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must grieve you deeply.”
     
    “Indeed it does, sir.”
     
    That was sufficient for both of them; but as he turned aside to follow the servant who would show him in, she saw that the squire with him was young Robert Fenner, who had aided her against Sir Walter’s anger at St. Frideswide’s that same time ago. In the three years since she had last seen him, he had left the last of boyhood for young manhood, Frevisse observed. But the brief, warm smile he cast her as he followed Sir Walter showed he remembered her.
     
    Then the little, bouncing man—whom she had learned was Gallard Basing, the usher here—advanced on her with another newly arrived guest. “Sir Clement Sharpe,” Gallard announced with unusual terseness, and stood aside.
     
    Sir Clement was a lean, pallid man with thinning hair the dull brown of dead leaves, and eyes that matched it. He was elegantly dressed in a wide-cut dark blue houppelande amply trimmed with gray fur, and a long-liripiped hat that he had already removed for his bow to her, a bow a little more deep and flourished than need be.
     
    “My lady, my profound regrets for your uncle’s death.”
     
    “Thank you. We greatly appreciate your coming. Aunt Matilda will be pleased.”
     
    She did not understand the twitch of his mouth, or his answer. “Assure her we’d settled the matter before he fell finally ill, and I’ll not take any advantage over it.”
     
    She smiled and said, “I’m sure you won’t.” Because whatever the matter had been, it would not be Aunt Matilda he dealt with, but the earl of Suffolk’s lawyers, for Suffolk and Alice were Chaucer’s heirs.
     
    “May I introduce my ward?” Sir Clement asked, and put back his hand to draw a girl forward. At first Frevisse thought she was a child, but a more careful look revealed she was more likely sixteen or seventeen, only small for her years and daintily built. “Lady Anne Featherstone.”
     
    Lady Anne curtsied. She was dressed in plain dark wool for travel, but her manners were as pretty as her face. Frevisse curtsied back but Sir Clement was already adding, less graciously, “And my nephew, Guy Sharpe.”
     
    There was little family resemblance between lean and pallid Sir Clement and the broad-chested, handsome young man who stepped forward on Lady Anne’s other side. He bowed and said appropriate words of greeting, but rather than his words, Frevisse noted the warm, sideways look of affection that Lady Anne gave him as he did.
     
    Frevisse was not sure if Sir Clement saw it, too, but before Guy had finished straightening, Sir Clement had begun to move away, drawing Lady Anne with him and to his other side, away from Guy, in one neat gesture. Frevisse saw the young man’s face tighten, his eyes on Lady Anne even as he finished speaking to her, before he followed in Sir Clement’s wake.
     
    Frevisse hoped they kept in abeyance whatever coil of trouble they were building until they had left Ewelme.
     
    A gap in travelers came late in the afternoon, and Frevisse left her duties to go to the chapel. Except for a brief time this morning, she had not been there since yesterday about this hour.
     
    Neither the shadows nor the candlelight nor the cold had changed since then. Nor her grief. And she was still tired, though now from dealing with too many people and talking more than she was used to, rather than from cold and travel. Even the watchers around the coffin might have been the same as yesterday’s; and then she saw that at least one of them was: the household priest, Sir Philip.
     
    She stood awhile inside the doorway, letting the silence envelop and soothe her, before she finally knelt to pray. But she had barely begun when low voices outside the chapel’s shut door broke her concentration. She tried to pray in spite of them, but although their words were obscured by the chapel door, their emotions were not. A young man and a woman—or perhaps a girl—her tone desperate, urging something to