He tapped his long nose. 'Nevertheless, for your stake you have cast down a very little: three nights of bed and board against the chaining me up.'
'Husband,' she answered. 'More than that you shall have.'
He wriggled a little beneath his furs.
'Husband is an ill name,'he commented. 'It smarts.'
'But it fills the belly.'
'Aye,'he said. 'Therefore I am minded to bide here and take with the sourness the sweet of it.'
She laughed a little, and, with a great knife, cut a large manchet from the loaf between them.
'Nay,' she said, 'to-morrow my army with their spits and forks shall drive thee from the door.'
He grinned with his lips. She was fair and fat beneath her hood, but she was resolute. 'I have it in me greatly to advance you,' she said.
A boy brought her a trencher filled with chopped things, and a man in a blue jerkin came to her side bearing a middling pig, seared to a pale clear pinkness. The boy held the slit stomach carefully apart, and she lined it with slices of bread, dropping into the hollow chives, nutmegs, lumps of salt, the buds of bergamot, and marigold seeds with their acrid perfume, and balls of honied suet. She bound round it a fair linen cloth that she stitched with a great bone needle.