< previous page page_261 next page >

Page 261
mood than the weather through which they traveled from London to Dover. The skies wept soft ice which clung to cloaks and hoods to melt with the body's heat and soak all in freezing water. There was none of the bright joy of snow that lay lightly and beautifully upon the limbs of the trees and sheltered the sleeping earth under its white mantle. Even when the sun at last came out, the bare bushes and straggled stalks of the previous autumn's reaping did not glitter and sparkle. They hung twisted and distorted under the weight of melting, transparent ice, naked and unseemly. The roads were a morass of frigid, glutinous mud that sucked at the horses' hooves so that they made their way painfully with hanging heads. Worse, it bogged the carts so that the men-at-arms, cursing and groaning, had to dismount and put their shoulders to the half-buried wheels to aid the laboring oxen.
Sometimes Alinor roused herself to speak a word of encouragement to her men, but mostly she just stared in silence, barely remembering to give Beorn Fisherman a few pennies to buy dry firewood. She remembered little of that ride, only misery of body and of mind, only that her fingers and feet froze and cracked even in their furred gloves and boots so that her skin, although it had been well rubbed with goose grease, split and bled.
To be cold was a misery, to be warmed by a fire was a sharp agony because the chilblains stung and stabbed when the numbing cold was gone. She remembered too that the Queen had praised her for her stoic endurance when Alais and her other ladies bewailed their state. Alinor had merely laughed. A physical pain, she had discovered, was a very little thing in comparison to an unquiet mind. It was a relief to think about how her hands and feet hurt, to wonder whether she would be able to find dry clothes and to consider the horror of having again to put on her wet, mud-weighted garments if she could not. Anything at all

 
< previous page page_261 next page >