The Green Children of Woolpit

by J. Anderson Coats

  The story goes like this: Just days after I arrived, a sow turned up in our yard. Her ear wasn’t clipped and she had no marks or brands. My da asked everyone he knew, but the pig belonged to no one in Woolpit, or at the abbey, or anywhere nearby. Still the mas whispered, muttering because my ma had taken in baby me when who knows what the raggedy woman who brought me had been and done. My da had to go to the manor house and swear before everyone that he had not taken the pig unlawfully and would give her up to her rightful owner within a year and a day if that person came forward. No one claimed her, though, and when I could talk I started calling her Mother, and she has never left.

  Today is not quarter day and I’m too young to owe taxes. I’ve done nothing wrong that I haven’t already paid for. If I’m being brought to the manor house, it’s because of the green children, and that is a very good reason.

  I follow the reeve through the weathered wooden gate. There’s a faint whiff of that rotty smell as we cross the muddy yard, and it gets stronger as we step through a big oaken door that groans on rusty hinges.

  I’ve been to the manor house yard many times, but never inside. I want to marvel at every last thing, but the reeve pulls me into a hall and toward a trestle table that’s piled with more food than I’ve ever seen in one place. Crouching under the table, poised to flee like stable cats brought indoors, are the green girl and boy. Each is gripping one of the sawhorse legs like someone recently tried to drag them out by force.

  The reeve guides me by the elbow to the head of the table. “Here she is, my lord. For all the good it’ll do.”

  Just the mention of him and I go still. There are so many places Milord has to be, so many manors to visit, that he never stays too long at any one of them, especially in places like Woolpit. But he’s here now, striding into the firelight in a fine woolen tunic and taking up so much space that I kneel well before he gets anywhere near me.

  “Rise, child.” Milord chuckles, and when I do as I’m told, trying not to think how I’ll be eating beans for supper while he sits down to a spread like this, he gestures to the green children beneath the table like all of this is ordinary somehow. “Will you greet them and ask if they’ll come out? This food is for them. It’s been days since they’ve had a proper meal. I’m at a loss as to how to get them to stop hiding and take even a bite of bread. As I understand it, you being here will do the trick. Since you were the first one they saw.”

  I go cold all over. The green girl saw me at the top of the pit. Then I went away. I know this part of the story — the reeve, the mask, the Woolpit mas penning me in so I couldn’t lift a wheat stalk without them knowing — but she doesn’t. The girl never put eyes on me again, and I know what Glory must have said. What she’s been saying. The green children likely believed her. They’d have no reason not to.

  If the green children want me here, they mean to punish me for abandoning them.

  “They cried when the other girl walked through the door,” Milord says mildly. “The reeve’s child. The pretty one who said she found them.”

  Milord must not have a granny. Otherwise he’d know that Those Good People would never eat any food but their own. If they ate mortal food, they would not be allowed back under the mountain, just like mortals who ate food offered by Those Good People would spend eternity in their underground court.

  I can’t say any of this, though. So I just shake my head.

  “You’re refusing?” Milord asks, but he sounds more bewildered than angry, like someone saying him nay is unthinkable.

  My belly turns over. This is a neither-nor. I can offend neither the green children nor Milord without consequences. I must do something, so I kneel and peer under the table while I plan what I’ll say. The girl turns toward me like I’m a sister or cousin she hasn’t seen for seasons. The boy shifts so his face stays in shadow.

  Carefully I tell them, “Milord would like to welcome you to his table. No need to be frightened.”

  Right away the girl crawls forward. The boy is on her heels. Once they’re out, the rotty, damp smell is overwhelming, but for the longest moment all I can do is stare.

  It wasn’t a trick of the light. They are green.

  There’s no calling them pale or gray from some illness. Their skin is the color of leaves uncurling in spring, shiny almost, though their hair is a rich mossy color. The girl’s is long and loose, wavy like it’s been braided of late, and the boy’s tumbles to his collar like he belongs here at the manor. Not cropped like my da’s or any of the village men. Their clothing is an endless wash of greens, all different, woven in a shimmery pattern that ripples like the scales on a fish whenever they move, and well made in a way that makes me think of hawking and feasting, not hacking at wheat in a field.

  Neither Milord nor the reeve seems to notice the smell. I must fight to keep from covering my nose with my cloak as the boy slides onto one of the benches and gives the girl a long, steady look. The girl grabs my wrist and guides me to the opposite bench. I nearly pull away from the shock of it, but her touch is no different from Glory’s, or my ma’s. The green of her is no different from the pink of me. She sits me down so we’re together there, side by side.

  For months now I’ve been alone with my spinning and alone in my playing. Without Glory to insist I be included, there’s always a reason I’m not allowed to come along or join the chore or play the game. I cannot help but smile sidelong at the green girl.

  A look crosses her face. Like she’s a cat and I’m a small scurrying sound in a hay pile. Then I blink, and she’s studying her hands folded in her lap.

  “Well, they came out,” the reeve says to Milord. “As I said, for all the good it’ll do you.”

  The boy looks to be eight or nine summers. He’s small and thin, like a bird, like a boy whose ma doesn’t want him playing out of her sight.

  Milord puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Eat something. Show them there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  I don’t need to be asked twice. There are two pewter plates on the table, and I pull one toward me and fill it with handfuls of bread and half a roast capon and a scoop of that savory whatever-it-is that smells like spices I can’t even guess at. Once there’s no more room on the plate, I carefully place it between the green girl and me. I mean to wait, to give her the first choice, but I can’t help myself and grab one of the capon legs. I’ve never had a whole leg for my own, and when I bite into it, the meat melts in a slurry of tender skin and butter.

  It would be something to be the daughter of a house like this.

  The green boy catches my eye, then goes back to looking at the food like it’s rubbish from the midden piled up before him. It’s almost like he heard me think it, then made it loud enough to push down other thoughts, and I know I shouldn’t think anything of the sort because wanting things is how Those Good People snare you.

  Fine gowns and servants to make the porridge. There’d be a lot less porridge, too, and a lot more meat. People would listen when I talked. They wouldn’t dare not, or I’d be interesting just because I lived here, and they’d want to listen.

  He’s smiling. For the smallest instant. Isn’t he? I take a big bite and chew it slow, tasting salt and spice and warmth and safety. The leaf-rot smell tickles my nose and all I can think is how much I want to live somewhere like here forever.

  The green girl uses the handle of her meat knife to push the heaping pewter plate so it’s entirely in front of me.

  Milord lifts his brows at the reeve, but the reeve muffles a groan like he’s fighting for patience. “No offense intended, my lord, but this is by no means proof. They’ve been told by their parents to be wary of strangers. Take it from a father who lost a son. It’s little wonder to me they’ll touch nothing.”

  “There’s no further proof I need,” Milord replies airily. “They can’t take the light. They won’t eat our food.”

  I stop chewing. If the green children are Those Good People and they’ve come to punish me, they’d ha
ve done it by now. So mayhap they want me here because they know the truth, that I’m the one who found them, and Glory is the liar this time.

  Mayhap they think to reward me after all.

  The green boy cocks his head of a sudden, sniffing like I would if there was a spiced cake nearby. He gets up and comes around the table toward the girl and me, and while I’m struck by the green of his eyes, he pulls from my apron two fistfuls of ripe bean pods still on their stalks from when I hurriedly wrenched them out of the garden this morning.

  My mouth is full. My hands, too, so I can’t stop him. I can’t tell him that those beans are for my family’s supper, that I was supposed to add them to the porridge at midday and I forgot and my ma will give me an earful.

  The green boy jams his fingers into the stalks, trying to pry them open as if the beans are in there instead of the pods. Even the reeve is staring openmouthed. There are other villages, surely. But other villages where kids don’t know that beans come in pods instead of stems is a story no one would believe.

  At length the boy slumps on the flagstones, defeated, and lets shredded stalks fall through his hands. He slices a tiny smile at the girl, and I am about to gasp but the rotty smell rises and the smile never happened because it’s a plea, begging her to help, begging someone to help.

  The green girl hisses and swipes a pod from his hand. She slits it with a thumbnail and wolfs down the beans raw, without butter or salt or any kind of sauce. While she finishes the beans I brought, Milord speaks quietly with a servant, and in a short while, the servant brings a basket heaping with bean pods. The girl eats those too without a glance at the capon and pie on the table, or a look at the boy. He does not reach for the basket. He barely moves at all.

  “I’ll hold a feast,” Milord murmurs. “Not here, of course. Somewhere grand. Men will come from all over. The king may even show.”

  “You’ll set about finding their parents, you mean,” the reeve says.

  “Their parents? Whyever would I do that?”

  The reeve’s face goes ruddy. “Do you mean to tell me you’re not even going to try to find their parents? Begging your pardon, my lord, but I will speak against it because that is not right.”

  “Tom.” Milord chuckles. “I will not find them.”

  “These kids are not . . . what you think they are. They are just children. It’s not like we’ve never seen little ones in this state. During the old king’s reign, when things were bad, don’t you remember seeing them along the roadsides? In ditches? A few were even this sort of color. Paler than this, but green.” The reeve’s voice warps. “Likely from eating nothing but grass when there was no one to care for them.”

  I put down my bread. I’ve heard those stories. I don’t like them.

  “Tom — ”

  “Look anyway,” the reeve says through his teeth, but then he must remember who he’s talking to because he gets redder and adds, “That is, the only right thing is to look anyway. You don’t want it said you’re stealing children. Do you?”

  Milord sighs. “Very well. But when I don’t find their parents, I won’t hear any more said about it. In the meantime, my steward will find them a place to lodge in the servants’ quarters.”

  “What of Agnes?” The reeve tips his chin at me, and the green girl looks up from searching the empty pods for more beans.

  “Walter’s daughter? Oh, she can be gone once she’s eaten her fill. She’s been most helpful, but I imagine she’ll be of more use in the wheat field now that I have the answers I wanted.”

  I’m wondering how much bread I can sneak into my apron, when the green girl shoves a hand into mine and grips hard. Her eyes get hard too, and she pulls me down to the floor and starts wailing like someone twice bereaved.

  The flagstones are cold beneath my knees. I think to put an arm around her, but I’m not sure she’d welcome it.

  Those Good People do not cry.

  The boy’s face is utterly still, like a carving from church. He’s not sad or scared. It’s like he feels nothing at all. The girl is holding my hand so tightly it stings, and part of me is happy because Glory and I once had a game where we’d see how long we could go holding hands before we had to break apart. But I shiver a little because Glory and I were all but sisters and I just met this girl.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, the children are very attached to Walter’s daughter,” Milord says to the reeve, sly and smug. “Perhaps she could stay here in the servants’ quarters with them.”

  If I stay here, no one in the village will know this story, that Milord needed my help, that I got to eat my fill at this table, that the green children wanted me instead of Glory. That girl and her stories, the Woolpit mas will say, but it will be the absolute truth. The reeve will have to swear to it. In front of everyone. Including Glory.

  Glory will surely want to make flower crowns with the girl who got to fill her guts with honey cake at the manor house instead of endlessly talking about nothing with Kate and Tabby.

  Milord brought the green children here and nothing ill has befallen him. He did not tack iron needles to his door or bury salt at his threshold. The girl is holding my hand like we’re friends already. If she’s one of Those Good People, I dare not offend her. If she’s not, she will have an easier time as a foundling if there’s someone nearby who understands.

  “Ah . . .” I raise my voice so I can be heard over the green girl’s crying. “The children could come to my house. My ma and da could look after them while you find their parents.”

  Milord frowns. “You should not promise for another, child. Besides, I could not ask it of them. Not with winter coming on. These two will be better off here.”

  The green girl bawls louder and her grip tightens.

  “They took me.” My heart is racing. “Not just for winter, either. Forever.”

  The reeve gives me a rare smile. “Agnes has a point, my lord. There’s no one better suited to care for foundlings while you look for their parents than the two generous souls who took in the last one.”

  That story goes like this: A bruised, hollow-eyed woman turned up on the heath dressed in scraps of a worn dress and gibbering like someone who’d seen war. She had a days-old infant strapped to her chest and went from house to house begging someone to raise it. Some of the Woolpit mas felt sorry for her. Most muttered mean things that even now make my ears go hot. No one opened their door for her — until my ma. My ma not only held out her arms for baby me, but invited the woman in to warm her feet and have some ale and talk about it. But as soon as she’d handed me over, the woman backed away, shaking her head. The Woolpit mas thought to question her, but neither she nor her body was ever found.

  “Very well, Tom.” Milord smiles faintly. “If you want to look the fool, so be it. Bring a cart around and take them to Walter’s place. I won’t search forever, though. They’ll be back here by spring.”

  The reeve nods, bows, and moves toward the door. Milord follows, and as soon as the grown-ups are gone, the green girl stops crying. She doesn’t whimper and tremble and at last get control of herself. She stops, like a candle flame snuffed out, and abruptly lets go of my hand.

  The green boy is still sitting amid the shredded bean pods. He picks one up and digs in his thumbnail so juice runs down his hand. I try to think of something Granny may have said about beans, but all that comes to mind is pity the wolves, yes, but it is their sacrifice that saves us.

  I am close now. It won’t be too much longer.

  At first I thought this Agnes was more clever than she looked, disappearing from the pit and sending a sacrifice in her place. Especially as the golden-headed fluffwit pranced and preened along the edge, telling her daddy to lower the rope a certain way, to pull the boy-thing up first because he was littler and therefore more afraid. As if she knew his heart somehow.

  That girl wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t do because she was not the one who heard me calling, and she would not take a hint.

  That’s w
hen I worked out there was no cleverness in the fluffwit turning up at the pit edge. It was all fortune, and I cannot trust fortune. Not with this boy-thing beside me. Not given what he wants.

  It took three days to get Agnes here. The lord of this place is like a garden worked through with manure; any fertile seed will grow. I had to be careful, though. Directing the boy-thing’s glamour is risky, and if I’m caught, he’ll turn the full weight of its power on me. I had to nudge the idea to fetch Agnes into the chieftain’s head in snips and pieces, and I paid for it well when the boy-thing put on that show with the bean stalks. No mortal child would look for beans in stalks instead of pods. He may as well have announced himself then and there.

  If he was permitted to speak above the mountain, doubtless he already would have.

  After all this time, such a piddling while as three days should not bother me. But I am no longer in the Otherworld, where time moves however the fair folk mold it. I have till All Hallow’s Eve. If I haven’t done what I’ve come to do, I’ll be worse than lost.

  Now Agnes is at the table, loading her apron with bread and meat. Her hands are warm, rubbed well with sheep grease, and her hair is the color of a tiny nameless bird. It’s hard to believe I was ever like her. That I could smile at a stranger and invite her into my home.

  I was, though. But I was also the kind of girl who could wring a chicken’s neck and crush mice that I found in the grain stores.

  The kind of girl who does what she must to survive.

  Past the mill, up the path, and there’s my house. My ma and da step outside as the cart rolls by the shed and into the yard. They must have come directly from the wheat field since their faces are so red and sweaty. The reeve leaps down and pulls them into the doorway, muttering something about poorly nourished and in deep distress and a little mothering, how my ma of all the mas in Woolpit is best suited to caring for them given their circumstances.