Girl In A Red Tunic by Alys Clare Read Free Book Online

little outburst, he said, his voice low and full of warmth, ‘Did you verify that your son really did call out to you in his trouble?’
         She found that she dared not risk speaking so she just nodded.
         After a time Josse said, ‘You once said to me, my lady, at a time when I felt myself to have been betrayed and was greatly distressed, that the act of childbirth turns a wife into a mother and there is no going back.’
         She gave a small gasp; she remembered the conversation very well, and also the tense and emotional circumstances under which it had occurred. She whispered, ‘Yes.’
         In the same gentle tone, he said, ‘Your words gave me great comfort then, Helewise. Hear them again, apply them to yourself and take the same comfort, for I am quite sure that God wouldn’t have bestowed on the world the immeasurable gift of maternal love had He not intended his children to benefit from it.’
         She felt tears spill from her eyes. Trying to be discreet, she turned her head so that her coif hid her face while she wiped them away.
         Josse said, far too bracingly, ‘And what of the little boy? Timus, was it?’
         An absurd chuckle almost broke from her at the obvious distracting ploy. But then she thought about her grandson and no longer felt like laughing. ‘He is too quiet,’ she said. ‘He was never very vocal, my son says, but now he makes no attempt at speech.’
         ‘Is that not normal in so young a child?’ Josse looked as if he were trying to recall if it was; no doubt, she thought, he was envisaging all those nephews and nieces of his.
         ‘Children speak when they are ready and in some it is sooner than in others,’ she replied. ‘For sure, I never knew a child to speak proper words much before a year and a half to two years. But most little ones try out their voices, Sir Josse! They make sounds and begin to string them together and sometimes they make up what sounds like a language of their own, although of course it is nothing but nonsense.’
         A vivid picture came powerfully into her head. She tried to dismiss it.
         ‘What of your own boys?’ Josse was saying. ‘I ask because I’m thinking that these matters of how soon a child walks and talks may be similar in the father and his son.’
         Oh, he was trying to help and she was more than grateful to him, but his innocent question was making those remembered images from so long ago so lifelike that she could smell the sweet lilac blossom and feel the tiny hands clutching hers. ‘My sons were always noisy, the pair of them,’ she said. She noticed absently that she sounded as if there were something constricting her throat. ‘Dominic spoke early, but he had his talkative elder brother to copy.’
         ‘And Leofgar?’
         She could no longer fight her memories. ‘It was Leofgar of whom I was thinking when I spoke of the nonsense language,’ she said. ‘He was so eager to speak that he even made sounds in his sleep. Ivo claimed he was snoring but I said he was trying to communicate with us. Oh, and he used to make every other sort of sound, too – he’d laugh at almost anything, he was such a sunny, cheerful child.’
         The nun that she now was commanded enough , and abruptly she stopped.
         As if he were reluctant to bring her from the happy past to the distressing present, Josse waited a moment before he spoke. Then he said, ‘What does Sister Euphemia have to say about your son’s child?’
         She went back to studying her hands. ‘She says he is afraid.’ She looked up hastily and met his compassionate face. ‘And before you ask, afraid of what, I have no idea!’ Then she shot to her feet and said, ‘Wait here. I will fetch Leofgar and the child and you can judge for yourself.’
     
    Josse watched her tall figure stride away down the infirmary. He lay back on his pillows, momentarily exhausted by the tension. She’s