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grief could not be plumbed. She stared fixedly into the trees as if willing herself elsewhere.
    Hildegard put a sheltering arm round her shoulders. “My dear little Maud, you’re safe with us. You know that. We’ll do everything we can to protect you.” She felt the hollowness of this remark in the circumstances, but could think of no other way to comfort the child. “It’s best if you tell us what you know so that those men can be found and punished.”
    “Nobody will punish them,” the girl muttered. “They’re protected by a great lord. They told us so. I know they won’t be punished.” There was anger as well as heartbreak in her voice.
    Hildegard walked her safely away from the water’s edge. “Why would they follow you, Maud? What possible reason could they have?”
    Maud scrubbed at her face with her knuckles. More coaxing and the obvious fact that Hildegard was not going to give up without some sort of explanation elicited a small, wounded voice. “They’ll be the men who destroyed our manor,” she began. “I don’t know where they came from.”
    “Destroyed your manor?” Hildegard repeated.
    “They rode into our vill and destroyed it the way they’ve destroyed your grange.”
    “Did you hear them use any names?”
    “They all called their leader, ‘my lord.’ He seemed to think he was the king because he said to our fathers when they objected, ‘Do as I say. You’re nothing but bondmen and bondmen you’ll remain!’”
    Those were the words King Richard was reputed to have said when the rebels were hanged at St. Albans after the Great Revolt.
    “And where did they come from, do you think?” Hildegard asked in a careful tone.
    “They said they came from far away … and that they were loyal liegemen … unlike our fathers who…” her voice dropped to a whisper, her words trailing away to nothing.
    Hildegard wrapped her cloak round her despite the hot day. The girl was shivering violently. “And then what happened?” she encouraged.
    “They said they’d come to put matters right for the barons, then they took our fathers and uncles out of the fields and made them stand on the green and they pretended to have a trial.” She buried her face in the folds of her cloak and her shoulders shook.
    “Go on, my pet,” Hildegard encouraged when her sobs abated a little.
    With difficulty and with many hesitations, Maud whispered, “After that they marched them down the lane away from the cottages and set the thatch on fire and we thought they’d march them back again, but one of the men rode back by himself and … and he was laughing and he said, ‘They won’t be rebels now!’ And then he told us they’d been strung up … food for crows.”
    She stopped suddenly and Hildegard wrapped her cloak more closely about her.
    But Maud had not finished her story. “The other men came back. There were six of them.” The words seemed to stick in her throat again and she was unable to continue.
    Eventually Hildegard was forced to ask, “When the men came back, Maud, my pet, did they harm your mothers?”
    Maud nodded. Her eyes moistened and then suddenly the dam broke and she burst into a flood of tears.
    “And the rest of you?” Hildegard asked after a long time, when the child had cried her heart out. “Did they harm you, Maud?”
    She nodded then clung to Hildegard as if she would never let go. Eventually in a stifled voice she said, “They killed my little brother. They cut him with their swords and killed him because he threw a stone at them to make them go away.”
    “How old was your brother?”
    “Five.”
    Hildegard held the child and rocked her to and fro. It would be useless to show weakness when she was all the child had left.
    When she could Hildegard rose to her feet, keeping a fold of her robe round Maud’s shoulders. “Thank you for telling me what happened. These men with their so-called lord must be caught and punished, whoever they are.”
    Maud was