20

Agnes could not have been asleep more than five minutes before the bell stopped and then began to ring again, more quickly, calling them to mass.

“Father Roche begins too soon. It is not midnight yet,” Lady Imeyne said, and it wasn’t even out of her mouth before the other bells started: Wychlade and Bureford and, far away to the east, too far to be more than a breath of an echo, the bells of Oxford.

There are the Osney bells, and there’s Carfax, Kivrin thought, and wondered if they were ringing at home tonight, too.

Sir Bloet heaved himself to his feet and then helped his sister up. One of their servants hurried in with their cloaks and a squirrel-fur-lined mantle. The chattering girls pulled their cloaks from the pile and fastened them, still chattering. Lady Imeyne shook Maisry, who’d fallen asleep on the beggar’s bench, and told her to fetch her Book of Hours, and Maisry shuffled off to the loft ladder, yawning. Rosemund came over and reached with exaggerated carefulness for her cloak, which had slid off Agnes’s shoulders.

Agnes was dead to the world. Kivrin hesitated, hating to have to wake her up, but fairly sure even exhausted five-year-olds weren’t excepted from this mass. “Agnes,” she said softly.

“You must needs carry her to the church,” Rosemund said, struggling with Sir Bloet’s gold brooch. The steward’s youngest boy came and stood in front of Kivrin with her white cloak, dragging it on the rushes.

“Agnes,” Kivrin said again, and jostled her a little, amazed that the church bell hadn’t waked her. It sounded louder and closer than it ever did for matins or vespers, its overtones nearly drowning out the other bells.

Agnes’s eyes flew open. “You did not wake me,” she said sleepily to Rosemund, and then more loudly as she came awake, “You promised to wake me.”

“Get into your cloak,” Kivrin said. “We must go to church.”

“Kivrin, I would wear my bell.”

“You’re wearing it,” Kivrin said, trying to fasten Agnes’s red cape without stabbing her in the neck with the pin of the clasp.

“Nay, I have it not,” Agnes said, searching her arm. “I would wear my bell!”

“Here it is,” Rosemund said, picking it up off the floor, “it must have fallen from your wrist. But it is not meet to wear it now. This bell calls us to mass. The Christmas bells come after.”

“I shall not ring it,” Agnes said. “I would only wear it.”

Kivrin didn’t believe that for a minute, but everyone else was ready. One of Sir Bloet’s men was lighting the horn lanterns with a brand from the fire and handing them to the servants. She hastily tied the bell to Agnes’s wrist and took the girls by the hand.

Lady Eliwys laid her hand on Sir Bloet’s upheld one. Lady Imeyne signaled to Kivrin to follow with the little girls, and the others fell in behind them solemnly, as if it were a procession, Lady Imeyne with Sir Bloet’s sister, and then the rest of Sir Bloet’s entourage. Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet led the way out into the courtyard, through the gate, and onto the green.

It had stopped snowing, and the stars had come out. The village lay silent under its covering of white. Frozen in time, Kivrin thought. The dilapidated buildings looked different, the staggering fences and filthy daubed huts softened and graced by the snow. The lanterns caught the crystalline facets of the snowflakes and made them sparkle, but it was the stars that took Kivrin’s breath away, hundreds of stars, thousands of stars, and all of them sparkling like jewels in the icy air. “It shines,” Agnes said, and Kivrin didn’t know whether she was talking about the snow or the sky.

The bell tolled evenly, calmly, its sound different again out in the frosty air—not louder, but fuller and somehow clearer. Kivrin could hear all the other bells now and recognize them, Esthcote and Witenie and Chertelintone, even though they sounded different, too. She listened for the Swindone bell, which had rung all this time, but she couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear the Oxford bells either. She wondered if she had only imagined them.

“You are ringing your bell, Agnes,” Rosemund said.

“I am not,” Agnes said. “I am only walking.”

“Look at the church,” Kivrin said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

It flamed like a beacon at the other end of the green, lit from inside and out, the stained-glass windows throwing wavering ruby and sapphire lights on the snow. There were lights all around it, too, filling the churchyard all the way to the bell tower. Torches. She could smell their tarry smoke. More torches made their way in from the white fields, winding down from the hill behind the church.

She thought suddenly of Oxford on Christmas Eve, the shops lit for last-minute shopping and the windows of Brasenose shining yellow onto the quad. And the Christmas tree at Balliol lit with multicolored strings of laser lights.

“I would that we had come to you for Yule,” Lady Imeyne said to Lady Yvolde. “Then we had had a proper priest to say the masses. This place’s priest can but barely say the Paternoster.”

This place’s priest just spent hours kneeling in an ice-cold church, Kivrin thought, hours kneeling in hose that have holes in the knees, and now this place’s priest is ringing a heavy bell that has had to be tolled for an hour and will shortly go through an elaborate ceremony that he has had to memorize because he cannot read.

“It will be a poor sermon and a poor mass, I fear,” Lady Imeyne said.

“Alas, there are many who do not love God in these days,” Lady Yvolde said, “but we must pray to God that He will set the world right and bring men again to virtue.”

Kivrin doubted if that answer was what Lady Imeyne wanted to hear.

“I have sent to the Bishop of Bath to send us a chaplain,” Imeyne said, “but he has not yet come.”

“My brother says there is much trouble in Bath,” Yvolde said.

They were almost to the churchyard. Kivrin could make out faces now, lit by the smoky torches and by little oil cressets some of the women were carrying. Their faces, reddened and lit from below, looked faintly sinister. Mr. Dunworthy would think they were an angry mob, Kivrin thought, gathered to burn some poor martyr at the stake. It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.

They came into the churchyard. Kivrin recognized some of the people near the church doors: the boy with the scurvy who had run from her, two of the young girls who’d helped with the Christmas baking, Cob. The steward’s wife was wearing a cloak with an ermine collar and carrying a metal lantern with four tiny panes of real glass. She was talking animatedly to the woman with the scrofula scars who had helped put up the holly. They were all talking and moving around to keep warm, and one man with a black beard was laughing so hard his torch swept dangerously close to the steward’s wife’s wimple.

Church officials had eventually had to do away with the midnight mass because of all the drinking and carousing, Kivrin remembered, and some of these parishioners definitely looked like they had spent the evening breaking fasts. The steward was talking animatedly to a rough-looking man Rosemund pointed out as Maisry’s father. Both their faces were bright red from the cold or the torchlight or the liquor or all three, but they seemed gay rather than dangerous. The steward kept punctuating what he was saying with hard, thunking claps on Maisry’s father’s shoulder, and every time he did it the father laughed, a happy helpless giggle that made Kivrin think he was much brighter than she had supposed.

The steward’s wife grabbed for her husband’s sleeve, and he shook her off, but as soon as Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet came through the lychgate, he and Maisry’s father fell back promptly to make a clear path into the church. So did all the others, falling silent as the entourage passed through the churchyard and in the heavy doors, and then beginning to talk again, but more quietly, as they came into the church behind them.

Sir Bloet unbuckled his sword and handed it to a servant, and he and Lady Eliwys knelt and genuflected as soon as they were in the door. They walked almost to the rood screen together and knelt again.

Kivrin and the little girls followed. When Agnes crossed herself, her bell jangled hollowly in the church. I’ll have to take it off of her, Kivrin thought, and wondered if she should step out of the procession now and take Agnes off to the side by Lady Imeyne’s husband’s tomb and undo it, but Lady Imeyne was waiting impatiently at the door with Sir Bloet’s sister.

She led the girls to the front. Sir Bloet had already lumbered to his feet again. Eliwys stayed on her knees a little longer, and then stood, and Sir Bloet escorted her to the north side of the church, bowed slightly, and walked over to take his place on the men’s side.

Kivrin knelt with the little girls, praying Agnes wouldn’t make too much noise when she crossed herself again. She didn’t, but when Agnes got to her feet she snagged her foot in the hem of her robe and caught herself with a clanging almost as loud as the bell still tolling outside. Lady Imeyne was, of course, right behind them. She glared at Kivrin.

Kivrin took the girls to stand beside Eliwys. Lady Imeyne knelt, but Lady Yvolde made only an obeisance. As soon as Imeyne rose, a servant hurried forward with a dark-velvet-covered priedieu and laid it on the floor next to Rosemund for Lady Yvolde to kneel on. Another servant had laid one in front of Sir Bloet on the men’s side and was helping him get down on his knees on it. He puffed and clung to the servant’s arm as he lowered his bulk, and his face got very red.

Kivrin looked at Lady Yvolde’s prie-dieu longingly, thinking of the plastic kneeling pads that hung on the backs of the chairs in St. Mary’s. She had never realized until now what a blessing they were, what a blessing the hard wooden chairs were either until they stood again and she thought about how they would have to remain standing through the whole service.

The floor was cold. The church was cold, in spite of all the lights. They were mostly cressets, set along the walls and in front of the holly-banked statue of St. Catherine, though there was a tall, thin, yellowish candle set in the greenery of each of the windows, but the effect was probably not what Father Roche had intended. The bright flames only made the colored panes of glass darker, almost black.

More of the yellowish candles were in the silver candelabra on either side of the altar, and holly was heaped in front of them and along the top of the rood screen, and Father Roche had set Lady Imeyne’s beeswax candles in among the sharp, shiny leaves. He’d done a job of decorating the church that should please even Lady Imeyne, Kivrin thought, and glanced at her.

She was holding her reliquary between her folded hands, but her eyes were open, and she was staring at the top of the rood screen. Her mouth was tight with disapproval, and Kivrin supposed she hadn’t wanted the candles there, but it was the perfect place for them. They illuminated the crucifix and the Last Judgment and lit nearly the whole nave.

They made the whole church seem different, homier, more familiar, like St. Mary’s on Christmas Eve. Dunworthy had taken her to the ecumenical service last Christmas. She had planned to go to midnight mass at the Holy Re-Formed to hear it said in Latin, but there hadn’t been a midnight mass. The priest had been asked to read the gospel for the ecumenical service, so he had moved the mass to four in the afternoon.

Agnes was fiddling with her bell again. Lady Imeyne turned and glared at her across her piously folded hands, and Rosemund leaned across Kivrin and shhhed her.

“You mustn’t ring your bell until the mass is over,” Kivrin whispered, bending close to Agnes so no one else could hear her.

“I rang it not,” Agnes whispered back in a voice that could be heard all over the church. “The ribbon binds too tight. See you?”

Kivrin couldn’t see any such thing. In fact, if she had taken the time to tie it tighter, it wouldn’t be ringing at every movement, but there was no way she was going to argue with an overtired child when the mass was going to begin any minute. She reached for the knot.

Agnes must have been trying to pull the bell off over her wrist The already-fraying ribbon had tightened into a solid little knot. Kivrin picked at its edges with her fingernails, keeping an eye on the people behind her. The service would start with a procession, Father Roche and his acolytes, if he had any, would come down the aisle bearing the holy water and chanting the Asperges.

Kivrin pulled on the ribbon and both sides of the knot, tightening it beyond any hope of ever getting it off without cutting it, but getting a little more slack. It still wasn’t enough to get the ribbon off. She glanced back at the church door. The bell had stopped, but there was still no sign of Father Roche and no aisle for him to come up either. The townsfolk had crowded in, filling the whole rear of the church. Someone had lifted a child up onto Imeyne’s husband’s tomb and was holding him there so he could see, but there wasn’t anything to see yet.

She went back to working on the bell. She got two fingers under the ribbon and pulled up on it, trying to stretch it.

“Tear it not!” Agnes said in that carrying stage whisper of hers. Kivrin took hold of the bell and hastily pulled it around so it lay in Agnes’s palm.

“Hold it like this,” she whispered, cupping Agnes’s fingers over it. “Tightly.”

Agnes obligingly clenched her little fist. Kivrin folded Agnes’s other hand over the top of the fist in a so-so facsimile of a praying attitude and said softly, “Hold tight to the bell, and it will not ring.”

Agnes promptly pressed her hands to her forehead in an attitude of angelic piety.

“Good girl,” Kivrin said, and put her arm around her. She glanced back at the church doors. They were still closed. She breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to face the altar.

Father Roche was standing there. He was dressed in an embroidered white stole and a yellowed white alb with a hem more frayed than Agnes’s ribbon, and was holding a book. He had obviously been waiting for her, had obviously stood there watching her the whole time she tended to Agnes, but there was no reproof in his face or even impatience. His face held some other expression entirely, and she was reminded suddenly of Mr. Dunworthy, standing and watching her through the thin-glass partition.

Lady Imeyne cleared her throat, a sound that was almost a growl, and he seemed to come to himself. He handed the book to Cob, who was wearing a grimy cassock and a pair of too-large leather shoes, and knelt in front of the altar. Then he took the book back and began saying the lections.

Kivrin said them to herself along with him, thinking the Latin and hearing the echo of the interpreter’s translation.

“ ‘Whom saw ye, O Shepherds?’ ” Father Roche recited in Latin, beginning the responsory. “ ‘Speak: tell us who hath appeared on the earth.’ ”

He stopped, frowning at Kivrin.

He’s forgotten it, she thought. She glanced anxiously at Imeyne, hoping she wouldn’t realize there was more to come, but Imeyne had raised her head and was scowling at him, her jaw in the silk wimple clenched.

Roche was still frowning at Kivrin. “ ‘Speak, what saw ye?’ ” he said, and Kivrin gave a sigh of relief. “ ‘Tell us who hath appeared.’ ”

That wasn’t right. She mouthed the next line, willing him to understand it. “ ‘We saw the newborn Child.’ ”

He gave no indication that he had seen what she said, though he was looking straight at her. “I saw …”he said, and stopped again.

‘ “We saw the newborn Child,’ ” Kivrin whispered, and could feel Lady Imeyne turning to look at her.

“ ‘And angels singing praise unto the Lord,’ ” Roche said, and that wasn’t right either, but Lady Imeyne turned back to the front to fasten her disapproving gaze on Roche.

The bishop would no doubt hear about this, and about the candles and the fraying hem, and who knew what other errors and infractions he had committed.

“ ‘Speak, what saw ye?’ ” Kivrin mouthed, and he seemed suddenly to come to himself.

“ ‘Speak, what saw ye?’ ” he said clearly. “ ‘And tell us of the birth of Christ. We saw the newborn Child and angels singing praise unto the Lord.’ ”

He began the Confíteor Deo, and Kivrin whispered it along with him, but he got through it without any mistakes, and Kivrin began to relax a little, though she watched him closely as he moved to the altar for the Orámus Te.

He was wearing a black cassock under the alb, and both of them looked like they had once been richly made. They were much too short for Roche. She could see a good ten centimeters of his worn brown hose below the cassock’s hem when he bent over the altar. The alb and cassock had probably belonged to the priest before him, or were castoffs of Imeyne’s chaplain.

The priest at Holy Re-Formed had worn a polyester alb over a brown jumper and jeans. He had assured Kivrin that the mass was completely authentic, in spite of its being held in midafternoon. The antiphon dated from the eighth century, he had told her, and the gruesomely detailed stations of the cross were exact copies of Turin’s. But the church had been a converted stationer’s shop, they had used a folding table for an altar, and the Carfax carillon outside had been busily destroying “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.”

“Kyrie eléison,” Cob said, his hands folded in prayer.

“Kyrie eléison,” Father Roche said.

“Christe eléison,” Cob said.

“Christe eléison,” Agnes said brightly.

Kivrin hushed her, her finger to her lips. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.

They had used the Kyrie at the ecumenical service, probably because of some deal Holy Re-Formed’s priest had struck with the vicar in return for moving the time of the mass, and the minister of the Church of the Millennium had refused to recite it and had looked coldly disapproving throughout. Like Lady Imeyne.

Father Roche seemed all right now. He said the Gloria and the gradual without faltering and began the gospel. “Inituim sancti Envangelii secundum Luke, ” he said, and began to read haltingly in Latin. “ ‘Now it came to pass in those days that a decree went forth from Caesar Augustus that a census of the whole world be taken.’ ”

The vicar had read the same verses at St. Mary’s. He had read it from the People’s Common Bible, which had been insisted on by the Church of the Millennium, and it had begun, “Around then the politicos dumped a tax hike on the ratepayers,” but it was the same gospel Father Roche was laboriously reciting.

“ ‘And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men of goodwill.’ ” Father Roche kissed the gospel. “Per evangélica dicta deléantur nostro delieta.”

The sermon should come next, if there was one. In most village churches the priest only preached at the major masses, and even then it was usually no more than a catechism lesson, the listing of the seven deadly sins or the seven Acts of Mercy. The high mass Christmas morning was probably when the sermon would be.

But Father Roche stepped out in front of the central aisle, which had nearly closed up again as the villagers leaned against the pillars and each other, trying to find a more comfortable position, and began to speak.

“In the days when Christ came to earth from heaven, God sent signs that men might know his coming, and in the last days also will there be signs. There will be famines and pestilence, and Satan will ride abroad in the land.”

Oh, no, Kivrin thought, don’t talk about seeing the Devil riding a black horse.

She glanced at Imeyne. The old woman looked furious, but it wouldn’t matter what he’d said, Kivrin thought. She’d been determined to find mistakes and lapses she could tell the bishop about. Lady Yvolde looked mildly irritated, and everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century. Kivrin had seen the same look in St. Mary’s last Christmas.

The sermon at St. Mary’s had been on rubbish disposal, and the dean of Christ Church had begun it by saying, “Christianity began in a stable. Will it end in a sewer?”

But it hadn’t mattered. It had been midnight, and St. Mary’s had had a stone floor and a real altar, and when she’d closed her eyes, she’d been able to shut out the carpeted nave and the umbrellas and the laser candles. She had pushed the plastic kneeling pad out of her way and knelt on the stone floor and imagined what it would be like in the Middle Ages.

Mr. Dunworthy had told her it wouldn’t be like anything she had imagined, and he was right, of course. But not about this mass. She had imagined it just like this, the stone floor and the murmured Kyrie, the smells of incense and tallow and cold.

“The Lord will come with fire and pestilence, and all will perish,” Roche said, “but even in the last days, God’s mercy will not forsake us. He will send us help and comfort and bring us safely unto heaven.”

Safely unto heaven. She thought of Mr. Dunworthy. “Don’t go,” he had said. “It won’t be anything like you imagine.” And he was right. He was always right.

But even he, with all his imagining of smallpox and cutthroats and witch burnings, would never have imagined this: that she was lost. That she didn’t know where the drop was, and the rendezvous was less than a week away. She looked across the aisle at Gawyn, who was watching Eliwys. She had to talk to him after the mass.

Father Roche moved to the altar to begin the mass proper. Agnes leaned against Kivrin, and Kivrin put her arm around her. Poor thing, she must be exhausted. Up since before dawn and all that wild running around. She wondered how long the mass would take.

The service at St. Mary’s had taken an hour and a quarter, and halfway through the offertory Dr. Ahrens’s bleeper had gone off. “It’s a baby,” she’d whispered to Kivrin and Dunworthy as she’d hurried out, “how appropriate.”

I wonder if they’re in church now, she thought and then remembered it wasn’t Christmas there. They had had Christmas three days after she arrived, while she was still ill. It would be, what? The second of January, Christmas vac nearly over and all the decorations taken down.

It was starting to get hot in the church, and the candles seemed to be taking all the air. She could hear shiftings and shufflings behind her as Father Roche went through the ritualized steps of the mass, and Agnes sank farther and farther against her. She was glad when they reached the Sanctus and she could kneel.

She tried to imagine Oxford on the second of January, the shops advertising New Year’s sales and the Carfax carillon silent. Dr. Ahrens would be at the Infirmary dealing with post-holiday stomach upsets and Mr. Dunworthy would be getting ready for Hilary term. No, he’s not, she thought, and saw him standing behind the thin-glass. He’s worrying about me.

Father Roche raised the chalice, knelt, kissed the altar. There was more shuffling, and a whispering on the men’s side of the church. She looked across. Gawyn was sitting back on his heels, looking bored. Sir Bloet was asleep.

So was Agnes. She had collapsed so completely against Kivrin there would be no way she could stand for the Paternoster. She didn’t even try. When everyone else stood for it, Kivrin took the opportunity to gather Agnes in more closely and shift her head to a better position. Kivrin’s knee hurt. She must have knelt in the depression between two stones. She shifted it, raising it slightly and cramming a fold of her cloak under it.

Father Roche put a piece of bread in the chalice and said the Haec Commixtio, and everyone knelt for the Agnus Dei. “ ‘Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis, ’ ” he chanted. “ ‘Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.’ ”

Agnus dei. Lamb of God. Kivrin smiled down at Agnes. She was sound asleep, her body a dead weight against Kivrin’s side and her mouth slackly open, but her fist was still clenched tightly over the little bell. My lamb, Kivrin thought.

Kneeling on St. Mary’s stone floor she had envisioned the candles and the cold, but not Lady Imeyne, waiting for Roche to make a mistake in the mass, not Eliwys or Gawyn or Rosemund. Not Father Roche, with his cutthroat’s face and worn-out hose.

She could never in a hundred years, in seven hundred and thirty-four years, have imagined Agnes, with her puppy and her naughty tantrums, and her infected knee. I’m glad I came, she thought. In spite of everything.

Father Roche made the sign of the cross with the chalice and drank it. “Dominus vobiscum,” he said and there was a general commotion behind Kivrin. The main part of the show was over, and people were leaving now, to avoid the crush. Apparently there was no deference to the lord’s family when it came to leaving. Or even in waiting till they were outside to begin talking. She could scarcely hear the dismissal.

“Ite, Missa est, ” Father Roche said over the din, and Lady Imeyne was in the aisle before he could even lower his raised hand, looking like she intended to leave for Bath and the bishop immediately.

“Saw you the tallow candles by the altar?” she said to Lady Yvolde. “I bade him use the beeswax candles that I gave him.”

Lady Yvolde shook her head and looked darkly at Father Roche, and the two of them swept out with Rosemund right at their heels.

Rosemund obviously had no intention of walking back to the manor with Sir Bloet if she could help it, and this should do it. The villagers had closed in behind the three women, talking and laughing. By the time he huffed and puffed his way to his feet, they would be all the way to the manor.

Kivrin was having trouble getting up herself. Her foot had gone to sleep, and Agnes was dead to the world. “Agnes,” she said. “Wake up. It’s time to go home.”

Sir Bloet had got to his feet, his face nearly purple with the effort, and had come across to offer Eliwys his arm. “Your daughter has fallen asleep,” he said.

“Aye,” Eliwys said, glancing at Agnes.

She took his arm and they started out.

“Your husband has not come as he promised.”

“Nay,” Kivrin heard Eliwys say. Her grip tightened on his arm.

Outside, the bells began to ring all at once, and out of time, a wild, irregular chiming. It sounded wonderful. “Agnes,” Kivrin said, shaking her, “it’s time to ring your bell.”

She didn’t even stir. Kivrin tried to get the sleeping child onto her shoulder. Her arms flopped limply over Kivrin’s shoulders, and the bell jangled.

“You waited all night to ring your bell,” Kivrin said, getting to one knee. “Wake up, lamb.”

She looked around for someone to help her. There was scarcely anyone left in the church. Cob was making the rounds of the windows, pinching the candle flames out between his chapped fingers. Gawyn and Sir Bloet’s nephews were at the back of the nave, buckling on their swords. Father Roche was nowhere to be seen. She wondered if he was the one ringing the bell with such joyous enthusiasm.

Her numb foot was beginning to tingle. She flexed it in the thin shoe and then put her weight on it. It felt terrible, but she could stand on it. She hoisted Agnes farther over her shoulder and tried to stand up. Her foot caught in the hem of her skirt, and she pitched forward.

Gawyn caught her. “Good lady Katherine, my lady Eliwys bade me come to help you,” he said, steadying her. He lifted Agnes easily out of her arms and onto his shoulder, and strode out of the church, Kivrin hobbling beside him.

“Thank you,” Kivrin said when they were out of the jammed churchyard. “My arms felt like they were going to fall off.”

“She is a stout lass,” he said.

Agnes’s bell slid off her wrist and fell onto the snow, clattering with the other bells as it fell. Kivrin stooped and picked it up. The knot was almost too small to be seen, and the short ends of ribbon beyond it were frayed into thin threads, but the moment she took hold of it, the knot came undone. She tied it on Agnes’s dangling wrist with a little bow.

“I am glad to assist a lady in distress,” Gawyn said, but she didn’t hear him.

They were all alone on the green. The rest of the family was nearly to the manor gate. She could see the steward holding the lantern over Lady Imeyne and Lady Yvolde as they started into the passage. There were a lot of people still in the churchyard, and someone had built a bonfire next to the road, and people were standing around it, warming their hands and passing a wooden bowl of something, but here, halfway across the green, they were all alone. The opportunity she had thought would never come was here.

“I wanted to thank you for trying to find my attackers, and for rescuing me in the woods and bringing me here,” she said. “When you found me, how far from here was the place? Could you take me to it?”

He stopped and looked at her. “Did they not tell you?” he said. “ All of your goods and gear that were found I brought to the manor. The thieves had taken your belongings, and though I rode after them, I fear I found naught.” He started walking again.

“I know you brought my boxes here. Thank you. But that wasn’t why I wanted to see the place you found me,” Kivrin said rapidly, afraid they would catch up with the others before she finished asking him.

Lady Imeyne had stopped and was looking back their way. She had to get it asked before Imeyne sent the steward back to see what was keeping them.

“I lost my memory when I was injured in the attack,” she said. “I thought if I could see the place where you found me, I might remember something.”

He had stopped again and was looking at the road above the church. There were lights there, bobbing unsteadily and coming rapidly nearer. Latecomers to church?

“You’re the only one who knows where the place is,” Kivrin said, “or I wouldn’t bother you, but if you could just tell me where it is, I could—”

“There is nothing there,” he said vaguely, still looking at the lights. “I brought your wagon and your boxes to the manor.”

“I know” Kivrin said, “and I thank you, but—”

“They are in the barn,” he said. He turned at the sound of horses. The bobbing lights were lanterns carried by men on horseback. They galloped past the church and through the village, at least a half dozen of them, and pulled up short where Lady Eliwys and the others were standing.

It’s her husband, Kivrin thought, but before she could finish her thought, Gawyn had thrust Agnes into her arms and taken off toward them, pulling his sword as he ran.

Oh, no, Kivrin thought, and began to run, too, clumsy under Agnes’s weight. It wasn’t her husband. It was the men who were after them, the reason they were hiding, the reason Eliwys had been so angry at Imeyne for telling Sir Bloet they were here.

The men with the torches had got down off their horses. Eliwys walked forward to one of the three men still on horseback and then fell to her knees as if she had been struck.

No, oh, no, Kivrin thought, out of breath. Agnes’s bell jangled wildly as she ran.

Gawyn ran up to them, his sword flashing in the lantern light, and then he was on his knees, too. Eliwys stood up, and stepped forward to the men on horseback, her arm out in a gesture of welcome.

Kivrin stopped, out of breath. Sir Bloet came forward, knelt, stood up. The men on horseback flung back their hoods. They were wearing hats of some kind or crowns. Gawyn, still on his knees, sheathed his sword. One of the men on horseback raised his hand, and something glittered.

“What is it?” Agnes said sleepily.

“I don’t know,” Kivrin said.

Agnes twisted around in Kivrin’s arms so she could see. “It is the three kings,” she said wonderingly.

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE DOMESDAY BOOK

(064996–065537)

Christmas Eve 1320 (Old Style). An envoy from the bishop has arrived, along with two other churchmen. They rode in just after midnight mass. Lady Imeyne is delighted. She’s convinced they’ve come in response to her message demanding a new chaplain, but I’m not convinced of that. They’ve come without any servants, and there’s an air of nervousness about them, as if they were on some secret, hurried mission.

It has to concern Lord Guillaume, though the Assizes are a secular court, not an ecclesiastical one. Perhaps the bishop is a friend of Lord Guillaume’s or of King Edward II’s, and they’ve come to strike some sort of deal with Eliwys for his freedom.

Whatever their reason for being here, they’re here in style. Agnes thought they were the three Magi when she first saw them, and they do look like royalty. The bishop’s envoy has a thin, aristocratic face, and they are all dressed like kings. One of them has a purple velvet cloak with the design of a white cross sewn in silk on the back of it.

Lady Imeyne immediately latched on to him with her sad story of how ignorant, clumsy, generally impossible Father Roche is. “He deserves not a parish,” she said. Unfortunately (and luckily for Father Roche) he was not the envoy, but only his clerk. The envoy was the one in the red, also very impressive, with gold embroidery and a sable hem.

The third is a Cistercian monk—at least he wears the white habit of one, though it’s made of even finer wool than my cloak and has a silk cord for a sash, and he wears a ring fit for a king on each of his fat fingers, but he doesn’t act like a monk. He and the envoy both demanded wine before they’d even dismounted, and it’s obvious the clerk had already drunk a good deal before he got here. He slipped just now getting off his horse and had to be supported into the hall by the fat monk.

(Break)

I was apparently wrong about the reason for their coming here. Eliwys and Sir Bloet went off in a corner with the bishop’s envoy as soon as they got in the house, but they only talked to him for a few minutes, and I just heard her tell Imeyne, “They have heard naught of Guillaume.”

Imeyne didn’t seem surprised or even particularly concerned at this news. It’s clear she thinks they’re here to bring her a new chaplain, and she is falling all over them, insisting that the Christmas feast be brought in immediately and that the bishop’s envoy sit in the high seat. They seem more interested in drinking than in eating. Imeyne fetched them cups of wine herself, and they’ve already gone through them and called for more. The clerk caught hold of Maisry’s skirt as she brought the pitcher, pulled her in hand over hand, and stuck his hand down her shift. She, of course, clapped her hands over her ears.

The one good thing about them being here is that they add tremendously to the general confusion. I only had a moment to talk to Gawyn, but sometime in the next day or so I’ll surely be able to speak to him without anyone noticing—especially since Imeyne’s attention is riveted on the envoy, who just grabbed the pitcher from Maisry and poured his wine himself—and get him to show me where the drop is. There’s plenty of time. I have nearly a week.