2

WILLIAM’S CURSE

Penhallam’s hall smelled of smoke, straw, dog excrement, and the sweat of men. Fresh straw laced with fragrant herbs was laid down across the timber floor every Sunday, and by the end of the week the manor’s residents picked a careful path through the hall. Tom Butler, Gerald’s uncle and the oldest of Penhallam’s household knights, crossed the floor to her with a large cup of ale in his hand.

“You’ll be wanting this, my lady,” he said gravely, handing the wooden cup to her.

She thanked him and took her usual seat on the stool at the end of the trestle table, across from the hearth. Without tasting the ale, she set the cup down on the table, bent her face into her hands, and rubbed her eyes. She felt as if she had aged ten years since that morning.

Martha set bread and ale out on the table, her usual chattiness gone. Death seemed to have followed them back from the woods, and the hall was quiet and somber in its presence. Gwendolyn picked up a crust of bread, felt her stomach turn, and put the crust back down onto the plate. She stared into the hearth, wishing she could enjoy its warmth without being reminded of the night when her parents had died. She had been five years old, but she remembered the heat of the fire clearly, the look on her mother’s face when the flames reached her skirts while Gwendolyn’s father lay unconscious beneath a collapsed timber. A man had rushed in and grabbed Gwendolyn beneath her arms, swept her out of the cottage, and then left. She had watched the roof of the house collapse, sending a burst of orange sparks up into the night. She remembered her shock that something so terrible and cruel could be so beautiful at the same time. When others arrived from the village, they had found her safe beside a tree, quiet and alone. The man who had rescued her was never found. As young as she was, she had known that night that her life had been altered in an irrevocable way, that joy and laughter were gone from her future.

Foolish or not, the woods had been her only sanctuary. Now that was gone, too.

Osbert stepped into the hall, carrying the heavy black pot of stew in front of him, followed by the stooped figure of Gamel, William’s father and a spicer. Gamel’s knowledge of the healing uses of herbs and salves had served Penhallam and nearby villages and abbeys since before Gwendolyn was born. Gamel had instructed William as his apprentice until William’s fourteenth year, when Gwendolyn’s parents died and she left to live with the baron and his family at Restormel. She had wondered later if Gamel resented his son’s decision to take up arms, to pursue a life of breaking men’s b