the hut she tried to feed the pup gruel, but when she met with little success she wrapped it in a cloak and placed it in a box beneath the lean-to that had been built on the back wall nearest the fenced enclosure where she and her father maintained their meager collection of livestock. She placed a rough plank over the top of the box to serve as a lid, fed the other animals, then went inside to fix supper.
❧
John the Fletcher was a large man, angular and strong, barrel-chested, with arms as long and as thick as an ox-yoke. He had a hawk-like face, with sharp features—a hooked nose that had been broken in a fight, and a strong chin with a heavy black beard. He had his Welsh mother’s unruly black hair and thick eyebrows. None of this you noticed when you saw him. It was as though these traits, each of which might have been prominent in another man, God had added in as an afterthought, something that would have dawned on you after he had left: “Oh, yes. He was like that, too.” What you noticed were his eyes. Fletcher’s eyes were black, sharp, piercing. They were deep set like onyx into that rugged Welsh face. They were as bright as they were dark, and they stood in such striking contrast to his other features that they held you captive for a moment. They seemed to miss nothing. He could spot an egret or a crane a mile off. The villagers sometimes said that he had eagle eyes, a reputation he had nurtured. The sheriff had been impressed enough to call upon his uncanny ability to spot even the slightest movement on the horizon.
Fletcher had been sent to the shire by his parents when he was quite young, and he had brought nothing with him when he’d come. No tools, no skills, fewer words. An apprenticeship to a bookbinder had ended in disaster—he was no good with books—but he could work miracles with a bow and arrow, like what he remembered of his father before he had been sent away. Fletching arrows and archery were in his blood and fingers. For a time, his grandfather had been the Welsh king’s personal archer and a skilled huntsman before he lost three of the fingers on his left hand when the cranking mechanism of his cross-bow had broken during a border skirmish with a band of marauding Danes.
He believed it was his mother who had arranged the apprenticeship with the bookbinder, though he did not know how she had accomplished this. She was unlettered, and the English village of Wharram near Warwick was a good distance from the Welsh border. He could not name the village where he had been born, and had only the dimmest memories of his parents. The bookbinder had done the finish work for the scriptorium of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad. It was a slow, demanding craft and John’s thick fingers had found no friend among the quires and glue and thread that marked the bookbinder’s trade. To make matters worse, he saw no use for books, and had stoutly refused to learn to read. Books were nothing more than dead markings on a page that confused a man’s spirit and made him discontent with the lot to which he had been assigned by Almighty God.
When the weather was fine he had played truant, which had displeased his master and brought beatings down upon him. When he had grown large enough to strike back he had been ejected from the bookbindery in disgust. Well and good. He hated the man. Instead, he returned to fletching arrows and archery the way his father had taught him in his early youth, before he had come to the shire.
It was from his father and grandfather that John the Fletcher had inherited his skill with the bow, not to mention his eagle eyes. Like them, he was master of both longbow and crossbow, this latter weapon introduced from Italy—lately made wicked by the addition of a steel bow, which added power and range, and by steel bolts with chiseled points for maximum penetration. Unlike its cousin the longbow, the crossbow could be carried loaded, it could be drawn and aimed with the archer lying prone, and it delivered its bolt silently, all of which made it an ideal weapon for hunters and assassins. A skilled marksman with a good eye and a steady hand could place a bolt through solid armor at three hundred and fifty paces. But the crossbow was slow. It had to be cranked back, rather than drawn back, and when speed was necessary an archer always preferred a longbow. British archers were unmatched in the whole of Europe; any one of them could fill the air with a steady river of arrows, the second arrow following so closely on the first that it was aimed and in the air before the former had struck its target. It was among such men that John the Fletcher was considered a master bowman. Once, with a longbow he had brought down a wild boar that had charged his party at full run twenty paces to his left.
So skilled was John Fletcher with either weapon that he had eventually been promoted to the rank of sergeant in the service of Ranulf, Sheriff of Warwickshire, perhaps the highest rank afforded a man who could not read. He had been an energetic man, had worked hard, had had hopes of living as well as any man born to a peasant’s modest station. That was before Alysse died in childbirth, leaving him with a broken heart and a pitiful, squalling baby girl whom he had kept alive with rough lullabies and a thin gruel of goat’s milk and boiled oats. (Thank God for the women of Wharram—especially Sarabeth—who had watched the baby when he had had to work.) After Alysse’s death he made no further attempt at progress, but simply accepted his station as the will of God.
Alysse had been dark and spirited and comely, the love of his life and now the angelic figure who haunted his dreams both waking and sleeping. Her high cheekbones and broad forehead had framed eyes that could have lighted the way home for mariners lost in the great sea.
Fletcher tried to think of the child as Alysse’s gift to him, someone for whom she had given her very life, but when he was tired or discouraged his perspective shifted and he saw the child as an intruder, a thief, who had taken its mother’s life in the very act of being born. Its first lusty squall had drowned out its mother’s dying sigh, so that when Sister Bertrice the midwife turned from the child to its mother she discovered that Alysse had quietly slipped away, like a messenger who leaves a package on the doorstep and moves along to another errand in a different place. To John it seemed as if the child had stolen its mother’s breath from her.
Sister Bertrice had handed him the squalling baby while it was still covered in its mother’s blood and what John thought was mucus from the birth canal. There was an urgency to her movements that made him panic. Why had she done this? The blood on his hands shocked and horrified him.
The panic was over in a moment. When Sister turned back, the look in her eye and the change in her manner told him that Alysse was gone.
His life itself was gone.
“I’m sorry,” Sister had said then. “God took her. I did all I could. It seems you can’t have both, John, but she got you a fine, strong child.”
“Boy,” he had said, not really asking. He had not looked, had been afraid to look, and had been distracted by the urgency of Sister’s movements.
“A girl,” Sister said. She cleaned her hands on a towel. “I’m sorry, John.”
Fletcher stood there numbly. Why would God take Alysse, and not me instead? Or the baby? What am I going to do with a baby? I don’t need a baby. Especially not a girl. Not without Alysse. Why take Alysse, and not the baby instead? With Alysse alive they could have tried again for another child, at another time.
Sister took the child gently, washed it and wrapped it in the blanket Alysse had folded and left ready on a chair near the bed. “Now take the child outside. Send for Sarabeth; she’ll know what to do. I got work to do here.” There was a pause in her talk as she handed the baby to Fletcher. “Hold its head like this,” she said.
John had tried to hold the baby’s tiny head, but it was awkward. The baby’s muscles did not work, and it was so small it seemed to get lost in his large hands, and then he was aware that it looked so fragile and its skin was wrinkled but so soft there against the rough calluses of his palms and fingers that he thought for a moment that it had none of him in it and all of Alysse, and he was overcome by the helplessness of it and he had felt helpless to care for it too and he wanted it gone. But then again, as fragile as it was, it had been strong
