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And torn apart your limbs be all

None can help you, no one shall:

Tomorrow lady, we shall call.

And Gilbert smiled and shook his head as the tale related how poor Sir Orfeo took all his useless precautions, standing guard over his queen with a thousand armed knights.

They formed in ranks on every side

And said with her they would abide

And die there for her, every one

Before the queen be from them gone

And yet from the midst of that array

By magic she vanished away.

Gilbert closed his eyes with a smile of contentment as the story related how Sir Orfeo became a ragged minstrel and beggar, wandering the world in search of his wife. For all his cautious management of his own estate, he identified with the pilgrim knight who gave up everything completely. He listened intently, familiar as the tale was, as Sir Orfeo at last saw the faery king, hunting in the forest with his lords and ladies. And then came, for him, the most touching moment of all, when the ragged Sir Orfeo sees that one of the ladies is his own wife, and approaches her.

Then he beheld her, and she him too

And neither to other a word did speak;

She for pity, to see him so,

Who had been a king, now so weak.

And then a tear fell from her eye:

And the other women the tear did spy

And made her swiftly ride away.

What was it about that meeting and parting, as though the hero’s wife were separated from him by a pane of glass, that always made the tears start from Godefroi’s eyes? Was it the sense of loss? He was not sure exactly.

But soon his eyes were glowing with delight again as Sir Orfeo followed the riders back to the faery castle and played his harp before the faery king. And when he was offered a reward for his playing, Gilbert’s face relaxed in pleasure as Sir Orfeo replied:

‘Sir’, he said, ‘I beseech thee

That thou wouldest give to me

That fair lady that I see

That sleeps under the orchard tree.’

And at last, having won his queen, the king, still disguised as a minstrel, returns to his astonished court and faithful servants:

To Winchester at last came he

That was his own city.

And then Gilbert reached out and took Rose’s hand and whispered:

“I’d have wandered a hundred years to find you.” And his wife, turning her head and smiling, squeezed his hand in return and said:

“I want us all to be together. Send for Thomas tomorrow.”

Before the young vicar left, Gilbert asked him if he had heard any news of the plague. He replied confidently that he had not.

“But I pray every hour for my little flock at Avonsford,” he replied stoutly, “and I’m sure we shall be spared.”

Gilbert himself was less certain; and the next morning, after he had sent his groom on horseback to Winchester to collect his son, prepared himself to ride into the city to see if there was any news.

It was just as he was leaving that he was stopped at the courtyard gates by a small but extraordinary delegation.

The Mason family now consisted of six people: Edward’s two grandsons, John and Nicholas; their widowed stepmother and her three young children. Since the death of their father Richard, three years before, John and Nicholas, both in their late twenties, had worked hard to support the second family Peter had left behind, and the house the whole family occupied in Avonsford, though crowded, had an air of cleanness and prosperity about it that pleased the knight. Though both men had followed the family calling as masons, John was also a bowman, and had recently returned from Crécy with a modest fortune in booty that was now the family’s reserve against times of trouble.

But it was their stepmother Agnes who ruled them all. Godefroi gazed at her with a mixture of dislike and admiration. She was a small, square-jawed woman whose precise age he could never guess, with sandy red hair and little grey eyes that were honest, but seemed to dart about constantly. With her busy, jerky movements, she often reminded him of a red squirrel; she defended her little family with