The Illuminator (67 page)

Alfred was rewarded as the look of smugness evaporated. The groom looked at the paper, puzzlement and chagrin playing across his face. “But Master Alfred, I can't read.”

“You've been to Norwich?”

The boy nodded, said with some pride in his voice, “Twice.”

“That line is the main road south out of Norwich. If you get lost, just ask for the road to Colchester, then to Ipswich.”

“But—”

“Don't worry. You'll be fine. You're a brave lad.” And Alfred climbed onto his own mount, whose muscles still trembled with fatigue, and spurred it toward Blackingham, leaving the groom scratching his head as he stared at the undecipherable lines and squiggles.

Alfred noticed the stench as he approached the Aylsham cross. His own sweat-stained body? Disgusting. Or maybe that of his horse ridden so hard, his neck and shoulders were flecked with white foam? No. It was growing stronger and all too familiar by now. It was a smell he thought he'd left behind him in an Ipswich field. It was the smell of dead men, rotting in the sun.

A buzzard roosted in an oak tree that anchored the hedge about a hundred
feet from the road.
No need to investigate; just hold your nose and ride on by as fast as you can. Too late for the poor sods there.

But as the buzzard receded from his peripheral vision, the smell grew stronger. His tired horse smelled it, too, and whinnied its disgust, but did not answer when Alfred dug in his heels. He should have remembered to feed the horse. “Just a little further, old boy, there'll be a bucket of oats for you when we reach home.” He'd been thinking himself of something good from Agnes's kitchen. But that no longer seemed appealing.

“Come on. Pick it up.” The horse clopped a little faster, then jerked sideways, startled by a buzzard suddenly flying up from the ditch along the road, where he'd been feasting on carrion. So. That was the source of the smell. This one didn't even make it as far as the false cover of the hedgerow where his fellows had been cut down, where the startled buzzard was now perched in the oak tree beside its mate, waiting for the interlopers to pass on by. His gaze lingered long enough to see the corpse was dressed in poor priest's garb, or what was left of it after the buzzard's feast. Probably a Lollard priest dispatched by the bishop's guards, not by the peasants. The rebels would have considered him one of their own.

His horse had stopped beside the body and stood with its head hanging down as though the last bit of energy had drained from it, yet Alfred did not spur it on. He was unable to draw his gaze away from the gruesome sight. The birds had picked the face clean. Empty eye sockets stared up at a hard sun in a cloudless sky. Some flies swarmed around the corpse's lower extremities where the birds had not stripped the bones. There was something achingly familiar in the shape of the skull. The stench was overpowering. He pinched his nostrils shut. But he got down from his horse and walked over to the ditch. Gently nudged the corpse with his foot, turning it over. Maggots crawled in the place were the head had lain.

Alfred turned his face away to retch.

It was then he saw the golden hair, gleaming in the brittle sun like some lost treasure, and the skull—he knew that skull—picked clean as a chicken bone, the flyblown flesh oozing putrefaction in the heat. It all belonged to the brother with whom he had shared his mother's womb. It belonged to Colin. Sunlight snagged on a patch of blond hair in the dust. Hair the color of light. Hair like the angels, he'd heard his mother say as he'd watched her stroke it when they were little. Stroked it in the way she never stroked his coarse red curls.

“You're one of Sir Guy de Fontaigne's squires,” a soldier said as he reined in his horse, motioning for his two fellows to pull up as well.

Alfred was still on his knees, picking up strands of Colin's hairs, winding them around his fingers as though they were threads of gold. Something at least to take to his mother, some keepsake that she could inter in a velvet-lined reliquary along with his bones.

“Why are you sniveling over this piece of buzzard meat?”

He looked up at the sound of the soldier's voice, recognized the crest embossed in gilt on the leather harnesses of the horsemen. The same crest on the letter he'd presumed to be from the bishop.

“He was no—”

“I know who he was.” The soldier laughed, leaning forward, the reins dangling loosely from his hands. “One of those
poor priests
with shite for brains. You should have seen the look of surprise on his face when my blade split his Lollard belly.”

A great surge of rage started somewhere in Alfred's gut and bubbled like bile into his throat, pushing out a roar like a young lion. He leaped to his feet, drew his sword and lunged at the speaker in a whirl of motion.

Three flashing swords hewed him down before his blade drew blood. The soldiers never even dismounted.

Alfred's body teetered for an instant before falling backward, and then, as if pushed by an unseen hand, it arced sideways so that it landed, not in the road, but in the ditch. It nestled spoon fashion against his brother's smaller body, with one arm hugging his brother's chest. The other hand still held the three strands of pale blond hair in his clenched fist.

“He was one of the sheriff's men,” one of the riders said. “Shouldn't we bury him or at least strip his livery?”

“Nay. Just leave him be. Whoever finds him will think they died killing each other.” Clicking his reins, he nodded at the pair of buzzards who had watched the whole affair from the oak tree. “They'll do the work for us. One man's skull looks much like another's.”

For He will be seen, and He will be sought. He will be waited on and He will be trusted.

—J
ULIAN OF
N
ORWICH
,
D
IVINE
R
EVELATIONS

M
agda was playing with Jasmine in the little anteroom off the illuminator's old quarters. The room that had been Rose's now was her daughter's nursery. “Her mother's spirit will watch over her,” milady had said. But Rose's spirit was not there. Magda knew such things. Besides, Cook said Rose's spirit was with Jesus. There was no one to watch over the babe but Magda.

Lady Kathryn was weak and listless since her illness, and heartsick with Master Colin gone, so Magda took Jasmine in the afternoons while milady rested in her great four-post bed. Today, when Magda had gone to Lady Kathryn's chamber after her kitchen duties, milady had looked longingly at the bed with her shadowy eyes and motioned for her to take the child away. She could see Lady Kathryn now, in her mind, lying in a heap behind the damask drapery that would be drawn against the light despite the summer heat. She could hear, too, in her mind, weak sobbing sounds, like little wounded animal whimpers. She could even feel the ache of milady's pain pulsing in her own temples.

As Jasmine sang her child's gibberish and rattled the oyster shells—the illuminator's empty paint pots with dried residue of color clinging to their edges—Magda looked out the second-story window, keeping watch. She could see across the courtyard, past the gate and into the pasture beyond where the Norfolk sheep grazed. They looked like woolly pillows scattered on a green silk counterpane. Above them, more woolly pillows floated in a clear blue sky. If not for the danger, it would be a fine June day, a day to take Jasmine out to play in the sunshine. They could play hide-and-seek among the hedges and chase the butterflies that sucked the nectar from the honeysuckle. But not today. And maybe not tomorrow. Milady had said to keep close and keep watch.

She was keeping watch, looking out the high glazed window as she did every day, when she saw him, the evil one, the one who had tried to take her in the fields like an animal. She thought milady had sent him away. But now he was back, stomping across the fields with a ragtag band of workers armed with scythes and pitchforks. Some of them carried torches—in broadest daylight—and buckets. The sheep stopped nibbling the sweet summer grass and watched them with wary eyes. Magda couldn't see their faces clearly from so far away. But she didn't need to. The tall one in front, he had no soul-light. The sight of him made her sick to her stomach with fear.

Cook had said the rabble mob might come at night and murder them in their beds. Cook and Lady Kathryn slept in the day and held vigil at night. She should wake Cook. She could hear the men now, their coarse laughter in response to what the tall one said, their voices loud and shrill like her father's when he drank too much. She wished she could say how many. There were more than the fingers of one hand but less than two.

She glanced nervously at the child playing at her feet. When she returned to the window, the tight knot of men had begun to unwind. Some of them were drifting off among the sheep. Maybe they had only come to steal the livestock and they would leave.

Milady had made apian. What had Lady Kathryn said her part was to be ?
The one with the darkness hovering around him, the evil one, came on toward the house, bringing a little bunch of men with him. She could only see the tops of their heads and the sunlight glinting off the scythes they carried and their soullights blending into a dark cloud. She was glad her father was not among them. She would have recognized his flat, rolled cap with its ragged crown.

What was the plan?
She had said her part over and over to herself as she lay awake on her straw pallet in Cook's room. Now, the devil had stolen it from her mind.
What was she supposed to do if they came?

She heard Cook's voice, loud and strident, belowstairs. “What are you doing back here? Lady Kathryn will set the dogs on you. You'd best be gone if you know what's good for you. And take that sorry lot with you.” Cook was awake then. Cook would send them packing, and then she would warn milady.

The bleating of the sheep drew her gaze to the pastures. The white woolly pillows wore scarlet ribbons around their necks. They bleated louder now, thin, helpless sounds that made Magda want to cry. The men weren't stealing the sheep! They were slashing at them, slaughtering them in the field! Then leaving them to bleed to death as the men marched toward the house. One stuck his torch to the grass, and little yellow teeth began to chew the pasture. The acrid smell of the smoke made her nose wrinkle.

What was the plan? What was her part?

Take the baby, Magda. Take the baby to your mother's cottage.

No, that was Lady Kathryn's voice in her head. But that was not the plan.

A honeybee lit on the windowsill and buzzed away.

Magda remembered.

She scooped Jasmine up in her arms.

“Hide-and-seek with Magda? D-does Jasmine w-want to hide from milady and let her find us?” she whispered.

Jasmine bobbed her blond curls, giggled something that translated, “Jasmine hide.”

“Shh. She's c-coming.”

Magda could feel the baby's breath, feel her small body shiver with the stifled giggle she held back with a pudgy hand as they fled down the stairs to the kitchen, then out the back door to the old dead tree standing sentinel on what passed for a hill in flat country.