The other interesting thing the tinker had to say is that the peasants have left the land and gone searching for better pay. I had read about that, but it all seemed frightfully unlikely. Now, here, seeing the vacant fields, I can tell it has really happened. The nobles have tried to put a stop to it, of course, but it’s done no good. It used to be that a man could not leave the land, for there would be no place for him elsewhere. Every lord had his own serfs and little need for more. Now, however, the Black Death has killed so many that there are places begging for any good man. Well, I remember that from Wellingford, from the Dower House. It was hard, even then, to get anything done, and the Death has been back several times since then. Strange, isn’t it. Men are more valued when there are fewer of us. Which is what I tried to tell them back in the twentieth. Which is what Puck said, too.
The tinker is a youngish man, but he has traveled these roads since he was a child. All Wellingford is empty now, he says. He does not know where the people went who used to live there. He remembers hearing of the King and Queen who were driven from their home over the seas, but he doesn’t remember where that home might have been. He will take me within a very short distance of East Sawley Mill, which still stands, and there I will ask about to see if anyone remembers.
ST.JUSTIN, MARTYR, FIRST DAY OF JUNE, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417
I got down from the cart in front of an inn. What passes for an inn in these times. Outside it, sitting on a bench, was a straight, slender old man chatting with a friend. When he saw me standing there in the road alone, he came forward to offer his assistance.
He looked at me for a long time. I felt dizzy from that look.
“Catherine?” he asked. “It is Catherine, isn’t it?”
For a moment I didn’t know him. When I did, I felt everything whirling, like a tornado of feeling, swirling me around with it. “Giles? Oh, Giles. Is it Giles? But, you’re dead. They told me you were dead!”
He held me, and for that moment I was thirty again. My heart was as strong as it had ever been and that instant became an eternity for me. He wasn’t dead. Giles wasn’t dead. He knew me when he saw me, though I cannot imagine how. He called me by the name he knew me by, Catherine. He put his hand out to touch my face, and he smiled, as though he had expected me. He told me he had expected me every day for the past fifty years. He said he has thought about me every day during all that time, and he knew I was somehow his own lost Beauty come back to him.
I cried when he said this. I cry every time I think about it. We are of an age. He is still straight as a lance, though his stride is shorter than I remember and he does not see as well as once he did. His hair is as white as mine, but it is still full and soft and falls over his forehead as once it did. I wept and begged to know what had happened to him, and he told me a tale of being waylaid by an impress gang, one of whom he had killed, defending himself, before he was overpowered and dragged away. It was that man who had been buried beside the road.
I told him I had gone there and laid flowers on the place, and he laughed, saying I was the only one to grieve over that ruffian. Because the horse was there, with the king’s arms upon it, the witness had not considered it might be one of the gang who had died rather than the man they had assaulted.
The impress gang was working for a merchantman who had a royal contract to carry supplies to France and not enough men to man the ships. They kept Giles for months, sailing back and forth across the channel, and when he escaped at last, I was gone. He had dwelt here about East Sawley since, he said, waiting for me to return, knowing that I would.
“If I’d known you were here, I’d have come long ago,” I told him. And I would have. I’d have come long, long ago.
“After what had passed between us, no little wait seemed at all worrisome,” he said. “I have lived all my life in the memory of those three nights.”
What can any woman say to that? I went into the privy behind the inn and wiped my face, telling myself I’d been a fool to go to the twentieth for vengeance sake when I could have stayed for love’s sake, a fool to stay there for pride’s sake, thinking there was anything I could do. But then, I never said I was not a fool.
When I spoke of them, Giles remembered the little royals, and he also remembered the name of their kingdom: Ponte Marvella, somewhere in the high mountains where Aragon and Navarre and France come together in a tangle. I told him about Elly marrying the prince and their having a daughter, my granddaughter. He says he will come with me to find her. Here we are, two old pots, though seemingly fairly hale for all that, going
