Campion was still worried. “Do you think they’ll come here?”

“No, child. They’re more troops for Corfe, I expect. Stop worrying. They’ll never come here.” Lady Margaret dismissed Werlatton and Scammell from her mind. The two houses were just twelve miles apart, but Puritan Werlatton looked south while Lazen went north for its supplies and market days. There were deep woods between the houses, of interest only to pig keepers and hunters of deer, and Toby’s incursion into Matthew Slythe’s land had been a rare occurrence.

The first frosts of winter came with the long nights. The laborers on the estate swathed themselves with sacking as they brought in the animals. Some were kept alive for the following year, but most were slaughtered and their meat salted down in the store rooms. Barns, paddocks, stables, and home pastures were filled with animals who all needed winter feeding, the great ricks being sliced open like giant loaves, and even the bees in their hives in the kitchen garden needed food. Lady Margaret and Campion put small bowls of water, honey and rosemary into each hive. The castle was closing down for winter’s siege, stocking up on timber and food, looking toward Christmas.

There was still some warlike activity. The hides of the slaughtered cattle were taken to the lime-pits where they were soaked till most of the hair was gone. Then the skins were scraped, tanned with oak-bark and steeped in farmyard dung. The finest leather was treated with dog dung, but this year’s leather did not have to command a high price in the market. This year Lazen made leather for defence, boiling the hides to toughen them, fashioning them into heavy jerkins that could stop a sword cut or a half-spent bullet. Sir George expected war.

He had finally declared his new allegiance. The King, wintering in Oxford, had issued a summons for a parliament to meet in the university town and Sir George had replied with an acceptance. He had asked, in the same letter, that the King should provide a small force to protect and fortify Lazen, and he had warned the tenants and servants that they, too, might have to bear arms beneath the banner of Lazender. The flag now flying on the gatehouse showed a bloodied lance across a green field.

The weather was cold and dirty now, the gray clouds sometimes so low that they obscured the flag and hid the topmost stones of the keep. The trees beside the Lazen stream were bare and black, and there were days when Campion sat in the long gallery and stared at a valley swamped by slanting rain, a gray and dark landscape, and she was glad of the three great fires that warmed the gallery and made mysterious shadows among the prancing deities of Lady Margaret’s heathen ceiling.

Her plasterwork might be pagan, but Lady Margaret was shocked to discover that Campion had not been confirmed into the Church of England. It was hardly likely that she should have been. Her father had despised bishops, and so the confirmation at the hands of the bishop had been dropped in Werlatton parish as had the other services of the church which Matthew Slythe disliked. The Reverend Faithful Unto Death Hervey (and it was with a strange, small shock that Campion sometimes recalled such people from her past) had even abandoned the service of Holy Communion, replacing it with what he chose to call the “Lord’s Supper.” Lady Margaret was outraged. “The Lord’s Supper! Quite ridiculous! You might as well have the Lord’s Breakfast, or the Lord’s Midday Rabbit-pie!”