Excerpt from An Epiphany Gift for Robin
"Why, Arthur, what is this?” Marriot stared down in surprise at the large, thickly wrapped bundle her husband placed in her lap.
The Christmas season was drawing to its close on this, the twelfth day following the Nativity of the Lord. The extra rents of eggs, bread and a fine speckled hen they’d been forced to pay to help supply the baron’s Christmas feast had been somewhat offset by Lord Beckford having selected her husband as one of two peasants he traditionally invited to the castle on Christmas day.
Arthur, representing the poorest of Beckford’s poor serfs, had carried away as much food and ale as he could balance in one cloth, a cup, and a wooden trencher, while the second tenant, a free farmer on the manor, had been allowed to take two friends and feast for two days at the baron’s own table. Arthur had returned all a-grumble at Beckford’s stinginess, claiming he’d heard that at many another manor, the lord or abbot invited all his serfs to a Christmas feast.
Still, he’d managed to return with enough good food to make a fine, if modest, Christmas dinner for their family.
The food was long gone now, along with the merry games played by the villagers to keep warm in the winter snows. The ivy and holly so gleefully gathered and hung by the children to brighten their tiny thatched cottage had grown dry and crisp, crackling off their garlands and crushed by shoes to form a fine, fragrant dust on the earth-beaten floor. Today, Epiphany, the day the Magi had presented their gifts to the Christ Child, was the last day of respite her family would have from the backbreaking work in the baron’s fields.
“What foolish thing have you done?” Marriot demanded of her husband. Gifts were only given to small children on Epiphany, especially among the poor. Her husband’s dark eyes danced with that mischievous gleam that had won her heart ten years ago. “Sometimes a bit of foolishness is just what a man needs to bestow on the woman he loves.”
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