The Lost Son Returns as the Duke novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: What They Call Us

Edith sets terms for the stranger's keep, the village spits at the Cobbs, and at night Edith tells an empty bed she never sold her son.

The loft smelled of wool and old apples.

Rain came through the thatch in three places, and Hild had set a pot under each.

"One for every winter since Da died," she said from the ladder. "You'll get used to the drip."

"Where do I sleep?"

"Wherever it isn't."

She tossed me a blanket that had been mended so often it was more thread than cloth.

Downstairs, her mother was setting out bread on a board.

The bread was dark, the butter was a scrape, and there were three bowls.

I took the third one and sat.

Edith Cobb did not look at me.

"You'll eat with us," she said, "but you'll earn it. Wood, water and the roof. You don't touch my loom."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you don't touch my daughter."

"Mam," Hild said.

"I'm not talking to you."

"I wasn't going to," I said.

Hild snorted into her bowl.

"What's your name?" Edith asked.

I opened my mouth, and the truth sat there.

Nobody in Thornwick had heard the new Duke's first name.

"Godric," I said.

"Godric what?"

"Just Godric."

"A man with no surname and a broken-wrist habit." She tore her bread in half. "I've known worse. Eat."

I ate.

I had dined with a king's envoy a month before, off silver, with eleven servants.

I had never tasted anything as good as that dry bread.

I could not say why, and I did not want to ask.

"You really did snap his switch," Hild said, grinning with her mouth full. "Right across your boot. Like a stick of kindling."

"It was a cheap switch."

"It was Ranulf's best."

"Hild," her mother said.

"What? It was. He cried like a girl."

"Don't insult girls," I said. "I've met three who'd have thrown him in the well."

She stared at me.

Then she laughed, the loud ugly laugh of someone out of practice.

Her mother looked up as if a window had opened.

It closed again quickly.

Edith stood and took the bowls.

"Early tomorrow," she said. "The well opens at dawn."

The well did not open for us.

It stood in the middle of the green, a stone ring with a crank.

By the time Hild and I reached it with two buckets, eight women were waiting.

They went quiet.

I counted their faces in the grey light.

Not one of them looked at us.

Hild stepped forward and set her bucket on the stone.

The woman next to it, broad and red-armed, picked the bucket up and tipped it into the dirt.

"Wasn't done with it," she said.

"That's mine."

"It was, till you lost the right."

Hild went white around the mouth.

"My mam never sold anybody."

"Twenty silver pennies," another woman said. "Everybody knows what a boy cost that year."

"She cried in the church for a week," Hild said, her voice cracking. "Did you see that? Did any of you see that?"

"Guilt's loud."

I stepped between them.

I did not raise my voice, which was a skill the old Duke had taught me.

"Draw her water," I said.

The broad woman looked at my face, then at the size of me.

"You're only a stranger. You don't know what they did."

"Then tell me what they did."

She opened her mouth and nothing came.

Not one of them could say what they had seen.

They only knew what they had been told.

"Draw her water," I said again.

The woman cranked the bucket up with a scowl and filled Hild's pail to the brim.

She slopped half of it on my boots on purpose.

I let her.

Across the green, the alehouse door stood open, and the keeper leaned on the frame with her arms crossed, watching.

She did not smile or frown.

She only watched.

That night I lay in the loft with the rain ticking in the pots.

Below me I heard Edith go to the second bed in the corner, the one that was always made.

She sat on its edge.

I heard the straw take her weight.

"Twenty-four," she said, very softly, to nobody. "You'd be twenty-four this month. I counted again."

Hild was asleep.

I held my breath.

"I never sold you," Edith said into the dark. "Whatever they say. I never did."

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