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and their singing together was always everyone’s pleasure. Their voices—his dark, hers light— blended around each other, wending through “At sometime merry, at sometime sad, At sometimes well, at sometimes woe” as gracefully as dancers winding a maypole until at the end they sang exactly together, “He is not wise, he is but mad, That after worldly wealth does go,” and then laughed at their own delight in their shared pleasure while Lady Anneys, Elyn, Tom, Hugh, and Miles lightly applauded them.
     
    Looking back from afterward, Hugh could only think how usual it all had been. A midday gathering like uncounted others, with no warning of what would come. But what warning could there have been, Hugh wondered now, crossing the foreyard back to the hall. Almost a week was past, with time enough to remember, and he did not see what…
     
    ‘Hugh,“ his mother said quietly from the hall doorway.
     
    He had been looking down, making no haste back to the hall, but at her call he looked up and lengthened his pace. He was tired and knew she was and he had not expected her to wait for him there after seeing the guests away. She had taken these past days quietly, the way she took everything. Not even in the first horrible surprise of Sir Ralph’s death had she cried. Elyn and Lucy had shed more than enough tears and Hugh’s thought was that Lady Anneys’ own were dried up with comforting them, but his fear might have been that with the funeral done and the guests gone, her grieving would come over her in a storm. Except, in a carefully buried part of his mind, he doubted that she grieved at all.
     
    But then, did any of them?
     
    He smiled at her as he joined her at the doorway and asked, “Will you rest now, Mother? Can I send Elyn and Lucy off to a far corner of a far field and let you be at peace for a while?”
     
    She smiled back at him. “Not just yet.” Against the black of her mourning gown and veil, her always fair-skinned face was even paler, the gray shadows under her eyes almost its only color. “Master Wyck wants to speak with us all.”
     
    ‘Now? Does it have to be now?“
     
    ‘To have it done with,“ Lady Anneys said. ”He’s to spend the night with Sir William, to be that much further on his road to home come the morning with no need to come back here.“
     
    ‘You’re tired.“ So was he, come to that. Since Sir Ralph’s death there had been no pause in things to be done, beginning with the useless hunt through the woods for his murderer, looking for track of someone and not finding it, casting the hounds wide and wide again, trying to flush someone out but failing. Then there had been sending for the crowner—the king’s officer charged with seeing into unexpected deaths—and when he came, his questions and demands to be answered. And then fetching Ursula from the nunnery and all the preparations for the funeral and finally today the funeral itself and the funeral feast and all that went with that, and now the lawyer wanted them.
     
    Hugh knew he himself was faltering, doubted how much more his mother could endure, and protested more strongly, “You’re too tired for this.”
     
    She laid her hand on his arm, briefly smiled at him, said, “It’s no matter,” and turned away, back into the hall.
     
    Hugh, needing more time than that to gather himself, paused a moment longer on the threshold between the day’s sunlight and the hall’s shadows. Woodrim had never been more than a minor knight’s manor and then for forty years an aged and childless widow’s dower land until, after her death, Sir Ralph had bought it from a distant heir. But he had bought it for the hunting and never much bothered with anything else about it, keeping the hall as he had found it—plain, bare-raftered, not overlarge, with an open hearth in the middle and the smoke meant to escape through a penticed louver in the roof. There was not even a screen-wall here at its lower end to block the