Free Enchantress Mine by Bertrice Small Page A

Aldwine Athelsbeorn inherited Aelfleah, he immediately set about to reconstruct the house in a way considered quite strange by his neighbors. The entire main floor was roofed over, and the firepit covered, while a large fireplace was put in its stead with a well-drawing stone chimney. At the end of the large hall he had two smaller rooms built to serve as a buttery and pantry. New glass was placed securely into the windows. Aldwine did not need to remove his windows as the great lords did who carried their window glass from house to house.
    Aelfleah’s kitchen was located in a separate building across the herb and vegetable gardens. It was connected to the main house by means of a covered portico through the gardens which Aldwine walled in to protect from the rabbits. This allowed access to the kitchen in times of danger. Eada was delighted, for now when she planted her garden she could count on harvesting it rather than losing her crop to predators.
    The Great Chamber on the upper floor was redesigned and now extended to the full length of the hall below it. One end of the second floor became a private bedchamber for the lord and his wife. The other end of the floor with its new fireplace for heating the upper story became a solar where the family might sit in privacy away from the noise of the hall. Between these two rooms ran a narrow hallway which had a small windowed chamber on either side of it for children.
    Aldwine’s neighbors were scandalized. They thought the house radical in its new interior. Why did a man need a private chamber for himself and his wife? What could he do behind closed doors that he could not do in an ordinary Great Chamber? As for giving children separate rooms, it was ridiculous not to mention dangerous! How was a boy to learn about women, and a girl about men if they were kept separated? Still there were those who secretly envied Eada her new privacy, and her two fireplaces, but they were wise enough to keep silent.
    The furnishings in the manor house were simple yet comfortable. In the hall there was a sturdy oak highboard, and trestles. There were high-backed chairs for the senior family members, and benches for the others who came to table. The solar with its smaller fireplace had two chairs for the master and mistress of the household, a small table, some low stools, and Eada’s loom. Anglo-Saxon women were famed for their beautiful cloth, and Eada was a particularly skilled weaver. The house’s lighting was supplied after dark by rush and tallow torches, some candles, and bronze oil lamps that were the pride of the manor.
    The bedchambers were just as sparsely furnished, with nothing more than beds and large chests which were bound in iron and used for clothing storage. Eada was the proud possessor of a round of highly polished silver which she used as a mirror. It had been her wedding present from her doting husband.
    The family’s personal servants slept in the solar. As the other serfs must give three days of their labor to their lord, those serfs chosen as body servants gave their lord three nights of each week sleeping in the solar on call should they be needed. When the children were young their personal servants slept with them upon a trundle which during the day was stored beneath the child’s bed. The rest of the household servants bedded down in either the hall or the kitchens if they did not belong to any of the cottages on the estate.
    There was a warmth and an intimacy to the manor house that had been lacking at Landerneau, Mairin thought. Perhaps if her mother had lived it might have been different, but Mairin’s memories were of cold gray stone walls made habitable only by the love and the attention that her father and Dagda had lavished on her.
    I can be happy here, Mairin decided. The lady Eada has easily accepted my presence at Aelfleah. It was an interesting comparison to the lady Blanche who had resented her husband’s child so very much; whose only concern had