She looked away from the man and his son, and reminded herself she would not be playing messenger if Sir Gerald had not been injured, and the fault for that was her own. She worried that such weighty words would be dismissed because they came from an ignorant girl and not a knight of Morency. But it could not be helped, and at least she knew something of these past sorrows that threatened to return.

She had lived the first ten years of her life around Lincoln, though only rarely visiting the town itself, and grew up with the story of the eighteen Jews who were hanged because it was said they conspired to kill a Christian boy. Her father had believed in their guilt, but her mother and Aunt Mary had called him wrong. And she remembered when every Jew in England was arrested for coin-clipping – she had been working for the weaver, who lamented that such an unnecessary measure interrupted his trade.

“That great cathedral,” said Elias, his voice bitter as he looked out the window. “When the earth shook its walls to dust, my grandfather gave money to help rebuild it, and knowledge too. The windows and the carvings – there is such decoration in it as shows my people were not always so reviled. And my grandfather’s grandfather laid the stone for this house that I am told I must flee.”

Nan nearly always kept her thoughts to herself, and easily, but it was an effort now to bite her tongue against saying he might sell this house and feed his son, and that he was a fool not to. Pride could not be eaten. It was none of her affair, though. This was the business and council of great lords, and she was only an accidental messenger.

“This is the message you send back with me?” she asked.

“Nay, I...” He looked down at his son, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Give him my thanks. You may tell him I have heard his warnings and will consider his counsel.”

She nodded, glad of the simplicity of it, and moved to the door. The Welshman waited patiently, the falcon’s cage on his back and covered by his cloak. She should have agreed to refreshment for his sake, she realized belatedly. But he looked eager to be gone from here. He inquired of Elias of the friend he sought, a falconer who would have come from Lancaster five years ago, he said.

It was the first she had heard his voice since yesterday. Gone was his easy conversation with Fuss or his idle observations on the weather or landscape as they walked. She missed it. His silence and careful distance made her more aware of him every minute. His eyes never turned to her, and yet still she felt scorched by his look.

But they would part soon, and she would grow used to silence again.