The Christmas Wassail by Kate Sedley Read Free Book Online

which makes him one of the Church’s martyrs.’
    My daughter was unimpressed. It worried me sometimes – whenever I had the time to think about it – that she had inherited a little of my ambiguous attitude towards religion. Moreover, her maternal grandparents, Margaret Walker and her dead husband, Adam, had dabbled in Lollardism. My former mother-in-law had, at one time, even possessed a Lollard Bible.
    Elizabeth said now, in a flat little voice, ‘Being a martyr’s silly. You might just as well pretend to agree with people and then go your own way afterwards.’
    I could see by the horrified expression on Adela’s face that a storm of protest was about to burst around my daughter’s head – not to mention my own for being too lax a father in these matters – so I said quickly, ‘Who wants to see the mummers’ arrival at the castle this afternoon?’
    Immediately four hands shot into the air, including that of the baby, who simply copied his foster siblings’ actions. As the other three clamoured and shouted their acquiescence, he gave us all a beaming smile, which made Elizabeth swoop to pick him up and give him a stifling cuddle, which only seemed to make him smile the more.
    â€˜You’ll come, too?’ I asked my wife.
    â€˜If Luke is to go, I shall have to. I wouldn’t trust him with any of you.’
    She gave me a little half-smile, indicating that she knew she had, for the present, been outmanoeuvred, but also letting me understand that the subject of my daughter’s irreligious attitude had merely been postponed, not forgotten.
    â€˜At what hour are they expected?’ she asked.
    I shrugged. ‘No one knows. But if we want a good view we’d best be at the castle as soon as we can. There’s bound to be a crowd waiting to see them.’
    I was right. News of the mummers’ arrival for the Christmas season had attracted not only hundreds from within the city itself, but also many from beyond its walls, from the surrounding villages and hamlets. With four children and a dog, and even arriving well before midday, I had my work cut out to force a passage across the barbican bridge and, once in the castle’s outer ward, to find a place where we could all see comfortably and without being too badly jostled by the smellier and more scrofulous riff-raff of the city streets. Adela and I shared the burden of Luke’s weight between us and Elizabeth, Nicholas and Adam took it in turns to be responsible for Hercules.
    While waiting, I took the opportunity to look about me, not having been inside the castle for some little time and, although I knew from general report that it had fallen into a bad state of disrepair, I was nevertheless surprised by how swiftly it had deteriorated since my previous visit. One building, a guardhouse, was practically roofless, while the chimney of yet another – the castle bakery – had tumbled to the ground, leaving merely a hole in the tiles. Loose bricks and stones lay scattered everywhere to trip up the unwary, while huge cracks were opening in the walls of various other outhouses and even in the great keep itself.
    I had learned something of its history from Alderman Foster who also lived in Small Street and who, unlike many of the other residents, had never resented my family’s presence there. I knew, for instance, that the castle’s construction had been started only a year or so after the Conquest under the auspices of Geoffrey de Mowbray, the warlike Bishop of Coutances (and later, for services rendered, of Exeter). The keep, however, with its six-foot-thick walls, had been built at the instigation of Earl Robert of Gloucester, bastard half-brother of the Empress Matilda, with stone brought from his birthplace of Caen, in Normandy. Every tenth stone had been set aside for the glory of God and the building of St James’s Priory.
    Two kings had lain within its walls. Stephen,