Later that morning, Brother Martin told William to fetch a pail of water and go scrub the long table in the frater. William had almost finished his work when Brother Snail came to clean the pewter candlesticks and replace the tallow candles. He made them in his workshop, dipping wicks of hemp into smelly vats of melted mutton fat. He had made the last batch with William’s help and it had taken a great deal of determined scrubbing with wood ash and cold water for William to get the pungent smell of sheep grease from his hands.
Brother Snail glanced at William. “You seem preoccupied today, Will. Is there anything wrong?”
William straightened up and took a deep breath. “I know about the angel.”
The monk seemed to turn to stone. His smile faded and he stared at William with a look of shock on his face.
“How did you find out about it?”
“I overheard Edgar from Yagleah talking to the prior. And the hob knows all about it, too.”
“I see.” Brother Snail lowered himself slowly and stiffly onto a bench and stared at the floor for a while in silence.
“And I know monks from the abbey buried the angel in the woods,” William added, watching him warily. Should he have kept what he had found out to himself?
“The angel has been a closely guarded secret for nearly a hundred years,” Brother Snail said at last, his face pale and his eyes troubled. “It is Crowfield’s curse. What did the hob tell you about it?”
William sat down beside the monk. “He said the angel was killed by a fay king one midwinter night. The angel was trying to save a hob from the king, so the king killed him instead.”
Brother Snail’s eyes were wide and bright as he listened intently to this. “A fay king?”
William nodded. “Brother Walter called him the Dark King of the Unseelie Court.”
“We never knew who fired the arrow, or why, until now,” the monk said softly. He held out his arm. “Help me up, Will.”
William took his arm. The monk leaned heavily on him as he got to his feet.
“Since you already know so much, I have something to show you. Come with me.”
William followed the monk out into the cloister alley, and around to the door of the sacristy, a small room beside the chapter house where the abbey’s books and few valuable possessions were kept locked away. Brother Snail took a ring of keys from the small purse hanging from the cord around his waist. With a quick glance around to make sure they were not being watched, he selected one and unlocked the door. He ushered William inside and lit the candle in the lantern hanging from an iron bracket on the wall.
“Close the door, Will.”
The monk unlocked a wall cupboard in a corner of the room. Candlelight gleamed on silver and William glimpsed a chalice and two candlesticks.
Snail took a plain oak casket from the cupboard and laid it on the small table in the middle of the room. He hesitated for a moment, and then lifted the lid. Inside was a folded piece of faded
blue silk.
William held his breath as Brother Snail carefully lifted the silk aside to reveal what William thought for a moment was a long silver blade. It gleamed with a soft moon-white sheen in the candlelight. Then William realized it was not a blade, but a single white feather.
“One of the monks who buried the angel found this in the snow. It has been kept here, safe and secret, ever since.” Brother Snail’s voice was barely more than a whisper. William thought he saw the gleam of tears in the monk’s eyes.
“Brother Walter said the angel was buried in the woods,” William said. “Why wasn’t it brought here and buried in the graveyard or in the abbey church?”
“The abbot couldn’t allow that, Will. Nobody could know about the angel, don’t you see?”
William shook his head, puzzled.
“If people found out that an angel could die like some mortal creature of clay, it would raise doubts about the nature of angels, and perhaps even God Himself, and they would ask questions for which we have no answers. It would shake the church to its very foundations. As far as the world outside these gates is concerned, angels cannot die. It is Crowfield’s curse that we have to know and guard the terrible truth.”
“Then how come Edgar of Yagleah knows about it?” William asked.
Brother Snail gazed down at the feather. “It was a Yagleah man who found the dying angel that night. It was Christmas Eve in the year 1243, and he was returning home after visiting friends in Weforde. He ran to the abbey for help but the angel had died by the time the abbot and two of his monks reached it. The villager helped the monks to bury the body, and the abbot swore him to secrecy.” Snail was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps the burden of such a secret was too much for the man. He told his son, and over the years, the secret has been passed down from father to son, all the way down to Edgar. When the stranger came to Yagleah asking questions about an angel, only Edgar knew what he was talking about.”
“So how did the stranger find out?”
The monk frowned. He folded the silk over the feather again and closed the box. “I don’t know, Will.”
“Whereabouts in the woods is the angel buried?” William asked as Brother Snail returned the box to the cupboard.
“Nobody knows, not even Edgar. Whatever else was passed down through his family, it didn’t include that.”
“Where was the body found?”
“On the track to Yagleah, near the ford over the Sheep Brook.”
William knew the place. The track from Weforde crossed the brook at the foot of Gremanhil. Huge old oak trees grew on the lower slopes of the hill. The Sheep Brook ran deep and shadowy through the trees before curving out into the sunlight and along the edge of the abbey’s East Field.
Snail opened the door and waited for William to go ahead of him, back out into the cloister. “Say nothing of this to anyone.”
William shook his head. “I won’t.”
They walked back to the frater. As they passed the door of the guest chamber, William said, “Did you know that Master Bone is a leper?”
The monk stopped and twisted his head around to stare up at William in astonishment. “Are you sure?”
William nodded. “I saw his hand, or what’s left of it.” He curled his fingers over his palm in a pale imitation of Master Bone’s ruined hand. “And he wears a mask to hide his face.”
Brother Snail looked worried. “I didn’t realize that he did. I haven’t seen our guest yet. Are you sure his hand wasn’t injured in an accident, Will? Maybe a fire?” A flush of color rose into the monk’s face as he realized what he had said. “William, I’m sorry. I didn’t think . . . it was tactless of me.”
William looked away. He knew what a fire could do to a person. He had seen the remains of his parents and his sister and brother after they had been dragged from the smouldering wreckage of the mill.
“He’s a leper,” William said softly.
“Then in God’s name, why has the prior allowed him to come here?” Snail said with a rare flash of anger. “I must speak to him straightaway. Go about your work, Will.”
William was startled by the monk’s tone and his abrupt dismissal but did as he was told. He was in a thoughtful mood as he went back to the frater to finish scrubbing the table. Perhaps Brother Snail could make the prior see reason and persuade him to send Master Bone away. He had heard that some of the larger abbeys had leper hospitals, well away from villages and towns. Master Bone could find shelter in one of those.
William dried his hands on the front of his tunic and carried the pail of water back through the kitchen, to empty it in the yard.
Brother Martin was skinning a rook. Several more, some already skinned, some just stiff little corpses of glossy black feathers, were lined up on the table beside him. He was taking the skin and feathers off in one piece, saving himself the bother of plucking the birds. He glanced at William when he came into the kitchen.
“Make yerself useful and fetch some herbs from Brother Snail’s workshop,” he growled, chopping off the rook’s head with one slash of his knife. It joined a small pile of heads on the bloodstained table. He slit the raw pink body open and hooked a finger into the cavity to drag out the innards. William stared in horrified fascination.
“Fetch somethin’ strong. Garlic, mebbe,” the monk said, scraping the rook’s innards into a pile and wrinkling his nose at the smell that rose from them. “Somethin’ really strong.”
Something to mask the taste of stewed rook. William was not sure anything would be able to do that, no matter how pungent.
William left the kitchen and headed across the yard toward the gate between the far corner of the south range and the goat- and pigpens. It was the long way around to the workshop, but William wanted to be by himself for a while, out of the chilly gloom of the abbey buildings. After all the talk of the angel and the fay king, he wanted to be somewhere as everyday and ordinary as the abbey garden.
The gray day clung damply to the abbey buildings and softened the mud in the yard. The crows high up in the treetops of Two Penny Copse were subdued that morning. As well they might be, William thought grimly, after seeing what had happened to the rooks. Brother Martin was surprisingly good with a slingshot, given that he only had one eye. The crows were probably anxious to draw as little attention to themselves as possible.
William caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, over toward the pigpens. Something small and reddish-brown moved past a gap in the wattle fence. Frowning, William went to see what it was.
The hob was sitting on the edge of Mary Magdalene’s water trough, his injured leg stretched out along the rim. A new growth of fur bristled around the healing wound. His tail was curled up his back and over his shoulder to keep it out of the water. The pig sat in front of him.
“What are you doing here?” William hissed, glancing quickly around the yard. “You should be in Brother Snail’s hut, not out here in the open. Someone might see you.”
The pig turned at the sound of William’s voice and shuffled over to him, grunting softly, in the hope of some food. William scratched her ear.
“I wanted to see the abbey,” the hob said with a dismissive wave of his paw. Then he nodded toward Mary Magdalene. “The pig sees all the comings and goings from her pen. She has seen some strange things these last few days.”
“She told you that, I suppose?” William said, raising his eyebrows.
The hob nodded and tapped his forehead. “We can talk in here. Not in words.”
Just like Peter and the white crow, William thought, looking down into the pig’s intelligent amber eyes. She gazed back at him calmly and he knew, without doubt, that the hob was telling the truth.
“What has she seen?” he asked.
“Two strangers came to the abbey yesterday,” the hob began.
William nodded. “Jacobus Bone and his servant. They are staying here.”
“And behind them, there were two others, creeping through the fog. The pig could not see who or what they were.”
“I sensed that there was something in the yard last night, though I couldn’t see anything, either,” William said, a shiver going through him at the memory. It had been a long time before he had dared to run back to the safety of the kitchen. He had locked the door and sat huddled by the kitchen fire late into the night, wondering what was lurking in the foggy darkness outside. It had not made for a good night’s sleep.
The hob gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment, head on one side. “You are unusually sensitive to such things, for a human. You have the Sight.”
“That’s what Dame Alys said.”
Again, that odd shuttered look came into the hob’s eyes. William was more certain than ever that the hob knew something about Dame Alys that he was in no hurry to share. He knew the hob well enough by now to know he would be wasting his time trying to pry it out of him.
“It seems that someone is very interested in Jacobus Bone and his servant,” William said. “I wonder why?”
The hob shrugged. “Who knows?”
“He’s just an old man who, I think, has come to Crowfield to die,” William added quietly. “He’s a leper.”
The hob sat upright in a quick jerky movement that startled William. He grabbed the edge of the trough with both paws to stop himself falling backward into the water. “A leper?”
William nodded, astonished by the sudden widening of the green-gold eyes and the fierce expression on the hob’s face.
“Has he brought anything with him, an instrument of any kind? A lute, perhaps?”
“Yes, along with two flutes and a recorder. Why?” William asked, his heart beginning to beat a little more quickly.
“Is it a lute made of golden wood?”
“Yes,” William said, his breath catching in his throat. “How did you know?”
The hob ignored his question. “Bone’s manservant, what is his . . . name?” He said the last word softly.
“Shadlok.”
“Ahhh,” the hob breathed out in a long juddering sigh. He banged the sides of his head with his fists. “Sceath-hlakk. Shadlok. Of course! Of course!” He turned and glared at William. “If you had said his name straightaway, we would not have wasted all this time in idle talk.”
“You know him?” William asked, too surprised by the hob’s alarming behavior to be offended.
“No, but I know of him, and of the one you call Bone. And I know who is following them. This is not good, Will Paynel, not good at all.”