Chapter 22: Pastoral

(Lady Alwen narrates)

I have found it painful in my back to mount a horse now. I believe the child I carry will be either too big to bear by the time of birthing, or else he or she presently swims in a pool that strains full at the dam. So I now go everywhere by foot. But then, everything that I need is nearby and interconnected as if by fine tapestry threads.

My Manor House is but a few hundred yards beyond the village, on a slight rise, with a sloping lawn down to a fish stocked lake behind, formed by yet another dam across the stream. The fish is essential for our observation of eschewing meat on Fridays. That stream eventually feeds into the river Bar. Here, though, it is naught but a stream at the foot of our valley, although some leagues down stream, various tributaries join with it into a fine river, running past the hill in Bartown, where my husband Will Archer has his Castle.

My Inn lies next to the stream, which was forded many years ago by the old road to Bartown. The ford was first causewayed in wooden logs by my grandfather, which has lately been rebuilt by me as a fine strong bridge in stone. The inn, with its deep well for fresh water, is but five hundred paces from my threshold. Behind the inn, is a water mill, with a mill pond and mill stream leading from the river, to drive the wheel, rotating the millstones which either cracks the barley malt for the brewing of ale, or adjusted tightly to grind the flour for the needs of our daily bread. Close by is my much enlarged brew house, which has its own well, and behind that is my dove cottage, which I check each day, to feed, water and clean, so the pigeons therein prosper in comfort.

Our stone built village church is at the top of the hill, five hundred yards the other side of the Inn, is small but it fits our needs. It is quite a climb, but between the church and the smithy is the bowmaker’s workshop where my husband Will can be found, when he is not playing the role of Shire Reeve, and where my adopted son and half-brother Robin is apprenticed to the arts of archery and bow making.

Within this cluster of buildings so important to me, Oaklea is a little paradise, except when war comes to call. And it is calling for the second time in nearly twenty years.

I have a separate narrow path from the Manor to the brew house, which runs parallel to the road, with a pair of footbridges over the river and mill stream. From that path I see a crowd of Knights arrive and be turned away by my capable Inn Steward, Stephen of Gloucester. I think with pleasure that the Inn must be full, probably of people fleeing the sacking of the city of Chester by the Welch Prince of Powys, and the consequential laying waste of the land throughout Chestershire.

I am tired and leave the brew house shortly past lunchtime, having seen the second set of drays for the day sent off up the hill and past the church towards Bartown. I lock up and leave before the early morning drays are returned, too weary to even await the news of my husband, charging the departing draymen to ask the returnees to drop by with any verbal recounting of the events at Bartown. My husband is a private man, who will not answer my letters in kind, in case the parchment passes on the plague that still rages there. But he reads my letters immediately, my brewers always remark, and tell me that all his worries drop from his face, replaced by smiles, while he does so.