He found the bag that held the woodcocks – Tiffin had brought down two this morning but there had been no time to spare for plucking them. Nan began to rise from the mending she now bent over, but he waved at her to sit back down on the bench next to her aunt, who was asking to know everything of Nan’s life. He sat just outside the door and methodically pulled feathers as he listened.

Nan said she had worked first for a weaver’s wife, and then went to serve in a kitchen in Chester. “From there I served in other places, and now I am at Morency these four years past.” She made no mention of any of the things she had told Gryff last night, nor even that she too had been married and widowed. When asked what her duties were at Morency if not in the kitchen, she did not say she could kill a man twice her size with a flick of her wrist. She only said her duties were to attend to whatever tasks the lady of Morency required, and went on to describe her efforts to learn from that lady about healing herbs.

He listened to them discuss the many and varied uses for swine-grass and wondered if Mary noticed that while every use she herself had for it was to treat digestion, every use Nan mentioned was to do with healing cuts and stopping bleeding. It was a strange circumstance, that he knew more about her than this woman who loved her so well.

When he finished with the woodcocks, he brought them in and found that Nan had removed the linen fillet from her hair. She was holding it out to Mary, who protested she must wash her hands first before touching it.

“To learn physicking from a great lady and stitching too,” she marveled as she thrust her hands into a bowl of water and scrubbed vigorously with a cloth. “My own sister’s daughter! She had fine looks but never such a fine manner as you have nor half the wit, and it’s sure you never got neither from your father, may God assoil him.”

Nan flinched at the words, staring at her aunt’s back. She had not known her father was dead, it was clear. But just as quickly as the surprise had appeared, it was gone. She banished all feeling from that expressive face, casting a quick glance in Gryff’s direction.

“Come, Aunt Mary, you will scrub your hands bloody and that is worse than any dirt.” She crossed to take Mary’s hands from the bowl and dried them with her own skirt, ignoring Mary’s protests that she would ruin a gown so fine. “Sit you by the window so you have light to see.”