James managed a false laugh, as if he thought the Millers’ grudging generosity to Alinor was funny; and unwillingly, Mrs. Miller smiled too. “Ah, well,” she said, recovering her temper. “No one is more charitable than me to our poor neighbors. I pride myself on my Christian spirit.”

James nodded his head approvingly. “It does you credit,” he praised her. “A woman so great as you in the neighborhood must show compassion to those who have less.”

“Was it Mr. Tudeley who chose her boy to be server to Master Walter?” she lowered her voice. “I thought it must be him.”

“I really don’t know.”

“But why would a man like him, his lordship’s steward, give a boy like Rob such a chance?” She slid a sideways glance at him. “I trust and pray that she has not played tricks on Mr. Tudeley. They say she can . . .”

James maintained a discouraging silence.

“. . . summon,” she said: an odd ambiguous word.

“Rob was chosen for his skills in the stillroom,” James repeated. “And because he’s a very clever boy.”

She hesitated. “I know she’s a good woman. I had her myself to the birth of my boy. But times are changing and if she can’t get a license for midwifery what is she to do? She might be an honest woman now, but what of the future?”

James glanced up and found Alinor’s dark gaze was steadily fixed on the two of them, watching them as if she could hear every spiteful word. He could not smile reassuringly while Mrs. Miller was pouring poison into his ear.

“Surely the only reason she cannot get a license from the bishop is because there are no bishops in the new parliament?”

“Aye, that’s what she says,” Mrs. Miller said grudgingly. “But everyone knows she’s lost more than one poor woman, dead in childbed. Her own sister-in-law . . .”

“She would get her license if they were being issued?”

“But they’re not! And so she has no license! And anyone can say anything against her.”

“Does anyone actually speak against her?” James asked. He longed to have the courage to add: “other than jealous wives and women with half her looks?”

“It’s only natural that they should. With men being such fools, and her in and out of the house when a wife is laid up. And her looking—” she broke off. She could not bring herself to acknowledge Alinor’s luminous beauty. “Like she does,” she said lamely.

“I hadn’t noticed,” James said firmly.

“You had not? I thought you went fishing with her?”

James was horrified that he was part of the gossip whirling around Alinor. “No, I took Master Walter in the boat with Robert,” he corrected. “She rowed.”

“And the rest of it,” she said coarsely.

He looked at her, his eyes cold, thinking that he must silence this woman at once. She must be stopped from gossiping, or sooner or later the parliament spies would hear of his stay at the Priory, and they would suspect him, Sir William, and the whole ring of conspirators. “There is no rest of it.”