John Saturnall's Feast (4 page)

Newly cut branches kept away flies, John knew. Boiled, their liquor loosened the bowels. Judas hanged himself-from an elder, Old Holy had told them in one of his lessons. And the sticks made blowguns. You had to poke out the pith.

John's mother dropped shoots into the kettle set within the cauldron, took a ladle and stirred, her ladle drawing slow figure-of-eights in the steaming liquid. A measure of water followed and a little of the liquor from one of her jars.

It took the blink of an eye to taint a liquor, she had taught him. Snapping a root too short or boiling it too long; a pinch too little or a peck too much; gathering bulbs beneath a waning moon or on the wrong days in the year. The liquid in her kettle would be strained and cooled then mixed or left pure. Then she would pour it off to join the stoppered jars which stood in neat rows beside the chest: her decoctions, simples, liquors and potions.

Moonlight was glowing through the window-cloths by the time his mother shook the drips off her ladle and reached for their supper-pan. From the Starling cottage below, Jake and Mercy's arguing voices drifted up. The back log shifted and sparks flew up the chimney. Sitting against the wall, John waited for the waft of smells to curl from the pot. As his mother lifted the lid, a puff of steam rolled up and broke against the rough underside of the thatch. She looked over with a smile. It was their game.

‘Mutton,’ he said. ‘Barley. An apple. Some lemon thyme. Bay . . . ‘

He had only to breathe in to know the names. When he had finished, she leaned across to ruffle his hair. As her fingers brushed the bruise, he winced. She frowned then drew him close, her fingers feeling gently around the swelling.

‘John,’ she soothed him. ‘My boy. It's just their sport.’

They were the words she always spoke, cradling his head or combing his hair with her fingers. Her whispers curled about his ears like riddles. Like the wisps of steam from her kettle that twisted up, stretching and dissipating into nothing. But John remembered the stink in the sack. Dando's kick. Abel Starling could bounce rocks off his head till his hair turned grey, his mother would still be murmuring in his ear. Suddenly his impatience flashed into anger. He pulled away.

‘We don't belong here,’ he said.

‘Belong?’

‘We should never have come back.’

His mother's eyes narrowed. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Ephraim Clough.’

‘What does he know?’ his mother retorted. ‘This is our home.

Everything we have is here.’

‘And what's that?’ he demanded, looking around the hut's narrow walls. ‘What do we have?’

A reproachful look from his mother. Silence would follow, he knew. That was how all their disputes ended. They turned to nothing like the steam from her kettle . . . But now he saw her brow furrow.

‘More than you know,’ she said. To his surprise, she got to her feet, walked to the hearth and reached up. When she turned, she had the book in her hands. She set it on the chest and eyed him across the heavy slab. ‘Open it.’

Was it a trick, he wondered? Some new riddle to bewilder him? As he lifted the leather-bound cover, the musty smell of paper rose up. He turned the first mottled leaf and looked down at an elaborately drawn image. A brimming goblet was decorated with curling vines and bunches of grapes. But instead of wine or water, the cup was filled with words.

John stared at the alien symbols. He could not read. Around the goblet a strange garden grew. Honeycombs dripped and flowers like crocuses sprouted among thick-trunked trees. Vines draped themselves about their branches which bristled with leaves and bent under heavy bunches of fruit. In the far background John spied a roof with a tall chimney. His mother settled beside him.

‘Palm trees,’ she said. ‘These are dates. Honey came from the hives and saffron from these flowers. Grapes swelled on the vine . . .’

She spoke half to herself as if she were reciting words learnt long ago, her fingers skipping from the faded symbols to the images of plants and fruits. Then she turned the page.

It might have been a different book. The ink was bolder and the paper less mottled. Here were the palm trees again, and the crocuses and vines, but with all their cousins too. Flowers that John knew from the meadow sprang up beside bushes whose fruit he had never seen before. Creeping plants coiled like serpents amid monstrosities which surely had never existed in nature. Yet every vein of every leaf or petal was picked out as if drawn from life. Every stem was labelled with tiny spiky letters. More such pages followed. Then the ancient book returned with its faded ink. This time a forest of birds rose from the mottled paper.

‘These pages were written long ago,’ his mother said, looking down at the trunks and branches. ‘Written and rewritten. Long before you and me.’

‘What are they?’ John asked, looking among the trees.

‘Each page was a garden. Every fruit grew there.’

Kettle-steam, he thought again as his mother fell silent. But then the images drew him in. Birds flew or roosted amid the branches: plovers, larks and doves together with others that John could not name. They carried words in their beaks, fluttering up out of their treetop garden. The building featured again, larger now but obscured by the trunks of the trees. The chimney peeked over the top. His mother turned and the bolder pages resumed. They seemed to have been added later to illustrate the ancient ones, for these showed birds from great eagles to fig-peekers. John turned to a river with fishes jumping in and out of the water. Each scale held a word, the lines leaping from body to body. The building rose on the far bank. The next was a seashore teeming with tiny scuttling crabs. Now he could see that the building was grander: a hall with high arched windows. The chimney was a great tower. Orchards of cherries, apples and pears followed, the trees all laid out in a criss-cross pattern. There were the high arched windows and chimney again. Almost a palace, John thought. Who lived there?

A strange plantation passed before John's eyes. At the back of his throat his demon stirred as if he might smell the scents of the blossom or taste the fruits. Every plant and creature imaginable was here, he thought, the real and fanciful crowded together. But the wisps of steam still rose from her kettle. The strange gardens no more told him why he and his mother belonged in Buckland than the grass in the meadow outside. John felt his defiance evaporate, replaced by bafflement.

‘I don't understand,’ he confessed at last.

His mother smiled.

‘I'll teach you.’

It was all but dark when the driver turned the piebald mare off the road. Josh and Ben tramped through a meadow to a broken-down barn. A ramp of earth led into the croft. Joshua hitched up the horses. Then he came to the mule. On its back, the boy lolled to one side.

‘I told you to keep an eye on him,’ the driver told Ben sharply. ‘Now look.’

The boy was shivering. Joshua untied the bindings about his wrists and ankles then eased him off the animal's back. He collapsed on the floor.

‘I thought you meant he'd run away,’ Ben Martin offered awkwardly.

‘How's he going to do that?’ Josh snapped, chafing warmth into the boy's hands. ‘Ain't got nowhere to run, has he? Come on, get hold of his feet.’

The boy struggled weakly as Josh stripped off the sodden coat. They worked on his shivering limbs then pulled a wool coverlet from one of the sacks. The boy seemed indifferent to these attentions, neither helping nor hindering. He was thinner even than he had appeared on the mule, his ribs and collarbone jutting out. His face betrayed no reaction as Josh wrapped him in the blanket.

While the driver brushed down the horses, Ben Martin foraged for wood. The parcel's strange odour wafted up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the boy's head turn.

‘You know this smell?’ Ben asked.

The strange odour had hung about him since the back room of the Dog at Night the week before. Like pitch but sweet, even wrapped in oilcloth and sealed with wax. Almery had heaved the parcel onto the table.

Buckland Manor, the dark-faced man had told him in his strange accent. Carriage to Richard Scovell. Master Cook to Sir William Fremantle himself, the man had added with a grin. Nine shillings had seemed a good price at the time.

Before that night he had carried nothing heavier than the ledger-books of Master Samuel Fessler, wool-factor, who was Ben's late employer. He had never set foot in the Vale of Buckland. He had never been so far as the Levels. But Ben had nodded to the dark-skinned man in the warm back room. The next morning he had shouldered the strange-smelling pack and set out for the Vale.

The boy looked away. The fire crackled and Josh cut a loaf into three. The men watched the boy rip hunks off his share and cram them into his mouth, chewing and gulping with a grim determination.

‘Where's his folks?’ Ben Martin asked.

‘Ain't got none.’

Josh recalled the trudge through the silent village, Father Hole's six half-flagon bottles clanking dully in their straw-lined panniers.

‘They don't dare show their faces,’ the priest had growled as he limped up the green from the smoke-stained church. A long rip in his cassock had been stitched with wool. A scar above his eye pulsed an angry red. They walked up the back lane where the priest called a wild-eyed man out of a white-painted cottage. Jake Starling led the priest, the driver and the mule up to the roofless hut. There the boy squatted in a sea of mud and filth.

Jake waded in then tied him to the mule. The blue coat was draped over his back. Father Hole had given his instructions then pulled a thin packet from his tattered robe and handed it to Josh.

‘The priest wrote a letter,’ the driver told Ben Martin now. ‘Left it open too. Not that it'd do the likes of me any good.’

Ben Martin looked at the letter. He thought of the dark village with its deserted green, the silence in the Flitwick inn when he had mentioned Buckland. His world was the back room of the Dog at Night. Not this Vale of Buckland. Not the village, or a boy tied to the back of a mule. None of this was his business. He was a fool.

‘I can read,’ he told Joshua Palewick.

‘
Annunciation Day, the Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred and Thirty-two

‘
To Sir William Fremantle, Lord of the Vale of Buckland, from his Servant the Reverend Christopher Hole, Vicar of the Church of Saint Clodock in the Village of Buckland

’My lord, the Wicked spring up like Grass and the Virtuous man stands like a Palm Tree. Just so have we in the Village of Buckland served as a Garrison of the Faithful since Saint Clodock swore his Oath and marched on the Witch with his Torch and Axe. Now I write to beg your lordship to stand Guard over one of our own, a Boy christened here John Sandall.‘

The firelight flickered. The letter was written in a loose running hand and it had been some time since Benjamin Martin had read so many words in a row. Josh listened and nodded from time to time but the boy only stared into the flames. The letter might have described people who were unknown to him, or a distant country that he had quit long ago.

’Sire, I beg your lordship to take in this Boy. None here will care for him and the People here shun him, being fearful of their own past Acts. For an evil Presence moved among us here at Buckland this Summer past. Then many young Souls were struck down, enduring great Sufferings before the Lord would receive them. Neither did that Evil neglect their Elders, who descended into Division, nor their Priest who committed two Sins of Omission. For he did not see the wicked Blades of Grass spring up, nor did he recognise the Viper which slithered in Disguise through the Garden and infected all here with its Poison. Now the people will not look upon the Boy's Face for his very Features do reproach them for their Viciousness. Therefore I do consign him to your lordship's Care .
. .’

Ben's voice sounded unfamiliar to him in the dark barn. The animals shifted and snorted. Josh nodded to himself at Father Hole's account as if the boy's expulsion confirmed some long-held suspicion. The boy himself hugged his knees and watched the fire, his face betraying no expression. But as Ben settled himself on his blanket, he thought on Father Hole's words, wondering at the ‘Viper’ and the ‘wicked Blades of Grass’ and listening to the rain drip through the rotted thatch. At last he fell asleep.

The bang of the door awoke him. Josh was up. Outside the sun shone down and the wet grass steamed. The packhorses ambled out of the croft and picked their way over the waterlogged turf. The limping mule followed. The boy emerged on shaky legs, his damp coat hanging from his shoulders. As Ben hauled his heavy pack across the ground, Josh looked over.

‘You can put your gear on the horses,’ the driver said gruffly. ‘Bit here. Bit there. Won't hurt none.’

A surprised Ben pulled the bedroll out of his pack.

‘And maybe you can do something for me,’ added Josh.

Pack-men's bargains, thought Ben. ‘What's that?’ he asked.

‘See him?’ Josh pointed. ‘Won't talk, will he?’

The boy stood beside the mule, raking his scalp with his nails. He was crawling with lice, Josh had noticed last night. Father Hole's letter was all very well but the boy's arrival would hardly set the chapel bells ringing at the Manor. Or Mister Pouncey clapping his hands for joy. A useless mouth was bad enough. A lousy useless mouth was worse. But a lousy, useless and mute mouth . . .