Odo Enters Nesta's Bedchamber.

Even now, Midsummer’s highest sun, it past the sunset when the feast arrived in flaggèd Nod. A woman led dame Nesta to her quarters for the time. It was a room within, and overlooked it to a little atrium it seemed to her. Difficult to tell it, for Selene was almost new. Two girls attended to her with some of nightclothes, and they helped her wash within a basin that they brouwt. The chamberpot was emptied. Then the girls abade her for the night and shut the wooden door with iron wrought in black. She kept a candle lighted, and pulled up her covers round her neck; the mantle of the swan. She fingered through the vulgate on the table, poured herself a glass of wine, and thought she fondly of her brother and her pa, some nearly forty leagues away in sweet Le Mans.

Were it not too long before the door came open. There t'were Bishop Odo of Bayoux. The hour--!

“Know ye, girl, the lineage of Christ?”

“My lord, that is a queer way to begin your conversation. For every girl in Christendom knows well that Christ from Mary, she a virgin, be.”

“In Matthew, Chapter one, the truth revealed that all the generations down from Abraham to David, they are fourteen generations; and David then bequeathèd down to Bablyon were likewise fourteen generations; and Babylon to Christ was born were also fourteen generations.”

“Neatly does Our Lord do work upon this mortal soil.”

“Neatly does He work his wonders,” Bishop Odo did assent.

“But fourteen, fourteen, fourteen, and then fourteen more make up the year 1066, my jeune corbeau, and have we now the fourth in these, the August chapters of our Lord.

Nesta counted off in contemplation and came up with many more than four fourteens of generations ere between the birth of Christ and this,1066. 

She smirked a little, but she kept her trump well-hid, for now. His wee fowl game can barely count, she thought.

Odo found the thread she spindled out. “Of course, in ancient days, the generations stretched out longer than they do today. Today, a life is measured ten and score of three; but eld Methuselah were-”

“-Nine hundreds, three score and another nine,” the dam recat. He smiled and he nodded his approval of her catechism whacht.

Odo then approached the fodder’s blèached foot, the flaxen silage covered up by flaxen linen broidered up and light. He stepped forth like a Tom, at turns he supplicating and enticing, sorceling his little prey. A little upturned-corner on his lips here in the candle-light; and narrower then were his eyes, which never strayed from herupon.

“I’ve had a dream, not unlike the dream was giv’d to ere our Joseph, and our Virgin, in those days, a thousand years ago.”