Out of the Dawn Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

into it in the lean-to, with no one but the friendly cow to appreciate how its colours made my eyes bright, it was a price worth paying.
    I studied Goda subtly, trying to work out how far along she was in her pregnancy. When I had asked when the baby was due she was at first vague and then, when I protested that surely she must have some idea, violent. ‘Mind your own business!’ she screamed, only there was another word between own and business , one that I would have been thrashed for using. I could have pointed out that, since I had to look after her during her pregnancy, it was my business, but the bruise on Cerdic’s temple was still in evidence and I kept my mouth shut.
    But I reckoned that, armed as I was with Edild’s instruction in the mystery of how women have babies, I could work it out for myself. The vastly swollen breasts and the sickness were, I believed, symptoms of the first three months, but I thought Goda was further along than that. Edild had demonstrated, using little drawings, how the baby in the womb gradually pushes upwards, so that a good midwife could judge from the height of the bulge how many months had passed since conception. I had to help my sister with her weekly wash – she complained, among many other things, that her condition caused her to sweat copiously – and, since she appeared to have left all modesty far behind her, she was in the habit of flinging off her clothes, lying back and ordering me to sponge her all over. Thus I was able not only to look at the big bump of baby but also run my hand over it and I calculated that she could be as much as six months pregnant.
    It was now the end of March and she had wed Cerdic in late September. This baby must have been conceived virtually on their wedding night.
    If not before.
    I did not waste much time on the fact that my sister might have anticipated her wedding vows. If she had, she was far from being the only one. Possibly she had feared a last-minute defection in her husband-to-be, and letting him make love to her – perhaps encouraging him to – had been a way of ensuring he made an honest woman of her. Who knew? Who cared? No – what concerned me was when I might expect to be released from her household. If I was right and she was six months gone, my deliverance could come as early as June or the beginning of July. I could be home – and back at my lessons with Edild – soon after midsummer, with the rest of that bright, happy, outdoor season still ahead.
    It was a lovely, heartening thought and it kept me going through the spring and early summer as inevitably, as Goda grew bigger, more cumbersome and more uncomfortable, matters went from bad to worse.

THREE
     
    R omain de la Flèche’s well-dressed appearance, level gaze and ready smile gave the impression that he was an amiable young man with plenty of money and not a great deal to concern him beyond the cut of his cloak and keeping a shine on his boots. The impression, however, was, like much about Romain, carefully calculated. He maintained it because it was in his own best interests to disguise his true personality and the pressing concern that drove him, relentlessly now, and held him so tightly in its grasp.
    As the days lengthened and it seemed that at long last spring was turning to summer, he watched in impotent rage and growing fear as the situation he most dreaded – and whose coming to pass he had at first only entertained in the most anxious of sleepless nights – unfolded before him. There was nothing he could do. His protests, had he dared to express them, would at best have been ignored and at worst earned him a hard cuff round the ear. He was eighteen now. It was not fair that he was still treated like a wayward child.
    There was a way in which he might escape the potentially fateful consequences of what was inevitably going to happen. By pure chance he had learned something amazing. It was so amazing that, when as so often happened it slipped quietly