The Hunter's Tale

Chapter 3

The trouble with summer days was how long they lasted, Hugh thought wearily, watching almost the last of the funeral guests ride out of sight around the far curve of the road along the woodshore beyond the church. Today had stretched out forever from sunrise until finally now when dusk had set the last guests homeward. Master and Mistress Drayton had a four-mile ride to go but twilight this near past Midsummer went on forever; they would be home before full dark. Hugh lowered his hand from a last wave after them and turned back through the gateway into the manor’s foreyard, trying to hold his shoulders straight against his weariness. Long summer days and their drawn-out twilight had always been pleasure for him, but today he had found himself wanting a brief winter’s day that would be done with and over, with a long night to follow when he could go to bed and not be anything except-with luck-asleep for hours upon hours and no need to say or do any of all the things he had had to do and say these past five days.

As it was, having no need for haste to be home before dark, the guests had lingered over the funeral feast. Not that there had been that many guests. “And most of them are here simply for the pleasure of seeing him dead,” Miles had said low-voiced to Hugh as they came out of the uncrowded church after the funeral Mass. Nor was anyone there who had to take much trouble over coming except Master Wyck from Banbury and that was more because he had been Sir Ralph’s attorney than for respect. Certainly there had been no great grieving from anyone, unless Elyn and Lucy’s tears meant much, which Hugh doubted. That his sisters’ weeping seemed more from duty-they owed it to themselves to weep-than from feeling was among the thoughts weighing on Hugh all day. Another heavy thought was that despite Sir Ralph had lived a goodly number of years, been married, had children, known a fair number of people along the way, at the end of it all he was buried with no one much caring and only duty-tears over his grave.

If anyone is going to miss him, Hugh thought as he crossed the foreyard, back toward the hall, his shadow stretching out black ahead of him, it will be me and the hounds. And I don’t think we do. Except maybe Bevis. The brindled wolfhound had been Sir Ralph’s present favorite, taken with him almost everywhere, even into church, where Father Leonel had frowned but not dared say anything. These days since Sir Ralph’s death, Bevis had limped restlessly through the hall and foreyard or else lain beside the hall hearth, long muzzle on paws, eyes fixed on the outer door as if awaiting Sir Ralph’s return. Yet when Tom had brought him to lie beside the bier, he would not, and today was tied in the kitchen yard, out of the way. Hugh had wondered before now how things would have gone that last day if Bevis had been with Sir Ralph. Assuredly not the way they had.

But Bevis had cut a forepaw on a stone the day before and the morning of the hunt Sir Ralph had rumpled his ears and said, “Best you lie up today, old fellow. It’s only hare-hunting anyway.” But a very good hare-hunting, as it happened; the best there had been that summer. Only fallow and roedeer bucks and hare were allowable to the hunt through the summer months and early autumn, between St. John’s Day and Holy Rood, and since Sir Ralph had hunted roedeer a few days earlier, he had been in the humour for hare-hunting, and so Hugh had been out in the green-gold dawn that day, a-foot and without dogs, to quarter the rough pastureland beyond the village fields, looking for the best place to bring the hunt. He had been glad the signs for likely best hunting looked to be in the farthest of the pastures, well away from the fields where the grain was ripening toward harvest. Sir Ralph had no care if his hounds coursed through the standing grain, but it set the villagers to fury to see their work and hope of winter bread trampled by hounds and hunters for the sake of sport. Sir Ralph’s answer to their protests when they came into the manor court about it was always, “I have to live with your poaching my game out of my forest whenever you’ve a mind to it and stealing my wood whenever my back is turned. You can live with my trampling a little of your fields in return. Now get out.”

A year ago Hary Gefori, the hayward’s grown son and shaping well to take his father’s place when the time came, had dared say angrily back, “Aye, we poach, and when we’re caught at it, we’re beaten and fined for it. So, in like, when you and your hounds and horses have robbed us of our grain, why shouldn’t you pay?”

Sir Ralph had half-risen from his chair, his hands gripping its arms so his knuckles stood out white, his face purpled with fury and his words almost throttled by his anger. “Pay for what’s mine? I own all this manor and everything on it, including you and every stalk of wheat and rye and barley and plain pasture grass. If anyone’s going to pay, it’ll be you-with half the teeth in your head and the skin off your back. Tom and you there, Duff, take him. Hugh, fetch my dog whip. I’ll show…”

Hary had not waited to be taken or whipped but had spun on his heel and shoved his way among the men gathered to the court, with no one-including Tom-trying to stop him before he was out the door. That had earned Tom a yelling-at and every man there the fine of a penny each, including Tom, though Hugh doubted Tom ever paid it, since Tom and Father Leonel between them kept the manor accounts and Sir Ralph “never cares what the accounts say,” Tom had raged once to their mother. “So long as the hounds are healthy and the roof isn’t falling in, he doesn’t care. I could be stealing him blind and he’d never know.”

“Are you stealing him blind?” Lady Anneys had asked.

“No. The more fool me,” Tom had said bitterly.

Now everything was Tom’s, and if the villagers had warily held back from outright celebration of Sir Ralph’s death, Hugh did not doubt there was nonetheless hidden joy among them because Tom, for all that his anger could flare like Sir Ralph’s, was far more even-handed in his dealings. He had been even more pleased than Hugh the morning of that last hunt to hear the chase would likely keep well away from the grain fields.

“It will be closer to the gathering place, too,” he had said. “Farther for the servants but closer for us, and Mother and the girls won’t mind the walk.” Which they would have to make, whether they minded or not, because last night Sir Ralph had pointed at Lady Anneys across the parlor and ordered, “See to it there’s food laid out at the spring after the hunt. We might as well make a day of it, since Sir William is bringing both Elyn and his girl.” Sir William being their near neighbor and as passionate to the hunt as Sir Ralph.

That night Miles said, while he and Hugh and Tom had been readying to bed in the chamber they shared over the kitchen at the hall’s other end from Sir Ralph and Lady Anneys’ own room, “So we’re to hunt in the morning, guzzle through midday, and return to the slaughter in the afternoon. I wonder if I feel a sickness coming on and must keep to my bed for the day?”

Tom had thrown a wadded shirt at him. “If I have to be there, so do you.”

“I hate hare-hunting.”

“You hate all hunting.”

Miles threw the shirt back at him. “Hare-hunting is worse. You can hunt the fool things twice in a day. Everything else you hunt and then go home. Red deer, roedeer, fallow deer, otter, badger, fox, boar, bear, wolf…”

“Boar? Bear? Wolf?” Tom had repeated cuttingly. “When have any of us ever hunted boar or bear or wolf?”

“Never, thank St. Eustace. It’s been bad enough listening to Sir Ralph moaning on about lacking them. Years and years of him moaning there’s no wild boar or bear or wolf left for him to slaughter. Moaning on and on…”

“Nephew,” Tom warned, “if you don’t shut yourself up…”

“… and on and on and…”

Tom and Hugh together had shoved him backward onto the bed and made to smother him with a pillow until laughter broke up their wrestling and they had all settled to sleep in the cheerfulness they so often had together when away from Sir Ralph.

In the morning Hugh had been first up and dressed and away, leaving them pulling on their heavy hunting hosen and debating whether hare was better baked in gravy in a crusted pie or roasted crisp on a spit. He had returned, more than ready for his breakfast, to find Sir William had arrived. His pair of scent hounds were in the foreyard, held on leash by Sir William’s steward, Master Selenger.

Master Selenger was a man as lean and ready to the hunt as the hounds he held, and Hugh traded a few words with him before going in to tell what he had found and snatch some bread and cheese while his father and Sir William discussed which hounds they meant to use today. Sir William was not quite Sir Ralph’s age nor given to anything like Sir Ralph’s rages but their shared passion for hunting had made them “as near to friends as Sir Ralph is ever likely to come,” Miles once said. Friends enough that Sir Ralph had married Elyn, his eldest daughter, to him and lately begun to talk with him of marrying Tom to Sir William’s daughter, Philippa.

For a wonder, given how readily Tom quarreled with Sir Ralph over anything and everything else, he had made no protest against that. Not that there was much to protest. Besides being Sir William’s only child and therefore his heir, Philippa was a pleasant-featured, pleasant-mannered girl, friends with Elyn and Lucy and so often at Woodrim that Lady Anneys, fond of her, said she was already more than halfway to belonging there. The only present complication was Sir William’s marriage to Elyn two years ago. Besides that it made him Tom and Hugh’s brother-in-law, it raised the likelihood he would father more children, lessening Philippa’s inheritance or, if there were a son, replacing Philippa altogether. Any marriage agreement made now would have to be most carefully made to ensure she stayed worth Tom’s marrying and as yet Sir Ralph and Sir William had not settled down to the task and Tom knew better than to push the matter. And since Elyn wasn’t bearing yet, everything was mayhap and maybe anyway and more important that morning was the hare-hunt.

They had gone on foot to the far pasture, the hounds knowing what was coming and as eager to the business as the men. At the pasture’s edge Sir Ralph had blown three glad notes on his hunting horn, and Hugh, Degory, and Master Selenger had uncoupled the six lymers-the scent hounds-who had the first work. Set forward with Hugh’s cry of “Avaunt, sire, avaunt!,” they had surged away into the pasture with Hugh’s following call of, “So howe, so howe, so howe!” to urge them onward. Not that urging was needed. Hares were cunning. As if ever-aware they might be hunted, one hare never, for choice, traveled straightforwardly but rather went one way, then back on its trail for a ways before going another way, over and over again, ten times or more and crisscrossing its own trails while it did, with sometimes a sideways leap to start a different way all over again. The lymers’ challenge was to sort out the trails and thereby track a hare to its form-its resting place-and rout it out, and Somer, Sudden, Sendal, and young Skyre, along with Sir William’s lymers, set to it joyfully, questing rapidly back and forth through the long grass, heads down and tails madly wagging. As always for Hugh, their intensity became his as he watched them searching, spreading apart, sweeping this way and that across the pasture to untangle the scents, while beside him and Tom, Sir Ralph, Sir William, and Master Selenger, the coursing hounds waited their chance with quivering eagerness. Miles, as always, stood a little apart, there because he had to be, but even so he was watching, smiling, the hounds’ joy at their work impossible not to share.

Hugh saw Sendal start to swing too far apart from the others and called out, “Howse, Sendal, howse!” to bring him back to the others, now closing in on a hare it seemed, to judge by how they were rushing forward, crowding together, then spreading apart and crowding forward again, all a-quiver and their tails wild. As Sendal rejoined them, the hare burst up from the grass and into a run hardly three hounds’ length ahead of Sudden in the lead.

“She goes!” Sir William cried. “Ears up! She’s a good one!” Because a hare that waited until the hounds saw it and ran with its ears up was confident of its strength and chance of escape. This one was as cunning in its running as it had been in laying its trail, swift in its turns and twice cutting sideways and away under the very muzzles of the hounds before Sir Ralph said, “That’s enough. Now,” and set Bertrand loose with the cry, “Venes!” The rest of them loosed the other hounds with him and-white, and brown-spotted, and brindled gray-Makarie, Melador, Bane, Brigand, and Sir William’s Chandos streaked away to join the others.

The end came quickly then, and hunters trotted out to the kill-site where Melador was standing over the dead hare while the other hounds seethed around with high-waving tails, panting and pleased with themselves. Sir Ralph held the corpse high and blared the death on his horn, they went through the various ceremonies demanded at a kill, and then the hare was dismembered, bits of it mixed with blood-soaked bread and cheese and given to the hounds, but the better parts handed to a servant to carry back to the manor. Then they began again.

Two more hares were started, both of them escaping after good runs, before another one was taken. By then the morning was far enough along that Sir Ralph declared the hunting done for the while and they headed across the pastureland and along the woodshore to the greenway, men and hounds all glad of the shade under the tall-arched trees and gladder when they turned aside from the way into the wide, smooth-grassed clearing of the gathering place. At its upper end a spring bubbled out of the slope, its cold water filling a stone-built basin before flowing over and away in a shallow, broadening stream the length of the clearing and out of sight among the trees. Along the near side of the clearing wooden tabletops on trestle legs had been put up and cold chicken, new cheese, bread, and ale set out by servants waiting now to serve, while beyond the little stream Lady Anneys, Elyn, Philippa, and Lucy were seated on cushions on the grass, Philippa with her small lute on her lap, the others with their embroidery.

As usual, Hugh, Master Selenger, and Degory saw to watering the hounds, then Hugh and Master Selenger left them to Degory to tie in the shade and feed while they joined the others at the tables to eat and drink and talk over the morning’s hunt. Afterward the women returned to their cushions, and the men, fed and tired and ready to rest, dropped down around them on what Lady Anneys called the hunt-cushions-large, old, not very clean cushions kept for this use. Only Miles went to sit on the wide rim of the spring’s basin, dabbling his fingers in the water. The midday warmth and well-fed bellies slowed the talk and even the women sat idle, their sewing in their laps, except Philippa took up her lute again and began to stroke small, silver-sounding notes from its strings, simple as the sound of the water flowing and hardly more noticeable. Sir Ralph tried to pick a quarrel with Tom over a pasture that had been grazed last month instead of left rough for the summer’s hunting but they were both too full and tired for it, and giving it up, Sir Ralph joined Sir William in dozing, stretched out with their heads laid on cushions and hands clasped on stomachs. Tom shifted to sit beside Philippa, watching her play. The family jest was that he had no more ear than a post for music, and when Elyn asked Philippa to sing, it was to Master Selenger that Philippa turned, asking, “Join me?”

Lying on his side, propped up on one elbow on one of the cushions, he smilingly said, “Gladly,” and sat up. He was Philippa’s uncle, brother to Sir William’s first wife, dead these dozen years, and their singing together was always everyone’s pleasure. Their voices-his dark, hers light-blended around each other, wending through “At sometime merry, at sometime sad, At sometimes well, at sometimes woe” as gracefully as dancers winding a maypole until at the end they sang exactly together, “He is not wise, he is but mad, That after worldly wealth does go,” and then laughed at their own delight in their shared pleasure while Lady Anneys, Elyn, Tom, Hugh, and Miles lightly applauded them.

Looking back from afterward, Hugh could only think how usual it all had been. A midday gathering like uncounted others, with no warning of what would come. But what warning could there have been, Hugh wondered now, crossing the foreyard back to the hall. Almost a week was past, with time enough to remember, and he did not see what…

“Hugh,” his mother said quietly from the hall doorway.

He had been looking down, making no haste back to the hall, but at her call he looked up and lengthened his pace. He was tired and knew she was and he had not expected her to wait for him there after seeing the guests away. She had taken these past days quietly, the way she took everything. Not even in the first horrible surprise of Sir Ralph’s death had she cried. Elyn and Lucy had shed more than enough tears and Hugh’s thought was that Lady Anneys’ own were dried up with comforting them, but his fear might have been that with the funeral done and the guests gone, her grieving would come over her in a storm. Except, in a carefully buried part of his mind, he doubted that she grieved at all.

But then, did any of them?

He smiled at her as he joined her at the doorway and asked, “Will you rest now, Mother? Can I send Elyn and Lucy off to a far corner of a far field and let you be at peace for a while?”

She smiled back at him. “Not just yet.” Against the black of her mourning gown and veil, her always fair-skinned face was even paler, the gray shadows under her eyes almost its only color. “Master Wyck wants to speak with us all.”

“Now? Does it have to be now?”

“To have it done with,” Lady Anneys said. “He’s to spend the night with Sir William, to be that much further on his road to home come the morning with no need to come back here.”

“You’re tired.” So was he, come to that. Since Sir Ralph’s death there had been no pause in things to be done, beginning with the useless hunt through the woods for his murderer, looking for track of someone and not finding it, casting the hounds wide and wide again, trying to flush someone out but failing. Then there had been sending for the crowner-the king’s officer charged with seeing into unexpected deaths-and when he came, his questions and demands to be answered. And then fetching Ursula from the nunnery and all the preparations for the funeral and finally today the funeral itself and the funeral feast and all that went with that, and now the lawyer wanted them.

Hugh knew he himself was faltering, doubted how much more his mother could endure, and protested more strongly, “You’re too tired for this.”

She laid her hand on his arm, briefly smiled at him, said, “It’s no matter,” and turned away, back into the hall.

Hugh, needing more time than that to gather himself, paused a moment longer on the threshold between the day’s sunlight and the hall’s shadows. Woodrim had never been more than a minor knight’s manor and then for forty years an aged and childless widow’s dower land until, after her death, Sir Ralph had bought it from a distant heir. But he had bought it for the hunting and never much bothered with anything else about it, keeping the hall as he had found it-plain, bare-raftered, not overlarge, with an open hearth in the middle and the smoke meant to escape through a penticed louver in the roof. There was not even a screen-wall here at its lower end to block the draughts when the outside door was opened and from where he stood in the doorway Hugh could see its length, past the servants clearing away the remains of the funeral feast from the long table set up along one side, in a hurry to have their own feasting in the kitchen, to the far end where the dais raised the master’s table a step above the rest of the hall for whoever sat there to see and be seen by the rest of the household.

The hall’s only window was there, looking out from one end of the dais onto the foreyard, tall and narrow and glassed at the top above the shutters so that even in winter or ill weather when the heavy wooden shutters were closed, there could be some light in the hall besides through the doorway or from candles or rushlights. Today in the warm afternoon the shutters stood open, letting the westering sunlight fall the dais’ length across Tom, Sir William, and Master Wyck standing together behind the table there, next to Sir Ralph’s tall-backed chair. Tom’s chair now, Hugh reminded himself; but neither Tom nor anyone else had sat there since Sir Ralph’s death. Tom would have to, sooner or later, there being only their mother’s smaller chair and the benches otherwise, but presently the men were all standing, talking, a cluster of blackness in their mourning gowns and doublets. At the dais’ farther end Elyn, Lucy, Ursula, and Philippa were gathered close together, Miles standing near them but somehow not with them, still in the silence that he had kept heavily around him this while since Sir Ralph’s death.

“Since I can’t mourn and shouldn’t openly rejoice, best I just keep quiet,” he’d said when Hugh had asked how he was.

Still wishing that Master Wyck would wait with whatever he wanted to say, Hugh followed his mother up the hall. Sir William and Master Wyck bowed to her as she joined them and Tom took her by the hand to bring her to her chair beside Sir Ralph’s. She sat and Sir William leaned over her, laying a hand on hers on the chair arm, saying something too low for Hugh to hear. She shook her head and said something back. At the dais’ other end Miles opened the door to the parlor and stepped aside for the girls and Elyn to go in. Lucy and Ursula did, but as Lady Anneys answered Sir William, Elyn and Philippa both paused and, with Miles, looked back toward them. Then Miles said something to Elyn and she nodded and went on, but Philippa paused a moment longer, looking from Miles to her father and back to Miles until from the parlor Elyn ordered loudly, sharply, “Philippa!”

Philippa winced. Miles ruefully shrugged at her and she ruefully shrugged back with a slight, uneven smile and followed Elyn into the parlor, Miles closing the door behind her. Hugh had sometimes wondered, in the two years since Elyn had married Sir William, how Philippa, only two years younger and often with Elyn while they were growing up, felt at having Elyn for a stepmother, wielding a stepmother’s authority over her. Hugh doubted Elyn troubled herself with wondering. Elyn had welcomed marriage, been glad to become Lady Elyn and free of anyone telling her what to do except her husband, nor had she yet shown any regrets; and since there was a great deal of their father in Elyn, Hugh well supposed she probably did not care what Philippa thought or felt about any of it so long as Philippa did what she was told and made no quarrel about it.

Sir William was still speaking to Lady Anneys, now sitting with her head bowed and her hands folded on her lap, seemingly making no answer. It was Tom, standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder, who interrupted whatever Sir William was saying, saying instead to Master Wyck, “I agree with Sir William. Why isn’t this something that can wait?”

Hugh joined Miles at the end of the table. Low-voiced he asked, “What’s the trouble?”

“Master Wyck wants to talk of the will. Nobody else does.”

“Maybe it’s better to have it over with?” Hugh said.

“Or better to put off knowing the worst until later,” Miles returned. There was laughter under his low-kept voice. Miles too often found laughter where no one else did, was sometimes reckless with it, and had brought Sir Ralph’s wrath down on himself more than once that way. These past few days Hugh had caught glints of it behind Miles’ few words and long silences that warned his outward seemliness was very thin and barely holding; but this wasn’t the time to give way and Hugh punched him just hard enough in the small of his back to remind him and said, keeping his voice low, “Easy enough for you, anyway. You already know the worst for you.”

“True,” Miles returned. “One badly neglected and diminished manor, complete with Sir Ralph’s curse because he couldn’t find a way to keep it from me.”

And Sir Ralph would have kept it from him if he could. About that, Sir Ralph had always been very clear. All else that he held was his to dispose of as he chose and he had more than once goaded Tom and Hugh with, “I can leave you no more than the clothes you stand in. You cross me once too often and that’s all I will leave you. I swear it.” But the manor of Goscote in Leicestershire had come to him by right of blood and was entailed by law to pass to the eldest male heir of the blood, meaning Miles, only son of his loathed eldest son. Bitterly grudging that, Sir Ralph had taken pains over the years to take as much from the manor as he could, do as little for it as possible, and make certain Miles knew it. “Still,” said Miles cheerfully now, “better a broken manor without Sir Ralph than Paradise with him. Not that any place with Sir Ralph would be Paradise.”

But the rest of them-except Lady Anneys with the dower land of her marriage agreement-were not assured of anything. Despite all his talking and threats, Sir Ralph had never told them for certain what was in his will; for all any of them knew, he might have left everything to the Church or a cousin they had never heard of or “a long-discarded mistress,” Miles had once speculated, “who’s become a nun and will pray forever for his soul.”

“I doubt it,” Tom had said. “If he was going to do a thing like that, he’d tell us, to watch us writhe.”

With that Hugh fully agreed, so it was not to avoid something he feared to hear that Tom was delaying as he turned from Sir William and Master Wyck and said, “Hugh, help me here. Mother doesn’t need more today. She-”

Lady Anneys straightened, lifted her head, and quietly, firmly interrupted him. “I’ve said that I’m ready.” She looked at Master Wyck, waiting in front of her with papers in his hand. “If you think this time is good, then let’s be done with it. Go on.”

“Lady Anneys,” Sir William said kindly, “this may not be wise.”

Lady Anneys looked past Master Wyck and Tom to Hugh and Miles. “Hugh. Miles. What do you say?”

Hugh hesitated. It was Miles who answered, “If you say now, then now it should be.”

Lady Anneys returned her quiet gaze to Master Wyck. “Now, sir, if you please.”

He made her a small bow and said to the rest of them, “If you would care to be seated, gentlemen?”

Miles promptly hitched a hip onto the edge of the table. Hugh and Sir William sat on the benches. Tom hesitated, looked at his mother, who understood what he was silently asking and nodded at Sir Ralph’s chair. “Now, for you, too,” she said with a smile. And he sat down in it.

“Well done,” Miles said, lightly mocking. “You fit.”

Tom shifted a little uneasily, settling himself more firmly, and turned his heed to Master Wyck.

The attorney had stayed standing, his papers at the ready. With them settled, he briefly bowed his head to them all and said, “What I have here is Sir Ralph’s will, with his sign and seal upon it, witnessed by my clerk and Master Carrow. I think you are acquainted with Master Carrow, my lady?”

“The saddler in Banbury. Yes.”

“Another copy, likewise signed, sealed, and witnessed, is in my keeping in Banbury. The provisions of the will are much as you probably expect. If there’s no objection, I will summarize, rather than read them out at length?” He paused and, when no one objected, went on, “Of course to Master Miles Woderove goes the manor of Goscote in Leicestershire, as entailed.”

“And be damned to Sir Ralph,” Miles muttered, so low only Hugh heard him. Miles’ hands, clenched one around the other, eased. He had been waiting, Hugh realized, for one final bitterness from his grandfather.

“This manor of Woodrim,” Master Wyck went on, “goes to Master Thomas Woderove with all appurtenances and rights and so forth.” He made a general gesture with one hand. “You are already well acquainted with what those are, I’m sure, Master Woderove. Also all other of his properties except as are otherwise given elsewhere in this will. Master Hugh Woderove is to have the hounds, all that goes with them, and his horse and his father’s recommendation as a worthy and skilled huntsman and master of hounds, should he need or choose to seek other hire than with his brother.” Master Wyck paused and looked at Hugh. “I have that recommendation in my possession, written out in his own hand, signed and sealed, against such time as you may desire it.”

Hugh made an acknowledging nod, caught between surprised pleasure and complete relief. Until now he had not dared let himself think about what might happen with him now Sir Ralph was dead. Here and the hounds were all he knew and if he had lost them…

“You are likewise to have such property as Sir Ralph held in Banbury and Northampton,” Master Wyck went on. “Also ten marks in coin or else property to that amount upon such time as you marry, so long as you marry with Lady Anneys’ approval and before you are thirty years of age.”

Miles insufficiently smothered a laugh. Hugh slapped the back of a hand against his leg and muttered, “Shut up.”

Tom was trying but failing to hold in a grin. Their mother was a little frowning but whether with displeasure or disquiet Hugh could not tell.

Master Wyck continued, “Lady Elyn, having already been provided with her dowry upon her marriage, has no further provision made for her. As is usual and as I think you knew?” he inquired of Lady Anneys and Sir William together. They both nodded that they did. Unless a daughter were also an heiress, her inheritance was usually considered complete upon her marriage. “For his other daughters, Sir Ralph has provided as much for their marriages as was given with Lady Elyn, so long as they marry with your approval, Lady Anneys, though if Ursula chooses to become a nun she shall have five marks more than otherwise.” Master Wyck cleared his throat. “There are a variety of other provisions made, mostly concerning Masses for his soul…”

Hugh kicked Miles’ foot and Miles choked his laughter into a smothered cough.

“I’ll leave those to Master Woderove”-he nodded respectfully to Tom-“and the executors to read in detail. It is the matter of the executors, however, that I should like to directly address.”

Tom leaned forward. “Is this where the bastard twists us over?”

“Tom,” Lady Anneys said.

“Three executors are appointed,” Master Wyck said. “Lady Anneys. Sir William Trensal. Master Hugh Woderove.”

Tom looked at Hugh, his surprise matching Hugh’s own, and Hugh let his discomfort and discomfiture show with a frown. He had neither expected nor wanted that duty. Tom shook his head, telling him that he didn’t care, and said to Master Wyck, “Sir William is to be main executor, I suppose?”

Master Wyck hesitated before admitting, somewhat uncomfortably, “In truth… no.”

“No?” Again Tom’s surprise matched Hugh’s. “Then who is?”

Master Wyck bowed his head to their mother. “Lady Anneys.”

She drew in her breath and said, sharp with protest, “He would never have given me that!”

“He did, my lady,” Master Wyck assured her. He cleared his throat. “With conditions, however.”

“Ah. Conditions,” Miles said. “This is where the bastard twists us over.”