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have my thanks, Rosamund. I cannot fault your manners, and it pleases me that you learn womanly skills.”
    “The mistress of Friarsgate should know many things, uncle. I am young, but I am capable of learning them,” Rosamund responded. Then she curtsied to him again, and moved to stand by her husband.
    “Rosamund made soap to keep us clean the winter long,” Hugh quickly said before Henry Bolton could consider his niece’s words. Discretion, he thought. We must teach Rosamund not to display her tactics so openly. Then he smiled at Henry. “Godspeed,” he said.
    “Aye, uncle, God speed you and protect you,” Rosamund echoed. Then she stood watching as he rode away from Friarsgate, slipping her hand into Hugh’s as she did. “If he but knew,” she said softly.
    “But he will not, until it is too late,” Hugh answered her.
    Rosamund nodded in agreement. “Nay, he will not,” she replied.

Chapter 2
    D uring the few years that followed Rosamund grew from a charming little girl into a gangling young girl, who sometimes seemed to be all legs and flying hair. They saw Henry Bolton but once in all that time. He brought his new wife, Mavis, a buxom girl of sixteen with careful eyes, to meet his niece. Mavis thanked the heiress to Friarsgate for the soap as she openly admired Rosamund’s house and lands.
    “Henry says our son will be your husband one day,” she boldly told the younger girl. “This is a fine inheritance for him.”
    “Are you with child?” Rosamund inquired with apparent innocence.
    Mavis giggled. “I ought to be considering how active a bed partner your uncle is, but you would not know of such things being a child yet.”
    “Perhaps you will have a daughter,” Rosamund said. “My poor aunt Agnes did, you know.” She smiled sweetly.
    “God and his Blessed Mother forbid it!” Mavis cried, crossing herself. “Your uncle wants sons. I will light as many candles as I must to gain my husband’s wishes. You are a wicked girl to suggest I have daughters. Perhaps you put the evil eye on your uncle’s first wife and caused her death.”
    “Do not be silly,” Rosamund responded. “I never saw my aunt again from the day she departed Friarsgate. Besides, I liked her.” This Mavis had fewer brains than a milk cow, Rosamund decided. “Tell me, if you know, what has happened to my cousin, Julia?”
    “When she is weaned from the farmer’s wife’s teat, she will go to St. Margaret’s Convent, where she will be raised to become a nun,” Mavissaid. “I don’t want to raise another woman’s daughter. Besides, the convent will take a smaller dower portion than any man would. Your aunt Agnes was no great beauty. Henry says the bairn favors her.”
    “It is comforting to know my cousin is safe,” Rosamund remarked dryly. How sad that her poor little cousin should be disposed of so easily and so callously. She knew that Henry Bolton would have done the same to her had it not been for Friarsgate.
    Rosamund was relieved when Mavis and her uncle departed. In the next three years the news came with monotonous regularity that Mavis delivered first one son, then a second, and finally a third. Her fourth child was a daughter, and after that they heard no more of Mavis Bolton’s fecundity. Her uncle did not visit. She was left to wonder about her cousins. They were probably, she decided, blond, blue-eyed blobs very much like their mother. The eldest of them, called Henry after his father, was supposed to be her future husband. As if I could wed with a four-year-old, Rosamund thought. Why, I am practically twelve!
    She could now read anything they put before her. She wrote with a beautiful hand as she transcribed the figures into her account books. She knew how to purchase supplies, the few they did not grow or make themselves at Friarsgate. She had learned exactly what they needed to survive comfortably. She was beginning to bargain for her holding when she, Hugh, and Edmund went to the cattle and