by Pat Walsh
“Can you help him?” William asked anxiously.
“I will try,” Snail said, a slight tremor in his voice. “Bring him to the table, Will.” He rolled up his sleeves and poured water from the pail by the door into a bowl.
William did as he was told. He cleared a space amongst the pots, bowls, and bundles of dried plants, and settled the hob on the scrubbed oak boards. The thin-fingered paws held tightly to William’s hand, and the small body trembled. William stroked the fur on the hob’s back to try to reassure it. The hob tensed. William had the feeling he didn’t like being touched like this. He lowered his hand and saw the hob relax a little.
Snail examined the hob’s leg, his fingers careful and gentle as they wiped the blood from his fur with a rag dipped in the water. “The break is clean. The trap snapped the bone but didn’t crush it into pieces, which is a good thing,” he said, glancing at the hob. “It should mend and be as good as new. I’ll clean the wound and splint the leg, and then I’ll mix you a caudle to ease the pain. You will need to rest until the bone heals.” He dried his hands on a clean corner of the rag and turned away to fetch what he would need to treat the hob. “You are welcome to stay here at the abbey until you are well enough to go back to the woods.”
The hob looked up at William. The creature’s face was drawn and his eyes shadowed with suspicion. He clearly did not trust people, and who could blame him?
“It might be for the best,” William said. “You can’t fend for yourself if you can’t walk.”
“Hobs and men have never been friends,” the hob said, looking from William to Brother Snail. “Sometimes men let us live in their homes, tend their animals, and clean their pots, but they do not like us or trust us. Mostly they do not even believe in us. Why should you be any different?”
“Well, for a start,” Brother Snail said, raising his eyebrows, “I believe in you, seeing as you’re sitting there in front of me. And I have no reason to dislike or distrust you, unless you give me cause to do so. Is that good enough for you?”
The hob nodded slowly.
“Good,” the monk said briskly. “Now I’ll prepare that caudle. William, you have work to do in the kitchen. You can come by and see our patient later.”
William opened his mouth to argue, but closed it again. Brother Snail was right. He should be in the kitchen, chopping vegetables.
“Hurry along, then,” Snail said, glancing at him with a smile, as if understanding his reluctance to leave the hut.
William walked to the door. He paused with his hand on the latch and looked back at the hob. “What’s your name?”
The hob’s eyes narrowed and he looked away. “I will not tell you.”
“Why not?” William asked in surprise.
The hob did not reply.
Brother Snail smiled slightly and glanced at William. “He can’t tell you, because if he does, it will give you power over him. Fay folk never tell humans their names, ever, unless they are tricked into doing so.”
The hob continued to stare at the wall, determinedly silent.
“So what are we meant to call you?” William asked.
The hob raised one shoulder in a shrug.
“We’ll call you Brother Walter,” Snail said with a gleam in his eyes. “Would that suit you?”
The hob turned and regarded the monk thoughtfully for several moments, and then nodded. “It will do.”
“That’s settled, then,” Snail said. “Brother Walter it is.”
William grinned. “That’ll please Prior Ardo and the other monks.”
“They don’t need to know,” Snail said firmly. “Now, get back to your work, Will, before Brother Martin comes looking for you.”
William did not need to be told again. It was very unwise to get on the wrong side of the abbey’s cook, an old soldier with one eye and a foul temper.
“I’ll be back before dinner,” he said, opening the door.
The monk nodded. “Bring some food with you for Brother Walter.”
William made a face. The most he could hope to smuggle out of the kitchen was a bit of bread and a bowl of Brother Martin’s vegetable pottage.
As if the hob had not already suffered enough for one day.
“Yer late,” Brother Martin growled, his one brown eye fixing William with a steely glare. “Where you bin?”
“Helping Brother Snail,” William said, picking up the basket of vegetables that Peter Borowe had delivered to the kitchen. He carried it over to the table and dumped it down beside a pail of water. Rolling up his sleeves, he started to pull the leaves off a cabbage and drop them into the water. He knew the routine; he had done it almost every day since he’d come to live at Crowfield. Peel, wash, and chop cabbage, carrots, and leeks, a few onions, and anything else the lay brother had managed to scavenge from the fields and woods around the abbey. Today there were three small carp from the abbey fishpond to add to the vegetables. William frowned down at them. At least one of them looked as if it had died of old age. They would do little more than add some flavor to the pottage, and if the smell was anything to go by, it was not going to be pleasant.
Brother Martin was making maslin bread for the main meal of the day, using a mixture of coarse dark rye and wheat flour. Soft white wheat bread was unheard of at Crowfield. It was just one more reminder, not that it was needed, of how frugally the monks lived.
Brother Martin had already been at the cider, it seemed. He made it himself from the apples growing in the abbey orchard, and it was strong enough to kill a horse. His cheeks were mottled dark red and he muttered to himself as he pounded the dough, his heavy fists pummeling it with a savagery that was frightening to watch. William eyed him warily. The stockily built monk with his scarred face and leathery skin seemed to be permanently full of rage, but at what or whom, William had never found out. You could not hold a conversation with Brother Martin; he spoke only to snap orders or pour scathing contempt on William’s efforts in the kitchen. Sometimes he seemed to forget he was no longer a soldier and had on several occasions threatened to tie William to a post and have him flogged.
“As if we ain’t enough damned work to do without guests dragging their stinking carcasses to the abbey gates and living off us like leeches,” the monk spat, knuckles thumping the dough. “Cook meat for ’em, Brother Martin, make pretty food and fine white bread for ’em, Brother Martin, wipe their arses for ’em, Brother Martin,” he sneered. He turned to scowl at William. “Get that lot finished and then go and help that idle layabout Borowe to muck out the guest chambers.”
William stared at him in astonishment. Here was an unexpected piece of news: guests coming to the abbey. Who were they? How long did they intend to stay? From what Brother Snail had told him, it was many years since anyone had stayed at Crowfield. Why would they? There were a couple of larger, richer abbeys within a couple of days’ ride of Crowfield, both far more suited to the needs of hungry and weary travelers. All he could think was that the guests, whoever they were, had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.
Brother Martin took a short-bladed knife from his belt and slashed the dough into smaller pieces, ready to shape into loaves and bake in the oven in the yard. “Mark my words, soldier,” he said suddenly, pointing the knife blade at William, “there will be trouble. Strangers in the camp, not good. Not good at all, you wait and see.”
It was a relief when the last of the vegetables was cut up and added to the cauldron hanging over the fire, and William could escape from the kitchen.
CHAPTER
FIVE
The guest chambers were on the west side of the cloister, below the abbot's chamber. The door stood open and two straw mattresses and a pile of bedding lay on the ground nearby. William could hear something heavy being dragged across the stone-flagged floor inside.
He stood in the doorway for a moment to look around. He had never been into any of the rooms on this side of the cloister before. He had no reason to go up to the abbot's chambers, and t
he rooms below them were kept locked. The abbey had been built to house many more monks than the eleven it did today, and half of its rooms were empty.
The guest chambers consisted of two rooms: a large chamber with a vaulted ceiling supported on two rows of squat stone pillars, and a small room tucked between the end wall of the chamber and the nave wall of the church. A second door led out to the yard, but it was locked and Peter did not have the key. There were three windows, just narrow slits high up on the wall overlooking the yard. They were covered with wooden shutters that kept out the rain, snow, and cold winds. They also kept out the gray winter daylight. The single rushlight in the iron bracket near the door barely troubled the shadows.
An indistinct shape moved between the pillars and stepped into the patch of light by the open doorway. It was Peter Borowe, and he smiled when he saw William, his face bright with a childlike pleasure.
“Will!” he said with obvious delight. “Are you here to help me?”
William nodded and smiled in return. “I am. What do you want me to do first?”
“We have to move all the old, broken things out of here and burn them in the yard, Prior Ardo says. Then we brush the floor and put down clean rushes, scrub the table and chairs, and make up two beds.” Peter spoke slowly and carefully, marking each task by gripping the outstretched fingers of one hand in turn. His voice was thick, with a slight lisp, as if his tongue was too big for his mouth. There was an earnest expression on his broad, blunt-featured face as he tried to remember exactly what it was that the prior had told him. William waited patiently for him to finish.
“We have to bring more rushlights and ask Brother Snail for a wax candle from his store cupboard, and . . .” He hesitated and there was a look of panic in his eyes as he struggled to recall the next thing on his list of tasks.
“Fetch firewood?” William suggested.
Relief flooded Peter’s face. “Yes, yes! That was it! A fire. Clean the hearth and lay the fire.”
“We’d better make a start, then,” William said, peering around with a grimace. The room had been used for storage over the years and the cold air smelled musty and stale. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust that rose in clouds and caught in their throats and made them cough. A pile of old straw mattresses in one corner had been chewed to shreds by rats and stank to high Heaven. Small, quick bodies scurried away into the shadows as soon as William pulled the first mattress from the pile and dragged it to the door.
Between them, William and Peter hauled the mattresses out into the cloister, and from there through the kitchen and out into the yard. To William’s relief, Brother Martin was not around to see the trail of filthy straw that followed them across the floor. With luck, he would get it swept up before the cook came back. It was either that or be on the receiving end of a thump from the monk’s hard fist.
Before too long, all the discarded furniture was piled up in the middle of the yard, well away from the barn and outbuildings, ready for burning. The two best beds were left in the chamber, along with a table and two plain oak chairs. The furniture had seen better days but it was all the abbey had to offer and would have to do.
William fetched a couple of birch-twig brooms from the storeroom next to the kitchen and gave one to Peter. Starting against the end wall of the guest chamber, they swept the stone-paved floor, until a pile of dusty straw and worm-eaten, powdery wood lay in the doorway. They swept the room a second time, and then scraped up the pile with a shovel and tipped it into a couple of wooden pails, which they emptied onto the midden in the yard.
William fetched water from the well and washed down the furniture, while Peter draped the new mattresses over the chairs and beat them with Brother Martin’s bread shovel to even out the lumps of straw. Between them, they made up the beds and arranged the furniture against the walls.
In the dim, dusty light, the room looked cavernous and bare. The huge fireplace was a gloomy cave set deep into the end wall of the room. A draft moaned up and down the chimney. Cold struck up from the floor, and the pillars seemed to William to be the trunks of stone trees, whose branches disappeared into the darkness of the arched roof.
He looked up and wondered at the skill of the stonemasons who had built the abbey. To fashion curving ribs that hung high overhead, and carve leaves and branches into stone, was as close to magic as it was possible to get. William spent secret moments in the church and cloister peering at the tiny details hidden in the carvings that decorated the stonework: animals, plants, and birds, the faces of people and demons and angels, the once-bright colors with which they had been painted now faded and dulled with time. It was a reflection of Heaven and Earth, turned to stone.
Peter swept the hearth while William went to fetch firewood from the woodshed. He was stacking logs into a basket when he heard voices outside in the yard. He looked through the doorway and saw Prior Ardo and Brother Gabriel standing by the open abbey gate, with a man William recognized as Edgar the carpenter, a freeman from Yagleah. He saw him most market days at Weforde, selling the wooden buckets and bowls he made. Edgar seemed agitated and his raised voice carried on the still, cold air.
“He were arskin’ questins, lots on ’em, and he knew, I swear it, Prior, he knew.” The man glanced over his shoulder, as if worried he was being watched or overheard. “He arsked ’bout the angel. He knew all about it, ’bout it bein’ dead and buried . . .”
The man got no further.
“Be silent!” Prior Ardo hissed angrily, grabbing the man’s arm with his long, bony fingers. “Come with me.”
Between them, Ardo and Gabriel quickly bundled the man across the yard and out of sight around the corner of the west range. Whatever business the carpenter had with the abbey, the monks were clearly anxious for it to remain private.
An angel, dead and buried?
But that’s blasphemy, surely? William thought, puzzled and troubled by what he had just witnessed. How could an angel die? And what had it to do with the monks of Crowfield Abbey?
William was in a thoughtful mood for the rest of the day as he went about his chores. If Peter noticed, it did not seem to trouble him, and he chattered on with his usual cheerfulness about anything and nothing.
As soon as the monks had filed into the church for nones, the last service before dinner, William filled a bowl with pottage for the hob and put it carefully in a flat-bottomed basket. He took a small loaf from the rows of newly baked maslin cooling on the table and put that in the basket, too. He fervently hoped that Brother Martin had not counted them. There would be trouble if William was caught stealing and he could not imagine trying to explain to Prior Ardo what he had wanted the loaf for. The best he could hope for was a sound beating. The worst was to be thrown out of the abbey and left to fend for himself, and that did not bear thinking about in the middle of winter.
William lit a stub of tallow candle from the fire and put it inside the battered old iron lantern that was kept on a hook by the yard door, and left the kitchen.
The afternoon was fading into a freezing dusk and a thin layer of mist lay over the river and flood meadows. A half-moon rose over Foxwist Wood and a single star shone in the sky above the rounded hump of Gremanhil, beyond the abbey’s East Field. Nothing disturbed the stillness and the only sound was the rasp of William’s boots on the icy ground.
It had been a strange day, all in all. William was not sure what disturbed him the most: finding the hob, the voice he had heard in the Whistling Hollow, or the snatch of conversation he had overheard between the villager and the monks. It was as if the everyday world had slipped to one side and he’d glimpsed something else, something much darker and harder to understand.
William paused for a moment outside the workshop door and looked around to make sure nobody had followed him from the abbey. Quite why anyone would, he didn’t know, but a nagging feeling that he was being watched had been growing since he left the safety of the abbey kitchen. There was still just enough light to see that the ve
getable garden and the East Field were empty.
But something was out there, hidden in the dusk, watching him; he was certain of it. His skin prickled uneasily as he stared across the river toward the woods and imagined someone looking back at him.
Pulling his jacket more closely around his shiv-ering body, he lifted the latch and stepped inside the hut.
CHAPTER
SIX
William put the lantern on the table and opened the small shutter in its front. The hob was curled up asleep on a pile of old, clean rags in a basket by the fire. The couvre-feu lay on the floor nearby. The embers in the fire pit glowed, and small flames flickered briefly every now and then. The hob’s reddish fur glinted russet-gold in the firelight and his tail was wrapped neatly around his small body.
William knelt beside the basket and touched the hob’s shoulder gently to wake him. The hob stirred and chittered softly in his sleep. William added a couple of branches to the fire, and flames licked the dry wood. He set the pottage in a corner of the fire pit to keep warm and put the loaf of bread on a hearthstone.
“Brother Walter?” he said, shaking the hob again. “Are you hungry? I’ve brought some food.”
Slowly, sleepily, the hob stretched and eased his body into a more comfortable position. His bandaged leg stuck out awkwardly and he winced as he tried to move it. The green eyes opened and the hob stared blankly at William, as if, for the moment, he had forgotten where he was.
“Are you hungry?” William repeated.
The hob nodded and worked himself up into a sitting position, with his injured leg stretched out in front of him.
William looked around for a spoon. He found one on the table, and stirred the pottage with it.
“What do you usually eat?” he asked curiously, wrapping the warm pot in a rag and handing the pot and spoon to the hob.
