The Exiled Read Online Free

see the moment of weakness and be curious.
    She was too new to Brugge, too new to the role she’d been given — that of Mathew Cuttifer’s ward — to be anything but careful; too much was at stake. She and Deborah must always retain the appearance of servant and mistress in front of the household, yet both women found the constant role-playing a strain, especially now. They’d get used to it, they had to. For the moment, it was their only safety for they had nowhere else to go.
    Anne sighed, then consciously relaxing her rigid shoulders, folded her hands at her waist and stepped down the wooden staircase to the kitchens without fuss, breathing deeply as the peace of being home and safe clothed her softly as a cloak.
    The kitchen was always busy in a large household, especially now as it was close to supper-time, but as Anne appeared, all work stopped. She was well liked, their master’s ward.
    ‘Lady, are you harmed?’ The Flemish cook, Maitre Flaireau, hurried forward. ‘Please, please, sit here by the warmth.’
    Anne nodded brightly in return for the relieved smiles from Ralph, the filthy scullion, Henri, the spit boy, and Herve, the Maitre’s meat-man as she allowed herself to be led to the ingle-seat beside the largest of the cooking fires. She must not let them know how strange she still felt or let them see how hard it was to keep her tightly clasped hands from shaking. She had one aim now.
    ‘Is Edward ... where is he?’ As Maitre Flaireau pressed her to sit. ‘There, mistress, do you see?’
    They had moved his cradle into the shadows, out of the light of the cooking fires into a warm corner of the cheerful, tiled room. And he slept on, oblivious to all the bustle around him in the busy kitchen.
    Anne yearned to pick him up, to kiss him awake, to hug him tightly to her breasts — the breasts which had never fed this child, but she restrained herself. Time for that later, when she was alone again with Deborah, the baby safely in the little annex of her solar.
    ‘Wine! Hot wine for our mistress. Herve, hurry now!’ Anne smiled slightly at the courtesy title ‘Mistress’. Lady Margaret Cuttifer, Mathew’s wife, was mistress in this house, even though she was so rarely here.
    Four months since Edward’s birth, four months of lies. She sipped the hot, rich wine; they’d spiced it with honey and nutmeg and beaten an egg yolk into it for strength. She was tired now, and aching. Leaning into the ingle-seat, she closed her eyes, just closed them and ...
    ‘Sssh! Herve, move quietly!’ The cook hissed at his assistant as he pantomimed creeping silently around the girl who seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. Chastened, Herve took care to sharpen the wicked boning knife as quietly as he could. He would be mortified to wake her, poor lady.
    But Anne was not asleep. She smelled the blood again; it was animal blood from the carcass Herve was butchering, but it was enough, she was back there ...
    His birth, Edward’s birth. Four months ago and a long, long way from Brugge. A tiny, suffocatingly hot room in the convent she’d been sent to by Sir Mathew to await the labour well away from prying eyes, away from gossip.
    Blood. Blood everywhere. On the straw-stuffed mattress, the whitewashed wall beside the bed, all over her. But he’d been born, alive and strong. Deborah had taken him from her belly and given him to a woman who’d been hired to suckle him, immediately, not even wiping the wax and the blood off his little body.
    It was best this way, said Deborah, best that Anne never suckled him for if she did, to give him to another would be unbearable. It would be easier with time. These words were muttered as a prayer by her foster-mother as she bound Anne’s breasts with bruised arnica and mallow to help with the pain when her milk let down, the milk that would not be given to her child.
    And now she and the Cuttifers called the baby her sister’s son. Her dear dead sister, Aveline.
    Anne frowned in