In three and a half years the Pessoners had changed very little except to grow rounder and noisier. An herb-strewn fire roared on the hearth, where some of the children played at rolling apples. Master Guy was not to be seen for he was counting cod in his warehouse next door. The low-raftered Hall smelt of fragrant smoke and fish. Hawise was standing at the dairy-room door vigorously pounding the dasher in a large butter churn when one of the young Pessoners let Katherine in.

Hawise gawked for a moment, her bare freckled arms dropped from the churn, then a wide happy gap-toothed grin spread over her big face. "God's beard!" she cried, " 'tis Kath - m'lady Swyhford!" She rushed across the Hall and folding Katherine in her arms kissed her heartily on the mouth. "Sit down, sweeting, sit down - I'm that joyed to see ye! Be'eht we, Mother? When I dropped the porridge ladle this morning I knew we'd have a lucky caller, but I never dreamed of you, love!" She pulled Katherine down beside her on a settle and beamed at her with so much affection that Katherine felt a pricking of gladness behind her lids.

Dame Emma bustled over with a pewter platter of honey cakes and sugared ginger. "Welcome, welcome, eat hearty o' these, lady while I mull some ale for us. We'll have crabs too," added Dame Emma comfortably, "a bobbin' o' their little pink cheeks in the ale."

Katherine laughed, basking in the warm kindly atmosphere and the goodwife's conviction that food was life's most important matter. She turned to Hawise with girlish eagerness and cried, 'Tell all! How has it been with you, this long time?"

"Ay, but first of you," said the older girl, sobering to glance at Katherine's black gown. " 'Tis worn for the Duchess - nothing else, I pray?"

"Nay. We're all well at Kettlethorpe. I've two babies, Hawise!"

"And I one" - Hawise let out a snort of laughter and ran to the court calling. "Jackie, Jackie - come hither, imp - for ever playing wi' the old sow, he is - 'tis that he's but a piglet himself-" She hauled her offspring into the Hall and cuffed him gently on the ear, then wiped him off before presenting him proudly to Katherine.

Jackie was two years old and a true Pessoner, being fat, cheerful and sandy-haired. He grabbed a fistful of honey cakes and plumped himself on the rushes to enjoy them while his grandmother bent down to add a sugar bun to his hoard.

"Ay, he's Jack Maudelyn's right enough," said Hawise, seeing that Katherine did not like to ask, "and he was born in wedlock too, though only just. Father held out stubborn long, the dear old goat."

"Is Jack still weaver's prentice?"

"No prentice now, nor yet weaver neither. He went for a soldier to make us a fortune in booty, we hope. He's a fine archer, is Jack, and he joined the free companies under Sir Hugh Calverly. They fight for England now that we're at war again, to be sure."

"To be sure," said Katherine smiling. "So your man is gone, and you've come back home to wait like many another."

"Is't the same with you, lady dear - your knight abroad too?"

"Not now," said Katherine, turning her face away. But feeling that her curtness rebuffed Hawise, she made an effort and while they drank their hot pungent ale and sat close together on the settle, she told a little of what had passed with her since Hawise had waved tearful good-byes beneath the porch of St. Clement Danes on the wedding day.

In truth, there seemed not much to tell, nothing momentous at all except the recent time of plague at Bolingbroke and that Katherine slid over quickly. Yet during tile bare recital of her years at Kettlethorpe, she noted that Hawise looked at her with shrewd sympathy, and when Katherine had done, Hawise said, "Have ye no woman there wi' you save those North Country hinds?" The London-born Hawise spoke as though Lincolnshire folk might be horned and tailed.

"Well, now for a while there's Philippa too, you know," said Katherine laughing.

"In truth." Hawise gave a sceptical twinkling glance but from politeness said no more. She had seen something of Dame Philippa while Master Geoffrey still lived in London with the Chaucers, and Hawise thought that Philippa was not a woman to give over the mastery of any household she was in and wondered how it would be when Katherine went home. Again as she had when they had first met, the girl aroused in Hawise a tender feeling. Having no beauty herself she felt no envy, but only a desire to serve it, and she recognised as had no other person except Geoffrey a bitter loneliness in Katherine that muted her shining fairness as dust films a silver chalice.

She could see that Katherine had had enough of living in splendour at the Savoy, and being intuitive as well as practical, she guessed that there was some embarrassment about getting back to Kettlethorpe. She was turning the matter over in her mind when there came another rap on the door.

" 'Tis doubtless the master o' that herring ship to see Father," she said to Dame Emma as she hastened to open it.

Raulin d'Ypres stood upon the doorstep and asked in his guttural voice, "Does anyone here know uff a Lady Swynford?"

Hawise, noting the Lancaster badge on the young man's black tunic, drew back and looked at Katherine, who stood up in surprise. "I'm Lady Swynford."

The squire bowed. "Please to come vit me to the Savoy. Someone vishes to talk to you, my lady."

"Who does?" said Katherine, in surprise.

The squire glanced at Hawise and Dame Emma and the tumbling children, then back to Katherine's puzzled resistant face. "May I speak vit you alone, my lady?"

Katherine frowned and turned to Hawise, who looked troubled. Hawise reminded herself that she did not know the ways of court folk, but a blind mole could see something out of the way in this. "Shall I call Father to rid you of him?" she whispered in Katherine's ear.

Katherine looked back at the stolid squire. He met her gaze and stared down pointedly at the Red Rose embroidered on his breast. How strange, she thought, what could that mean? Most of the men in the palace below knight's rank wore that badge. "Well, come over here," she said, stepping into the empty dairy-room, and as the squire followed, she added, "What is this coil?"

"His grace vants you to come to him, my lady," said Raulin very low.

She lifted her head, the pupils of her eyes dilated until the greyness turned as black as her gown. "The Duke?" Raulin bowed.

"Why does he send for me in secret?" She pressed her hands tight against her breast to still the jumping of her heart, but she stood very quiet leaning against the milk table.

"Because since the funeral he has seen nobody but me, nor does he vish to, my lady, except now - you."

The colour ebbed slowly back into her face and still her great eyes stared at the squire in question, in disbelief, until he said brusquely, "But lady, hasten. It is already long since I vas sent to find you."

Katherine moved then, she walked back into the Hall and reached up to the perch where Hawise had hung her wet cloak. "I - I must go," she said to the anxious Pessoners. "But I'll see you very soon."

"Not bad news-" cried Hawise, quickly crossing herself.

"Lady, ye look so strange!"

"Not bad news," Katherine took a quick breath, smiled at Dame Emma and kissed Hawise, but it seemed as though she did not really see them. When the door had closed behind Katherine and the squire, Hawise turned frowning to her mother. "She was happy here afore wi' us. What can that gobble-tongued outlander've said to throw her into such a maze? 'Twas like she wandered in a fearing dream and yet feared more to wake."

"Fie, daughter," said Dame Emma, adding cinnamon and nutmeg to the hare she seethed over the fire. "Ye make too much o' naught. Do ye get on wi' the churning."

Hawise obeyed, but as she pounded slowly in the churn, her cheerful face was downcast and she sang a plaintive little song that she had heard on London streets.

Blow, northern wind, fend off from my sweeting.

Blow, northern wind, blow.

Ho! the wind and the rain they blow green pain,

Blow, blow, blow!

CHAPTER XII

Katherine and Raulin rode back to the Savoy in silence until they had passed beneath the great Strand portcullis into the Outer Ward, and dismounted at the stables. Then Raulin said, "This vay, my lady," and led her towards the river-side, nearly to the boat landing. In the west corner of the court, between the barge-house and the massive wing which housed the ducal children's apartments, there was a low wooden building surmounted by a carving of a large flying hawk. This building contained the falcon mew, and one of the falconers stood always on guard to prevent strangers from entering, or any sudden happening which might upset his high-strung and immensely valuable charges.

Raulin nodded to the falconer, skirted the mew and plunged suddenly into a dark passage that lay hidden between it and a stone water-cistern. Here was a small wooden door which he unlocked. "But the privy apartments are in the Inner Ward," protested Katherine nervously as he motioned her up narrow stone steps that were hollowed from the thickness of the wall.

"This leads to them," said Raulin patiently. "His Grace does not vish that people see you. It vould make talk."

Katherine swallowed, and mounted the steps. They ended on the next floor in a narrow passage that ran along the inside wall of consecutive chambers and ended in another wooden door. This door was concealed by a painted cloth-hanging. Raulin pushed it aside and they emerged into the Duchess' garde-robe, a small oblong chamber.