Yet these two would have supported them all in sufficient comfort, were they well administered, Katherine thought. Hugh still had over sixty serfs at Kettlethorpe, man, woman and child; plenty to give him week-work on his home farms, boon-work at the harvests and inside work to run the manor.
The trouble here, of course, was twofold; the Lady Nichola's eccentricities and the mortal sickness which had attacked Gibbon, the bailiff.
Three days after Katherine's arrival she felt well again and decided to see this man who lay in a wattle-and-daub hut at the end of the courtyard between the dovecote and the bakehouse.
The weather had at last cleared and Hugh, having bullied and whipped some sulky serfs from their own fieldwork and back into the manor kitchen, had taken Ellis and ridden off into the forest to hunt for sorely needed food. He was not sorry to put off the countless tasks which awaited him. A manor court must be called, the serfs brought to punishment, their overdue fines collected, a new bailiff found. But above all the larders must be replenished; they were completely empty. Lady Nichola lived, on sheep's milk and stewed herbs which she cooked herself in an iron pot in the tower-room where she spent all her time when she was not wandering through the marshes and fields towards the river. Gibbon existed on the fitful donations of Margery Brewster, the village alewife, who felt kindly towards him, having several times shared his bed in the days of his strength, but whose tavern duties and brood of babies left her little time for charity.
Katherine had not asked Hugh's permission to visit the bailiff. Already she had learned that the mention of painful subjects induced in him an angry stubbornness which might well have led to refusal.
She waited until she saw the tip of his longbow disappear into the forest on the other side of the moat, then set herself to a leisured inspection of her domain, much irked that she still had no proper clothes except the travel-stained green gown the Duchess had given her, not even a linen coif to hide her hair and show her housewifely status. No matter, she thought, braiding and looping the great ruddy ropes neatly on either side of her face. She was determined not to be discouraged, and to meet this new life with calmness. Since there was no one to help her, she must depend on herself, and again, as it had on the morning after her marriage, this thought gave her strength.
She decided to visit the Lady Nichola first in the tower-room. She had not seen her mother-in-law since the night of arrival, but smoke and steam sometimes drifted through the arrow-slit windows and twice she had heard a not uncheerful crooning sound from up there.
The low defensive tower had been built, as had the manor, a hundred and fifty years ago, in the reign of King John. It was attached to the hall and solar, but there was no communication with these except by the outside staircase, which also served the solar. The manor plan was simple and old-fashioned. There was the thatched two-storied Hall, forty feet long, and the narrow solar where Katherine slept with Hugh was tacked high on to its western end. Beneath the solar lay an undercroft for stores. At the eastern end of the Hall there was a kitchen, and a half-loft above it where the servants slept. These and the tower with its ancient donjon and two round rooms above were all there was to Kettlethorpe. No private chapel, no spare chambers, garderobes or latrines.
The demands of nature were answered in an open corner of the courtyard behind the dovecote.
It was a more primitive dwelling than any Katherine had ever known; even the convent at Sheppey and her grandparents' great farmhouse had been more luxurious, while the Pessoner house in London, and of course the great castle at Windsor, had shown her entirely different standards of comfort.
And the furnishings at Kettlethorpe she deemed shockingly plain and scanty for a knight's home. The planks and trestles and benches in the Hall were barren of carving and as roughly hewn as those in a rustic's cot, while the solar was furnished only with a square box frame heaped with a mouldering goose-feather bed and a flea-infested bearskin for a coverlet. It surprised her much that they should drink the small ale Hugh had commandeered from the village out of coarse wooden mazers and that there should be no object of the slightest value to be seen, not even a saint's statue, or a tapestry to keep out the constant draughts. She longed for explanation of this singular poverty, but did not dare ask Hugh, seeing that he felt shame at the condition of his estate and tried to hide it by loud rantings against his stepmother. All the more she could not ask him because she had brought him no dowry, nor had he reproached her with its lack. In justice, she owed him all her help to straighten out his affairs.
As she ascended the outside flight of wooden steps into the tower, her heart beat fast, for she heard the Lady Nichola's high murmuring float out on to. the still air. The dairymaid said that the Lady Nichola had water-elf sickness, a fearsome spell; and none of the servants would go near her. Katherine paused to gather courage and looked across the courtyard wall and the moat, towards the cross on the church spire. She had not yet been over to the church, and there was no Mass except on Sundays. The parson, grown slack, as everyone eke on this manor, was not even at home, but had gone some days ago to Lincoln on business of his own.
She mounted the stairs and entered the tower's ancient guardroom. Many generations had passed since it had heard the clash of steel and the oaths of men-at-arms, and its slit windows, sunk seven feet deep into the walls, had never heard the whir of defending arrows. No other baron had coveted this isolated manor. The first lord had built the tower and dug the moat because it was the fashion of building in his day, and he had used Kettlethorpe chiefly as a hunting lodge. Katherine, glancing quickly about, saw that the room contained only two ironbound chests. In the centre of the stone floor there was a rusty grille over the only airshaft to the donjon beneath. In the time of Hugh's father, Sir Thomas, this donjon had been used occasionally for the detention of serfs awaiting trial, but now it had long been empty of all but the rats who tunnelled upward from the surrounding moat. Katherine saw that dust lay thick as her hand on the chests and that a drift of dead leaves had blown into the corners.
She climbed the narrow stone steps that were built in the thickness of the wall and came to the top room. A mangy deer-hide barred the doorway. The murmuring had stopped, there was a listening silence within.
Katherine cleared her throat and called softly, "My lady Swynford! It's Katherine, Hugh's bride. May I enter?"
She heard a. scuffling noise as though something were being quickly hidden, and a tiny stifled sound, sharp and high. Her heart beat faster, but she called again. Still there was no answer, but she heard the rasp of frightened breathing.
She pushed the deer-hide and entered. "Ah no!" she cried when she saw the little black figure. "My poor lady, you mustn't be afraid of me!"
The Lady Nichola, her arms clasped tight across a lumped cloth on her breast, was cowering behind her bed. Her dark eyes were fixed on Katherine with dumb terror. When Katherine drew nearer, she flattened her shoulder blades against the wall as though she would break through its stones. From the lumpy cloth she strained to her chest there came again the stifled sound.
"Dear lady, I won't hurt you. I've come up to do you honour, as is right. See, I'll come no nearer. I won't move from here." Katherine's voice, low and soft as a viol, thrilled with pity.
Nichola, who had heard no kindness since she had come to Kettlethorpe ten years ago, stared unbelieving. "You'd take her away from me-" she whispered. "Don't take her away - she does no harm."