Candace ROBB - A Fox in the Fold

Enormous thanks to my friends Louise Hampson, PhD, and Mary Morse, PhD, for reading with care and thought my belated (as in last minute) delivery of a draft manuscript. Both were facing their own book deadlines yet took the time to check for flow, clarity, and historical accuracy. I am in your debt. Huge thanks to my agent Jennifer Weltz, whose keen eye for character consistency and radar for missed opportunities in the story never fails me. I am so fortunate.

Thanks also to Anne Louise Avery, whose brilliant retelling of the medieval tales of Reynard the Fox (Bodleian Library Publishing 2020) indirectly inspired the title and a character, though the personality of my fox is as Reynard is perceived by his victims, cunning and cruel. Apologies to Old Fox, the character in Anne Louises wonderful twitter tales I intend no slander of your kin. (@AnneLouiseAvery)

Many thanks and much admiration to the team at Severn House for taking my manuscripts and turning them into beautiful books.

As ever I am grateful to my husband Charlie for his beautiful maps, and all his loving support. Especially near deadlines it cant be easy sharing a house with me.

Last but never least, my thanks to my readers for falling in love with my unruly characters and welcoming them into your homes.

York, October 1376

From her seat in the shade of the linden, Lucie Wilton observed the young man bending to his work on the stone wall, golden in the autumn sunlight. The stack already rose several layers above the ditch her husband had dug to outline the foundation of the new garden wall, providing her a clearer sense of how she might shape the garden round the extended building and the new arc of the walkway leading from the gate to the York Tavern yard. The enlarged apothecary would provide much-needed space for her work, but digging up two of the oldest beds of essential herbs had felt a desecration of her first husbands masterwork, an apothecary garden of more variety than might be found even in the wealthiest monasteries. She reminded herself that even before the wall the garden had changed, expanding to more than twice the size it had been in Nicholass lifetime. Her father had gifted her the house next to the shop, with its own large garden, where she and Owen, her present husband, might raise their family. Even so, she felt a tug of remorse.

Seeking to buoy her mood, she walked along the winding garden path, letting the morning sun warm her, smelling the rich scent of the earth after last nights rain, looking up at the colors of the changing leaves, listening to the bees seeking out the last hardy blossoms, and trying not to spy on her ten-year-old daughter Gwenllian as she flirted with the young laborer.

Gwen watched Rhys tuck the chisel into a fold in the stone, take a deep breath, and, with the care of someone working a delicate carving, tap it with his hammer. A shard flew toward her, just missing her cheek.

I pray you retreat to a safe distance, my lady, said Rhys in his soft voice. I would never forgive myself if a stray shard marred your beauty.

She stepped back with a giggle and a blush. Gwen hated how easily the color rose Rhys would think her such a child. But he was smiling, not laughing. A beautiful smile. If it were not for the long scar on the right side of his face, he might be almost as handsome as her father. Das was not so disfiguring he said that was thanks to the salve her mother made him, softening the scar and keeping it from tightening and puckering his face. Rhyss scar lifted the right side of his mouth and lowered the outer corner of his right eye so that he looked as if he were ever wincing in pain. And the line stayed a nasty red. It looked as if someone had slashed him from temple to chin with a sword, though he claimed it was nothing so exciting. She had overheard her father talking to the joiner who had hired Rhys to help with the apothecary addition. Will said by the looks of it Rhys had been injured shortly before he had arrived in York looking for work. Months ago now.

Settling on a bench, near but far enough away so that she would not alarm him, Gwen asked if he would like to hear the story of how her father lost the sight in his left eye.

I have wondered. He was a soldier, I think? He moved his hand over a side of the stone, turned it toward him, placed the chisel, and tapped.

Captain of archers for the Duke of Lancaster. She cleared her throat and began the tale of her fathers terrible injury. How one night, when he was on guard at the tents where the noble prisoners were sleeping, he caught a Breton jongleur whose life he had saved cutting the throats of the French nobles held for high ransom. A woman helping the jongleur came up behind and as her father turned round the knife meant for his neck sliced his eye instead.

Rhys had stopped working to listen. What happened to the two traitors?

Da killed them. Gwen took a deep breath, pushing aside the image that always arose with the tale, of her father with a hand over his eye, the blood seeping through his fingers.

The pain. How does a man bear it? Rhys touched his own wound. At least I did not lose my eye.

No. But Dame Magda says Da has a third eye. It helps him see things more clearly than others do.

Is that like the Sight? Can he see the future?

No. Its more like he understands what is happening.

Nodding, Rhys turned back to his work. He chose a stone from the pile, using both hands to hold it and move it slightly back and forth and side to side, all the while standing with eyes closed. She knew from asking him before that he was weighing the stone, sensing its balance, where it was heavy, and imagining where it would best fit. Now, with a little nod, he opened his eyes and carried it to the wall he was building, setting it not where she had expected, but a few stones away from that.

Hed told her he had always loved stone. When he held one he knew its heart, saw the true shape of it. She liked how he spoke about stone, much like her father about archery, or her mother about how to tend the plants in the garden and how she mixed the physicks in her apothecary. When shed asked her mother how she knew that is what spoke to her, she had smiled with surprise, asking where Gwen had learned that phrase.

I heard someone talking about it. So how did you know?

As a child I found peace in the gardens at Freythorpe, and at the priory I enjoyed helping in the garden. Dame Doltrice encouraged me to come whenever I had time, kindly saying I was a help, though I doubt it. I interrupted her with questions. When I married Nicholas Wilton I asked him to teach me all he knew. And he did.

Gwens father said that all young men learned archery when he was a lad, just as many did now, and he had developed a liking for it. She was glad of that. Had he not been so good he might not have been captain of archers for the old Duke of Lancaster, then come to York when his lord died. If he had not come to York and met her mother, Gwen would have different parents. And she adored her parents. She was proud to be Gwenllian Archer.