Georgette Heyer Read Online Free PDF Page B

thing. ‘What have you all learnt since I saw you last, eh? Are you scholars yet? Can Harry play another air on the gitern?’
    Harry, like Mother, was musical. He said: ‘Not the gitern, sir, but the harp!’
    ‘And I can ride my pony, Bel sire!’ said Thomas, forgetting Mother’s precepts.
    ‘Thomas, not so hardy!’ Mother said.
    But Bel sire was in a benign humour, and he only laughed, and said that before he went away he would see all their accomplishments. After that the noble company trooped into the Great Chamber; the Countess’s ladies begged those who attended Dame Katherine and my lady of Huntingdon to accompany them to the bower; the Steward and the Yeoman took the gentlemen of the Duke’s household in charge; horses were led off to the barmekin; chests and coffers were carried into the several buildings of the castle; but just as the nurses were trying to remove the children out of the bustle they caught sight of an elderly man, rather thickset, and dressed in sober raiment, who was watching them with a smile in his eyes; and they broke from restraining hands, and ran across the court, shouting: ‘Master Chaucer! Master Chaucer!’
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    Only Father could have been more welcome, and not even Father could tell such stories, much less have them transcribed in bound volumes. Bel sire, who possessed these, said that one day they should be allowed to read them, a promise which they received with more civility than enthusiasm. None of them wished to struggle with the written word when they could listen to the stories from Master Chaucer’s own lips. Sometimes he would tell them as their nurses might, only much better; and sometimes his expressive voice would drift into poetry, reciting lines that made the lordings’ ears tingle, even though they might not always understand them.
    He was not one of Bel sire’s household, but Bel sire was his patron; and at one time his wife had been in attendance on Spanish Grandmother. He did not seem to have liked his wife very much, but he was on good terms with Dame Katherine, who was her sister. His purse was a farthing-sheath, yet he had held several good appointments in his time. Bel sire, who had given him one of the pensions he had sold in a moment of stress, said that he was unthrifty; but he said it indulgently, because Master Chaucer had thought no lady the peer of Grandfather’s first wife, and had written a long poem about her death, and Grandfather’s grief for it. There were some good bits in the poem about hunting; but far too much of it was taken up with the moan of a Man in Black, who appeared to be Bel sire, bewailing the death of Grandmother Blanche of Lancaster. It did not sound at all like Bel sire, and the lordings disliked it. Master Chaucer quite understood their feelings, and he never inflicted the poem on them, unless commanded to do so by Bel sire, when he naturally obeyed, but with such a twinkle in his eye that the lordings forgave him.
    The nurses knew that there would be no hope of wresting their charges away from Master Chaucer without a brawl, so although they knew the poet to be a mere scrivener, and (if report did not lie) at one time guilty of a scandalous fetching, they raised no objections to his taking care of the lordings for an hour. The lordings dragged him off to see all the wonders of the Great Hall; and here Bel sire, who had himself come to cast an eye over the stonemasons’ work, found them. ‘Ah!’ said Bel sire. ‘So you have met a friend, have you? Well, Master Chaucer? Do you see something of my lady in this knave?’
    He dropped his hand on to Harry’s head, and Master Chaucer, pulling off his hood, said: ‘Verily, monseigneur.’ He added, in a soft voice: ‘ “So steadfast countenance, So noble port and maintenance!” ’
    ‘Well, well, we shall see!’ Bel sire said. ‘What was it that you wrote? “Ruddy, fresh, and lively hued,” eh?’
    The lordings resigned themselves. Bel sire was going to recite the