The lady of Wearie Manor hummed to herself as she stitched a new hem in her linen gown. Humming and hemming, she thought to herself, and smiled. It was Lady Phillipa’s favorite time of day. Her baby Robbie was asleep in his cradle downstairs, under the watchful eye of the nurse, Matilda. Her older children were with Father James at the parish chapel school in Macclesfield. The men of the house were hard at work threshing in the barn, and the women were doing the household’s weekly washing outside at the well. She could enjoy her time alone in the solar, letting her thoughts wander where they would.
Running the manor while her husband was away on crusade with his liege lord, Earl Ranulf of Chester, was a greater task than she’d anticipated. She had always had charge of the cook and household maids, the children and their nurse, but now she was also expected to give
orders to the two huntsmen who doubled as manor guards, to the reeve, and to the farmhands and peasants who lived on the estate and owed their lord service, especially now, during harvest season. Lady Phillipa did not relish being in this position. She much preferred her books and her needlework, her interior life in the quiet time she spent alone in her chambers. These days it was
hard to get a moment to herself until well after sunset, and so this peaceful hour was bliss to her.
It ended when a clamor reached her from downstairs. Robbie had begun to fuss, and the crying went on for several minutes without subsiding, so that Lady Phillipa, stifling a few mild oaths, rose unwillingly from her chair. She stepped out of her solar and went to the top of the stairs leading down to the parlor, where her nurse was tending the baby. “Matilda!” she called.
“What’s happening down there? Can’t you keep him quiet?”
She received no answer, but in a few moments the child had graduated from bellow to sob. Lady Phillipa assumed that Matilda had picked up the infant to soothe him and had the situation well in hand. Yet no sooner had the lady seated herself in the solar once more, taking up her sewing, than the uproar started again, this time far more urgently: the child seemed to be screaming in real pain. Phillipa rushed back to the top of the stairs and shouted down, “Matilda! What in heaven’s name ails the boy?”
When she again received no answer, Lady Phillipa sighed and started downstairs. It was all too likely that her quiet time was over for the day. Damn that nurse! Phillipa had hired her herself, after the baby had come. Lord Wearie had gone off to the Holy Land two months before the child arrived. Matilda was a young woman from nearby Macclesfield whose own baby had died and who had no husband to support her. She had seemed an ideal nurse, but Phillipa was not happy with the woman’s work. She would have to give her a reprimand if she could not keep the child from this kind of frantic display.
When she reached the foot of the stairs, she turned toward the parlor and began to scold. “Matilda, you must know that this is not acceptable—”
But when Lady Phillipa entered the parlor, Matilda was not holding the baby. Instead the nurse was crouched in a shadowy corner at the far end—in fear or in hiding?—while looming over the cradle in the center of the room was a tall figure in a black hood, holding a long, bloodied tool of some kind. His intent was unmistakable: Phillipa could see red stains on the cradle as she watched its rocking slow and cease. The infant’s crying had stopped.
The lady had only one thought—to protect her child. She dashed forward and snatched the boy up in her arms, her mind recognizing at once that the infant was dead but her arms still pressing him to her breast in futile hope.
Sick with shock and grief, Lady Phillipa turned and ran screaming for the door, in the vain hope that one of the threshers in the barn or the washers at the well would hear. But the man was already upon her. He grabbed her long brown hair from beneath her linen fillet and, forcing her to her knees, yanked her head back.
“Spare me!” Lady Phillipa pleaded. “In the name of our sweet Virgin, Maria Misericordia, hold your hands!”
Her plea was useless. The weapon swept across the lady’s exposed throat, mingling the mother’s blood with the son’s. Her last thought, as darkness descended on her eyes, was a hope that the killer would be gone before her other children came home.
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