Read Online I Serve by Rosanne E. Lortz - Free Book Online

tenanted a small croft that my mother’s father had stewardship over. I was ten years old at the time, old enough to work the fields like any serf or hired plow hand. I swung a scythe at harvest time and sweated among the hay ricks. Sometimes, my grandfather brought me with him when he administered the lands of the estate. Sometimes, he took me to the manor house when he surveyed the rent rolls. The landowner himself was rarely present. My grandfather told me that the master was too great a man to stay long on his estates. The king demanded his attendance and so he traveled around the England with the transient royal household, only stopping in Hertfordshire when the court came close.
    My father, too crippled to follow the plow himself, raged against this activity on my part. “You’ll make the boy unfit for anything but field labor,” he complained to my grandfather. Even though the hammer of war had broken his own body, he had no desire for me to be anything else but a soldier. With me, the line of Potenhale warriors must continue or become extinct. “He must learn to swing a sword, not a scythe. His arm must heft a shield, not a bag of meal.”
    At evening time, when the day’s labor had concluded, my father would hobble out of doors with me. There he would bid me strike with a wooden blade at a fence post, as the squires do on the wooden pels of the practice yard. “Strike harder!” said he. “From beneath! Now turn about!” My mother would watch from the door of the house, small wrinkles forming in her brow. Women never feel the stirrings of the march in their breast or the call of the trumpet in their soul. She had seen what a life of arms had brought to my father, and though she never spoke it, she hoped I might someday become a steward in my grandfather’s footsteps.
    One summer’s day, when I had reached my twelfth year, my grandfather brought news that the owner of the estate had returned for a few short days. My father looked at him sharply, and in cryptic language said, “Now God be praised! The boy is of age now, Thomas,”—for Thomas was the name of my grandfather—“and what better time to put him forward than the one at hand?”
    My grandfather frowned a little and rubbed his wizened forehead. “I have said that I will ask, but the request is a great one and unlikely to be granted. You are not of noble blood. Your father was no knight. What call should my master have to take in your son?”
    “ Well were you named Thomas,” replied my father fiercely, “for you do nothing but doubt when the way is laid out plain in front of you. Aye, I am no nobleman, but your master was no nobleman himself. He was knighted for his worth and not his name, and so too will be my son.” He turned to me. “Boy, ready yourself! Your grandfather is taking you to the manor house, and if God be willing, you shall not come back here again.”
    The landowner was in his prayers when we arrived. I remember the stoop of his broad shoulders before the image of the Blessed Virgin on the altar. The dust of travel still coated him but it could not dim the bright blue of his surcoat or the silver face that shone upon it. “Ah, Thomas!” the master said when he had arisen. “It does me good to see your face. The tenants are as quiet and the house as orderly as I could ask. You have done your work well in my absence.”
    “ Sir John,” said my grandfather humbly. “I am glad that my work finds favor in your eyes, for I come before you to beg a boon.”
    “ Speak it,” replied the master.
    In short, halting words, my grandfather humbly beseeched that I might enter the house as a page, be trained in service later as a squire, and someday—if the Holy Trinity willed it—become a knight. Then, before Sir John could muster any objections to receiving me, my nervous grandfather nearly buried his request with a pile of them. “The boy has his wits about him, but he’s none too clever. He works hard, but he’s awkward