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will you.”
    She was speechless, for one of the few times in her life.
    “The Normans are here to stay,” said Alric the shepherd, who rarely spoke and had come into the cookhouse to warm his feet as he did every morning. His solemn voice made them all stop and look at him. “He is one man. Better that than an army.”
    “Aye,” said Alf. “If he stays, mayhap Count Robert will not bother us too much. They can be satisfied.”
    “So you mean to give in?” Elsinora cried. “Will no one fight?”
    The spit boy tugged on her sleeve and she looked down at him. “I will fight beside you, my lady.”
    Her heart swelled at his simple, innocent loyalty. “Thank you, Nat. I see you are the bravest man here.”
    “You’re the one that must be brave,” chuckled Bertha, “facing the likes of that on your wedding night.”
    Immediately the women descended into more guffaws and even the men struggled to keep straight faces, except young Nat, who failed to understand, and Alf who, finally remembering she was the master’s daughter, chided them all for speaking crudely.
    Elsinora gathered her temper. “It does not escape my notice, Bertha, that when we were all to be ravished in our beds while we slept, it was a matter for great lament and all my fault. Now that I am to be the only one ravished in her bed by a mercenary Norman cuckoo no one seems at all concerned. In fact, it is to be encouraged and I must shut up and be brave! ”
    Bertha couldn’t meet her eye, but held her apron to her mouth and turned away to get on with the cooking.
    Elsinora was frustrated by the giggles of the other women. She’d once heard one of her father’s milk-maids refer to her as “frost-bitten”. They said she was like her mother—a lady who had considered the act of coupling with a man as something God gave to women as punishment, a painful, terrifying ordeal that must be suffered and got over with quickly. All desires of the flesh, her mother had preached, were wrong, sinful, and should be repulsed. Men forced themselves on women to beget heirs, but women never had pleasure from it, and once it was done they must pray to God and repent the sin they’d tempted with their own bodies.
    “Men can take by force,” her mother used to say, “everything but our love. Always keep your heart pure. It belongs to God. Lock it away where no man’s filthy, undeserving hands can abuse it.”
    Because Elsinora had avoided marriage to Stryker Bloodaxe for so long, the other women thought she was the same as her mother and had no passion, no desires of that nature. But they were wrong. In youth, she’d believed what her mother told her, but, as the years passed and she discovered her own bodily needs, Elsinora grew to doubt her mother’s lectures. She knew Gudderth had enjoyed the company of a cheerful mistress for years, although he liked to call his visits to her cottage “medicinal”. Elsinora was often sent to find her father and deliver a message when he was in the arms of his mistress. Many a time she remembered sitting on a barrel outside the woman’s cottage, kicking her feet in the dirt and singing songs while she waited for her father to get dressed and come out. It had eventually occurred to her that her father’s mistress was far too happy about his visits for the act of swiving to cause her any pain, terror or degradation. There were often screams from inside the cottage, yes, but they were not the screams of fear or torture. Too often they were followed by laughter and pleas for more of the same.
    She’d began exploring her own body then, just to see if she was capable of sinful sensations like the lusty wenches in the village, who tumbled gladly with any man once they’d had enough cider under the hot harvest sun. When she stood, thigh-deep, in her stream for the first time and realized she was not like her mother at all, it was hardly a welcome discovery. It meant she was a sinner and had a great deal of praying to God