The Crowfield Curse (5 page)

C
HAPTER
FIVE

 

 

T
he guest chambers were on the west side of the cloister, below the abbot's chamber. The door stood open and two straw mattresses and a pile of bedding lay on the ground nearby. William could hear something heavy being dragged across the stone-flagged floor inside.

He stood in the doorway for a moment to look around. He had never been into any of the rooms on this side of the cloister before. He had no reason to go up to the abbot's chambers, and the rooms below them were kept locked. The abbey had been built to house many more monks than the eleven it did today, and half of its rooms were empty.

The guest chambers consisted of two rooms: a large chamber with a vaulted ceiling supported on two rows of squat stone pillars, and a small room tucked between the end wall of the chamber and the nave wall of the church. A second door led out to the yard, but it was locked and Peter did not have the key. There were three windows, just narrow slits high up on the wall overlooking the yard. They were covered with wooden shutters that kept out the rain, snow, and cold winds. They also kept out the gray winter daylight. The single rushlight in the iron bracket near the door barely troubled the shadows.

An indistinct shape moved between the pillars and stepped into the patch of light by the open doorway. It was Peter Borowe, and he smiled when he saw William, his face bright with a childlike pleasure.

“Will!” he said with obvious delight. “Are you here to help me?”

William nodded and smiled in return. “I am. What do you want me to do first?”

“We have to move all the old, broken things out of here and burn them in the yard, Prior Ardo says. Then we brush the floor and put down clean rushes, scrub the table and chairs, and make up two beds.” Peter spoke slowly and carefully, marking each task by gripping the outstretched fingers of one hand in turn. His voice was thick, with a slight lisp, as if his tongue was too big for his mouth. There was an earnest expression on his broad, blunt-featured face as he tried to remember exactly what it was that the prior had told him. William waited patiently for him to finish.

“We have to bring more rushlights and ask Brother Snail for a wax candle from his store cupboard, and . . .” He hesitated and there was a look of panic in his eyes as he struggled to recall the next thing on his list of tasks.

“Fetch firewood?” William suggested.

Relief flooded Peter's face. “Yes, yes! That was it! A fire. Clean the hearth and lay the fire.”

“We'd better make a start, then,” William said, peering around with a grimace. The room had been used for storage over the years and the cold air smelled musty and stale. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust that rose in clouds and caught in their throats and made them cough. A pile of old straw mattresses in one corner had been chewed to shreds by rats and stank to high Heaven. Small, quick bodies scurried away into the shadows as soon as William pulled the first mattress from the pile and dragged it to the door.

Between them, William and Peter hauled the mattresses out into the cloister, and from there through the kitchen and out into the yard. To William's relief, Brother Martin was not around to see the trail of filthy straw that followed them across the floor. With luck, he would get it swept up before the cook came back. It was either that or be on the receiving end of a thump from the monk's hard fist.

Before too long, all the discarded furniture was piled up in the middle of the yard, well away from the barn and outbuildings, ready for burning. The two best beds were left in the chamber, along with a table and two plain oak chairs. The furniture had seen better days but it was all the abbey had to offer and would have to do.

William fetched a couple of birch-twig brooms from the storeroom next to the kitchen and gave one to Peter. Starting against the end wall of the guest chamber, they swept the stone-paved floor, until a pile of dusty straw and worm-eaten, powdery wood lay in the doorway. They swept the room a second time, and then scraped up the pile with a shovel and tipped it into a couple of wooden pails, which they emptied onto the midden in the yard.

William fetched water from the well and washed down the furniture, while Peter draped the new mattresses over the chairs and beat them with Brother Martin's bread shovel to even out the lumps of straw. Between them, they made up the beds and arranged the furniture against the walls.

In the dim, dusty light, the room looked cavernous and bare. The huge fireplace was a gloomy cave set deep into the end wall of the room. A draft moaned up and down the chimney. Cold struck up from the floor, and the pillars seemed to William to be the trunks of stone trees, whose branches disappeared into the darkness of the arched roof.

He looked up and wondered at the skill of the stonemasons who had built the abbey. To fashion curving ribs that hung high overhead, and carve leaves and branches into stone, was as close to magic as it was possible to get. William spent secret moments in the church and cloister peering at the tiny details hidden in the carvings that decorated the stonework: animals, plants, and birds, the faces of people and demons and angels, the once-bright colors with which they had been painted now faded and dulled with time. It was a reflection of Heaven and Earth, turned to stone.

Peter swept the hearth while William went to fetch firewood from the woodshed. He was stacking logs into a basket when he heard voices outside in the yard. He looked through the doorway and saw Prior Ardo and Brother Gabriel standing by the open abbey gate, with a man William recognized as Edgar the carpenter, a freeman from Yagleah. He saw him most market days at Weforde, selling the wooden buckets and bowls he made. Edgar seemed agitated and his raised voice carried on the still, cold air.

“He were arskin' questins, lots on 'em, and he
knew
, I swear it, Prior, he
knew
.” The man glanced over his shoulder, as if worried he was being watched or overheard. “He arsked 'bout the angel. He knew all about it, 'bout it bein' dead and buried . . .”

The man got no further.

“Be silent!” Prior Ardo hissed angrily, grabbing the man's arm with his long, bony fingers. “Come with me.”

Between them, Ardo and Gabriel quickly bundled the man across the yard and out of sight around the corner of the west range. Whatever business the carpenter had with the abbey, the monks were clearly anxious for it to remain private.

An angel, dead and buried?

But that's blasphemy, surely?
William thought, puzzled and troubled by what he had just witnessed. How could an angel die? And what had it to do with the monks of Crowfield Abbey?

William was in a thoughtful mood for the rest of the day as he went about his chores. If Peter noticed, it did not seem to trouble him, and he chattered on with his usual cheerfulness about anything and nothing.

As soon as the monks had filed into the church for nones, the last service before dinner, William filled a bowl with pottage for the hob and put it carefully in a flat-bottomed basket. He took a small loaf from the rows of newly baked maslin cooling on the table and put that in the basket, too. He fervently hoped that Brother Martin had not counted them. There would be trouble if William was caught stealing and he could not imagine trying to explain to Prior Ardo what he had wanted the loaf for. The best he could hope for was a sound beating. The worst was to be thrown out of the abbey and left to fend for himself, and that did not bear thinking about in the middle of winter.

William lit a stub of tallow candle from the fire and put it inside the battered old iron lantern that was kept on a hook by the yard door, and left the kitchen.

The afternoon was fading into a freezing dusk and a thin layer of mist lay over the river and flood meadows. A half-moon rose over Foxwist Wood and a single star shone in the sky above the rounded hump of Gremanhil, beyond the abbey's East Field. Nothing disturbed the stillness and the only sound was the rasp of William's boots on the icy ground.

It had been a strange day, all in all. William was not sure what disturbed him the most: finding the hob, the voice he had heard in the Whistling Hollow, or the snatch of conversation he had overheard between the villager and the monks. It was as if the everyday world had slipped to one side and he'd glimpsed something else, something much darker and harder to understand.

William paused for a moment outside the workshop door and looked around to make sure nobody had followed him from the abbey. Quite why anyone would, he didn't know, but a nagging feeling that he was being watched had been growing since he left the safety of the abbey kitchen. There was still just enough light to see that the vegetable garden and the East Field were empty.

But
something
was out there, hidden in the dusk, watching him; he was certain of it. His skin prickled uneasily as he stared across the river toward the woods and imagined someone looking back at him.

Pulling his jacket more closely around his shiv-ering body, he lifted the latch and stepped inside the hut.

C
HAPTER
SIX

 

 

W
illiam put the lantern on the table and opened the small shutter in its front. The hob was curled up asleep on a pile of old, clean rags in a basket by the fire. The
couvre-feu
lay on the floor nearby. The embers in the fire pit glowed, and small flames flickered briefly every now and then. The hob's reddish fur glinted russet-gold in the firelight and his tail was wrapped neatly around his small body.

William knelt beside the basket and touched the hob's shoulder gently to wake him. The hob stirred and chittered softly in his sleep. William added a couple of branches to the fire, and flames licked the dry wood. He set the pottage in a corner of the fire pit to keep warm and put the loaf of bread on a hearthstone.

“Brother Walter?” he said, shaking the hob again. “Are you hungry? I've brought some food.”

Slowly, sleepily, the hob stretched and eased his body into a more comfortable position. His bandaged leg stuck out awkwardly and he winced as he tried to move it. The green eyes opened and the hob stared blankly at William, as if, for the moment, he had forgotten where he was.

“Are you hungry?” William repeated.

The hob nodded and worked himself up into a sitting position, with his injured leg stretched out in front of him.

William looked around for a spoon. He found one on the table, and stirred the pottage with it.

“What do you usually eat?” he asked curiously, wrapping the warm pot in a rag and handing the pot and spoon to the hob.

The hob examined the spoon for a couple of moments, and then put it on the floor. “Nuts, berries, leaves.” He sniffed the pottage and wrinkled his nose. He glanced up at William and then took a cautious sip from the pot. “Not usually pond water and leaf mold.”

William grinned. “It's Brother Martin's vegetable pottage. I brought you some bread, too.”

The hob picked up the small maslin loaf and smelled it. “I have heard of bread.” He licked it and took a small bite of the crust with small, pointed, and very yellow teeth. “It tastes better than the pond dredgings.”

William could not argue with that. He settled himself on the floor with his back against the table leg while the hob ate his meal. The creature seemed much better this evening. Whatever Brother Snail had put in the caudle, it had worked quickly and very well. The danger with open wounds was that fever could set in and burn its way through the whole body, and sometimes turn the blood foul.

William had seen it for himself when Piers, the blacksmith in his home village of Iwele, had been kicked on the back by an ox he was shoeing. That wound had turned red and then black, and the smith had died in a fevered agony, his skin covered in black blotches.

William stirred restlessly; he tried not to think of Iwele these days. It did not help to remember the places and people he had grown up with. And though Iwele was only a day and a half's walk from Crowfield, it might as well have been a hundred days away, because he would probably never see it again. Not unless his brother, Hugh, came to take him home. And that was not likely to happen — not when Hugh had gone off to London to make his fortune three years ago and did not even know about the fire that had destroyed the mill and killed all but one of his family.