by Alis Hawkins
‘Hearing of her martyr’s death, the people brought flowers and offerings and laid them around her well. And they mourned her greatly.
‘Soon, miracles were granted to those who prayed at the well where she had been martyred; the dead were raised, crops grew in drought, herds dying of the murrain were healed.
‘And then, one day — many years after her death, when Cynryth’s name no longer came quick to people’s minds and tongues — a barren mother had a vision at the well. She saw a maiden, all in white, carrying a new-born child. And, that very night, the woman conceived a son.’
The fire has burned low by now and I lean forward to put more wood on to the bed of embers.
‘And ever thereafter,’ I tell them, ‘Saint Cynryth was known as the White Maiden and her well as the White Maiden’s Well. It lies in woods on a hill outside the city of Salster and there are miracles done there to this very day.’
‘Is that where you’re going?’ Stephen asks. ‘Salster?’
I hesitate, flick a glance at Hob whose eyes are fixed on the fire. ‘Yes.’
And, in the discussion of routes and likely dangers that follows, the saint, wrapped in blankets in the hut, is forgotten.
CHAPTER 15
Thus far, though I know that Tredgham’s parson survived the pestilence’s coming, I have not sought him out. But thoughts of my father’s unhallowed grave in the forest plagued me all through my watch with Stephen and I barely slept thereafter. I must go and find the priest today, ask him to say a mass for my father’s unshriven soul. I need not mention the saint, nor my father’s stubborn faith in her which took us both to the forest, away from the protection of the church.
‘Go now!’ Hob says when I raise the subject. ‘The three of us can oversee the pit for an hour. There’s no wind, so the pit should burn quietly.’
He is echoing my own words so I can hardly find fault with his encouragement but, still, I hesitate, my eyes on the steady streams of smoke coming from the vent-holes. Can I leave Hob in charge? What if something happens while I am gone and the pit collapses? All our work will be wasted and we will be forced to start again.
I glance in the direction of the hut. I have not left the saint in Hob’s hands before. What if she disappears? After all, it would not be the first time. And perhaps, this time, she might not come back.
‘Go on, Martin! For a man crossing England in defence of his father’s soul you’re chary of walking half a mile to church.’
I look about me. All is as it should be. There is nothing for it but to go.
I do not know what makes me look back at the wood as I approach the church over the glebelands, but, even as I turn, I hear the startled crake of a pheasant beating frantically at the air to escape the men who have frightened it.
Tom and Stephen, walking towards the village. Has Hob given them leave to go? Or has he sent them away? They would not have left without his encouragement, I know that. But, freed from the hearth, they are keen to get to the village, that much is clear.
Why has Hob let both of them go? How many times have I told him that collyers should always be two together? He should have let one of the men go back to the village while the other stayed with him.
Perhaps he has sent them to the barn, to see what the cart holds.
I try to close my ears to the demon’s words but he knows my fears and picks at them.
Or perhaps he already knows, perhaps he lifted the canvas, in the wood before Cricklade, while Edgar was still prowling for your life.
A sudden alarm chills me. The thought of my father’s money-bag, sitting beneath the clothes in our press, has nagged at me ever since we left the cart in the reeve’s barn. I should have brought it with me. It contains all the money I have in the world. And the letters. The letters we are to deliver at Slievesdon — what if somebody takes it into his head to steal them?
I turn. The church is a furlong away, at most. I look for Tom and Stephen, on the path towards the village. Though they are a good way off, it seems to me that they are still hurrying. Did Hob tell them to go quickly, be back before me?
A blackbird swoops past, its warning call trailing behind. I turn but can see nobody coming after me.
You have to find the parson and ask him to say a mass. For your father’s sake.
My angel’s words turn me towards the church again and I stumble on. At the edge of the churchyard, I follow the wall around to the lych gate. With a last look in the direction of the wood, I cross myself and pass through. The gate is recently built, its thatch new and yellow. A wide slab for the body stands on one side and a narrower perch where the bearers can rest on the other. It speaks of a parson who cares for his people and a lord who’s dutiful in his dealings with them.
Beyond the gate stand scores of earth mounds, raw against the winter grass, the absence of a single weed-shoot proving their newness. I walk between them to the south door and, lifting the heavy latch, enter the church. The smell of old incense and snuffed candles is so familiar that, for a moment, I am back in Lysington. My hand rises to cross myself, my knee bends before the font and my fingers touch its rim of their own accord.
‘Is anyone here?’ I am ready to explain myself, the words waiting on my lips. Does the parson know about the saint? Has the whole village heard of her from Will?
Again I call out. My voice rings in the dimness but no answer comes.
I walk in to the body of the nave. Despite the familiar smells, this church is quite different from the Church of Our Lady. Where the panels that separated chancel from nave in Lysington’s church rose only to chest-height, here, the rood screen stands higher than a man. And, where ours was of wood, with a curtain above which was drawn back during the mass, here the screen is of stone, carved into window-like tracery. I wonder what it must be like, peering through this lattice of stone to see the parson raising the host, instead of having him in full view.
Hoc est corpus meum. This is my body.
The words of the holy mass; the words I longed to speak, myself, from the first time I put on the white robe as a boy of eight, trailing Master William to the altar where the host and the blood stood in shining silver.
Hoc est corpus meum.
The words of eternal life.
Before the pestilence, hearing those words sent a thrill through me, and the prospect — however dim — of standing in the sanctuary one day, facing east, saying the mass before my people, was what drove me to study, to hope, to defy my father.
But everything has changed, now. The church has failed us. Not prayers nor processions nor masses nor observances have stayed the march of the pestilence one inch. Worse, the church has overseen unholy burials — excused and sanctioned them — and crossed itself whilst doing so. And the miracle that saved me from death came not from a stone-canopied saint but from a girl who chose to make her home in the woods. Like my father.
As I turn away from the rood screen, I realise that I have never been alone in a church before. In Lysington, William was always with us. He never sent us boys on ahead to make preparations while he idled elsewhere; always, if we were in the chancel, he would be there too, explaining, guiding, admonishing, encouraging.
Parson’s pups: that’s what the people of Lysington called us, William’s assistants. But I outgrew puppyhood in his service, walking tall behind him while the raggle-taggle of little white-robed boys scurried after the two of us, casting their eyes aside at the cat-calls and jeers that the manor’s youths threw at me.
I have not passed beyond the rood screen with candle and cross since Candlemas. Since my family were taken. All the time my father kept us in the Dene, I tallied each service missed and held their loss against him but, since leaving Lysington, I have not ventured near a church.
I should not have come. I should not have left the saint. There is nothing for me, here.
I throw the door open, crossing myself as I pass over the threshold and duck through the lychgate at a trot. Though it seemed no great distance
when I was walking over, now, the grazing common that separates me from the hearth seems to have grown so wide that I will never cross it, never reach the wood. I run and run, head down, eyes on the treacherous ground.
As I come within a bow’s shot of the wood, a sharp cry of displeasure jerks my head back up. Black and white. Wings, feathers, beak, claws. A single magpie, coming for me. I feel myself falling, my hands going up to protect my face. As I fall, the bird seems to rear back, its wings chopping at the air, its tail-feathers splaying like rigid fingers stretching for the ground.
Devil’s bird, it lands on both feet despite its tussle with the air. It watches as I scramble up, tips its head to one side then hops back to whatever my stumbling run chased it from. It tears and comes away with a full beak. A scrap of bloody fur and bone.
Without thinking, I run at it, clapping and shouting, waving my arms, wanting to drive it off, to banish the threat of sorrow. The magpie throws itself into the air and half a dozen powerful wing-beats see it up and away.
I kick at the pathetic scraps it has left behind, sending shards of flesh-tattered bone in one direction, a bloody strip of fur and sinew in the other.
‘Martin!’
I look up. Hob is coming towards me from the edge of the wood.
‘Martin!’ He closes the distance between us and takes me by the shoulders. ‘What’s happened? I heard you shouting —’
I shake him off, break into a lumbering run, wanting to get back to the saint.
‘Martin?’
‘Where are the others?’ I do not stop, do not turn my head.
He catches up with me, seizes an arm to turn me. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Why did you send them away?’
He lets go of my arm. ‘I didn’t send them anywhere! They wanted to go into the village. We were all sitting idle so I let them go.’ He stops. I can feel his eyes on me. ‘Why did you think I would send them away?’
I turn and start running through the trees, not looking back despite Hob’s shouts.
Back on the hearth, I fling aside the covering that hangs at the hut’s door. The saint is not there. I left her standing against the wall behind one of the pallet-beds, the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her head free. And now she is gone.
My heart begins a panicked gallop. Why did I leave her?
I spin around to find Hob watching me, his breath coming as quickly as mine.
‘Where is she? The saint?’
Wordlessly, he turns and points. A blanket-wrapped bundle is leaning against the cordwood stacked for the next pit.
My hands shaking, I go to her. I kneel, unwrap the blanket. Unmarked and unharmed, the saint gazes at me, her outstretched hand reaching towards me. The linseed-and-summer-hay smell of her calms me.
‘Why did you bring her out here?’
Hob squats on his haunches in front of me. Next to the delicate features of the saint his face seems coarse and high-coloured. ‘Tom and Stephen wanted to see her. It’s too dark in the hut to see properly.’
‘She’s my saint. You had no right showing her to them.’
‘There’s no harm in it! Will had already seen her — he sneaked into the hut one morning when you’d gone for a piss — and he’d told Stephen.’
‘That’s still no reason to bring her out so they can gawp at her.’
Hob shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t like that. There’s something you’re not telling them and they want to know.’
‘Know what?’
‘Well, for a start, why you’re hiding the saint away in the dark. Shouldn’t she be where everybody can see her?’
‘That’s for me to decide. She’s my saint.’
My father was right. This is what he feared would happen if he told the story of the saint’s coming to him. Folks’d come traipsing through the woods wanting to see her. They’d come pawing at her and touching her. I won’t have it.
‘The point is, she’s the work of a master.’
‘So?’
‘So how exactly d’you come to have such a thing?’
I look at him. He came running when he heard me shouting at the magpie. While I was stumbling back to the hearth full of suspicion, convinced that he wanted to rob me, that he might do harm to the saint, Hob was minding the pit and looking out for me. Whatever his actions against Will, against Edgar, he has offered me nothing but friendship.
I lower myself on to the nearest stool. ‘If truth be told, Hob, I’m not sure. I thought I knew but…’
Hob pulls the other stool up and sits nearby. ‘But what?’
‘I found her after my father died.’ I swallow. ‘I thought my father must’ve commissioned her, that she’d arrived while I was sick. But— but then she disappeared again.’ Hob stares at me, waiting. ‘And she came back to me,’ I mumble, ‘when I was on my journey. When I needed her.’
‘A miracle?’
I look away from him. Am I really going to tell him this? For, once he knows, everyone will know.
‘A second miracle, perhaps.’
‘What do you mean?’
I turn my eyes to the saint, offer her a quick and silent prayer. Lady, protect me. ‘I told you I survived the pestilence — that I was sick but didn’t die?’
He nods. I can see he is still reserving judgement as far as my healing is concerned.
‘While I was sick — after our parson had anointed me, given me the rites — my father put me in the cart and took me from our village to our hearth in the forest.’
‘To your charcoal hearth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where the saint’s shrine was. That’s where she first appeared to my father.’
‘Appeared?’
‘In a vision. He had a vision of the saint a week or two after the peddler came and told us her story.’
Hob nods, slowly.
‘The vision of her made the hearth holy to him.’ I swallow. ‘So he took me there. Placed me under the saint’s protection.’
‘And then what?’
‘I woke up, in our hut. And he was lying there. Dead.’
‘He was dead when you woke up?’
‘Yes. He must have known he was dying.’ I hesitate, not sure how much to tell him. ‘When I woke up,’ I watch Hob’s face, ‘he’d sewn himself into his shroud.’
He frowns. ‘Sewn himself into it? What d’you mean?’
I remember the old woman’s kin lying, shrouded and band-wrapped. Not everybody sews up their dead.
‘In the Dene we lie our dead on their shroud, gather it in the middle and sew it from toes to crown.’
‘So you lay there, asleep, while he sewed himself into his shroud and moaned and cried out and died?’
I hear Richard’s suspicion again. Just upped and died, did he?
‘I don’t think there was much moaning.’
‘How so?’ There it is again. Hob likes this unexplained death as little as my brother did.
My father’s still, composed face appears in my eye. ‘When I woke, there was blood on my tunic where I’d coughed and coughed. His shroud didn’t have a drop of blood on it. Nor his clothes either.’ I see again that sad, neat little pile of garments that I found on the stool at the foot of his bed.
‘So. How did he die? Quickly and quietly doesn’t sound like the pestilence.’
‘I think —’
‘What?’
I glance over my shoulder at the figure of the saint. ‘I think my father struck a bargain with the saint. My life for his. All the prayers he’d made to her should have saved him. Instead, he spent them on me. And Saint Cynryth healed me.’
CHAPTER 16
Our apprentices have brought out the village. Or what the pestilence has left of it.
‘Well met friends!’ Hob’s call makes me jump.
The reeve, Geoffrey Levett, strides forward. ‘Well met, indeed, Hob Cleve! I hear you have a saint on the hearth?’ His eyes are on Hob, not me. Hob does not turn a
hair.
‘Yes. Martin’s patron saint. And not just a saint but a miracle-worker too.’
‘And what miracles has she done?’
This question comes from a small, slight man in modest, clerkly garb. He steps forward as he speaks and Geoffrey Levett turns to him.
‘This is our parson, Thomas Hassell.’
We bow to each other but, before I can answer him, Hob is speaking.
‘She healed Martin of the pestilence.’
Thomas Hassell looks troubled, as if he might have preferred less miraculous news. ‘May I see her?’
Hob turns to Tom. ‘She’s over there —’
‘No!’ All heads turn to me. ‘I’ll do it.’
I cross to the blanket-wrapped saint and take her in my arms. As I unwrap the covering I say a silent prayer. This is not my doing, lady, do not hold it against me or against my father…
Then, turning around, I hold the saint up so that her reaching hand stretches out to the parson and his people. There is a collective intake of breath and hands rise in the sign of the cross.
Thomas Hassell steps forward, eyes on the saint. ‘May I?’ he says again, glancing at me.
I lower the White Maiden’s figure so that the length of her is cradled against me and watch him as he stares at her. The expression on his deep-lined face is as unreadable as it is unchanging. He reaches out, reverently, and touches her cloak, her head covering.
‘Well?’ Levett is impatient. ‘Is it this unknown saint? Or have they stolen a church’s patron?’
‘I don’t know her. She’s like no saint I’ve ever seen. But I would dearly love to meet the craftsman who made her —’
‘Hold hard!’ Hob says. ‘We don’t know that a craftsman made her.’
Hassell’s eyes flick to me, not to Hob.
‘Martin doesn’t know where she came from, do you Martin?’
The parson pays him no attention; his gaze is still pinned to me. ‘Your friend says you were healed. Will you tell us about it, yourself?’
I shift my grip on the saint. She is heavy in my arms, unwieldy.
‘The plague came to our manor while my father and I were off coaling. When we got back to the village my eldest brother and his family were all dead and my mother and my new sister took ill soon after the babe was born. So many were dying that they couldn’t all be buried in the churchyard.’ I falter, remembering Newman’s Field. ‘And then I fell ill.’