Had he tried, he could have been a good student, I think. He was clever enough, but easily bored, which meant he often turned his attention to other things. Usually these were small matters, such as hiding our master’s quill and stylus before a class, but not always. One summer’s morning he took some two dozen pots of honey from the storehouse and smeared their contents underneath the benches where we sat in the schoolroom. As the sun climbed higher and the day grew warmer, we were besieged by wasps, and Æthelbald was stung several times on the arm and was in too much pain to continue, which meant we had no more lessons that day.
How did I know it was him? Because he came and told me afterwards.
‘I did it,’ he said, beaming proudly as if he’d done us all a favour. He wasn’t the bragging sort, so I can only guess he was looking for approval and thought I might be the one to give it.
Instead I said he’d been foolish, and that nothing good would come of what he’d done. Sure enough one of the deacons quickly discovered what had caused the sudden plague of insects. He demanded to know who the culprit was, and when no one confessed his gaze turned upon me. I knew then that I was for it. I protested, of course, but he wouldn’t listen. He subjected me to ten strokes of the birch rod and then, straight afterwards, set me to work. He found me a pail and brush and cloth and made me clean the schoolroom from top to bottom while the stingers and the flies buzzed around my head.
‘You should have told him it was me,’ Wulfnoth said later that day, when I returned to the dormitory and gingerly sat down upon my bed. My arse was still hurting; my arms felt about to drop from my shoulders, and I was ready to collapse from the heat.
‘I did,’ I replied.
I was expecting him to apologise, but he didn’t. There was no glimmer of remorse, no sign of gratitude in his eyes. Instead he merely nodded, his usual smile gone.
‘I owe you,’ he said simply, as if it were merely a mark on his tally stick, a weight needing to be balanced on his scales. And then he went without saying how he meant to repay his debt.
I wanted nothing more to do with him for a long time after that, and avoided him whenever I could. He’d brought me enough trouble as it was. Master Æthelbald returned a few days later, once the swelling and the pain had diminished. While the redness on his arm had gone, though, the redness in his face was deeper than ever. Every time I misremembered a passage or forgot my grammar he would instruct me to hold out both my hands and he’d strike me hard across the palms with his birch rod. Meanwhile Wulfnoth sat on the bench opposite me, his face impassive.
It was many weeks before he dared speak to me again. The leaves had fallen by then and the river mist hung over the church precinct as we made our way to our first lesson of the morning.
‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ he said as he scurried up alongside me.
He was mistaken if he thought he was getting any favours from me. I pretended not to hear him and quickened my pace, but he wasn’t about to give up so readily.
‘I know you don’t want to speak to me,’ he went on as he fell into step with me. ‘But find me after class, by the tree behind the bakehouse, and I’ll explain.’
There was an earnestness about him, a desire to please, that I found unnerving, and yet at the same time I was intrigued. And so as soon as the morning’s teaching was done I went to see what he had to say. I told myself that I was really going so that I could dissuade him from whatever folly he had in mind, but that was a lie.
He was waiting for me as he said he would be. He was clutching a leather pouch, which he thrust towards me as soon as I approached. I took it, more in surprise than anything. It felt like there were coins inside, and quite a number of them too, to judge by the heft.
‘I need you to get something for me,’ Wulfnoth said.
I asked him, ‘How did you come by this? Did you steal it?’
‘My father sent it to me.’
‘I thought your father hated you.’
That was why he’d sent him away to the cathedral school – to be rid of him. So Wulfnoth had told us when first he arrived.
‘My uncle, then,’ he replied flatly. ‘My uncle sent it to me.’
‘You took it, didn’t you?’
‘Listen,’ he said impatiently. ‘I haven’t told you yet what it is I want you to get.’
‘I don’t care.’
He gazed back at me, tight-lipped. He was hoping to appeal to my baser instincts, I knew, and I was sorely tempted, but his earnestness made me suspicious. Whatever he had planned, I wanted no part of it.
‘I’m paying my debt to you,’ he said. ‘But first I need you to do this one thing for me.’
‘Why can’t you do it yourself?’
‘Because you’re the one who has the keys.’
So it was something from the church that he was after. I reminded him they’d taken the keys from me after they found my hoard. Besides, if he reckoned I was going to risk punishment again on his behalf, he could think again.
He didn’t answer.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘what do you think will happen when they find me with this silver?’
They kept a close eye on me now, and I had little chance of being able to hide it from them. Besides, I wasn’t about to become a playing piece in his game. That’s what these things were to him. It was about seeing how clever he could be, and how much he could get away with, while making sure that others paid the penalty.
I thrust the pouch back at him. ‘Find someone else to do your work for you. Better yet, take that back to wherever you got it from.’
He took it from me and I walked away without looking back. Still, that wasn’t the last time he tried to solicit my help. I suppose he saw me as something of a kindred spirit, and that was why he confided in me and tried hard to win me over. Certainly I never encouraged him. It’s true that we were alike in some ways, but there was much more that set us apart. Yes, the school’s strictures could be harsh, and they grated upon me too. And yes, there was always that urge to rebel. But the difference between us was that, deep down, I wanted to be good. I’d come to believe what the deacons and Master Æthelbald said, which was that the temptations that plagued me were a sickness that needed to be cured.
Wulfnoth wasn’t like me. He didn’t have a pious bone in his body. He had no desire to learn, no instinct for hard work or understanding for its value; he didn’t see why it might be useful to know one’s letters or to be able to engage in the art of rhetoric. Everything we did was to him a waste of time. Why his father had thought he should be schooled at the cathedral and train as a priest, I could never work out. Maybe he was hoping that the masters would instil some discipline in his boy. But there was no disciplining Wulfnoth. He was restless and forever in need of something to do, something to occupy his mind.
Many things went missing around the cathedral quarter over the next few months, as the old year went out and the new one began, from candles to gold-spun altar cloths and even the embroidered cushion from the bishop’s throne. None of those thefts were my doing, but I could guess who was behind them.
That never stopped them from blaming me, though.
It was after the cushion disappeared that I was called before the bishop himself. Brihtmær, it was by then, kindly Leofgar having died the year before. He was a much sterner man, thin like a withy but not nearly as old or as frail as his predecessor. He demanded to know why I continued to defile God’s house with my sins, but when I tried to defend myself, he shouted me down. Leofgar had been too lenient, he said; if it had been his choice he would never have taken on a wretch like me in the first place. A miller’s son, no less. But that was what Leofgar had done, and so Brihtmær owed it to his predecessor to try to cleanse my soul and rid it of evil. He lectured me for the better part of an hour, warning me that my obsession with worldly goods would condemn me to eternity in Hell if I didn’t mend my ways.
He told me that if anything else went missing, I would be expelled from the school and barred from receiving communion.
I tried to explain that it wasn’t I who had taken his cushion, or the candles or the altar cloth, and that if I knew where they were I would say. He was deaf to my protests. I knew then that I had to do something. I couldn’t allow them to send me away, back to work under my father’s eye, assuming he still lived. The cathedral school was all I’d known for so long, and it was still preferable to labouring with my hands out of doors, hefting sacks of grain and flour from storehouse to mill and from mill to kitchen, bending my back to the plough under the blistering sun and the driving rain. That was not the life I wanted. At least in the Church I could live in some comfort.
Which meant that Wulfnoth had to go.
I knew I couldn’t wait long. If I didn’t get rid of him soon then it would be too late. And so almost from the moment Bishop Brihtmær dismissed me I started plotting.
It had to be something truly terrible, some act for which there could be no forgiveness. The masters never liked to give up on a student, you understand. No matter how wayward he was, they always made their best efforts to bring him back within the fold, as they did with me. It was almost unheard of for any boy to be sent away. They preferred instead to impose penance and to pray fervently for the salvation of the souls in their care.
Remember I said I used to be a keen climber when I was young? Mostly it was trees that I climbed – that oak was my favourite – but sometimes it was buildings too. Often, back when I was living with my father and wanted some time alone with my thoughts, I used to climb the mill itself, just so that I could watch the stream glistening in the sun, the wheel turning.
Anyway, I decided to put those skills to good use. Two nights after I’d been called before Bishop Brihtmær, long after everyone else had gone to sleep, I rose from my bed. Barefoot and stepping as lightly as I could, I slipped out the dormitory door, the satchel that usually contained my tablet and stylus slung across my shoulder. The moon was full and the skies were clear, which meant I was better able to see what I was doing, although I suppose had anyone been about it would also have made it easier for them to spot me. Fortunately, there was no one. I hurried through the shadows towards the small stone church and proceeded to scale the outside, working my hands and my toes into the cracks and the crevices, one limb and then the next, as quickly as possible until I was able to swing myself on to the roof of the nave, which had been rethatched the previous summer, so I knew I could trust it with my weight. I scrambled up so that I was sitting astride the roof and then, taking from my bag one of several blocks of chalk that I’d taken from the schoolroom earlier, I set to work.
It was after Easter by then, but it was a chill night, and I was glad of the long winter cloak draped across my shoulders. Not my own cloak, you understand; I had no intention of getting all that dust on my own clothes and so giving myself away. That would have been foolish of me. But it wasn’t long before my hands, my face, my hair was caked in the stuff.
I worked as quickly as I could. By the time I’d finished, the first glimmer of grey was already beginning to show in the east. My eyes were sore from lack of sleep and my backside was hurting from sitting so long in the same position. Before anybody else woke and noticed I wasn’t in my bed, I stuffed the chalk back into my satchel, climbed down and stole back through the shadows to the dormitory, pausing first to shed my borrowed cloak and to rinse my face and hands and hair as thoroughly as I could in the brook that ran behind the dormitory, knowing I had to be quick. Then, folding it into a bundle so that none of the dust came off on my person, I carried the cloak back inside, opening the door carefully so that it didn’t creak on its worn hinges. None of the other boys stirred, for which I thanked God as I made my way to where Wulfnoth was curled up underneath his blankets, eyes closed and with a frowning expression on his face, breathing softly and steadily. Hardly daring to breathe, I knelt down by the chest at the foot of his bed, lifted open the lid and laid his dusty cloak back inside, together with what was left of the chalk from my satchel, before hastening back to my own bed.
Sleep must have claimed me not long afterwards, although how I was able to settle, I don’t know. I remember waking to the sound of shouting as daylight flooded in through the doorway, paining my eyes. Master Æthelbald stood in the middle of the room, roaring at us all to get up, while the deacons marched from bed to bed, pulling the sheets back from those who were too slow, forcibly dragging them from their mattresses.
‘Out,’ Æthelbald roared. ‘All of you, out!’
I remember catching Wulfnoth’s eyes as we filed, one by one, out of the dormitory and were made to wait in the yard outside. He had a puzzled look on his face, as did the rest of them, but when he asked me what I thought was happening I merely shrugged. The sky was light, but the sun was barely up and there was a keen breeze, and we stood in our shirts and our bare feet.
‘Which one of you is responsible?’ Æthelbald asked us.
‘For what?’ one of the younger boys asked. Of course no one had any idea what he was talking about.
No one but me. I hoped Æthelbald didn’t look in my direction, thinking that I would surely give myself away.
Our master thrust out his arm, pointing above our heads. ‘For that!’
We all turned as one, looking up in the direction of his outstretched finger, towards the church, and specifically the bell tower, where my handiwork was clearly visible. It looked even better in the light of day, and I smiled with pride despite myself as howls of laughter rang out from the assembled students.
‘This isn’t funny,’ Æthelbald screeched, and his cheeks were bright red. ‘Whoever did this will be sorely punished!’
In bright chalk across the southern face of the belfry was what I’d spent a full hour last night working on. Two male figures, crudely drawn and yet clear enough. Both naked save for the crosses hanging around their necks. Both with members erect: members almost as long as their arms, I remember. Balls as big as platters. I was especially proud of those details. One of the figures was bent forward, his rear exposed, resting upon his bishop’s staff, while the other approached him from behind. Above the standing one I’d written, in tall majuscules so that they could be easily read from a distance, ‘ÆTHEL’, while below the one bent over I’d scrawled ‘BRIHT’. It wasn’t the most clever thing I could have attempted, but I was never much good at drawing.
I know, I know. It shames me to think back on it, on what I did. At the time, though, I couldn’t stop grinning. I didn’t have much time to enjoy the moment, though.
Æthelbald rounded upon me. ‘This was your doing, wasn’t it, Guthred?’
‘Me?’ I asked, looking up because he was tall, and hoping that my performance was convincing enough. ‘No, master, I swear it wasn’t.’
He fixed me with his darkest frown. He didn’t believe me, I know he didn’t, because he never did, and I remember starting to panic, thinking that if this didn’t work then it would be on my head, when just at that moment one of the deacons emerged from the dormitory and called Æthelbald over to see something.
I knew then that they’d found it.
Our master went to see what the deacon had discovered, and shortly called us all back inside. The blankets and sheets had been torn from the beds, some of which had been overturned. The contents of our chests, where we kept our spare clothes and the few possessions we were allowed, had been spilt on to the floor.
‘Who sleeps here?’ Æthelbald asked as he pointed to where an acolyte stood at the foot of one of the beds.
At first none of us said anything. We all knew it belonged to Wulfnoth, but no one dared be the one to tell, and I certainly wasn’t about to, since that would only invite suspicion.
‘Someone speak quickly,’ Æthelbald said, ‘or else you’ll all be facing the rod. Five lashes for every one of you until I hav
e an answer. Well?’
Wulfnoth stepped forward, looking confused. ‘It’s mine, master.’
Æthelbald beckoned the deacon across, who held up Wulfnoth’s cloak for all to see. White marks everywhere, as clear as if one of the bishop’s precious doves had defiled it.
‘And this?’
There was a look of such bewilderment on the boy’s face that I almost wished I hadn’t done it. Almost. He looked at the cloak, then back at Master Æthelbald, not yet comprehending, and then his eyes widened as he began to realise.
‘I don’t know how—’
‘And yet you don’t deny that it’s yours.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘What about these?’ Æthelbald said, hefting two of the lumps of chalk. ‘They’re yours too, aren’t they?’
Wulfnoth shook his head. ‘N-no.’
‘You thought you wouldn’t get caught, didn’t you?’
‘I swear I don’t know where they came from,’ he said.
‘Liar,’ said the deacon.
‘Sacrilege,’ said Æthelbald and spat.
He towered over Wulfnoth, who was short for his age, and not the strongest either, with some of the scrawniest arms and legs you’ve ever seen. If Æthelbald or any of the deacons had asked themselves how he’d managed to climb all the way up the side of the tower, by himself and without a ladder, then they might have worked out he was telling the truth. If they’d paused for even a moment to ask why he hadn’t simply rid himself of the chalk once he’d finished with it, they might have seen through my deception.
But Æthelbald was red with fury and in no mood to ask questions, so they did none of those things. And so Wulfnoth’s fate was sealed.
The Harrowing Page 10
