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"Pinch him blue and pinch him black, Let him not lack Sharp nails to pinch him blue and red Till sleep has rocked his addle head."

Those nails had certainly done their work when he was home, to judge by his appearance during the next day or two. But for all that Mistress Harman had had to keep the child. She might pinch her husband, but she must obey him and breed up his bastard—if so be it really was his, since none could tell whose child the mountebank might have fathered on him. Possibly she didn't know herself whose it was, but her luck had sent her a mighty fine chance to get rid of it. Sir Charles Alard had had her searched for, but she had gone from the district.

Exalted Harman would never hear a word against the child being his. You might have thought he gloried in it, though for the matter of that Gervase guessed well enough that his faith in Providence was at stake with his paternity. The Lord would never have condemned him with another man's child, so the child must be his and he would bring her up in his family as a perpetual memorial of his sin, its punishment, and its forgiveness. He had drunk strong waters at a fair, and gone with a vagabond woman, and hidden his sin for a year. But there is nothing secret that shall not be revealed, and that which ye shall speak in your closets—or rather in the hollow by the hedge of Dodyland Shaw—shall be proclaimed on the housetops—or on the lawn of Conster Manor at a May-day feast. To that end he had had the poor wretch christened Condemnation, so that he might say when he saw her: my rebuke is ever before me. The old fool! Gervase switched off a head of fennel in the ditch.