The Owl Killers

september

osmanna of brieuc, an irish princess who fled to brittany to escape marriage. she died around a.d. 650 and is the patroness of fericy-en-brie.

iT WAS MY SAINT’S DAY, so for once I was excused from all work. Servant Martha had told me I should pray in the chapel. I tried, but in the silence all that filled my head was the same terror that seized me every long night as I lay awake in the dark. I only had one prayer. “Please let my blood come today. Please let it be over.”

At night as I lay in my cot I ran my hands over my belly. Was it swelling? I tried not to eat. Beatrice had noticed that and coaxed me with tender pieces of meat from her own trencher and honeyed pastries which she pressed on me in the fields. She was kind. But after meals I rushed to the latrines and made myself vomit. I was hungry all the time, but I had to starve that thing inside me so it wouldn’t be able to grow. I wouldn’t let it feed on me. I had to make it die!

A sudden fusty draught sent the lamp over the altar swinging and the shadows scuttling towards me. Unable to bear it a moment longer, I flung open the chapel door and raced out into the blinding sunlight.

In the outer courtyard, the stout stone pigeon cote squatted contentedly on the patch of green. It had been finished only in these past few weeks after the storms destroyed the old wooden one. It was stout and dry, with good thick walls lined with nesting alcoves for the birds right up to the flight platform at the top. It had stone steps built into it, so that you could creep up and slide your hand under the squabs as they sat quietly in their nests, never suspecting that Kitchen Martha’s knife awaited them. I’d already discovered that the back of the cote was a good place to shelter out of the wind and out of sight of the other women.

But as I rounded the cote, I almost tripped over Ralph, who was sitting in my favourite spot, his back resting against the stone wall of the pigeon cote. A crippled child lay across his lap, her floppy head supported in the crook of his arm. The stick fingers of her tiny hand fluttered beside her face, as if they were trying to grasp at something.

Gate Martha had found the child abandoned on our threshold one morning with scarcely a rag to cover her. Her small body was so twisted that she couldn’t even sit up or control the movements of her limbs. But the strange thing was that Ralph had taken to her as soon as he saw her.

When Ralph first arrived he’d just sat hunched, staring into the fire for hours, not talking or eating. Healing Martha had tried lavender oil to restore his wits, but nothing did any good until that child arrived. Now the leper would sit for hours stroking her hair, patiently feeding her, and telling her stories. It was as if he poured all the lost love for his family into her.

Ralph was holding out stale bread crumbs in his free hand as the pigeons fluttered in to snatch the crumbs. When a leper holds out his bound stumps to people, they shy away, twisting their own hands behind them, but the birds didn’t flinch from him.

“She likes the birds,” Ralph said without looking up. “Listen to her laugh. She thinks they fly for her, bless the mite. We come every day to feed the birds, don’t we, Ella?”

I crouched down beside them. “Is that her name-Ella? I didn’t know.”

“It’s what I call her. Ella means all, so I’ve been told. It’s fitting. She’s all I have and I’m all she has, I reckon. If ever she was given a name afore, she can’t tell me what it was. I don’t reckon they’d have given her any sort of a decent name. The Devil’s spawn, that’s what I heard one old cat in the infirmary call her.”

He turned towards me, his eyes bright with anger. “What manner of god would curse an innocent bairn with such an affliction? Priests say a bairn is punished this way to pay for the sin of her parents. Me, it’s just that I’m cursed, for I’ve sinned aplenty in my life, though there’s many done worse than me that still sits in health and wealth. But what kind of master would whip a little bairn for his father’s thieving?”

“My father would. I saw him flog a potboy with his own hands until he was senseless just to punish his widowed mother because she confessed she was with child and her husband had been dead for over a year.”

“Can we expect no more mercy from God than from your father when he feels slighted?” Ralph whispered softly, as if he feared to be overheard.

And what would my father do if he ever discovered that demon’s spawn was inside me? Potboys were not the only children he flogged. Once, when I was little, my father was raging about some matter to his bailiff and caught me smiling. I was far away inside a story in my head, but my father thought I was laughing at him. He called for a rod, threw me over a bench, and thrashed me in front of the entire household. Afterwards he made me kiss his mouth to show everyone I loved him. Even now I can still taste my salt tears running over his fat wet lips. I hated him for that. Not for the whipping-for that kiss. But I hated myself more that I had lied in that kiss and I hated myself for being afraid of him.

Pater noster, qui es in coelis. Our Father who art in Heaven. Each time I said it, I tasted that kiss again. Each time I said it was a new lie, because a voice inside my head was shouting, “No, not pater noster, not our father, not my father.” I would not pray to a father. I would never call Him Father.

Ralph gazed at the face of the child, rocking her and stroking the bare skin of her cheek gently with his forearm. Ella half closed her eyes and her little moans become singsong cries, as if she tried to imitate the notes of a bird or the cradle song of her mother. Her fingers opened and closed, playing upon an imaginary pipe that only she could hear.

“Have you heard any news of your own children?” I asked and immediately cursed myself for saying anything so stupid.

His eyes filled with tears. I turned away hastily, pretending not to notice. Ever since that night in the forest I found I couldn’t cry anymore and other people’s tears made me angry.

Ralph’s voice was husky. “Nights I lie awake wondering if they’re starving in some ditch. If my poor Joan’s been driven to sell herself to put food in their bellies or to sell Marion or my little lads into labour.”

“Pega says your wife took the children to her own kin in Norwich. You know Pega; if she says it then it’s bound to be true.” I refused to look at him for I could hear in his voice that tears still shone in his eyes.

“But her kin won’t take them in, not when she tells them of me, for fear she carries the sickness with her.”

I hesitated; I didn’t want to upset him again. “Perhaps she’ll have said you had an accident.”

He seemed to brighten a little at the thought. “Aye, you’re right. My Joan’s an honest woman, but she’d do anything to protect our bairns. And they’d not refuse a widow and that’s what she is, without a word of a lie, for I am dead. Father Ulfrid said as much.” He nodded to himself. “She’ll like as not wed again for she is still pleasing to look at. And her new husband’ll surely treat the bairns kindly for her sake. She’d not take to a cruel man.”

“Of course she wouldn’t. She’d only marry a good man like you. Besides, the children will soon be grown and have children of their own,” I said eagerly, crowding into his cheerful daydream.

But he looked down again and the light died in his face. “And what if their bairns are born like Ella? They say His curse reaches to the seventh generation.”

His grasp on Ella tightened and she opened her eyes wide in surprise. He rocked her, murmuring softly, his mouth against her ear so that she gurgled in the tickle of his breath. Then he held the child away from him and, awkwardly, with his clumsy stumps, dragged open his shirt and turned towards me. Around his chest he had twisted bands of leather with iron studs sticking through into his flesh. The bands were bound so tightly to his skin that each time he moved the studs bruised and cut him. His flesh was purple and swollen on either side of the leather straps. Each time he held the child against him, her wriggles and jerks must have driven the metal deeper into the bruised flesh.

“I wear them sleeping and waking,” he said as he struggled to pull his shirt back and cradle the child against him again.

“But why, Ralph?” I asked, almost unable to believe what I had just seen.

“For my bairns,” he answered as if only a simpleton would not know this. “God must take my penance as enough, and spare my bairns.”

I’d heard that a mother might put herself between a man’s fist and the child she loves, but I didn’t know that any man could have such tender feelings as to put himself between God’s fist and his child. My father wouldn’t. God put the mark of His curse on me while I quickened in my mother’s womb, but if God cursed me for my father’s sins, my father added his own curse to me for bearing it.

“It’s quiet here today, Osmanna. Few souls about.”

Ralph’s words were so calmly spoken that I wondered if I had imagined the horror beneath his shirt. Ella had closed her eyes again and was lying contented in his arms.

For a moment I couldn’t drag my thoughts away to make sense of what he’d said. “Yes… yes, it is quiet. Most of the women have gone to the seashore to rake for razor shells and to gather seaweed to dry for winter fodder for the goats. There won’t be enough hay to see us through this winter.”

“You didn’t want to go with them?” Ralph asked. “I’d have thought you’d be glad of a day by the sea.” He sighed wistfully.

I felt guilty. I was free to go out, but spent my time inside, while he must long to walk by the sea or climb the hills or wander again in all the places he had known as a boy, but he couldn’t step outside the gates.

“It’s my saint’s day,” I said. “I’m supposed to spend it in contemplation.”

“Blessings on you. I wish…” he began. Then suddenly he thrust the half-sleeping child into my arms. “Wait, wait here.”

He rose with a struggle and limped off towards the infirmary.

Ella twisted in my arms. She knew I was not Ralph and the anxiety showed in her face. Her body was lighter even than it looked, like a dried fish, transparent and sharp, but her head was heavy as it lolled against me.

Ralph came limping back across the grass, stumbling often. Soon he would need crutches. He would not be able to carry Ella to the cote next summer, if she lived until then. He laid a package wrapped in oiled cloth on the grass beside me, eased himself back down on the grass, and scooped Ella out of my arms.

He nodded at the bundle. “For you. A gift for your saint’s day.”

I blushed and stammered in surprise, “I can’t take it.”

“Please,” he said. “My Joan brought a bundle of things for me the night she fled. I didn’t see her. I wish she’d asked for me, but I think she was afraid. I don’t blame her. This was hidden inside a blanket. Open it.”

I unwrapped the package more from curiosity than any intention of accepting it. It was a book bound in calf’s leather, with fine tooling and traces of gold leaf upon the cover. The lettering was in a fine hand. I looked up. Ralph was watching me eagerly.

“It’s a pretty book, is it not? Can you read it?”

I nodded. “Merchants would pay good money for this. Why didn’t your wife take it to sell? She must be badly in need of the money.”

“Poor Joan was always afraid of it. A man gave it me in exchange for some work I did for him. He’d no silver, but he said we could sell the book for more than he owed.”

“Then why-”

“I told you-my wife was afraid. The man told me it came from the Jews in France. There were Jews once in this land too, but that was afore you were born. My father said when they were driven out from Norwich they left many things behind they couldn’t carry.” He shrugged. “Some never reached the ships, but died on the march. But I hear tell they’ve been driven out of France now too. So maybe those that died were the lucky ones.”

“But the book, was your wife afraid it was stolen?”

He shook his head. “You can’t steal from a Jew; all they had belonged to the King, for he owned the Jews, but the only books the King’s men were interested in were the moneylenders’ ledgers. Besides, they didn’t always get there first and who’s to know what a Jew had in his house before it was ransacked?

“No, my Joan was afraid because she heard that Jews’ books are full of witchcraft and evil magic. She thought that if any knew we had the book or we tried to sell it, someone might accuse us of sorcery. She said I was a fool for taking it, though the man said it was a holy book.

“I didn’t know what to do with it,” Ralph continued. “She’d not burn it in case it was holy and that brought down a curse from God-or if it was evil and she burnt it, it might conjure a demon.” He studied me anxiously. “It’s not a book of sorcery, is it? My wife blamed my sickness on the book. We can neither of us read and she’d not let me show it to any who could.”

I turned the pages carefully. “This isn’t a Jewish book,” I told Ralph. “It’s not written in their tongue. If it was I wouldn’t be able to read it, but I can read this. It’s in French. It means The Mirror… of Simple Souls. I don’t know why the man said it came from the Jews… unless a Jewish merchant bought it to trade or a moneylender was given it as a pledge. I heard that Jewish moneylenders often took books from Christians as surety. Anyway, this can’t have brought a curse on you; it speaks of God.”

His mouth twisted into a crooked kind of leer, but I was no longer frightened by that. I knew it was his way of smiling.

“Then it’s a good gift for your saint’s day,” he told me. “Take it; it’s no use to Ella or me and I’ve nothing else to give. I’ll not forget your kindness that day you brought me here. You’ve more courage than any man in the village, though you’re little more than a bairn yourself. I often think on how you gripped my arm and lifted your hand to cover me when they…” He faltered, his arm half raised against his face as if he could still feel the sting of the filth and muck they threw. “If it weren’t for you and Servant Martha, God bless her, I…” He scrambled up as fast as he could, holding Ella fiercely against him. “Take it for a blessing,” he said brusquely and limped away before I could put it back in his hand.