Remembrance Read online

  Meg wanted to weep. She should have known Talis wouldn’t consider apologizing to this young lord. No doubt her whole family was now on its way to the gallows.

  “I’ll have your ears for that,” the boy said, seething. How dare this lout of a peasant speak to him like that? His accents were of the coarsest nature, the talk of a boy meant for nothing but pulling a plow. He would be dead of overwork by the time he was twenty-five.

  “Oh, will you?” Talis said easily and slid off the horse to stand before the boy. For all his great height, Meg knew that Talis wasn’t quite nine years old yet, while she suspected this boy was eleven or twelve.

  Immediately, Meg stepped between the two boys, or as she was beginning to think of them, between the two young gentlemen. “There’s no harm done, sir. You have your horse back. The children were only bringing it back to you. No harm done at all.”

  Neither of the boys seemed to notice she was there. With each passing moment, Edward was getting angrier. It was the arrogant stance of this dark-haired, dark-eyed boy, and it was the way that girl on the horse looked down at him. She was just a child, but with that hair swirling about her and with those eyes that looked so old, she bothered him. He didn’t like that she was looking at the peasant boy as though he were capable of anything, while he, Edward, was worth nothing. And how could that be possible? He was the one wearing the velvet and the jewels, not this coarse lad.

  Edward struck the first blow—a blow that Talis easily parried, stepping aside to miss the boy’s fist coming at his face. But Edward’s next blow caught Talis on the shoulder, then, by accident, he stepped on Talis’s bee-stung foot and pain shot up his body. Talis leaped on the older boy and they fell to the ground, fists and feet flying.

  Meg thought she might faint again. They were going to be hanged for sure.

  “What’s this!”

  Never in her life had Meg been so glad to see anyone as she was to see Will.

  “I thought you were picking berries,” Will said, more annoyed than anything else. “Can I not trust any of you?”

  Will was not concerned with matters of class and whether one of the boys in the tangle of arms and legs at his feet was a gentleman and the other not. All he saw were two boys fighting and so he broke them up. Grabbing the collar of each one, he pulled them apart, holding them at arm’s length while they fought to tear each other to bits.

  “Behave yourselves!” he said, giving them each a curt shake.

  “Unhand me, you…you…farmer!” Edward shouted at him, trying to recover his dignity.

  “Aye, I am that,” Will said, unperturbed. “Now, what’s this about?” he asked as he set the boys to the ground.

  “They stole my horse,” Edward said, pulling down his doublet, dusting himself off.

  “This horse?” Will asked. “They stole this horse that’s standing here? You mean they took it away from you?”

  “No, I…There was a mishap. It was not my fault but I landed on the ground.”

  “So they stole it after it tossed you off and ran away? And where did they take the horse after they stole it? To London? Shall we send the sheriff to pursue them?”

  Meg knew she had never loved Will so much as she loved him at that moment. He was so very sensible. He treated boys as boys, no matter what their status.

  When the young gentleman looked confused by this, Will slipped his arm around the boy’s shoulders as easily as he did with Talis. “Now, where do you live?”

  When Meg saw quick tears come to the boy’s eyes, she knew that he was lost.

  “Meg!” Will said sharply. “Is there more of that beef pie left? And what of a berry tart? Callie, get down off that animal and bring it home. All of us are hungry.”

  What was nearly a disaster, and would have been had it been left to Meg, she guiltily thought, turned into a lovely day. After the initial hostility between the boys passed, they found they were interested in each other. Both of them were very proud and hated to ask each other questions, but at Will’s urging, they soon warmed up, with Talis showing Edward his wooden sword. Edward laughed when Talis punched the air with it and was soon giving lessons on how a real knight correctly held a sword.

  Will instructed Meg to try to keep the boys interested in each other while he made some inquiries and tried to find out the direction of the boy’s home. As far as he could tell the boy was at least twenty miles from his home. Finding this place was not going to be easy, since the villagers considered any man who had traveled more than six miles from his birthplace a world traveler. Meg had no doubt at all that Will would find where the boy lived. After this morning she knew that Will could do anything.

  After Will left, Meg watched Talis’s concentration, seeing that Talis studied the boy, studied his clothing, his walk, even a couple of times mimicking his way of talking.

  What was sad was Callie’s face, the way she watched the two boys, feeling left out and alone. It was Talis who invited her into their world as they sat under a shade tree and drank Meg’s sweet cider. “Tell us a story, Callie,” Talis said.

  Smiling, feeling confident, Callie started one of her best stories, a story she had been working on for days about a dragon, a horse, and a witch with green hair. But she was hardly into the story before Edward yawned and said, “I’ve read much better than that. Isn’t your father going to come back? I wanted to…to say farewell before I left.” He wasn’t about to admit that he wanted to ask a farmer how to get home. Not that he thought a peasant would know where a house as rich as his father’s was, but perhaps he might know something.

  Because he was thinking of his own problems, Edward did not see the look of shock on the faces of Callie and Talis. He wouldn’t have known what caused it had he seen it.

  Read a story, Callie thought. Only the village priest could read. He said it wasn’t good for any but men of God to read. Reading took great thought, so the priest would read the Bible and tell the villagers what it all meant. Ordinary people, people not chosen by God, could not read.

  “What do you read?” Callie whispered, her knees drawn into her chest. “The Bible?”

  Edward looked at her out of the corner of his eye. He was at the stage where he wasn’t sure whether girls were good or bad. And he was especially unsure about this girl. She wasn’t pretty and never would be no matter how old she got; her face was too pale, too colorless, the features too plain. Her hair, however, was glorious, now pulled back into a fat braid hanging down her back. What was odd about her was the way she followed this boy about, this black-haired Talis who dressed and spoke like a peasant but carried himself as though he were a king’s son.

  The girl followed him about as though she were his shadow and he never seemed to be aware of her—except when she so much as took her eyes off of him, then he would whip around and frown at her. Talis seemed to know exactly when her attention was on something other than him, even if his back was to her.

  It was very strange to Edward, since in his house, boys and girls were kept separate from one another. They wanted to be. Who wanted a stupid girl hanging about all the time? And why was this girl so silent? The girls Edward knew chattered all the time. The only time this Callie had opened her mouth was to start some boring story about flying animals and witches. He had tired of those stories years ago. Now he liked real stories, stories of knights and kings and wars—something this peasant girl could know nothing about.

  Edward opened his mouth to tell her this when Will reappeared, and moments later, he was being sent on his way. He didn’t know how to say good-bye. He couldn’t very well say thank you to peasants, could he? What would his father do in this situation?

  Edward mounted his horse and looked down at the four of them. Now that he saw them all together, they were a curious-looking lot. The two adults had the sun-weathered looks of farmers, but the children were…Well, dress them richly and they would fit into the queen’s court. Especially that boy (Edward could afford to be generous, now that he had found out he was f