“Have ye too high a stomach to lie on straw?”
“Oho!” thought I to myself, “then I am to be kept for the mare’s sake, but not admitted to the house:” and said aloud that I could put up with a straw bed.
“Because there’s the stable loft at your service. As ye hear” (and in fact the singing still went on, only now I heard a man’s voice joining in the catch) “our house is full of company. But straw is clean bedding, and the mare I’ll help to put in stall.”
“Agreed,” I said, “on one condition—that you send out a maid to me with a cup of mulled sack: for this cold eats me alive.”
To this he consented: and stepping back into a side room with the other fellow, returned in a minute alone, and carrying a lantern which, in spite of the moon, was needed to guide a stranger across that ruinous yard. The flare, as we pick’d our way along, fell for a moment on an open cart shed and, within, on the gilt panels of a coach that I recogniz’d. In the stable, that stood at the far end of the court, I was surprised to find half a dozen horses standing, ready saddled, and munching their fill of oats. They were ungroom’d, and one or two in a lather of sweat that on such a night was hard to account for. But I asked no questions, and my companion vouchsafed no talk, though twice I caught him regarding me curiously as I unbridled the mare in the only vacant stall. Not a word pass’d as he took the lantern off the peg again, and led the way up a ramshackle ladder to the loft above. He was a fat, lumbering fellow, and made the old timbers creak. At the top he set down the light, and pointed to a heap of straw in the corner.
“Yon’s your bed,” he growled; and before I could answer, was picking his way down the ladder again.
I look’d about, and shiver’d. The eaves of my bedchamber were scarce on speaking terms with the walls, and through a score of crannies at least the wind poured and whistled, so that after shifting my truss of straw a dozen times I found myself still the centre of a whirl of draught. The candle-flame, too, was puffed this way and that inside the horn sheath. I was losing patience when I heard footsteps below; the ladder creak’d, and the red hair and broad shoulders of a chambermaid rose into view. She carried a steaming mug in her hand, and mutter’d all the while in no very choice talk.
The wench had a kind face, tho’; and a pair of eyes that did her more credit than her tongue.
“And what’s to be my reward for this, I want to know?” she panted out, resting her left palm on her hip.
“Why, a groat or two,” said I, “when it comes to the reckoning.”