Ann of Cambray Read Online Free PDF

more-loving hearts than among the common folk at Sedgemont; and although I professed always to miss Cambray and longed to return there, it is Sedgemont that taught me how to reason for myself, speak the truth as I saw it, and act as I thought right, however convention should bid otherwise. Such common sense rings justly in my ears. I do not say it is always easy to live with and it has cost me dear. But the experiences of those times are witnesses to their integrity. True, we had little enough to eat and were often cold and badly clothed. Those things I could endure. And when rumours came to us, for even the Lady Mildred could not keep out rumour, well then, these wars made little impression upon me, who held them far off and of no import in my life. The young Henry of Anjou was knighted by the Scottish king; his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, died; his mother, the Empress Matilda, went back to France; King Stephen and his son, Eustace, fought against their enemies wherever they could make them stand and fight. Presumably Lord Raoul was engaged in these wars. At least he did not return to Sedgemont, and as long as he was away from us, that was good news. Gwendyth and I kept to ourselves, making virtue of necessity, ate our own food, contrived our own clothes, kept our own counsel. And if you had asked me, I would have said, as would any serf, that what was done in the outside world was none of my concern, provided the great barons of the land kept it far from Sedgemont. And so time passed.
    Perhaps I should not say how much those years meant to me. Gwendyth merely suffered them. She was so old I do not recall a time without her, yet she was still round and fat, without a streak of grey in her black hair. She was my father’s age, yet she seemed ageless. And she had put the past behind her as if it had never been. She never spoke to me of Cambray; never, except in moments of great stress, would talk to me in our language, trying always to urge me towards ‘more cultured’ ways, by which she meant the ways of the Norman-French. I could never understand why. Now I think that in her great grief she wished to tear ail longing and memory away so as to pretend it had never been. All I knew then was that she tried to make me into a copy of these Norman ladies, and if giving up her own memories would make this easier for me, she would do that also. She had not counted on my stubbornness. For, as I grew older, I began to do many things that she could not approve of. As I have said, even at Cambray I would not have been so free. She disliked my friends, distrusted what we did, saw all her hopes diminished every day. Only her deep love for me prevented her from going to the Lady Mildred herself, but I had threatened her if she did, and, God save us, she believed me then. No, they were not happy times for her, but I was young and thoughtless. God forgive me now that I did so little to please her then.
    One of the things I took pleasure in was hunting. I was good with a slingshot. Talisin had taught me years ago. How many things there are that I have learned from him; the list is endless. It is a boy’s sport; but when we were hungry, even Gwendyth did not grumble too openly that I coursed a hare or found a partridge in the home meadows. It was against the law, of course, the Norman law I mean; but I was careful and the men had too many other worries to be looking out for children. But it was my friendship with Giles that most distressed her. I suppose it was unusual, he being but a groom, a little older than I, a serf at Sedgemont. But from the first day, when he had put out his hand to stop my fall and I had scowled at him, we ever sought each other out. Without Giles, life at Sedgemont might have worn another colour. With him, all the rest fitted into place.
    When we could we would slip from one of the small side gates (ever since a band of marauders had come down, unexpectedly