by Non Bramley
I peered into every corner. We were all alone.
‘Thank you. The Lady’s right – I don’t speak Hebrew.’
—The child was not speaking Hebrew, Jude. This is Mercian Old English, the language of the Anglo Saxons.
‘How are you here, Artie?’ I said, crouching so that our eyes were level. The child’s had the same red glint as her great-grandmother’s.
‘The Lady made it so only Granny could see me, and then she took me away before the bad man got me. Granny’s dead now so I’m here.’
‘Where is the Lady, sweetpea?’
The little girl grinned, and crossed her legs, dancing a little jig.
‘She’s here, in the ground. She’s bones now but that doesn’t matter a bit. She looks after me. She’s beautiful!’ she said, with earnest eyes. ‘She has silver hair and golden eyes and she’s like an angel but she’s not an angel. She hid me from the bad man and the doggie brought me here. He’ll be dead soon too. All the doggies will be dead but that’s okay because then they can be people. I’m sorry my doggie hurt you. Are you better now?’
I smiled at her. ‘I’m much better now.’
She patted my shoulders. ‘You’re big!’ she said delightedly. I want to be big. The Lady says we have to go to the abbey and that you’ll take us on your horse. I really want to ride on your horse. It must be big too!’
‘What happened to me, Artie? Who made me better?’
She looked at me as if I was teasing her. ‘The Lady did. The bad girl poisoned you and the Lady sent me to find you. Doggie followed you all the way here. In the morning we’ll go to where all the people are, where they do the singing.’
‘The abbey, child? I have to go and find the bad people first. The ones who hurt me.’
‘They’re gone. Oh!’ She looked at me with round eyes. ‘They took your horse! We’ll have to walk back. Is it far? I want to hear the singing. The Lady says we have to go and you have to take her stinky old bones. They’re in the floor.’
I believed her completely; she was the fount of miracles.
In front of the altar was a dark stone slab. It was carved with the image of a tree, its boughs laid out roughly in the shape of a cross. Strange beasts with ringed eyes were tangled in its branches. I couldn’t read the carved letters.
‘What does this say?’ I asked the child.
I guided her hand, and she traced the letters with a finger.
‘Ælfgifu. It’s the Lady’s grave. No one has said her name in years and years … so long she’s almost forgotten it.’
Artie was so sure-footed; surely she could see a little? I watched her moving about the place, but it didn’t look like she was seeing, or remembering her way. She was being guided by the voice in her head.
We spent the night in the church. When the child slept I stripped and looked at my body. My scars had gone. The jagged scar that ran across my brow had disappeared, the hole in my palm where Lollis had scooped out the rotten flesh had melted away. My arms that were usually criss-crossed with the evidence of blocked knife thrusts were as smooth as when I was a child on the island. I felt better than I had ever done but like a trespasser in my own skin. I was so happy to be whole, but God help me, I felt cheated. I had won those scars.
I slept on the floor by Artie’s little bed and she woke me at dawn.
We levered up the stone and found the crumbled remnants of a wooden box. I brushed the dry stuff away and found a tiny skull, not much bigger that the child’s. It had been filled with rowan berries that had shrivelled to nothing, but were still a dark blood red. Together, we laid out the bones. A skull, a few long bones and a handful of finger or toes bones were all that was left. She had been buried with reverence and love but nothing else. There was no gold or silver cloth, no carved crucifix, she had been given nothing more than berries from the hedgerow, the most beautiful thing they could afford.
I wrapped her in a scrap of cloth.
John had told me long ago that yew trees are ancient living things. They can look dead for a century but they’re just sleeping, and will wake and grow again. They can live to be thousands of years old. On impulse I added to the bundle of bones a sprig of yew from a tree that grew by the church door. Perhaps it had been just a seedling when the Lady Ælfgifu was put in the ground. It was my way of giving thanks.
I lifted Artie on to my shoulders; we would make better time that way. She held my ears, which made us laugh but left me deaf until I persuaded her to put her little arms around my neck. She was thrilled to be up so high, riding on my rocking shoulders.
I took us back to the farmstead, despite Artie’s exasperation.
Simon and the woman had gone. So had Meg. I took Artie by the hand and searched but there was nothing to say where they had gone to.
They must have been miles away by now. I would take the child back to Banfield and then start the hunt.
Artie stopped talking abruptly as I looked through the grisly box where Simon kept his collection of bones. It was all still there.
‘Who did these belong to, sweetheart? Can the Lady tell me?’
‘They just skellingtons from the graveyard. Why would he dig them up? They’re no good for playing with. I’ve tried,’ she said, with a peculiarly adult inflection.
I swept the bones into the box. I would come back and bury them again when I could. My hammer was still lying by the now-cold fireplace.
Outside the palisade gate the wolf was waiting for us. It hung its head when Artie pointed. ‘Bad dog! Go away now. Go away dog!’
It whimpered.
The day was warm, a strong sun shone in the white sky. The snow was melting, leaving brown muddy patches. Bird calls were loud in the trees. We found the road. When I turned and looked back I could see the wolf, watching us with something akin to love.
We walked back to the abbey like Saint Christopher and the Christ child.
It was near noon when we saw the abbey church spires and I left the road and went cross country. A ladybird landed on my hand and I let it walk on to Artie’s palm, her delighted shrieks scared rooks from the trees.
‘It tickles!’ she said. ‘We’re nearly there! Go where you put the dead lady, the one you put in your sack.’
She had me stumped for a while and then I remembered the dammer I’d found and left by the abbey midden.
‘What do you want to go there for?’
‘You’ll see!’
We were approaching the abbey from the north side, so it was no trouble to aim for the dark slick of rot that could be seen running down the wall, even from here. This was a sad place. The broken bodies of dammers were piled up, mouths gaping open in the hopes of something rancid being dropped from above. They were like flowers that turn to the sun, only animated by the sound of what might just be food.
‘Put me down,’ Artie said. She wiggled from my shoulders and I had to catch her or she would have fallen.
‘Don’t go near, little one. You could get bitten. There’s dammers all around your feet.’
‘Give me the head, please. I need it for medicine.’
I unwrapped Ælfgifu’s skull, its features delicate, even pretty. Artie felt for it, and took hold. She found the eye sockets and turned it so that its face looked out, and something happened. The gaping mouths drooped, heads nodded, outstretched hands relaxed and lay still, and, as quiet as a kiss the dead, died.
‘That’s better,’ Artie said to the air. ‘Go on now. They’re waiting for you. Bye bye.’
‘What have you done?’ I was breathless.
‘They wanted to go home. Can’t you hear them? They’re laughing!’
Rooks burst from the abbey church spires, a hundred, thousand specks of midnight black in a sky the colour of pearl.
‘And you can go away too,’ Artie whispered, her face turned up to the screaming birds.
Everywhere we went it was the same. Twisting, jumping sinews dried up and blew away, the ground under our feet heaved and went still. We had been walking
over human souls buried alive for decades and we’d never known. I walked through the south gate with the child on my shoulders, the skull of a saint balanced on my own.
It felt like a crown.
My story should end here but I suppose wonders aren’t enough for you. They weren’t enough for me.
There were no more miracles after that day but Saint Ælfgifu drew pilgrims to Banfield that were willing to help. The world had seen the unthinkable – they’d had jam today. Things improved, a little.
Philip had gone when I returned. For years I heard his name in the mouths of women and I wished them joy of him. He had none of me.
Johanna allowed the fingerbone of Saint Ælfgifu to be gifted to the Abbey of Saint Ivo. It draws a few more pilgrims west but Prior Richard’s dreams of a new Camelot are far from being realised. Still, he’s not dead yet.
What of Thomas? He disappeared with the fair-haired girl who blew poison dust in my eyes all those years ago. Some time later I showed my sketch of her face to the mother of Rebecca Moorhead. She confirmed it was her missing child. Who the blonde young woman we found murdered and buried in a pit was, I suspect I will never know.
Anne’s bones disappeared with Thomas Tavener, or Brother Simon Wright as I suppose I should learn to call him. Will Mercer remarried. His grandson is now as old as I when we first met.
The wolves died, their sickness closely resembling the crippling death of syphilis. I can’t be sure but I want to believe that this was Magdela’s last gift. She gave Tom the pox with a kiss and the wolf that attacked him contracted the sickness with one bite. It spread out from there. It wasn’t Anne’s divinity that made the wolf recoil, it was the pestilence it could taste in Tom Tavener’s blood. Why the wolf bit him, going against its every instinct to avoid diseased flesh, I can’t fathom. It must have been fuelled by something more than hunger – perhaps the murder of its child as it lay helpless in its dead mother’s blood.
I believe Tom used the wolves’ revulsion to walk at night, to put a tree up against the abbey walls and to tempt a monster into Lollis’s infirmary. I charge him with that death too. The words that she spoke to me as she died were not ‘selfless’ and ‘easier’ but ‘syphilis’ and ‘he’s here’. She had seen him on her visit to the lazar house that day, and recognised him. I believe this. You may not.
Thomas Tavener will be long dead, coughing his slimy lungs out into a ditch somewhere. There’s not even dammers to eat his corpse now.
So, you see, it was a red-haired girl who saved the world. She sold her self and what she gained in return was everything.
—These truths are terrible, Jude. They bring no comfort. There must be more. Why did Thomas stay? He had the bones of the poor murdered Anne. He could have been gone and away months before you found him.
—‘I love the very bones of you, Jude.’ There’s your answer. I was next.
I have one last thing to tell you.
Months after I returned to my little house at Saint Ivo’s, I had a dream. I hesitate to say it was a vision because I’m not the woman for visions. In my dream I stood in a house, very like my own. At a loom a woman with silver hair and golden eyes guided the shuttle from one hand to the other, concentrating so hard she didn’t raise her strange gaze to me as she spoke, and I knew that I was in the presence of the Lady Ælfgifu.
‘I can’t change things that must be, I can only use them. I can use a death if it’s pointless, I can weave with the thread, see here.’ She laid her finger on the cloth, I saw the red, blue, green and yellow mixed together to a new colour, beautiful and unnameable.
‘It was all for you. You’re the iron thread, you give it strength, it will never wear. I will weave you into the world and you will be the cloak that shields the weak and the hated. Where there is harm I will spread my cloth. What do you want in return?’
‘My scars,’ I answered.
When I woke, I was as God intended.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
Bright Belovèd Acknowledgements
(or, more accurately, apologies)
Thank you for coming with me on Jude’s very first outing into the world. There are many more to come. Although the work-a-day activities described in this book are based on medieval practices, I’ve used quite a bit of artistic license here and there.
Anglo Saxon language scholars will also no doubt recognise that my use (of a bastardised version) of the language is grammatically horrible.
For all of these mistakes and omissions I ask your indulgence.