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add thy blade to ours ‘gainst thieves
     or Lombards, as is equitable.’
    It was a generous offer, and for a moment Roger was tempted to accept it; he did not underestimate the risks he was taking.
     But it was not, after all, money that he was primarily hoping to recover, and he knew besides how little likely he was to
     be given any money to go back to Oxford from Robert Bacon’s hands; then he would be stranded in London, with no possible course
     but to ship with Busshe’s wool to Flanders and try his luck in Paris at the dormant University. That was out of the question;
     he was not ready for that by years.
    Nay, I cannot,’ he said. ‘God’s blessing on thee, William Busshe, but I’m bidden to Ilchester, and thence to Oxford, and will
     abide the course. I’ll recall thy kindness in my prayers.’
    ‘As it pleaseth thee,’ Busshe said. ‘Fare thee well, then.’ He called Madge home and hooded and jessed her; and in a while,
     the last of the procession had vanished to the north.
    Gloomily, Roger got John Blund into motion, more than half convinced that his refusal had been the worst kind of folly. He
     was not even much cheered by the sight of a distant inn from the top of the next rise, nor finding, as he drew closer, that
     the ‘bush’ or sign was up on the ale-stake, meaning ‘open for business’. Good wine needs no bush, but he was in no position
     to pay for good wine, nor bad, either. And there could hardly be any money for him at Yeo Manse; he was making this wittold’s
     pilgrimage for the sake of nothing but a few childish trinkets ….
    A few toys, and an
ignis fatuus, a
will-o’-the-wisp drifting far in the future, conjured into being by a Greek dead fourteen weary centuries already.
    *
    Yeo Manse was not, properly speaking, in Ilchester; legally, it was in the parish of Northover, on the other side of the river,
     connected with Ilchester by a low stone bridge. Northover was, however, nothing notable as a town, while Ilchester stood athwart
     Fosse Way, a major road through the district ever since the Romans had built it, and the Bacons had seen the advantages which
     would accrue from identifying with Ilchester quite early on – long before most of the other local franklins had, in fact.
     The parish church of St. Mary had been established by Christopher Bacon’s grandfather as a chantry where masses were to be
     sung for his soul by a single priest; later, Christopher’s father and two other freeman landholders had contributed the silver
     and the boon work which had raised the squat octagonal tower, so oddly pagan and brooding for a Christian temple, and since
     that time, all the Bacons who had died at home had been buried there.
    How the town had prospered since was clearly visible to Roger from where he had paused in the early morning light just over
     the rim of the valley. The chessboard of orchards and pastures was sere and without motion in the cold of Autumn-Month, but
     from the clustered house and shops south of the Yeo, there rose many slow-writhing lines of hazy white wood-smoke; and the
     bare trees of the churchyard could not conceal the elegance of St. Mary, with its new (no older than Roger!) horizontal building
     abutting the octagonal tower, which had piers formed of mouldings in stone at doors, windows and arcades. Ilchester was a
     borough of substance now: it even had bailiffs, though only as of last year.
    What of substance now remained for Roger of Yeo Manse was the question. Ilchester itself did not, from this distance, look
     at all disturbed by the incursion of the King’s justiciar, but that meant only that de Burgles knights had not burned anything
     down–for which, of course, one should thank God, but not too hastily, for there were worse depredations possible which would
     still leave behind just so superficially peaceful a scene as this. The problem now was to skirt YeoManse closely enough to assess how it had fared, and thence into Northover to find