Out of the Dawn Light Read Online Free PDF

returned from checking on the sheep in their outhouse and we exchanged a few rather stiff comments. That was about it but all the same I wished, as I hunched up my pack and tried to blow warmth into my cold hands, that there had been the occasion to say goodbye.
    Perhaps he would not even realize that I had gone.
    Depressed, I put my head down, struggled against the wind – just to add to my misery, it was blowing hard out of the east, almost exactly the direction in which I was walking – and plodded on. All too soon, the huddle of small cottages, pens and outbuildings that was Icklingham came into sight.
    I strode up to Goda’s door – they had made quite sure I knew where to go – knocked and waited. As if she were deliberately making me stand out there in the cold, perhaps to indicate right from the outset just who was in charge around here, it was some moments before she answered. Then I heard her voice, its timbre rasping, its tone discontented and complaining.
    ‘Don’t loiter out there all day!’ called my sister. ‘I’ve just been sick, I’m shivering and I need a hot drink, oh, and you’d better clear up the mess. I missed the pot.’
    My first two orders, before I’d even got through the door. It was without doubt a taste of things to come. With a secret sigh, I went in.
     
    You could be forgiven for thinking that a woman not quite six months married to the man of her choice, in a decent enough little house and with a baby on the way, might have been happy; ecstatic, even. You don’t know my sister. It was hard to imagine why on earth she’d wanted to marry Cerdic, since now that she was his wife she spent all her time telling him how useless he was and how she’d been far better off at home. I couldn’t see how she reasoned that out. At home she had been made to do at least some of her share of the work (my mother can be a tough woman) and she had shared her cot and her tiny amount of privacy with Elfritha. Cerdic’s house might have consisted of just one small room (I slept in the lean-to with the placid and gentle-mannered family cow, an arrangement I would have chosen even had there been room for me in the house), but he was a skilled carpenter and had made it soundly so that it was wind-proof and, when the fire in the central hearth was well alight, really quite snug. He had built a low cot up against one wall and on it he and Goda had the luxury of two wool blankets, made for them by Cerdic’s mother, as well as a mattress stuffed with new straw. There was even a curtain fixed up to draw across in front of the bed if Goda so wished. Cerdic was not a poor man; a good carpenter always finds work. Like everyone else, he had to spend a part of each week working for the lord but he was eager and had an honest face, two qualities that ensured a regular stream of requests for his services.
    Whatever he did, he was never going to be good enough for my sister and, poor man, he must have realized it. I wondered, with pity in my heart, just how soon after the wedding she had revealed her true self; how soon the now even more massive breasts had begun to pale in significance in the face of the bad temper, the selfishness, the foul mouth and the unerring aim with a wooden spoon or, in really bad moments, a clog. When I arrived, I noticed that Cerdic had a bruise on his left temple and I had a pretty good idea how he’d come by it.
    When out in my lean-to I had unwrapped Elfritha’s present, I discovered that she’d woven for me a beautifully soft shawl of lamb’s wool, dyed in the lovely, subtle shades of green that she knows are my favourites. I was very glad that I had opened it in private, for Goda would have taken one look and demanded to be given it since, as she so often repeated, she was the pregnant one, she was the one suffering all this discomfort and misery and she was the one who needed spoiling. I vowed to make sure she never found out about my shawl. If this meant I could only snuggle