Free To Defy a King by Elizabeth Chadwick Page B

praying. You are going to get better, aren't you?'

    He gave a weary smile and closed his eyes. 'I certainly hope God will be so merciful. Play me some music, there's a good girl.'

    Mahelt fetched her lute and sat down at the bedside. 'What shall I play?'

    'You choose. Something soft.'

    Mahelt bit her lip. She had taken her mother's news in the chapel as an indication of a fuller recovery and had not expected him to be so weak.
    Tentatively she set her fingers to the instrument and began to pluck the strings. His eyes remained closed, but he nodded his appreciation of her delicate notes.

    'I have much to think about, Matty,' he said after a while. 'It is long past time I put my affairs in order.'

    'Papa?' She stopped and looked at him, but he shook his head and gestured her to continue.

    'Let me hear the one I taught you. The one your mother likes about the Virgin and the Christ Child.'

    Day by day, Mahelt watched her father recover from the sickness that had threatened his life and been a chill warning to all about mortality and how swiftly the scythe could cut the corn. He was in no great haste to force the pace, for which everyone was glad because there had never been such a sustained period when he had dwelt at home with his family. Always, before, the world had taken him away from them, but now, briefly, time stood still.

    In the early days of his recuperation, Mahelt spent her time in the sickroom perched on his bed, talking to him, singing, or playing her lute and citole. As his concentration improved, she played games - chess and merels and tables.
    Sometimes she would catch him looking at her with a pained and concentrated stare, but when she asked him what was wrong, he would smile and make light of the moment - say it was nothing, or that he was proud of her and the lovely young woman she was becoming.

    As his health and strength returned, he began to ride out and regain the use and tone of his muscles. He was no longer content to sit in his chamber or in a sheltered warm spot of the keep and be passive. Once more he gathered the affairs of the earldom into his hands and began to spin policy and intent.
    Once more time began to move and gain momentum.

    'He's going to ask the King's permission to go to Ireland,' Richard told Mahelt as they watched a ship unloading its cargo of wine at the castle's water gate on the river Wye. Tripes snuffled along the base of the wall, pausing now and again to mark his territory.

    'How do you know?' Mahelt eyed her brother. His hair glinted like bright copper wire in the autumn sunshine and his greenish eyes were shrewd. She felt a twinge of jealousy that Richard was party to something she wasn't.
    Just because he was older; just because he was a boy. It wasn't fair.

    'I heard him talking to Jean D'Earley in the stables. He said he needed to go to Leinster and sort matters out - that he had let it slide for far too long, and that he was going to write to the King and ask his permission to go.'

    Mahelt listened to the hornsman blowing the signal and then the squeak of the winch hauling the net of wine barrels aloft. She had visited Ireland when she was a little girl. Her grandmother Aoife had been a daughter of the High King of Leinster and still alive then, and Mahelt could remember the bare, cold fortress of Kilkenny, with its leaky roof and musty chambers. She had vague memories of the bustle of repairs and of the new building work her father had undertaken there, including founding a port on the river Barrow to bring prosperity and commerce to Leinster. The rain too. Always the rain, but her father had sheltered her under his fur-lined cloak and kept her warm and dry. 'He has people there who can look after it for him,' she said.

    'Yes, but they are not doing the best job they can, and some of them are King John's creatures. Leinster is Mama's dowry.'

    Mahelt shrugged. 'What of it?'

    Richard looked sombre. 'Well, it's what Mama would have to live on if she was