Chapter 4: The Knight in the Wood

I told Edith about the fifteen marks at the cottage door, flour still in my hair.

She heard me out.

"Fifteen," she said. "He'll make it twenty by Sunday."

"Then we'll find it."

"We?"

I had said it before I thought.

"I eat your bread," I said. "It seems fair."

Her mouth moved, not quite a smile.

"Go and wash," she said. "You look like a ghost."

I washed at the well, where nobody came near me, and when it was dark I took my saddlebag and walked out to the wood.

The captain was waiting in a hollow past the charcoal burners' clearing.

He was sixty, with a white beard cut square and a sword older than I was.

He sat his grey horse.

He had taught me to ride, to fence, and to read a man's face across a council table.

He had never once told me what to feel.

"You look thin," he said.

"I've been three days at the table of a woman who counts every crust."

"Your mother."

"I don't know that."

"Do you not?"

I did not answer.

He swung down stiffly and handed me a leather tube.

Inside were two rolls of vellum, stamped with the exchequer seal of Mercia.

"The rents of Thornwick manor," he said, "for the last twenty years."

I unrolled it by the light of his lantern.

The figures marched down the page in a clerk's neat hand.

"Two marks a year," I said.

"Two, in good years. One and a half in bad."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Lost Son Returns as the Duke from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.