Read The Hunter’s Tale for Free Online Page B

draughts when the outside door was opened and from where he stood in the doorway Hugh could see its length, past the servants clearing away the remains of the funeral feast from the long table set up along one side, in a hurry to have their own feasting in the kitchen, to the far end where the dais raised the master’s table a step above the rest of the hall for whoever sat there to see and be seen by the rest of the household.
     
    The hall’s only window was there, looking out from one end of the dais onto the foreyard, tall and narrow and glassed at the top above the shutters so that even in winter or ill weather when the heavy wooden shutters were closed, there could be some light in the hall besides through the doorway or from candles or rushlights. Today in the warm afternoon the shutters stood open, letting the westering sunlight fall the dais’ length across Tom, Sir William, and Master Wyck standing together behind the table there, next to Sir Ralph’s tall-backed chair. Tom’s chair now, Hugh reminded himself; but neither Tom nor anyone else had sat there since Sir Ralph’s death. Tom would have to, sooner or later, there being only their mother’s smaller chair and the benches otherwise, but presently the men were all standing, talking, a cluster of blackness in their mourning gowns and doublets. At the dais’ farther end Elyn, Lucy, Ursula, and Philippa were gathered close together, Miles standing near them but somehow not with them, still in the silence that he had kept heavily around him this while since Sir Ralph’s death.
     
    ‘Since I can’t mourn and shouldn’t openly rejoice, best I just keep quiet,“ he’d said when Hugh had asked how he was.
     
    Still wishing that Master Wyck would wait with whatever he wanted to say, Hugh followed his mother up the hall. Sir William and Master Wyck bowed to her as she joined them and Tom took her by the hand to bring her to her chair beside Sir Ralph’s. She sat and Sir William leaned over her, laying a hand on hers on the chair arm, saying something too low for Hugh to hear. She shook her head and said something back. At the dais’ other end Miles opened the door to the parlor and stepped aside for the girls and Elyn to go in. Lucy and Ursula did, but as Lady Anneys answered Sir William, Elyn and Philippa both paused and, with Miles, looked back toward them. Then Miles said something to Elyn and she nodded and went on, but Philippa paused a moment longer, looking from Miles to her father and back to Miles until from the parlor Elyn ordered loudly, sharply, “Philippa!”
     
    Philippa winced. Miles ruefully shrugged at her and she ruefully shrugged back with a slight, uneven smile and followed Elyn into the parlor, Miles closing the door behind her. Hugh had sometimes wondered, in the two years since Elyn had married Sir William, how Philippa, only two years younger and often with Elyn while they were growing up, felt at having Elyn for a stepmother, wielding a stepmother’s authority over her. Hugh doubted Elyn troubled herself with wondering. Elyn had welcomed marriage, been glad to become Lady Elyn and free of anyone telling her what to do except her husband, nor had she yet shown any regrets; and since there was a great deal of their father in Elyn, Hugh well supposed she probably did not care what Philippa thought or felt about any of it so long as Philippa did what she was told and made no quarrel about it.
     
    Sir William was still speaking to Lady Anneys, now sitting with her head bowed and her hands folded on her lap, seemingly making no answer. It was Tom, standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder, who interrupted whatever Sir William was saying, saying instead to Master Wyck, “I agree with Sir William. Why isn’t this something that can wait?”
     
    Hugh joined Miles at the end of the table. Low-voiced he asked, “What’s the trouble?”
     
    ‘Master Wyck wants to talk of the will. Nobody else does.“
     
    ‘Maybe it’s