The Green Children of Woolpit

by J. Anderson Coats

  But the morning after, I wake up in my bed. Ma hands me some porridge and kisses my forehead like it’s any other day, and I smile so big and grateful that Da asks me all teasing if I have a sweetheart.

  I’m safe. I’m well and truly free.

  Kate is tall and bony, with a great torrent of red hair that barely stays beneath her hood. Tabby’s front teeth were knocked out long ago by a stray hoof while she was milking, and she talks in whistles. They are glamoured easy. They are used to believing things they wish were true, and I hardly have to brush the fairy cloth before they are Agnes’s dearest forever friends.

  I arrange for us to wash clothes together one bright day just into the blood moon time, and I invite Glory to join us. She is desperate to have these girls as friends, and if I bring us all together in a tight little flock, I’ll win her over for sure.

  Only Glory takes one look at me, smiling there with Kate and Tabby standing as close to me as bark on an oak, and her eyes narrow. She makes some excuse and hurries away, and when I catch up with her, she hisses, “There’s no need to show me up, Green Agnes. I’ll not have someone be my friend out of pity.”

  The next day, the reeve starts watching me.

  He wanders near a house where I’m helping the wife dye skeins of wool with a bitter brew of walnut shells, and he happens past when I’m minding a tiny toddling child while her mother takes a much-needed rest. Other times I spot him speaking in mutters to some of the men as they thresh or fix things, and they shrug and make the friendly, unhelpful gestures I direct them toward. Once the reeve appears near the mill where I’m looking for that bad pig who doesn’t like me, and he raises an eyebrow when I tell him she’s reluctant to sleep in her byre.

  Chore by chore, errand by errand, Agnes has been making herself the darling of Woolpit, but the reeve constantly idling nearby makes people smile and wave me along. They don’t want my help if someone is there to notice, and I must use the fairy cloth to change their minds again and again.

  One rainy afternoon, the reeve turns up at our house. Glory is with him, bundled in a nubby brown cloak that’s trailing salt from every hem. It is so clearly her ma’s doing that it’s hard to be angry. Her ma is trying to protect her. It’s what mas do. Even so, that much salt is going to muddle my glamour, and I cannot have it.

  “May I take your cloak?” I smile at Glory, open and pleasant, all the while cursing myself. I should have directed Kate and Tabby to befriend Glory, not me. I should have seen how it would look — me taking something from her instead of inviting her into it.

  “I’ll keep it,” she replies, and even though she smiles back, she is not the girl Agnes would have as a friend, but Glory Miller from the pit.

  Ma dips them each a mug of ale and shows them to the bench, but they do not sit.

  “It’s come to my attention that the green girl has learned our tongue,” the reeve says, and I pull in a sharp, silent breath because it was not supposed to come to anyone’s attention. It was simply supposed to be, like it was never any other way.

  “You should have said something,” the reeve tells Ma. “Sir Richard would very much like to know how she and the boy found themselves here and where they came from. He won’t like knowing this was kept from him.”

  “What does it matter where they came from?” Ma asks with just the smallest bit of an edge. “She’s happy here. They both are.”

  “Surely you want these children to be reunited with their parents.” The reeve peers at her. “Do you not?”

  Ma takes long moments to reply. As far as she’s concerned, Martin is playing somewhere nearby, or staying at a friend’s hearth overnight. She has not asked about the old Agnes since All Hallow’s Eve.

  I will not take chances, though, not with this, so I rub the scrap of fairy cloth in my apron and Ma says, “Their parents may be dead. Or gone. These two are like my own children now.”

  “Your own,” the reeve repeats, and I smile. But Glory elbows him, salt spilling from her hem, and the reeve startles visibly and goes on. “Sir Richard feels he has asked too much of you and your husband, keeping them all this time. With winter coming on and all. He insists that they’re most welcome at the manor house.”

  After everything it took to get here, out from under anyone’s thumb — no, I will not have it. But the reeve is speaking slow and reluctant. He did not like how his chieftain thought to keep lost children from their ma and da. If it were left to him, the reeve would look for my parents till his eyes bled, even though they have not walked this place for a thousand years.

  He needs an excuse to keep looking. Something he can take back to his chieftain, but I can give him nothing that will do him much good or he will quickly see it for the falsehood it is. So I say, “I don’t know how we got here. We were following our father’s cattle, then we heard a sound. Then we found ourselves in the pit.”

  There. It’ll take him a while to speak to everyone within ten days’ walk who has more than one cow to follow.

  Glory cocks her head. “Sound? What sound?”

  “It was . . .” I cast about for words. I did not plan on Glory turning up with her hem full of salt. “The ringing. That we hear sometimes in the day.”

  “You mean the bells?” She frowns. “From the abbey of Saint Edmund? Surely you come from a place where you’d know the sound of bells. Bells that are rung in churches.”

  I am rubbing the fairy cloth hard now. Every god wants a sacrifice. The gods brought by the soldiers were no different.

  “Father says she will not go to mass.” The reeve speaks polite and careful still, but honed, and he keeps glancing at Ma and that’s when it hits me. He’s not as sure anymore that I’m a lost child, and he’s trying to protect her and Da, too, just in case. He’s trying to protect them from me.

  Mayhap his hem is full of salt as well. Glory’s ma wants me nowhere near her family.

  Ma puts her arm across my shoulders and pulls me close. “Agnes goes to mass. What a terrible thing to say.”

  The reeve starts three different times to speak. Finally he manages, “Mistress, I won’t call you a liar in your own house.”

  “Ask your daughter.” Ma is on her feet now, indignant. “Agnes stands with Glory often, and those other girls, too. The redhead and the one who lisps.”

  I run one bare toe across the hard-packed dirt floor. One day I will go to mass. It’s what Agnes does, and I am Agnes now. Today I rub the fairy cloth and the reeve blinks and suddenly remembers that of course Agnes goes to mass. But I study the floor as I do it. I cannot command Woolpit with glamour forever. Not if I simply want to be Agnes.

  “Speaking of Agnes.” The reeve clears his throat. “Where is she?”

  “Right here.” Ma takes my hand and smiles down at me, and my insides go melty like a warm summer shower.

  “Agnes,” the reeve replies, “with the fair hair. Your daughter.”

  “Her?” Ma shrugs irritably. “Who cares about — ”

  “You’ve seen Fair Agnes,” I tell him. “She left for the well not long ago. You must have seen her on the path.”

  “I must have seen her on the path.”

  “I remember a river, where we came from.” I speak clear and gentle. The reeve cannot leave here thinking something’s amiss with the old Agnes. He has to leave here on a hunt for rooster eggs. “A broad, rushing river. All the land around was green. So beautiful and full of growing things.”

  My first da would make fish traps out of willow wands and we’d weight them with stones and set them in that river. He’d bring some bread and we’d eat it on our walk home, through endless meadows, toward our fields and garden that all but sang with growing. Not even a thousand-thousand years could change this place so much. If it’ll take the reeve seasons to speak with everyone with more than one cow, walking every patch of green in this place, every stretch of river, will take him years.

  Years I will happily spend here.

  “Green.” The reeve nods as if he�
��s putting it to memory. “There was a river.”

  I show him and Glory to the door. “Look for our parents if you must, but I’m happy here. This is my home now.”

  Later today I’ll offer to help the housewives collect bark for tanning. I’ll thresh and winnow on the morrow, and wind yarn and even tread flax. Chore by chore, errand by errand, Woolpit is coming around and I am leading it by the nose. The reeve may have the ear of the chieftain in the grand house, but the mas will put him firmly in his place if he thinks to raise an eyebrow at me. The fewer questions about the boy-thing and the old Agnes, the easier it will be for people to forget they were ever here.

  Ma tugs me back to the fire and sits me down on the best part of the bench. “You never have to leave if you don’t want to. You know that, right? You are our baby, like you were born to us.”

  It warms me all the way through. “Want me to get more wood for the fire?”

  “Definitely not.” Ma groans to her feet. “You need your rest.”

  That is not something a ma would say. Ever.

  By spring I will be able to bury this piece of fairy cloth. All of Woolpit will believe me to be the girl I’ve always been. I’ll do it. I will.

  As soon as I know for sure that no one can ever make me leave.

  I’m certain this rat is lost. Instead of taking me down elegant corridors made of lovely twig pictures toward Em’s chamber, we’re crawling down a dank-smelling hallway that’s barely lit by guttering greenish lamps every stone’s throw. When the rat stops next to a fraying linen curtain with a moldy hem, I actually ask it, “Where are we? This can’t be right,” as if it could answer.

  Em claws back the curtain. Her wheat-pale hair is long and flyaway over both shoulders, and she’s wearing a musty dressing gown. “What are you doing here?”

  I dare not reply, so I hold up my hand where the orange butterfly still clings gamefully to my finger.

  “That brrzzzzzz,” she mutters, and I shiver because I know a swear when I hear one. She swipes the butterfly off my hand and crushes it in her fist. I squeak and flinch, but only fragments of a dry leaf scatter to the floor. “Taunt me, will he? I’d give much to see how he’d like it, being made the fool.”

  Em grabs my wrist and hauls me into the room, jerking the curtain closed. I stumble into a narrow wooden bed made up with a colorless blanket. There’s not much else in the room because there’s no space for it. A single chair with dead moss and rocks and tiny round bones piled on the seat. A peg on the wall, empty. There’s a faint shine of greenish light from the ceiling that seems to leak from the cracks, and the leaf-rot smell is thick like summer sweat.

  Em sees me glancing around and says, “Dreadful, isn’t it? It’s taking all my will just to make it decent. My other chamber is gone. Like it never was. All my gowns, my bed, my shoes — everything. My punishment, the king says. Till I produce that dratted pig.”

  It just seems, I want to tell her. But whether it’s real doesn’t matter here. Whatever glamour she has must pale against the king’s.

  “So not only must I walk into the revel in the ninety-and-ninth row,” Em goes on, “but I must do it as I stand. Barefoot, and practically in rags.”

  I stay near the door. My feet are made of the same coarse rubble as the ground. My hands the same linen as the curtain.

  “The way I see it,” Em says calmly, “it’s your fault I’m here. In this hole in the wall. In the ninety-and-ninth row.”

  She says it like Glory would. Simple and straightforward, like there’s no split to work in a chisel and gain a handhold. No way for me to say, But all I did was stand there. You were the one who needled the king. You were the one who overstepped her bounds, and not by accident, either. You were the one who turned my ma into a pig just for the fun of it and she got away and now you’re in trouble.

  I open my mouth to beg her pardon. Like I would if she were Glory. But it’s not my fault Em was punished. Just like it’s not my fault that the May King was cruel to Glory. It would have cost him nothing to dance with her just once.

  Em wants something. She’s not content with what she has. I may not be one of Those Good People, but I know what it is to want something so much you’ll give almost anything to get it. I know what it is to feel it’s so close that all you must do is give up one more thing.

  I know what it is to want someone to simply listen and believe.

  “The way I see it,” I say, “it’s the king’s fault you’re here.”

  She swivels to face me, squinting like she’s trying to decide whether to turn me into a rat or hear me out.

  “The king means to embarrass you,” I go on, and I wish Glory were here so she could hear it too, “but if you turn up at the revel anyway, who looks the fool then? Not you. You’re the one who can hold her head up no matter when she walks in. No matter what she’s wearing.”

  “There’s still the pig. If I don’t turn it back into the mortal thing it was before all the court, I will never hear the end of it. Worse than that, I’ll stay in this hole in the wall forever. No more gowns. No more carpets.” Em grabs my chin and peers into my face. “The king is wrong. You cannot be that pig. Yet somehow you must be the pig.”

  Those Good People rarely have babies of their own so she’s not thinking along those lines, but if she sits too long with it, she will work it out. Em wants things, and I must make it feel possible that she will have them. So I say, “At least let me make you a dress to wear. Then I should go back. Before the king notices I’m gone and you get in trouble again.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  The girl in the story knows Those Good People will always listen to flattery. “Whoever’s fault it is that you’re here, I don’t want to be on your bad side.”

  Em fidgets with threads loosening from her cuff. “Very well. It is your fault, after all.”

  I kneel beside the chair and pick through the rubbish on the seat. There’s moss, sure enough, and sticks and leaves, but also a handful of tiny bones the size of my smallest fingernail. Bones make me think of meat, which makes the whole room smell like the tastiest supper the manor house could offer, which makes my belly light up with stings and jabs of hunger, but I fight it and keep working. The bones are a bit like glowworms, only not easily biddable like things that are alive. They must be coerced. Slick tendons appear and slither around the bone ends to join them, just like something living. A tiny headache sprouts in the middle of my forehead, but I keep weaving till the bones run out.

  “What do you think?” I hold up what I’ve made so far. A bodice, laced together with the tenderest wisps of sinew.

  Em brushes admiring fingers against it and the bones whisper clickety-tick. “Oh yes. Keep going.”

  “I used all the bones. Can you get more?”

  She bangs her fist twice on the wall and a heap of bones grows at my feet. They’re stripped bare and smooth to the touch, like they’ve been bleaching at the bottom of a pit.

  A life for a life, by whatever means. There are bones because there is sacrifice.

  Em is sitting on the edge of the narrow bed toying with her hair, pulling it up this way and braiding it that way. She is already halfway to the revel and paying me no mind. With slow, quiet motions, I start slipping the smallest bones under my folded skirts. One by one. A handful. Soon, the only bones left in the towering pile are bulky and thick. Thigh bones and ribs, half a skull.

  “Beg pardon, but these are too big,” I say. “The dress will look silly. I need little ones.”

  Em frowns at the pile and kicks it a few times. Then she sighs and raps on the wall again. Another gush of bones rises in the pile, and when she goes back to fiddling with her hair, I hide the tiny ones till none are left. When I ask a third time, Em hits the wall so hard that bones fill half the room in a heap taller than my head.

  I hide small bones steadily. There’s a mound of them now and they dig into my bare legs under my skirt. It’s all I can do not to squirm.

  “I’m
sorry.” I hold up a pair of huge collarbones. “I suppose I’ll have to use these big ones. I’m sure your gown won’t look too ridiculous.”

  “Numbwit good-for-nothing walls,” Em growls. “Think this is funny, do you? There are plenty of ways to get bones around here.”

  She buzzes angrily into the corridor, and when I leap up to make sure she’s out of sight, the curtain won’t budge. It’s like a sheet of rock, unmoving and solid. I couldn’t escape if I tried. But I don’t mean to get out. Not now. Not yet. Em must go to the revel believing she has beaten the king at his own game.

  I don’t want to think about the ways there are to get bones around here. I have what I need. Before Em returns, I must make a pig.

  First a cage of bones, then moss as muscle and skin. My hands are still littered with cuts atop cuts from the wheat field, not a one of them healed, and my blood slicks over the monstrous thing in drips and smears. I close my eyes and think of Mother, her bristly skin and sturdy trotters and loppy, folded-over ears. She got me out of here once. With any luck she can do it again with this blood we share that must serve.

  Glamour makes things seem, but surely there are limits. Making yard waste and bones seem like a living thing might be one of them. It doesn’t have to seem for that long, though. Just until the king calls Em to account.

  When I open my eyes, a pig-thing stands before me. It wavers on legs that are too skinny, and its eyes are flat and blank like the rocks they truly are. But Em will want to see a pig, so she will see one.

  Bones cover half the small room knee-deep. I heap them near the door so the pile is almost to my waist, then carve out a hole and tuck the pig-thing inside. The poor creature makes no sound and sways on its little trotters. I cover the hole carefully and arrange more bones over it so nothing of the hole or the pig is visible.

  Then I whisper a prayer to any saint listening, pour the mound of little bones I hid back into the pile, and pick up making the dress like nothing is amiss. I’m working the last part of the skirt when Em sweeps in, the curtain dancing like ordinary linen once more. Without a word, she pours a basketful of tiny bones onto the floor by my knees. They rattle and bounce everywhere, like hail on hard-packed ground.