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the man, who answered with an urgency of his own.
     
    Then there was a third voice, another man’s, raised loud enough to leave no doubt about what he said in anger and bitter satisfaction. “I
thought
you’d both disappeared most conveniently!”
     
    The girl answered, her own words clear with matching anger now. “How did you know where we were? Who told you?”
     
    “I’m not the fool you wish I were. There aren’t mat many places in a house this size and full of people you could go to be alone. Once Jevan said you were both gone, I could guess where you were easily enough.”
     
    “Jevan!” the girl said bitterly.
     
    The young man began to say something, but was cut off scornfully by the older man answering, “You’re just idiot enough to think that, boy!”
     
    Goaded into raising his voice, the young man snapped, “Not so much an idiot as to think you can keep us apart forever!”
     
    “You’d better think it, boy, because I can!”
     
    The girl cried out desperately, “We love each other!”
     
    Brushing past Frevisse on his way to the door, Sir Philip said under his breath, “Jesus, God in heaven.”
     
    Supposing the young woman might take better to her presence and hoping the men might abate their anger because of it, Frevisse rose to follow the priest.
     
    In the small antechamber to the chapel, Sir Clement Sharpe had his nephew, Guy, and his ward, Lady Anne, blocked into a corner. Neither of the young couple looked intimidated or shamed; side by side, they faced his towering anger at them with anger of their own, the girl’s hand laid possessively on Guy’s arm.
     
    She was dressed now in a dark amber, high-belted houppeland and had loosed her pale, honey-colored hair in a haze around her head and shoulders. In the shadowed room she looked as delicately lovely as a carven angel, her brightness the focus of the dark anger between the two men.
     
    “Love has nothing to do with whom you marry,” Sir Clement was saying with a sneer. “You marry whom you’re told and to the best profit. I paid money for that right and profit, and you’ll remember it!”
     
    Before either Guy or Lady Anne could reply, Sir Philip said, “You’ll do better to remember where you are, and why, and lower your voices.”
     
    His own voice was low, at church level, with no temper in it, but it stopped them and brought Sir Clement around to face him, clearly willing to turn his anger that way. But then with what Frevisse could only read as a dawning delight, he exclaimed, “God’s sweet breath, it’s Philip Base-born! You’re looking well above your place in the world!”
     
    “And you’re disgracing yours,” Sir Philip replied evenly. “This is a house in mourning, and on the other side of this door is the cause of it. Take your family squabbling somewhere else. Or better, let it be until you leave Ewelme.”
     
    Sir Clement cast a scornful glance at his nephew and Lady Anne. “Better to tell them than me!” he retorted. “It’s their disobedience, not—”
     
    “You’re too loud in the near presence of God and death,” Sir Philip interposed.
     
    “Don’t you dare speak to me like that, you field whelp! I know—”
     
    “Enough to mind your manners in the
earl
of Suffolk’s house, surely.” Sir Philip cut him off more sharply. Sir Clement drew up short. In that brief advantage Sir Philip said as calmly as before, “May I suggest you and your nephew and ward go to supper quietly now?”
     
    The sideways lift of Sir Clement’s mouth was more sneer than smile. “You may suggest. And I may do exactly what I want.”
     
    He twitched his head in parody of a bow to Sir Philip, then seemed to notice Frevisse for the first time and bowed more credibly to her, then held out his hand demandingly to Lady Anne. Her chin jerked up and her lips tightened, but she stepped away from Guy, made a curtsy to Sir Philip and Frevisse, and, spurning the hand, left the antechamber. Sir Clement,