles from the convent."
"To be sure, Reverend Mother," said Long Will grinning, "holy flocks must be guarded, but I thought the Damoiselle Roet being a secular, perhaps she'd wandered that way-"
He winked at Katherine but the girl lowered her eyes as she had been taught. She was thinking that this Will Finch's bold stare was a little like that of the young squire who had come to the convent to see her a year ago. It made one feel warm and embarrassed but not unpleasantly so. The only other men she had ever talked to, the old bailiff and even older convent priest, had no such look in their eyes.
"Then ye didn't see the great Duke of Lancaster when he came himself to inspect the building last year?" persisted the messenger. "A pity. He's the most knightly, and many think handsomest too, of our King's sons, except, to be sure, Edward, Prince of Wales, God gi' him grace."
Katherine was not interested in the Duke of Lancaster, but there was a question she ached to ask. So she leaned forward whispering, "May I speak, Reverend Mother?" and peered around to see that the prioress's face was again bland beneath the fluted white wimple. Godeleva nodded, torn between the impropriety of gossiping with a servant, albeit a royal one, and her own curiosity about what would await them at Windsor.
Katherine turned to Long Will. "Do you perhaps know my sister, Philippa de Roet? She's one of the Queen's damoiselles."
"By cock's bones - of course I do," said Long Will. "Since it was she gave me the Queen's purse and sent me on this trip."
"What's she like then now?" asked Katherine timidly.
"Small, dark and plump as a woodcock," said Long Will. "They call her La Picarde. She's a bustling little body who has charge of the pantry maids and rules them stoutly. She's not light-minded as some of the Queen's ladies, by God!"
"That sounds like Philippa," said Katherine, smiling at last. "She ruled me stoutly enough when we were children."
"In truth you aren't much alike," cried Long Will, having just discovered that when she smiled Katherine was the fairest maid he had ever seen. Her teeth were small and white as daisy petals, her smile had a radiant charm, and yet a wistfulness that would melt your heart. It was a sad pity she could hope for no great marriage. No doubt the Queen had some one of her yeomen in mind or a squire. Long Will knew little of the background for his mission to the little Kentish priory except that it was like a dozen others he had performed for Queen Philippa, whose heart and charities were large. She always concerned herself with orphaned children, particularly those, like the de Roet girls, whose fathers had been her own countrymen.
"Are many of the royal family now at Windsor?" asked Katherine presently. She thought of them as clothed in misty glitter, King Edward and Queen Philippa, and their princely sons and daughters; vague names seldom heard at Sheppey where the talk was all of the proper observance of saints' days, the shiftlessness of the priory serfs or the recurrent fits, perhaps divinely inspired, which afflicted one of the novices.
"Most of 'em'll be at Windsor for the Saint George Day's feasting and jousting," said Long Will, "but I don't know just which ones. They all move so much from place to place, and now there's this new talk o' war."
"War?" cried the prioress sharply. "But we've been at peace with France these six years." Blessed Mary - not war again, she thought, knowing from bitter experience how war increased her administrative problems. Labour was scarce and grudging enough on the manor as it was. After the terrible Black Death in forty-nine there had been no strong serfs left at all to do the work. The nuns had laboured in the fields themselves - those of them that survived the plague - and Sheppey had nearly gone under. Godeleva had been a novice then, and too young to realise the stark anxieties of her superiors. But they had struggled through. A new generation of serfs had grown up, though not the gentle biddable types of the old days, for these new ones flocked off to war by preference instead of waiting to be called. It had been so before the Peace of Br6tigny, it would be so again if war came and no one left to labour except feeble old men and gloomy women.
"Not war with France, but with Castile, I hear," answered Long Will. "The Prince o' Wales, God gi' him grace, interests himself in the matter at Bordeaux." Suddenly bored with the women and his mission, Long Will spurred his horse and rode ahead cursing the plodding priory nags. If war came he'd not be sent on silly errands like this - herding virgins through the countryside.
"Come up, come up, my reverend dames," he called back impatiently turning in his saddle. "I see the ferry waiting."
Long Will's patience was further tried by the crossing of the Swale. Bayard baulked again, refusing for half an hour either to swim or board the ferry. Dame Cicily, who was even more afraid of water than she was of horses, managed to slip off the foot-plank and was hauled out weeping, her black robes soaked and clinging to her skinny legs. And the ferryman, seeing the royal badge on Long Will's tunic, naturally tried to extort double fares. The Queen was thrifty like all Flemings and the purse she had provided for the journey would barely cover expenses, so that the messenger had to subdue the ferryman with a rough and practised tongue.
Katherine sat on a mossy stone on the farther bank of the Swale and listened dreamily to a spate of oaths she had not known existed, while waiting for their guide to finish with Bayard and the ferryman. She was happy to be on the mainland at last, and a little frightened too. The April sun shone warm on her back, blackbirds sang in a wild cherry tree, and from over the hill on the road to London she heard the confused baa-ing of sheep and the tinkle of the bellwether.
She gazed across the Swale at the Isle of Sheppey where she had spent most of her conscious years. She could see the battlements of the unfinished castle but not the priory's squat little minster, nor hear the bell which must now be calling the nuns to Tierce, and she thought of the first day she had heard that bell over five years ago when she had been delivered at the convent from a cart, along with a side of beef and half a tun of wine sent as gifts to Sheppey by the Queen. The Queen sent three gold nobles as well for Katherine's keep and Prioress Godeleva had been jubilant.