Free Rhiannon by Vicki Grove Page B

maid-of-all-poultry.”
    â€œI will, Granna, and thanks!” Rhiannon waved good-bye to Daisy and set out, easing slowly and carefully through the press of folk, hoping she’d not lose sight of her pals.
    Far to her left, rising above the sea of heads and shoulders, she glimpsed the flowing pennant atop Lord Claredemont’s colorful pavilion. The lord oft had this fine silken shelter constructed to give himself and his family comfortable viewing when some tournament or race was staged on the manor grounds. But today, he’d lent the pavilion to be set up on the green, where it gave the butcher’s table shelter. Rhia supposed it would give shade to the body of the murdered man, and would also lend some privacy to the ritual, which by local custom should be witnessed only by God, the vicar, and the bailiff.
    Still, with its orange and green stripes, the pavilion struck Rhia as unseemly bright and cheerful for such grim work. A long line of people moved slowly toward that tent, where each must take a turn putting hands upon the corpse.
    Rhiannon shivered and felt no hurry. First, some fun.
    â€œRhia! Come on, then!” Maddy stretched her arm through a gap in the crowd and grabbed Rhia’s wrist, and Rhia was well content to be pulled along.
    Maddy was a strong girl, bigger than Rhia and with far more nerve. She had no qualms at all about treading on the feet of others or barking rough orders when making her way, and so she maneuvered them through the roiling crowd, jabbing with her elbows at those who wouldn’t move and sometimes giving someone a little kick.
    Soon they reached the spot where Maddy’d left the other two to wait, and the four girls linked arms to keep from being separated. Giggling with freedom and good spirits, Nedra, Ginny, and Rhiannon left it to Maddy to blaze them a passage on toward less congested space where they could talk all at once and hear themselves as they were at it.
    Sometimes Rhia envied these three. Nedra and Ginny worked within the high-walled manor house complex just as Maddy did. They were two of Lord Claredemont’s dairy maids, and, as Granna had noted, though Maddy was only the orphaned daughter of local peasant farmers, she had nevertheless risen to the important job of maid-of-all-poultry. Her strength and bluster were put to good use in the job, as she was boss of the lazy young boys who carried in the firewood and mucked out the chicken yard.
    Rhia sometimes thought it hard, meeting your friends only on market days. When they’d all been little girls, Nedra and Ginny and Maddy had worked together as a gang in the fields. As farmers’ daughters they’d picked fruit, gathered rocks that might have stopped the plow within the furrows, brought home kindling for the fires, that sort of thing. Rhia’d met them all when she first came down to market with Mam when she was about Daisy’s age, and from then on they’d taught her their new games on the fly each time they met. Now, she imagined it would be fine living with your mates in the loft above the manor house kitchen in the center of all the world’s activity with no one to supervise you. Well, no mother or grandmother, that is, though these three claimed there were plenty of higher maids and housekeepers to make their lives miserable.
    They did not seem miserable, though. They seemed lively, always filled with the manor gossip, which they generally knew well before Lord Claredemont himself did. In fact, Nedra said it was not unusual for Lady Claredemont to wangle news from her under pretense of wandering through the manor kitchen to check the condition of the eggs collected of a morning and eve.
    â€œMaddy, where are we going ?” Rhia called, suddenly realizing they’d left most of the crowd behind. She resisted a little, pulling back her arm, but Maddy showed no signs of slowing the pace she’d set for their little caravan of four.
    Rhia’s question