Free An Excellent Mystery by Ellis Peters Page B

and a younger boy and girl about nine or ten, who by their likeness might well
be twins. Evidently Reginald Cruce had secured his succession with a
well-filled quiver, for by the lady’s swelling waist when she rose to muster
the hospitality of the house, there was another sibling on the way.
    Nicholas
made his reverence and offered his name, a little confounded at finding Julian
Cruce’s brother a man surely turned forty, with a wife and growing children,
where he had assumed a young fellow in his twenties, perhaps newly-married
since inheriting. But he recalled that Humphrey Cruce had been an old man to
have a daughter still so young. Two marriages, surely, the first blessed with
an heir, the second undertaken late, when Reginald was a grown man, ready for
marriage himself, or even married already to his pale, prolific wife.
    “Ah,
that!” said Reginald of his guest’s former errand to this same house. “I remember
it, though I was not here then. My wife brought me a manor in Staffordshire, we
were living there. But I know how it fell out, of course. A strange business
altogether. But it happens! Men change their minds. And you were the messenger?
Well, but leave it now and take some refreshment. Come to table! There’ll be
time to talk of all such business afterwards.”
    He
sat down and kept his visitor company while a servant brought meat and ale, and
the lady, having made her grave good night, drove her younger children away to
their beds, and the heir sat solemn and silent studying his elders. At last, in
the deepening evening, the two men were left alone to their talk.
    “So
you are the squire who brought that word from Marescot. You’ll have noticed
there’s a generation, as near as need be, between my sister and me — seventeen
years. My mother died when I was nine years old, and it was another eight
before my father married again. An old man’s folly, she brought him nothing,
and died when the girl was born, so he had little joy of her.”
    At
least, thought Nicholas, studying his host dispassionately, there was no second
son, to threaten a division of the lands. That would be a source of
satisfaction to this man, he was authentically of his class and kind, and land was
his lifeblood.
    “He
may well have had great joy of his daughter, however,” he said firmly, “for she
is a very gracious and beautiful girl, as I well recall.”
    “You’ll
be better informed of that than I,” said Reginald drily, “if you saw her only
three years ago. It must be eighteen or more since I set eyes on her. She was a
stumbling infant then, two years old, or three, it might be. I married about
that time, and settled on the lands Cecilia brought me. We exchanged couriers
now and then, but I never came back here until my father was on his deathbed,
and they sent for me to come to him.”
    “I
didn’t know of his death when I set out to come here on this errand of my own,”
said Nicholas. “I heard it only from your groom at the gate. But I may speak as
freely with you as I should have done with him. I was so much taken with your
sister’s grace and dignity that I’ve thought of her ever since, and I’ve spoken
with my lord Godfrid, and have his full consent to what I’m asking. As for
myself,” he thrust on, leaning eagerly across the board, “I am heir to two good
manors from my father, and shall have some lands also after my mother, I stand
well in the queen’s armies and my lord will speak for me, that I’m in earnest
in this matter, and will provide for Julian as truly as any man could, if you
will…”
    His
host was gazing, astonished, smiling at his fervour, and had raised a warning
hand to still the flood.
    “Did
you come all this way to ask me to give you my sister?”
    “I
did! Is that so strange? I admired her, and I’m come to speak for her. And she
might have worse offers,” he added, flushing and stiffening at such a
reception.
    “I