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setting sun had turned the sky the colour of burnished bronze, the grove was abandoned to the dead, who lay still and quiet in the soft green grass.
    “May God have mercy on their vile and wretched souls,” Tuck whispered, hastening away, “and grant them the peace they have denied to others.” Thinking better of this crabbed prayer, he added, “Welcome them into Your eternal kingdom—but not for my sake, Good Lord, no—but for the sake of Your own dear Son who always remembered to forgive His enemies. Amen.”

CHAPTER 3
      Hereford
    B aron Bernard Neufmarché unexpectedly found himself in complete agreement with Lady Agnes, who was determined to make the wedding of her daughter Sybil splendid in every way possible. Much to his amazement and delight—for the baron had long ago resigned himself to a wife he considered little more than a frail ghost of a woman—the baroness was now a creature transformed. Gone were the headaches, vapours, and peculiar lingering maladies she had endured since coming to Britain. She was energetic and enthusiastic, tireless in her work at organizing the wedding. Major military campaigns received less attention, in his experience. What is more, the too-slender Agnes had gained weight; her previously skeletal figure had begun filling out to a more robust shape, and a wholesome glow of ruddy good health had replaced her customary sickly pallor.
    This change in the woman he had known fully half his life was as surprising as it was welcome. He had never before seen anyone altered so utterly, and he revelled in it. Indeed, the renewal of his wife affected him far more deeply than he could have imagined. His own outlook had altered as well. Something like gratitude had come over him; he looked at the world around him with a warm and pleasant feeling of contentment. For the first time in a very long time he was happy.
    For all this, and more, he had his Welsh minions to thank.
    On reflection, the baron thought he knew almost to the precise moment when the change—no, the transformation —of Agnes began. It was in the churchyard of the little Welsh church where they had laid to rest the body of his vassal, King Cadwgan of Eiwas. Something had touched his wife at the funeral, and when the three days of observance drew to a close, the rebirth had begun.
    Perhaps nowhere was the change more evident than in her view of the Welsh themselves. Where before Lady Agnes had considered them subhuman savages, a nation of brutish barbarians at best, now she viewed them more as unfortunates, as children who had survived an infancy of deprivation and neglect—which she was now intent on redressing.
    Sybil’s wedding was just the beginning; once she and Prince Garran—no, the young man was king now, it must be remembered—once the two young people were married, Lady Agnes planned nothing less than the rehabilitation of the entire realm and all its people. “They only want a town or two and markets,” Agnes had informed him a few weeks ago, “some proper churches—good stone, mind—and a monastery, of course. Yes, and a better road. Then farms would flourish. I do believe it would be one of the finest cantrefs in the land.”
    “They are cattle herders, mostly,” the baron had pointed out as he skimmed through a list of provisions he was amassing for the wedding.
    “That, I suspect, is because they know little else,” she concluded. “We shall show them how to husband the land.”
    “Teach them to farm?”
    “ Bien sur ,” she replied lightly. “Why not? Then they will have things to trade in the markets. With the money that brings, they can begin making something of themselves.”
    In Agnes’s view, the pitiful Welsh holdings were to be built up and made productive, the wasteland tilled and the wildwood managed—as in her father’s prosperous estates in Normandie. With the considerable aid and support of the Neufmarché nobility, Eiwas would become a dazzling jewel, a bright and shining