Maid Marian Read Online Free PDF Page A

afraid,” she replied. “And they’ve fallen to hard times too. My sister Polly’s man, Edgar, was killed in King Henry’s wars, and Polly’s moved home since, together with her four babes.”
    “Do you not miss them?”
    “Law! Ever so much, Lady Marian, more than I can tell you. But I’ve my duty to do by you, and I won’t be running off to Wodesley when I’ve you to care for. I do what I can and send my wages, but Saint Alfred knows I’d give a month’s silver to see them once more.”
    She worked with her spindle as she spoke, and as she pulled at a thick lump of wool, my eye caught the shape and form of her hands. I’d not noticed before the way her blue veins surfaced from the backs, nor the yellow curving of her nails. Annie, I realized then with a start, had aged herself just as I had, growing older each year with the turn of the wheel until she was a maid no longer.
    “Annie, you’ve known me all my life. I’m fourteen now, what age does that give you?”
    “I’ve lived nine-and-twenty summers, m’lady, many of those here beside you.”
    “And have you never longed for a family? To marry and tend to a house of your own?”
    She looked at me sharply, but lowered her eyes to her work as she answered. “There’s not a woman alive doesn’t think of love and family matters, to my way of thinking. But a body’s got to go where it’s needed, and as I’ve never struck a man’s fancy, I suppose I’m needed here more than elsewhere. I’ve not your lovely face and manner, Lady Marian. We’d be hard put to keep the lads at bay if it weren’t for your being long since wed.”
    This enflamed my mind for some hours, for I was just at an age when I’d started to notice the tallest and comeliest of the stable boys. To think of myself as a beauty was strange enough. But to loosen my mind to thoughts of men who might have stopped to pledge troth to me threw me to such a distracted state that I scarce could concentrate on my stitches.

    M Y INTERROGATION OF A NNIE continued until I knew more of Wodesley village than I did of the castle in which I lived. And not long after, I was startled to learn one thing more, that a complete Saxon language existed—a true surprise, since I had heard only French or Latin spoken about me. I asked her to speak it, and as she chattered I thought its tones did sound familiar, as if I had heard the rhythms before and had discounted them as murmurs or nonsense, mere background sounds that had no meaning.
    The more I questioned, the more it seemed that a hidden world lay beneath my own. All of England, I found, was filled with villages of farmers and smiths who spoke nothing but Saxon. They considered themselves almost as a separate race from the French-speaking Normans, though we were most of us born on the same green-treed island.
    This piqued my interest, and soon I proposed that Annie teach me some of this mysterious tongue. We got on slowly, for Annie had not a teacher’s acumen, and I found the language to be more complex than I had expected. Indeed, it was as unusual to my mouth and mind as Latin ever had been, and in some ways proved far stranger since it shared so little with the southern tongues. But I struggled forward as Annie giggled at my mistakes, and after a time I began to improve.
    During these days I harassed my tutor with constant questions, for I felt a deep desire to understand what teeth and gears caused the world to turn. I knew that I was powerless, as a wife and a woman. But if I could not have independence, at least, I determined, I would have knowledge. My tutor was stubbornly addicted to his poems and philosophical treatises, or so it seemed to me, but at last I gleaned from him this one truth. What I owned of value was my land.
    Land brought rents, raised up crops, and maintained workers. Without it one had little power, for one had always rent to pay. But with it, all those rules reversed; the landowner sat on the seesaw’s high end. My lands,