“I will say this, Master, though I let my tongue be still most times. Outrageous folk, men are. They’ll go pleasuring to market, in spite o’ Garsykes being out against ’em. They’ll let their women moil and toil for ’em, and wait their coming—and, like as you might say for frolic, they’ll come an hour late to supper.”
Hardcastle could understand her wrath no better than Causleen’s tears. It seemed to him simply that the two of them were daft. But then most women were.
“I was kept,” he said.
“Aye, you were kept—and the best supper ever cooked is spoiling to a cinder. And you never stopped to think I should be picturing you dead on the roadway all this time.”
The moon was racing through a scud of cloud, and Rebecca peered through the silver dusk.
“What have you got on your saddle?” she asked sharply.
“Storm, poor brute. He fell asleep on the journey, worn out with it all.”
Rebecca’s gusty mood pointed south-west now, instead of shrill nor’-east. “Then I’m glad you’re late. Shepherd Brant was in my kitchen just now, boasting he’d put lead into Storm at last and that he’d die of it among the brackens.”
“He came near it.”
“Maybe; but a miss is as good as a mile. I sent Brant stamping out, with a flea in his big, hairy ear—and, as for Storm, poor lamb, we’ll mend his legs for him.”