Kitte came whispering to her husband, with:—
“Dame Emma will give me a fresh-laid egg, and gladly, if she know we have so fine a guest.”
“Nay, wife, we will not flaunt our honours abroad,” Langland answered. “'T were as well Dame Emma do not know.”
So Kitte was fain content herself with a sly smoothing of Calote's hair in the midst of Langland's Latin blessing.
The cook in Kennington Palace was one had learned his trade in France a-following the Black Prince. He had a new sauce for each day of the year. Stephen looked with wonder upon the mess of beans that Kitte poured out for him. His trencher bread was all the bread he had; yet even the trenchers at Richard's table were not such bread as this,—black, bitter, hard. He ate his beans off the point of his dagger, and looking across at the fair flower of Calote's face, he marvelled. He had a little mug of penny-ale, and Langland kept him company. Kitte and Calote drank whey and nibbled their trenchers. The meal was silent and short. At the end none poured water over his fingers nor gave him a towel of fine linen to wipe his lips. Excepting the half of his own hard trencher, and this Kitte set away on a shelf, there were left no crumbs wherewith to comfort the poor. Then Kitte lifted the charred sticks off the fire and laid them aside, and Calote scoured the iron pot, and Langland set himself to discourse to his disciple upon the Vision concerning Piers Ploughman.
“And now the Vision 's ended dost dream a new song?” quoth the squire, but his eyes were on Calote.
“I have but one song,” said Long Will. “I write it anew, it changeth ever as the years run, yet in the end 't is the same song.”
He drew forth two rolls of parchment from a pouch at his girdle and looked on them:—
“Since the death of the Black Prince I have changed the old, somewhat. Here”—and he pointed with his finger—“I have a mind to set in a new fable.”
Calote had come to lean against his shoulder, and now she said:—