Changeling by Philippa Gregory

gardens and fields.
    Freize slipped, nearly losing his footing, and exclaimed as he saw that he had stepped in a dark green puddle of goose-shit. ‘Look at that! Damned bird. I would snare and eat him, I would.’
    Luca took both horses’ reins and let them drink from the water as Freize bent to wipe his boot with a dock leaf.
    ‘Well, I’ll be . . . !’
    ‘What is it?’
    Wordlessly, Freize held out the leaf with the dirt on it.
    ‘What?’ asked Luca, leaning away from the offering.
    ‘Look closer. People always say that there’s money where muck is – and here it is. Look closer, for I think I have made my fortune!’
    Luca looked closer. Speckled among the dark green of the goose-shit were tiny grains of sand, shining brightly. ‘What is it?’
    ‘It’s gold, little lord!’ Freize was bubbling with delight. ‘See it? Goose feeds on the reeds in the river, the river water is carrying tiny grains of gold washed out of a seam somewhere in the mountain, probably nobody knows where. Goose eats it up, passes it out, I find it on my boot. All I need to do now is to find out who owns the lands around the stream, buy it off them for pennies, pan for gold, and I am a lord myself and shall ride a handsome horse and own my own hounds!’
    ‘If the landlord will sell,’ Luca cautioned him. ‘And I think we are still on the lands of the Lord of Lucretili. Perhaps he would like to pan for his own gold.’
    ‘I’ll buy it from him without telling him,’ Freize exulted. ‘I’ll tell him I want to live by the stream. I’ll tell him I have a vocation, like that poor lass, his sister. I’ll tell him I have a calling, I want to be a holy hermit and live by the pool and pray all day.’
    Luca laughed aloud at the thought of Freize’s vocation for solitary prayer but suddenly Freize held up his hand. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he warned. ‘Hush, let’s get ourselves out of the way.’
    ‘Why should we hide? We’re doing no harm.’
    ‘You never know,’ Freize whispered. ‘And I’d rather not be found by a gold-bearing stream.’
    The two of them backed their horses deeper into the forest, off the path, and waited. Luca threw his cape over his horse’s head so that it would make no noise, and Freize reached up to his cob’s ear and whispered one word to it. The horse bent his head and stood quietly. The two men watched through the trees as half a dozen nuns wearing their dark brown working robes wound their way along the path, their wooden pattens squelching in the mud. Freize gently gripped the nose of his horse so that it did not whinny.
    The last two nuns were leading a little donkey, its back piled high with dirty fleeces from the nunnery flock. As Freize and Luca watched through the sheltering bushes, the women pegged the fleeces down in the stream, for the waters to rinse them clean, and then turned the donkey round and went back the way they had come. Obedient to their vows, they worked in silence, but as they led the little donkey away they struck up a psalm and the two young men could hear them singing:
    ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I’ll not want . . .’
    ‘I’ll not want,’ Freize muttered, as the two emerged from hiding. ‘Damn. Damn “I’ll not want” indeed! Because I will want. I do want. And I will go on wanting, wanting and dreaming and always disappointed.’
    ‘Why?’ Luca asked. ‘They’re just washing the fleeces. You can still buy your stream and pan for gold.’
    ‘Not them,’ Freize said. ‘Not them, the cunning little vixens. They’re not washing the fleeces. Why come all this way just to wash fleeces, when there are half a dozen streams between here and the abbey? No, they’re panning for gold in the old way. They put the fleeces in the stream – see how they’ve pegged them out all across the stream so the water flows through? The staple of the wool catches the grains of gold, catches even the smallest dust. In a week or so, they’ll come back and pull out their