Free Twelfth Night by Flora Speer Page B

in the treatment of
such unfortunate souls I see little difference between your time
and mine,” she admitted. “If you were to walk down any city street
in my country, you would see homeless beggars with their bowls, and
many of them with their children.”
    “Some of these are ill or maimed,” Adam said.
“Father John and our barber-surgeon will help as best they
can.”
    “It’s the same in my time,” she responded.
“Churches, hospitals, various charitable organizations try to help,
but the supply of poor seems endless.”
    “The scripture says we will always have the
poor with us. Perhaps they are sent to us to test the degree of our
charity. I try not to fail in my duty to them. We are especially
bidden to help at this holy season. Even at castles where beggars
are turned away at other times, they are given food and a night’s
lodging at Christmastide.”
    She watched him squat down to wrap a shawl
around a little boy in tattered rags, watched him hand an apple to
the boy and send him off with a pat on the head to where his mother
was feeding her other children from a large bowl of hot vegetable
stew.
    “You are a good man, Adam of Shotley,” she
said, taking his arm with pride.
    “I do what I can,” he replied humbly, ”but it
is never enough.” His somber mood lightened when they returned to
the great hall, where he saw Blaise and Connie talking to each
other with unusual animation.
    “I see some hope there,” he said to Aline.
“Connie grows warmer by the day.”
    They feasted again all that afternoon and
into the evening. And when night had come, Adam took Aline to his
bedchamber, where he made love to her until it was almost
daylight.
    She had kept her original guest room as a
place to which she could retreat for privacy when Adam was occupied
in his chamber with Blaise or the captain of the guard, or with any
of the other men of the castle who came to him to discuss its
administration. Adam was on good terms with the priest, Father
John, and he also had a cleric, Robert, who acted as his secretary.
In addition, Adam and Blaise spent a lot of time together each day,
Adam having given his son a fair amount of responsibility for the
castle defenses. Somehow, Adam managed to stay up-to-date with all
of his lordly duties and still have the afternoons free for the
feasts his people expected of him. The nights he kept for
Aline.
    She made no secret of her feelings for him.
She was deeply and passionately in love with him and she would not
allow herself to think of being parted from him. Having arrived in
the twelfth century, and having made a reasonable adjustment to her
new life, she prayed daily to be allowed to remain where she
was.
    Her days were busy. She had begun to help
Connie with the domestic chores, which during this season consisted
mainly of supervising the cooking and serving of enormous amounts
of food for each day’s banquet, and the cleaning of the resulting
mess in the kitchen and great hall so preparations could begin for
the next feast. As Aline had noticed soon after her arrival at
Shotley, for all her timidity with Blaise, Connie was a competent
chatelaine and the servants willingly obeyed her. Only the
temperamental cook occasionally challenged Connie’s authority in
the matter of food, but even she accepted offers of help with
peeling or chopping, or the apparently endless grinding of
ingredients with mortar and pestle. Aline quickly learned how to be
helpful, for she did not find the castle kitchen greatly different
from the old-fashioned one that she remembered in her grandparents’
house when she was a girl.
    The differences, of course, were in the areas
of refrigeration and cooking methods. At Shotley, all the cooking
was done in a huge open fireplace fitted with iron hooks so kettles
could be hung over the open flames. There were also what looked
like large trivets on long legs, on which iron pots were set for
slower cooking. There was also a system of spits of varying