“Hell, we do need a long evening and lot of wine, don’t we. Well, you can give this blue silk to someone more deserving, then.” He set the red and blue cloth out, and picked up the harp again.

Another fabric poked out of the sack. Marcus tugged the corner into better view while David tested the instrument’s sounds. “This green velvet is very rich. Is that for me, too?”

David tucked the harp into his arms and tried the strings again. A little melody managed to come together. “That is for the sister.”

“Do you mean Nesta?”

“She admired it in my shop that day, and I thought she might like to have it. It would be rude to gift you and Genith and not her.”

Marcus stroked the luxurious velvet. He glanced at the handsome merchant absorbed in the harp. He thought about how David had remembered Nesta’s coveting this cloth, and how he now planned to bestow this gift privately.

“David, you are an old friend, but let me make something very clear to you.”

“What is that?”

“If you give Nesta this velvet, I will kill you.”

The fingers on the harp did not pause. David did not even look up, but a vague smile formed as he watched the strings. “It sounds as though we need a very long evening and at least a barrel of wine, Mark.”

All afternoon Nesta watched the statue being moved. It became a major project, with many men involved, but they probably finished in half the time they should because the huge Swede named Sieg lent his strength to the task. Finally a long line of satisfied men filed out the chapel door and headed to the hall for some ale and supper.

Once the yard was quiet, Nesta nipped down from the wall walk from where she had observed the work. This statue made her curious. That it bore a likeness very similar to Marcus did not especially fascinate her, nor that it was the first marble statue she had ever seen. It had been the expression on Marcus’s face when he saw it in the wagon that compelled her to go. She suspected that the statue embodied some of the things she had neglected to ask him about that night.

Total silence shrouded the chapel. Like the lodge in the morning, only narrow shafts of light entered the cold, dark stones through the little high windows.

She found the statue in an alcove tucked inside the shallow transept. The figure of the last lord of Anglesmore rose above the stone marking his crypt. It was so lifelike that it might have been an image of the resurrection after the final judgment, when the bones leave the grave to enter the body again.