He wiped his forehead, shook his head to cast off his thoughts, and took her hand as he stood. “Do not bow, Cook. I pray you. Ah! Here is Blanche!”

The girl squeezed up against him, hugging his side.

“I must speak before the rest come in,” Cook continued, wheezing. “They’re holding them all outside. I snuck in the back way.”

“Sit, I pray you.”

“It’s easier for me to stand with my aching bones, my lord. Let me just say my piece, and I won’t bother you more.”

“Go on.”

She had lost several teeth, which made her cheeks sunken, but her gaze remained firm and intelligent. “I beg your pardon, my lord. I did not mean for Lord Geoffrey to discredit you. Last year I told him what I did know, because he asked me for the truth.”

“You said nothing but what you knew to be true. You have no need to apologize for it.”

“Yet I’m sorry. I never believed he would treat you so cruelly. I wouldn’t treat a dog so, chained and caged like that! So I told him!”

“Then you did me a service for speaking when you might have kept silent. Never mind it.” He patted Blanche on the head. “What of the girl?”

“Oh! This one?” The pinched look left her face. She gave a grand smile and tweaked the girl’s ear fondly. “What a hard-working little creature she is, isn’t she, then? She stuck beside me all this time and did everything I asked of her. Good with a knife! Very careful handed, which you don’t often see in a child this age. I can’t trust just any lass with peeling and cutting. Washed me up turnips and parsnips, cutting out the soft spots, of which there are plenty, for these are the end of our winter store and some of them mostly mush by now.”

Blanche blushed, face half hidden against Alain’s tunic, but she was smiling proudly.

“Will you keep her in the kitchens, then, as your helper? And keep care of her? Can you do that?”

“For you, my lord? Willingly. I swear to you I will do by her as I would for my own granddaughter.”

“You’ll stay here, Blanche.”

“I want to go with you, Uncle,” she said into the cloth.

“You can’t.” He only needed to say it once. “Here you’ll stay. Tell me you understand.”

She spoke in a muted voice while her arms clutched him. “I stay with Cook.”

A dozen soldiers tromped onto the porch and came into the hall, placing themselves to either side of the dais. A pair of servants carried the count’s chair in from another chamber and set it in front of the high table. Folk moved cautiously into the hall behind the soldiers, their movement like the eddying of river currents caught in a backwater. A few crept close to him and knelt furtively, whispering words he could not really hear because of the shifting of feet and murmur of voices.