The PROMISE
Which is it to be, my lady? The blue brocade or the brown velvet?’
‘Oh, Alys!’ Lady Elinor de Bohun smiled, as she considered the dresses held up for her inspection. ‘Have you no poetry in your soul? Why not offer me a robe the azure of this summer sky, or the russet of the turned earth?’
‘Have you no poetry in your soul?’
She flung her arms wide in a sweeping gesture, which took in the view from the open, leaded window of the manor’s carefully tended gardens and terraces, the moat, the jousting field and, beyond that, the wooded estates, and the farms shading into a blur of green and gold in the sun. Then she indicated the blue – or rather, the azure – and Alys, her lady-in-waiting, began to help her to dress.
On the other side of the room, Joan Hobby smiled to herself as she emptied the slops into a pail. Her rough dress was brown too – the brown of a muddy puddle. As the daughter of a peasant farmer, and not a lady like Lady Elinor or even a lady’s maid like Alys, it was the only dress she could ever hope to own.
She’d been lucky to get her job at the manor. Her brothers and sister, though younger, were already working for their father, stoning crows and pulling thistles. Work at the manor, even the most lowly, was easy by
