Belinda: A Maiden of the Early 1300's

Remembrance

"I swear, Father, that I will walk into the sunrise; that I will travel to your older brother and seek asylum with him rather than allow my lady mother to make a marriage match for me." Belinda spoke the words aloud, exactly as she had said them the first time.

Warmth crept into her soul despite the early morning chill and she smiled as she turned to walk back up to the keep. It had been so good to hear her father's voice, even if it were only a memory.

On the way back up the hill, however, some of that warmth fled as Belinda thought about actually fulfilling her promise. It was a rash oath to make, Belinda knew, for certainly her lord and her mother would never allow her to undertake such a journey! She weighed the possibilities as she walked but the distance from the churchyard to the keep was too short a distance to give Belinda time to properly resolve the matter in her mind. Once she had returned to her duties there was no time for quiet reflection, no place solitary enough for her to plan without someone interrupting her thoughts.

After another sleepless night, Belinda again sought the church yard. This time however, she went straight to her father's head stone. As she stood there, one of her father's stories came to mind. It was custom each year for Lady Kendra to present each of her husband's knights with a new tunic, one with her husband's crest embroidered on the chest. Belinda remembered her father's tales of a young Lady Kendra, who spun and wove so poorly that her cloth had sported great gaps in the weave.

We went about for an entire year feeling as bare as the day we were born. The wind cooled us whether we wanted it or not and the summer sun found us right through the cloth. We soon learned to wear more than one tunic and to keep our old cloak for warmth at night- if any was to be had! I tell you, Daughter, we knights were glad we'd gone to the south before Lord Merrick married or the Saracens would have died laughing! Still, we are grateful that our lady has grown in skill and proud of her for it.

Belinda chuckled and patted the headstone as she rose to return to the keep. On the way up the hill, it dawned on Belinda that she had yet to see Lady Kendra spin or weave at all! Yet every year, Lady Kendra bestowed the new garments upon her husband's knights as if she'd done the work herself. That sudden knowledge, that her ladyship was passing off others' work as her own, infuriated Belinda.

She wished she could expose Lady Kendra's fraud but felt powerless to do so. The injustice of it niggled at the back of her mind as Belinda sat down at the spinning wheel. If Lady Kendra wants to give the knights a gift of her own hands, she should spin and weave the cloaks and tunics herself! Belinda thought.

Still, the knights needed quality cloth to keep them warm since so many of them relied on that annual boon for their only garments. The thought of her father's comments pressed Belinda to spin the thread as evenly as she could. As fast as one woman carded the raw wool to remove any debris and to make the wool fibers all lay the same way, Belinda spun it into thread.

All the while Belinda spun the thread for her mother to wind into skeins; still another wove the thread into cloth for the knight's tunics. Lady Kendra sat with a few others, stitching cloth into clothing as it came off the loom and then embroidering Lord Merrick's crest onto the front.

Belinda concentrated on the rise and fall of her foot on the pedal that pushed the spinning wheel, on the feel of the thread as it fed through her fingers and on toward her mother to be wound. If she went too fast, she would out-produce the carders and run out of balls of wool for spinning. Too slow and the loom would overtake her thread output.

Lady Kendra looked up from her embroidery to take stock of the progress. "Mary, I think Gwendolyn can seam by herself for now. Perhaps you should assist Margaret at carding."