Read The Town House for Free Online Page A

about Kate to be other than vexed by the performance and the time it took, but even then I could see its comical side, especially when the little foal, shrewd enough to see that it was being robbed, came butting in. However, at last we had a cupful of milk in the bowl. Kate drank it and it stayed down. The old woman slipped some more herrings on the stick.
    ‘Maybe St. Christopher knew what he was about when he let my basket break,’ she said. I then looked at the two osier baskets which stood by the fire and saw that the bottom of one of them had given way.
    ‘I’d have been a mile or two farther along the road if that hadn’t happened,’ the old woman said. ‘Couldn’t go scattering the good fish, so I thought I’d stop and mend it up while I could see; then I felt hungry and reckoned I’d eat first.’
    ‘And we smelt your supper and were saved,’ I said, looking at Kate, who was holding the bowl in both hands and sipping slowly, but steadily.
    ‘Slip a bit of bread down with it, afore your belly shuts again,’ the old woman said, handing her a slice. Kate ate, obediently, and when that stayed with her too I knew the worst was over.
    When I was full to bursting, I licked my fingers and offered to try my hand at mending the basket. I used a piece of the cord and some young hazel wands. Kate curled up under cover of her cloak and slept; the oldwoman and I sat by the fire. She had lost all fear of me by that time, and when I needed my knife for the work, handed it back with a grin.
    ‘I was flummoxed to see you,’ she confessed. ‘Mostly I’m on the look-out for trouble, but on this bit of road I never seen another living soul, not in all the years I’ve travelled it. None else know of it, and I ain’t likely to tell them.’
    It was a strange road, like none I ever saw before or since. Under the grass, which was shallow-rooted, were large flat slabs of stone, set edge to edge. I scraped away the grass to have, a better look at it.
    ‘It’s a wonderful good road for a loaded donkey,’ said the old woman. ‘Pity there ain’t more like it. I blundered on it by accident.’
    She told me how, years before, with another donkey, she had camped for the night on a common and waked to find that, despite his hobble, the donkey had strayed. She thought she could hear him moving behind some breast-high bracken, and looking for him, had found the road.
    ‘That was the end, all grown over and known to none. But it looked to me to run the same way as the other, so I reckoned I’d try it. And I’m glad I did. It’s ten miles of easy going for the beast, and nice for a lone woman to have a spell with her mind at rest without fearing to be set upon. The ghosts I don’t mind. They don’t heed me, nor me them.’
    ‘Ghosts?’
    ‘Aye. The like of no mortal men they are. Marching men, with short skirts, like a woman’s but up to the knee, and shining helmets with brushes atop. There’s great silver eagles on poles going ahead of them. I’ve seen them many’s the time. The first time I was too scared to breathe, but I crossed myself and they went by without so much as a glance.’
    ‘You have a stout heart,’ I said.
    ‘For some things. I’m feared of robbers. And of the time when I cannot get around to sell my herrings.’ She watched me work for a while. ‘By your hands,’ she said, ‘you’re a smith. I’ve an idea that you broke your time and ran off to get married.’
    An apprentice who left his master before his time was up was in fault, but he was not the marked, hunted man that a serf was who had run from his manor, so I nodded.
    ‘Ah well, there’s good masters and bad. Was yours a beater?’
    I nodded again, thinking to myself that in the morning I must warn Kate to tell the same tale.
    ‘There’s a smith in Baildon who might take you – if you was well-spoke of by somebody he knew, like me.’
    ‘Would you so speak?’
    ‘I might. You seem to me a decent sort of chap. And it’d cost me