’Twas a generous sum, I thought, even for a greedy Scot, so I was taken aback at his scornful bray.
“One hundred livres fer yer life? E’en a Scot values his breath more than that. Mayhap ye’re too young to deal, sae I’ll gae back to my original statement: I’ll tell ye what to do. Now, Alex, lad, as a youngest son, my drive is fer land and only land. I’ll get ye to yer Uncle Frank; aye, I’ll do more if need be and chancit what e’er comes our way, but in return ye’ll promise me half of yer lands here and now. Half of yer lands, nae more, nae less. There’ll be no quibblin’ or dealin’ further. That’s my terms.”
He fair knocked my breath away. Give up half of Wanthwaite? After what my father had said about his and my mother’s souls resting there? Never, never would I part with a mudball of Wanthwaite, not a twig from the park, not a stone from a drywall. I gazed into that tough Scottish craw and smiled sweetly:
“Aye, Enoch, I see your point. Half my land is a small price for my very life and the other half be plenty for me. The risk is great for both of us. Why shouldn’t the stakes be equal?”
He grinned back in broad triumph. “Ye’re a smart lad and yer good blood shows. Let me have yer hand.”
I thrust my right hand forward into his grasp. No sooner had we completed our shake than we heard a chapel bell in the distance; instantly the Scot’s gloating changed to caution.
“A clinkumbell jowin’ Prime,” he said. “Best be fleeing, bairn, while we may. Here, take a few farls to stay yer hunger.”
He lifted me atop Twixt again and handed me hard pellets which had the feel and taste of dried mud balls. We shared nappy from a leather flask to wash them down, but I was too panicked to care whether I ate and wished only that Enoch would push his mule faster. He sought silent footings and took many pauses to test the wind so that we seemed to creep. Usually any rustlings turned out to be animals or birds, but once we heard human voices and Enoch cursed softly that we’d drifted too close to Dere Street.
After a few false stops, Enoch was satisfied by a domed willow whose tendrils created a room. Huddled behind its swaying circle of fronds, we felt safe from view, though the spongy ground was crisscrossed with streamlets and we had to cut faggots to make dry pallets for ourselves and our beasts. We all bedded close, warm in our mutual body heat and steamy breaths. Enoch and I spoke no more that day of Wanthwaite.
The next day was the same, and the next: silent and tense. By the third night out we were both hungry and cold for we dared not build a fire or take game. Enoch explained that the punishment for hunting in the king’s park was death. Only Lance could take his fill.
Indeed, the next day I became aware that prime game roamed as pets around us. Only the king and his men could hunt here, but they rarely did. Twice we came across ancient deserted villages where people had been deprived of their farms to make way for the king’s sport. There we found roofs for our heads, wells for water, good forage for Twixt and Tippet. And at the second village, Enoch again brought up Wanthwaite.
“Where exactly be this Wanthwaite castle? Close to where we met?”
His half-closed eyes glinted like sunstruck water and his voice was deceptively friendly, but I instantly sensed a sinister purpose.
“Nowhere near there. Dame Margery had led me for the better part of a week, I believe. I told you—Newcastle.”
“Should be easy to find.”
“Aye.” I tried not to show my fear. “Speaking of distance, how long do you think it will be before we get to London?”
“Twa weeks, more or less.”
Two weeks! And I’d promised Dame Margery I would be back in a week. Briefly I wondered if Enoch was deliberately stretching our journey but decided he had no cause. No, I’d just have to suffer through this period and get to the king as soon as possible once in London. The king would deal with the Scot.
From that night Enoch plied me with questions about my castle as I invented one “fact” after another. ’Twas deliberate on my part, but forsooth I couldn’t have answered him honestly if I’d wanted to, for I discovered that I knew little about the husbandry of my estate. Yet ’twas better to make up answers than to admit my ignorance, for that might also admit my true sex, and I recalled what my father had warned: that a man could get Wanthwaite by marrying me. To be wed to a Scot!
However, Enoch accepted me completely as a boy which both heartened and surprised me. Certes I was feminine in my own eyes and gave myself away a hundred times daily. I finally concluded that for Enoch—and I hoped for everybody—once the sex of a person is established, that’s the end of the matter. He seemed not to notice that I always sought privacy to relieve myself. Nevertheless, when Enoch wasn’t looking I studied his person and habits, learning how to be manly and oafish together. If he’d turned suddenly, he would have found me strutting cockily in his shadow, my chin up, my feet pounding the ground as a woodman hits with his ax. When I spoke with him, I thrust out a belligerent lip, gazed coldly into his eyes, cracked my words like nuts. Sitting over odious cocky-leeky, I plunged my whole hand into the slops, chewed voraciously with open mouth as the fat dripped down my chin, then belched to make the leaves tremble. I blew my nose into my palm or directly onto the ground instead of using my sleeve as I’d been taught.
I didn’t consciously try to imitate his Scottish way of speaking but certes one of us was changing, for his speech now sounded normal to my ear. On the one hand I wasn’t eager to assume his guttural grunts and stops, but on the other ’twould be a good disguise if we were to pass as brothers. However, I would never master his savage vocabulary though I knew well what he meant most times by the way he said it. He was always positive no matter what: positively angry, positively hungry, positively calculating, positively suspicious. Not a subtle beast, a bull not a snake.
Enoch was particular about bathing and plunged into icy streams or weirs as joyfully as a salmon. Over and over, he invited me to join him though I demurred. On the day he announced that we were halfway to London, he said that we could be more relaxed and we lolled by a pretty pond after our midday nap. Suddenly he picked me up like a babe:
“Alex, no offense but ye stink like an otter that’s been dead three weeks.”
And he tossed me screaming through the air to the center of the water where I promptly sank to the bottom. I felt his hand grapple for my hair and pull upward.
“Waesucks, lad, why didn’t ye say that ye couldna swim?”
I sputtered that I could, then fell silent. Best let him think as he list, for of course ’twas my treasure that pulled me down.
One night we lay gazing upward at the sky.
“See, Enoch, a shadow on the moon. Be that significant?” For he knew all omens.
“Ye’ve a keen eye. ’Tis the good folet Abunda, a witch that’s guiding our steps.”
“But I thought witches were bad.”
“Who told ye that? Some witches be mischievous, but those take human form. Abunda be a fine folet.”
He then turned his back and snored as I continued to watch the drifting witch. By day I was too nervous to dwell on my grief but at night, alone under the stars, my loss made the cold earth seem a grave. Mayhap this witch could guide me back to my home and to life. I gazed and thought until the darkness dispersed her into the void.
THE NEXT DAY WE MET PEOPLE. Enoch and Lance heard them before I did and took their familiar listening stance.
“Summun’s callin’ fer help,” Enoch whispered. “Listen: ‘Help! Help!’ ’Tis a man callin’ but there’s also a woman—no, twa women.”
Now I could hear them as well. “They’re speaking some form of Saxon, not the Norman-French patois.”
“Aye, they canna be Roncechaux. Well, bairn, what say ye? Shall we be chivalrous cnichts?”
“I think we should—you can’t tell what may have happened.” And again I saw Wanthwaite burning.
Warily Enoch prodded Twixt ahead while we both strained to see the distraught man. Well before he came in view, his
voice was joined by a woman’s howl of pain and a second woman’s harangue of anger. We entered a clearing containing a mean hut of sticks and thatch whence came piercing screams, while before it knelt a scrawny churl crying for help and defending himself as best he could from the blows leveled with astounding force by a dark old crone.
“You feckless hog, you pig’s arse, you timorous mite, get up and help!” she bellowed.
“I can’t, Aggie, honest I can’t,” he whined. “The pope will come personally and kill me if I do and I’ll ne’er get into Heaven.”
“The pope’s in Rome, God rot his soul, and I’m here! So consider that, you miserable turd.”
She beat him with a handful of faggots to tear his skin in shreds and he took it meekly. ’Twas possible she was a witch in sooth for her brown face folded onto itself like saddle bags and her formidable arm had unnatural strength.
“Do you want the babe to lose its father?” he protested.
“Aye, that I do. Better that than father lose babe, that’s my law which says you’re hiding behind the canon law because you’re a blubbering (wham), slobbering (wham), weak-gutted (wham), bitch-boned (wham), sour-breathed (wham), sticked swine what puts your popper in a pouch, then loses gullet when the seed comes back a babe. Get off your knees now and give help, for murder be a worse sin than witnessing a birth.”
“Not for a man, Aggie, not for a man. Canon law says—”
“Get off your toute-ass and help!” she finished for him.
Enoch pushed Twixt a mite closer, then raised his horned hat and spoke politely. “Beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am, be this man abusin’ ye?”
There was a moment of startled silence while both the bleeding churl and the dame looked up with gaping jaws, nonplussed.
Her eyes, small and red as ladybugs, suddenly fastened on me and she jerked me rudely to the ground.
“Come on,” she ordered. “You’re a boy, not a man, so canon law doesn’t apply. If I don’t get help, Maud will die.”
Now the screams from the hut took over to make my skin crawl. I cast a beseeching look at Enoch as Dame Aggie dragged me inside the shack. Neither of us could stand upright in the thick dark space and my ears split, my nose quivered and my stomach lurched at the sound and stench of the place. Gradually I saw a figure rolling on the floor at my feet, clutching a great mound on her belly.
“Oh, God help me!” the figure cried. “Where’s Lucina? Lucina, come help me! Anybody, make the pain stop!”
“Don’t worry, dear,” Aggie soothed, “I’ve got help at last, a very experienced young leecher.” Her tone was crisp. “You, boy, kneel down and take two corners of the blanket.”
I knelt.
“Now lift when I say.”
I got back to my feet, holding the corners. At her signal I tried to lift and nothing happened.
“Lift, you fool!”
Again I tugged along with the dame, but her side went up alone and Maud fell at my feet.
“Do you need a few lashes to give you strength? Up, I say!”
Terrified, I lifted with force I didn’t know I had and Maud hung between us on a hammock, screaming ever louder in a series of spasms. We were killing her sure and my knees knocked in panic.
“Heave!” bawled the dame.
And I heaved as Maud flew high and fair broke my arms in her fall.
“Heave!”
Again we tossed her like a pulpy rock, up and down, up and down, while her stomach began strange gyrations.
“Now, lower her easy.”
I did.
“Now sit on her stomach and get in rhythm.”
“I’ll hurt her,” I whimpered.
“Sit on her stomach!”
I sat.
“Up! Lay on sore. Up! Lay on sore.”
I felt the lump moving under me and closed my eyes.
“Stop, that’s enough. Come help me here.”
Too cowed to protest, I crawled to Maud’s lower end and witnessed a huge dark mouth stretch wide, then spit a waxy bag in a torrent of slime and blood while Aggie pulled and pulled. The bag was fastened inside by a long piece of gut which Aggie snapped with her teeth.
“Lordy Maud, it’s twins born in their own caul. Was ever such a blessing? Look, darling, twins!”
Aggie ripped at the caul with a knife and lifted two wormy creatures as I leaned forward to see what they might be.
I gasped aloud.
“Get out of here!” Dame Aggie snarled viciously.
“But—” I said, too dazed to move.
“And not a word!”
“But—” I repeated in a stupor.
“Here’s your payment. Don’t let me see your silly face when I come out or you’ll be sorry.”
Still toty I felt something thrust in my hand and was suddenly in bright light holding the bloody caul, which looked like a boar’s liver.
“Augh!” I dropped it in disgust.
“Pick it up and let’s go,” Enoch commanded sharply.
Reluctantly I obeyed and soon we were riding rapidly away. When we were well beyond earshot, Enoch questioned me closely upon what had transpired for he’d never seen a baby be born. I described the revolting details as best I could and at last reached the terrifying mystery.
“And when I leaned to look closely, Enoch, one babe looked normal though hideous ugly, but the other had only two holes where his nose should have been.”
I turned anxiously to see his reaction.
“That explains it, certes, for otherwise the old dame would never have give up the caul. She was buyin’ yer silence.”
“About the freak?”
“Aye, partly. Worse for Maud be the fact that her secret’s out. When one twin shaws a marked difference fram the other, ye can be sure that twa sires bred the mare.”
“What?”
“There’s been two bittern booming in the mire. Adultery, my lad, simple adultery.”
Adultery! One of the deadly sins, I knew, though I’d never been sure what it signified nor did I now. Yet I must have had some notion of it for I found myself surprised that a creature as low as Maud would be guilty. Somehow I thought only kings were adulterous. The sin went down somewhat in my estimation, like gluttony.
I held the purple-veined slime at arm’s length. “Why is a caul so important?”
“A caul usually be destroyed by the babe at birth. When it comes whole, ’tis a token straight from Heaven with strong magic powers. Niver let it gae, fer ye’re the first wight I’ve known personally what received such a gift. It mun mean summit.”
I was grateful to Enoch, for suppose I’d gotten such a loathsome innard without him to explain it? ’Twould have been flung in a ditch afore now. Then I had a further revelation: this caul was a sign from the good witch Abunda! Instantly I drew the flesh to my chest and hugged it tight. Never would I be separated from my caul until my mission was complete.
SOOTHLY THE CAUL WROUGHT ITS MAGIC, FOR two weeks later we stood safely on a grassy verge overlooking a stream of people.
“We’ve changed to Watling,” said Enoch, “where it joins Icknield Street nigh to Dunstable. Folk from the north and folk fram Oxen-ford march togeddir from this point on and we’ll disappear in the crowd.”
I looked at him in disbelief. Even after all this time, I thought him the wildest, woolliest creature ever born and he would disappear only in a crowd of Scots. Also, since Northumberland and Roncechaux now knew my disguise, I was as visible as Enoch. But apparently we’d have to take our chances, for Enoch assured me that the only alternative was to cut across open fields and I wanted no more of that ever again.
’Twas a wondrous crowd of people jostling along the way, but I was too anxious searching for my enemies to enjoy the sight. When we were sure all we saw were strangers, Enoch nudged Twixt down the slope onto the stones with Tippet trailing after and Lance a shadow under the ass’s bulging belly.
My heart started and stopped in panic as the safety of the last two hazy green weeks w
as left behind. I tried to hide my face under my hat, peering from under the brim. Knights there were aplenty, such a ratty bunch of ruffians that they were more brigand than noble. Foot soldiers as well moved in the crowd, with bits of armor and an occasional helmet. Churchmen of all casts, friars, priests, monks, holy sisters, pardoners, even two hermits, but by far the largest group were buyers and sellers headed for the London market. There were physicians in purple robes and gray gloves, a sprinkling of strange folk with yellow circles on their sleeves and yellow pointed hats, rich landowners in coifs. Once we passed hand-carried litters of two noble young ladies, with heads held high on long necks, their expressions as regal and mean as swans’.
The din was fierce. Everyone talked or shouted in a babble of tongues while babes screamed from their cradle-boards and tore at their mothers’ snoods and drivers flicked whips to clear the way for long lumbering carts crowded with ancients. Horses neighed and struck the stones smartly with their hooves while harness bells jingled and somewhere someone caught the rhythm and began to sing.
“When misty clouds break to the sun,
Then shall whistling soon be begun
Of May!
Of merriest May!
Tunes to sing are delighful
When they’re made with fable full
Of May!
Of merriest May!
No more have hearts to mourn in pain,
No more let envy your lives stain;
Be gay! Be frivolous gay!”
’Twas a happy song joyously sung and I began to feel an excitement stir in spite of my fears, when of a sudden the Scot joined the chorus. What ailed the oaf? Had he forgotten utterly our need to be inconspicuous? Not only did he bray in his native tongue louder than anyone, he sang some toty tune up in the clouds known only to himself.
I tried to shrink wee as a fairy, but the horror was soon doubled when Twixt was jostled out of step by a fat horse, and a female voice called out, “Don’t stop! Sing on and I’ll join ye.”
Enoch grinned and complied while I stared from under my hat at a plump partridge riding a white mare. She sang lustily loud, further off-key even than Enoch, her mouth stretching wide over her pointed gap-teeth. I had never seen such a bold wench, a chicken vendor to judge by the huge white hens caged on the rump of her mare, for her dress was cunningly contrived to show more than it concealed. Her egg-white wimple was starched stiff as parchment, but slipped back to display wiry red crinkled hair; her full freckled face was framed by heavy dangles in her ears; her pale brows were plucked above jade-green eyes threatened with sties; her bosom was covered to its cleavage—albeit with a transparent gauze; her kirtle was pulled tight at her waist so that both hips and breasts bulged like melons; her scarlet skirts were hiked to show a bold expanse of thick hairy legs above her brown boots. Yet no doubt she was a handsome dame in her coarse way, for she was spritely and friendly as a sparrow.
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