Free The Uncrowned Queen by Posie Graeme-evans

prosperous Low Countries—perhaps even the very citadel in which they slept tonight. The balance of power in Europe, relatively stable for a few short years, was beginning to teeter, and disaster loomed.
    Yes, Hastings, too, hoped the king’s messenger had reached Anne de Bohun in Brugge. She was close to the court, close to the duke. Charles might listen to Anne as a go-between, where hewould be suspicious of his own wife’s opinions and intentions, as she was Edward’s sister. Lord, let it be so, let the man have found her. Let her have agreed to help the king’s cause with Duke Charles.
    Surely Anne de Bohun would see that was her duty, whatever history had been between them? Surely she would help Edward Plantagenet?

CHAPTER NINE
    There were secrets about the farm Anne had bought. And one of them was in the oak grove on a small hillock near the river.
    Flanders and the countries about it were not called the Low Countries for nothing. The land, once covered by the sea—as evidenced by the seashells found so often in the good soil—was nearly completely flat, leveled by water long ago, most probably Noah’s flood it was said. But there were still one or two pieces of raised ground close to Brugge, and the small hillock on Anne’s farm was one of them. It was deep in the night, with a rising wind and a new sickle moon, and all the lights in the farmhouse were out. Even the carefully banked embers on the kitchen hearth gave out no active flame, though the ashes glowed fitfully as night air sighed and stirred in the chimney’s throat.
    Hour after hour, the new moon mounted the sky, until, in the darkest part of the night, when it had finally begun its long, slow setting, two figures stole out of the back door of the farmstead house and moved as quietly as shadows through the yard, past the animals sleeping in the winter byre. So softly did they tread that not even the geese wakened, nor the lurcher, kept to bring the cows in from the fields for milking. He slept before the kitchen embers peacefully, because Lisotte was kind to him now that the nights were cold.
    As the wind dropped, frost settled out of the still air and thetwo women found the going easy because the mud in the plowed fields hardened in the freezing night. Moving as quickly as they could, they hurried toward the distant river at the bottom of the home pasture. They could see their destination if they strained their eyes—the dark shape of the hillock with its almost leafless trees reaching into the sky above them.
    â€œAre you sure you have it?”
    â€œYes, Deborah. Of course I have it.”
    Anne and her foster mother reached the very end of the plow land and came to the stile in the hawthorn hedge that gave entrance to the hillock ground. There was only the last faint starlight abroad now, but it was enough: they could see the path in front of them, winding around and around their little hill, up to the ancient oaks crowning its top.
    Deborah had been the first to recognize the path for what it was: an ancient track cut into the face of the hill which led, by a spiral path, right into the heart of the grove. Its discovery was the final omen Anne needed to convince her to buy her farm. Local legend said the little hill was not made by God, but man, a long, long time ago. It might even be the grave of an ancient king. Deborah and Anne did not doubt it when they saw the overgrown path winding around the hill.
    This place had seen much life in its long past, well before the city of Brugge was founded or formed, or so Deborah believed. Neither woman had done anything to clear the path on the hill—so that none but they would know they came here—and the place had become their church.
    Silently they hurried now along the spiral path until the darkness of the trees swallowed them up. From a distance, there was nothing to say the two had passed this way. But then the wind rose again, sighing. Something knew.