The Marriage of Meggotta [antikvár]

CHAPTER I November 1230: Burgh-next-AyIsham; Westminster Richard came to Burgh in the steely twilight of a .November day, blown in at the gatehouse on a withering east wind, that scoured torn wisps of blacker cloud before it across a vast, forbidding, marbled greyness of wintry sky, and stung the lips and eyelids with salt spray even at this distance from the sea. There was no ground, in all those nine or ten miles between, high enough to ward off the flaying cold of it, only the open coastal plain and the leaden mirrors of the pools that the tides shaped and reshaped almost every spring. And then the wilderness of the sea, and beyond the sea lands as flat as these, and nowhere any shelter from the blistering cold. Meggotta was used to the East Anglian winds, and well wrapped up against them. Alice had bundled her into her furred cloak and hood before she would let her run loose in the baileys, for there was no keeping the child indoors now that she knew her father was coming home. Ever since his herald had ridden in at noon, with word that the earl's company were only a few hours behind him, she had been in and out like quicksilver wherever the bustle and excitement ran highest, through kitchen, buttery, bakery, stables and mews, in and out of the armoury, where there would soon be work enough for every hand, after a summer campaign in France, and after every foray, back to her mother or to Alice, whichever had more time to answer her endless questions. 'Do you know about this boy my father's bringing home with him? Do you know what he'll be like? Shall I like him?'