Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  Jaufre crossed his arms. “What are you proposing?”

  “You don’t have to build a house, or a warehouse,” Tregloyne said with a wave of his hand. “You have all the storage space you need here, and all the living space you need in my keep.”

  “You want us to move in with you?”

  Tregloyne laughed, the sound booming off the cavern walls. “Tempting as that sounds, no.” He looked at Angelique. “I have longed to see what lays beyond my own shores for some time,” he said, “but I could not leave my people.” He looked back at Jaufre. “If we came to an agreement, you would be factor here, and responsible for the care of the people of Glynnow.”

  “Making sure they don’t starve, is that what you mean?” Johanna said.

  “That and more. You will look after their interests, represent any of them if they run into trouble with the sheriff in Launceston, which does happen now and then, or if someone takes it into their heads to encroach on any of their lands. They would look to you, and tithe to you. You would be, in effect, their lord.”

  Daunted, Jaufre said, “I don’t know, Tregloyne. How many people look to Glynnow?”

  “A hundred and three,” Tregloyne said promptly.

  “A hundred and three!” Jaufre looked at Johanna, at Shasha, at the rest of Wu Company. There were only nine of them, and that many had on occasion felt more than enough. And they were all pretty self-sufficient, too, if it came to that. The prospect of having a hundred and three people dependent on him was daunting in the extreme.

  “Possibly a hundred and four, if Mistress Melwyn has finally given birth to her first. She’s been in labor for a full day and night, poor lady.”

  Jaufre was speechless.

  Tregloyne nodded placidly, as if that was what he had expected. “I can see you’re a bit overwhelmed. Let’s go back to the house and have some cider. Fresh pressed, from our own trees. You won’t have seen them, they’re farther inland than the village, in a little valley that protects them from the wind.”

  When they would have turned to leave the way they had come, Tregloyne said, “No. This way.”

  He walked back into the cave where the shadows were darkest and seemed to disappear. Jaufre, approaching, put out his hand and where there should have been rock wall there was nothing.

  Tregloyne’s voice came out of the darkness. “There is nothing to fear.” A scrape of flint and a spark, and the master of Glynnow was seen to be holding a torch now ablaze, looking at them with a grin on his face.

  “Where does this lead?” Johanna said.

  “Follow me and find out,” Tregloyne said.

  The tunnel was long and narrow and so dark that Tregloyne’s torch did not reach very far. Jaufre heard Alma say something, sounding a little panicky, and heard Hayat reply in a soothing murmur. The tunnel ended in a flight of narrow, lumpy steps carved from the rock. They went up, and up, and up some more, until they finally emerged on the cliff above the house, blinking in the light. The exit was concealed by a hawthorn bush that had been allowed to run wild, and they were all scratched and a few of them bleeding by the time they were aboveground again.

  The exit wasn’t far from where Jaufre and Johanna had come together the first time, and he looked at her to see her smiling at him.

  “The Romans mined tin and silver all up and down the coast in these parts,” Tregloyne said. “This tunnel was part of one such. We, ah, repurposed it to our own uses. There is another exit halfway up the cliff, nearer the house. I will show it to you later.”

  He led the way back to the house. As they neared the door, Shasha said, “I know something of the healing arts, sir. Might I offer my help to Mistress Melwyn?”

  “We would take it most kind in you,” Tregloyne said. “Hicca!” A young boy came trotting up. “Show Mistress Shasha to Mistress Melwyn’s cottage, and fetch anything she needs.”

  “Yes, Tregloyne.”

  Shasha took her pack and she and the boy vanished up the path next to the stream.

  The rest of them followed Tregloyne inside and sat down to pitchers of cider and a dinner of whole roast pig and a vast bowl of mashed turnips. “Here it is, Jaufre,” Tregloyne said, as the table was cleared. “You have to belong somewhere. You may have already noticed that our island is a contentious and violent place, and one needs to know who one’s friends are. Jaufre of Glynnow has a much better chance to form friendships and associations and partnerships with the English than does Jaufre of Nowhere in Particular. Jaufre of Nowhere in Particular, especially if he is going into competition with the local merchants, will carry no weight with the authorities who are, inevitably, bought and paid for by those same merchants.”

  “You barely know me,” Jaufre said feebly. “Why would you trust me with the care of your people?”

  “I’m used to summing up men and women pretty quickly,” Tregloyne said, with a sidelong glance at the captain. “It comes of living on such a chancy place as the Cornish coast.” He smiled. “I like you. I like your friends. I especially like how your plans will bring prosperity to my people. They could use some.” He held up a hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll spend this winter with you, to make you known to Glynnow and to see you into the way of things. But next fall—” he looked at Angelique “—next fall it is my wish to leave with Angelique on her last trip of the season.”

  He drained his cup and pushed himself to his feet. “I will leave you to discuss this. It’s not a decision to be made without due consideration, and you will have more questions. We will talk again in the morning.”

  He and Angelique ascended the stairs, and the company gathered around the hearth. Jaufre’s head, for one, was whirling. “Well,” he said. “What do you think?” He looked at Johanna.

  “I think I like it here,” Johanna said. “I think you do, too.” She jerked her head in the direction of the dock. “And I think here we have easy access to a ship if we need to feel the Road beneath our feet again.”

  “What if they sail away and we never see them again?” Tiphaine said in a small voice.

  “They won’t,” Jaufre said, tousling her hair. “Tregloyne will want to check up on how I am doing my job, and Angelique makes her living on the freight she ships in and out of Glynnow. But even if they did, why…” He smiled. “We’d build our own ship. Or have Ser Gradenigo build one for us.” He looked around the circle, every face dear to him. “What you think?”

  Hayat frowned. “I think I spent too many years locked up in a harem. I’ve only had a taste of freedom. I don’t think I’m ready to settle down.”

  “Or me,” Alma said.

  “Or me,” said Hari, not unexpectedly.

  “But this could be home for you,” Johanna said. “You could come back whenever you wanted, stay as long as you wanted.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Alma said, smiling at her.

  “I wasn’t intending on leaving forever,” Hayat said.

  Hari bowed his head. “There is much still to be learned here.”

  “Angelique will have to build a warehouse on her side,” Jaufre said, thinking. “And I must write to Gradenigo immediately. Perhaps I should even go to him myself.”

  “I will take your letter to him,” Firas said. “Shasha will want seeds to grow her own herbs, and a larger supply of spices if she’s going to be ministering to the needs and ailments of an entire village.”

  “You’re staying, then?” Jaufre said.

  Firas nodded. “If Johanna is staying, Shasha is staying, and if Shasha is staying, so am I.” He smiled. “I’m already half a merchant. I might as well become a whole one.”

  19

  England, Winter, 1326–1327

  Firas, Alma, Hayat and Hari departed with Angelique two days after Tregloyne had made his offer. Alma, Hayat and Hari were bound for Paris. Firas would accompany them that far before moving on to Lyon and then Venice if the mountain passes were open to travel.

  “Ask Imbert if Laloun ever showed up,” Johanna said. At Firas’ bla
nk look she said, “Félicien’s maid?”

  Firas’ face cleared. “And if she has?”

  “Make an offer of employment. Alma and Hayat could use a maid.” At his expression she said impatiently, “Fine, if they don’t want her bring her here, we’ll find a job for her.”

  Firas salaamed deeply, hand to heart, lips and head. “All shall be as you desire, mistress.”

  She picked up a roll and made as if to shy it at him. He went out, laughing.

  Jaufre, Johanna, and Shasha settled in to plan an English extension of the Road, and Jaufre began his study of how to be a lord under the tutelage of Tregloyne. “Not a lord,” Tregloyne told him, “God’s teeth, save me from that, I’d be taxed to death and have to take up arms at the king’s behest to boot. Master of Glynnow is what they call me, and what they’ll call you.”

  At first Jaufre was certain they wouldn’t. They were a taciturn bunch, these Cornishmen, and unwilling to put their trust in strangers, no matter whether Tregloyne vouched for him or not. Grunts were the usual response to his attempts at conversation, and when it wasn’t grunts it was Cornish, which was worse.

  He didn’t force things, and instead let his company speak for him. Shasha spent part of every day in the village, administering tonics and tinctures and dressing wounds and splinting the occasional broken limb. Alaric had hired two of the more likely Glynnow lads to help him maintain their small armory, and had begun to teach them how to use a small sword, which, when they went back to the village and told the tale, had the entire male population of the village there the next day. Tiphaine was ever attended by a covey of small children who wanted to learn to juggle, and after a while she started teaching them songs from Wu Company’s repertoire.

  Johanna kept herself busy with North Wind and the rest of their string. This was a good land for horses, covered in rich sweet grass, and as the summer’s travels had taught her horses were highly valued in England not just for transportation and war but for entertainment. She broached the notion of planting more oats and lucerne with the villagers, and was met with a receptive ear. She brought the men of the village into the stables a few at a time to introduce them to North Wind and to discover if there might be some among them with the gift for horses. She found a boy, Talan, who could be relied on to muck out stalls and replenish feeding troughs when he was supposed to. Then one day she found Talan’s younger sister, Kerra, in North Wind’s stall, currying him with long, slow strokes. North Wind was so annoyed by this invasion of his personal space that he was sound asleep. Johanna engaged brother and sister as permanent stablehands on the spot.

  When they discovered that Cornishmen were natural stonemasons Johanna hired some to expand the stable. When the Arabian mare who had traveled with them all the way from Talikan came into season she planned to put North Wind to her. The resulting foal would be the beginning of their own breeding stock.

  Shasha hired more men to build a high-walled garden in which to plant her garden, aided in its design by Jaufre, who remembered the walled garden at Sant’ Alberto. She hired boys to bring in topsoil for the garden by the basket, hauled on their shoulders from a vacant farm inland, and then set them to working seaweed harvested from the beach into the soil.

  Johanna got wind of the vacant farm and went to look for herself. She came back full of plans for a practice track and badgered Tregloyne to seek out the holder of the title to see if he would sell. He did, he would and for a pretty cheap price, too, and Johanna found herself in possession of a nice piece of flat land where most of the rocks had long since been harvested for fences. She got two men from the village to clear the undergrowth that had begun to creep back in after the farm had been abandoned and then set them to building a dirt oval from one corner of the lot to the opposite corner. The village carpenter built a wide, wooden rake according to her specifications and each morning the dirt of the track was groomed. While the weather held she was out there every day, exercising each horse in turn and when he insisted North Wind twice a day.

  Before midwinter the horses were snugly housed and the walled garden was ready for planting in the spring. Improvements to the house were in the planning stages because, Johanna told Jaufre, she was not prepared to spend their lives sleeping in the same room as the rest of Wu Company.

  “Or not sleeping,” he said, sliding his hands around her waist and kissing her.

  When she could speak again she said, “Oh well, there are always the stables.”

  “So there are,” he said, and tossed her up in his arms and carried her out the door.

  Tregloyne, accompanied by Alaric, disappeared inland for a month, and returned in time for Christmas, barely beating the first winter storm to the door. He handed Jaufre a scroll tied with a red ribbon.

  “What’s this, then?” Jaufre said. It was a long document, written in Latin side by side with a French translation. His eyes ran down the document, and his jaw dropped. He read it a second time, and a third, before he looked up, dazed. “You adopted me?”

  “All legal according to the laws of the land. Keep that in a safe place and should someone try to come the lord over you, pull it out. It was the best thing I could think of to keep you and this place safe.”

  Jaufre carefully rolled the document back up and retied the ribbon. Johanna, watching, smiled to herself. Jaufre liked Tregloyne a great deal. It was warming to know that that feeling was returned.

  Alaric had brought back news of the wider world. “Edward and the few followers he had left fled into Wales. The queen said that since he’d left the country their son should take the throne, and he did so on October twenty-sixth.”

  “He was right then,” Johanna said. “The queen didn’t have to bring anyone with her. All her supporters were already here.”

  “Waste no sympathy on Edward of Caernarfon, as he is now to be styled,” Tregloyne said. “Twenty years we had of him, and in twenty years there was neither peace nor prosperity in the land. He had a positive genius for befriending the one person who was most guaranteed to inflame the nobles into rebellion, and to inflict more suffering on humbler folk than they have any right to bear.”

  “He looked tired, when we sang for him in September. Maybe he’s glad to be rid of the crown. What have they done with him?”

  “He’s at Kenilworth, they say.”

  “And the men who were with him?”

  “The younger Despenser was dragged through the streets of Hereford by four horses, and then hanged from a fifty-foot scaffold so everyone could see, and so could he, because he was not quite dead as they cut off his cock and balls and threw them into a fire burning below.” Alaric’s voice was flat and even. “His entrails and heart were pulled out and also thrown into the fire. One hopes he was dead by the time his body was lowered to the ground to be butchered into quarters.” He paused. “It is said that the crowd whooped for joy during the entire display.”

  Even Tregloyne looked a little ill at this.

  “His head hangs now in London. The elder Despenser was likewise disposed of in Bristol, the day after the new king was proclaimed. They sent his head to hang on the walls of Winchester.”

  Johanna shuddered, and thought of Gokudo before the walls of Talikan. “And Wilmot?”

  “I can discover no news of him.” Alaric looked drawn. “It may be that he held so minor a post in the king’s household that he escaped punishment. After all, they couldn’t kill them all.”

  Tregloyne snorted.

  At Christmas they held a celebration at the house for the entire village, and put on a performance for which Johanna brought out the Robe of a Thousand Larks, which alone elevated her to the role of goddess in the dazzled eyes of the villagers. Who were then doubly astonished when their new master stepped up with a tambour and joined his pleasant baritone to her smoky contralto. Shasha and Tiphaine provided an admittedly high baseline that nevertheless had everyone tapping their feet. These Cornish could dance, too, as they discovered in short order, and it was a merry evenin
g that ended in gifts for all that Tregloyne had brought back with him from his trip to Launceston. They roasted a whole beef and a whole sheep and Tregloyne had brought sugar back from the Launceston shops for the baker to make iced cakes. There was a barrel of hard cider, but only one, and it wasn’t enough for anyone to become too jolly.

  Jaufre watched everything Tregloyne did very carefully, storing away information against the next Christmas celebration, when Tregloyne would be gone and Jaufre would be expected to host his own feast. Tregloyne read his intent expression correctly and roared with laughter. “You will make a fine Master of Glynnow, my boy, never fear!”

  After the new year Johanna called for the carpenter, this time to remodel the first floor of the house. As it existed it was little more than a copy of the great room below, with the addition of a garderobe, which at least obviated the necessity of chamberpots. There was one bed and one clothes press and one stool and one fireplace that was built into the existing chimney. The roof of the first floor was much lower than that of the great hall and therefore more amenable to walls, as well as much easier to heat. She was able to create eight rooms separated by walls made of woven lathes and a plaster compounded of sand, straw and clay found in deposits along the coast which the local people used for pottery. She set the carpenters to making beds, and found a local woman to sew mattresses and fill them with straw and sweet smelling herbs. She was determined to have their own weavers in Glynnow as soon as possible, but for now most of the beds were without blankets.

  The rooms smelled of sawdust and lavender when they were done. There was room and beds enough to house all of Wu Company when they were all at home.

  When they were all at home. Johanna wondered what it would be like, to live in one place all the rest of their lives, and knew a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. She took the feeling to Jaufre. “We must find another Jaufre,” she said.