“Help me with the copper into the scullery for Rob.”

The two women slid the pole through the carry rings and lifted the copper filled with hot water to the center of the room, then Alinor kissed her daughter and saw her out of the front door, turned to the foot of the stairs, and shouted for Rob again.

He came downstairs in his shirt and stripped naked, and washed himself, using the gray soap as Alinor poured jugs of hot water over his shoulders and over his head.

He stepped, long-legged as a calf, out of the water onto a little mat that Alinor put before him, and rubbed himself down with a linen sheet. He sat, wrapped in the sheet on a stool before the fire, as Alinor trimmed his thick brown hair and rubbed it dry with her own mixture of olive oil and apple vinegar and then combed it through with a lice comb. Rob dressed himself in the clean linen that they had given him at the Priory, and a pair of breeches belonging to Walter Peachey.

“Eat some breakfast,” Alinor urged him, and put some bread and small ale before him on the kitchen table.

When he had finished, he lifted the copper with her and carried it back to the scullery. “Shall I pour it away?” he asked her. “It’s heavy for you.”

“I’ll wash down the floors with it later,” she said. “Leave it there.”

Alinor had bought him good secondhand hose in Chichester market and he could still get into the shoes they had given him for Christmas at the Priory, though they were tight across the toes. He had a secondhand jacket which once belonged to Walter.

Alinor stroked the thick wool of the sleeve. “It’s very fine,” she said.

“It’s nothing. It’s his old one, his second-best. He wore velvet to go to university.”

“I am sorry . . .” she started to say.

Rob grinned at her. “Sorry that I don’t have a velvet jacket? Sorry that I can’t eat my dinners at Cambridge? Ma, it is me that’s sorry that my earnings are stopped from the Priory, and Alys can’t get enough for her dowry, and you have to work all the hours of daylight. I know how lucky I am. I know how blessed we’ve been. And as soon as I earn my first wages you shall have them all.”

Alinor reached for him and he bowed his head and allowed her to embrace him, but he no longer clung to her as he used to do, when he was her little boy.

“You’re growing up,” she said mournfully.

“I’m an apprentice lad!” he said proudly.

“I feel like I’m losing you,” she said. “Like you’re slipping away.”

“It’s Chichester,” he reminded her. “I’m not going to sea.”

“No, and I thank God for that at least,” she said. “I’ll look in to see you when I come to market, and you’ll come home for Alys’s wedding on Sunday, and then Lady Day.”