La Belle Sauvage Read online

  "What did those gentlemen say to you?" he said.

  "They were asking about the priory."

  "They want to talk to you again. They said you were a bright boy. Mind your manners, now. You know who they are?"

  Malcolm, wide-eyed, shook his head.

  "That's Lord Nugent, that is--the old boy. He used to be the lord chancellor of England."

  "How d'you know that?"

  "I recognized him from his picture in the paper. Go on now. Answer all their questions."

  Malcolm set off down the corridor, with Asta whispering, "See? Who was right, then? The lord chancellor of England, no less!"

  The men were tucking into their roast beef (Malcolm's mother had given them an extra slice each) and talking quietly, but they fell silent as soon as Malcolm came in.

  "I came to see whether you'd like another light, gentlemen," he said. "I can bring a naphtha lamp for the table, if you like."

  "In a minute, Malcolm, that would be a very good idea," said the man who was the lord chancellor. "But tell me, how old are you?"

  "Eleven, sir."

  Perhaps he should have said my lord, but the ex-lord chancellor of England had seemed quite content with sir. Perhaps he was traveling incognito, in which case he wouldn't like to be given his right form of address anyway.

  "And where do you go to school?"

  "Ulvercote Elementary, sir, just across Port Meadow."

  "What are you going to do when you grow up, d'you think?"

  "Most probably I'll be an innkeeper, like my father, sir."

  "Jolly interesting occupation, I should think."

  "I think it is too, sir."

  "All sorts of people passing through, and so on."

  "That's right, sir. There's scholars from the university come here, and watermen from all over."

  "You see a lot of what's going on, eh?"

  "Yes, we do, sir."

  "Traffic up and down the river, and such."

  "It's mostly on the canal that there's the interesting stuff, sir. There's gyptian boats going up and down, and the horse fair in July--the canal's full of boats and travelers then."

  "The horse fair...Gyptians, eh?"

  "They come from all over to buy and sell horses."

  The scholarly man said, "The nuns in the priory. How do they earn a living? Do they make perfumes, anything like that?"

  "They grow a lot of vegetables," Malcolm said. "My mum always buys her vegetables and fruit from the priory. And honey. Oh, and they sew and embroider things for clergymen to wear. Chasubles and that. I reckon they must get paid a lot for them. They must have a bit of money because they buy fish from Medley Pond, down the river."

  "When the priory has visitors," said the ex-lord chancellor, "what sort of people would they be, Malcolm?"

  "Well, ladies, sometimes...young ladies...Sometimes an old priest or bishop, maybe. I think they come here for a rest."

  "For a rest?"

  "That's what Sister Benedicta told me. She said in the old days, before there was inns like this, and hotels, and specially hospitals, people used to stay at monasteries and priories and suchlike, but nowadays it was mostly clergymen or maybe nuns from other places and they were convales--conva--"

  "Convalescing," said Lord Nugent.

  "Yes, sir, that's it. Getting better."

  The last man to finish his roast beef put his knife and fork together decisively. "Anyone there at the moment?" he said.

  "I don't think so, sir. Unless they're indoors a lot. Usually visitors like to walk about in the garden, but the weather en't been very nice, so...Would you like your pudding now, gentlemen?"

  "What is it?"

  "Baked apple and custard. Apples from the priory orchard."

  "Well, we can't pass up a chance to try those," said the scholarly man. "Yes, bring us some baked apples and custard."

  Malcolm began to gather their plates and cutlery.

  "Have you lived here all your life, Malcolm?" said Lord Nugent.

  "Yes, sir. I was born here."

  "And in all your long experience of the priory, did you ever know them to look after an infant?"

  "A very young child, sir?"

  "Yes. A child too young to go to school. Even a baby. Ever known that?"

  Malcolm thought carefully and said, "No, sir, never. Ladies and gentlemen, or clergymen anyway, but never a baby."

  "I see. Thank you, Malcolm."

  By gathering the wineglasses together, their stems between his fingers, he managed to take all three of them as well as the plates.

  "A baby?" whispered Asta on the way to the kitchen.

  "That's a mystery," said Malcolm with satisfaction. "Maybe an orphan."

  "Or worse," said Asta darkly.

  Malcolm put the plates on the draining board, ignoring Alice as usual, and gave the order for pudding.

  "Your father," said Malcolm's mother, dishing up the apples, "thinks one of those guests used to be the lord chancellor."

  "You better give him a nice big apple, then," said Malcolm.

  "What did they want to know?" she said, ladling hot custard over the apples.

  "Oh, all about the priory."

  "Are you going to manage those? They're hot."

  "Yeah, but they're not big. I can do 'em, honest."

  "You better. If you drop the lord chancellor's apple, you'll go to prison."

  He managed the bowls perfectly well, even though they were getting hotter and hotter. The gentlemen didn't ask any questions this time, just ordering coffee, and Malcolm brought them a naphtha lamp before going through to the kitchen to set the cups up.

  "Mum, you know the priory has guests sometimes? Did you ever know them to look after a baby?"

  "What d'you want to know that for?"

  "They were asking. The lord chancellor and the others."

  "What did you tell 'em?"

  "I said I didn't think so."

  "Well, that's the right answer. Now go on--get out and bring in some more glasses."

  In the main bar, under cover of the noise and laughter, Asta whispered, "She was startled when you asked that. I saw Kerin wake up and prick his ears."

  Kerin was Mrs. Polstead's daemon, a gruff but tolerant badger.

  "It's just 'cause it was surprising," said Malcolm. "I 'spect you looked surprised when they asked me."

  "I never. I was inscrutable."

  "Well, I 'spect they saw me being surprised."

  "Shall we ask the nuns?"

  "Could do," said Malcolm. "Tomorrow. They need to know if someone's been asking questions about 'em."

  Malcolm's father was right: Lord Nugent had been lord chancellor, but that had been under a previous government, a more liberal body than the present one, and ruling at a more liberal time. These days the prevailing fashion in politics was one of obsequious submissiveness to the religious authorities, and ultimately to Geneva. As a consequence, some organizations of the favored religious kind found their power and influence greatly enhanced, while officials and ministers who had supported the secular line that was now out of favor had either to find other things to do, or to work surreptitiously, and at continuous risk of discovery.

  Such a man was Thomas Nugent. To the world, to the press, to the government, he was a retired lawyer of fading distinction, yesterday's man, of no interest. In fact, he was directing an organization that functioned very like a secret service, which not many years before had been part of the security and intelligence services of the Crown. Now, under Nugent, its activities were devoted to frustrating the work of the religious authorities, and to remaining obscure and apparently harmless. This took ingenuity, courage, and luck, and so far they had remained undetected. Under an innocent and misleading name, Nugent's organization carried out all kinds of missions, dangerous, complicated, tedious, and sometimes downright illegal. But it had never before had to deal with keeping a six-month-old baby out of the hands of those who wanted to kill her.

  --

 
On Saturday, Malcolm was free, once he'd done his morning tasks at the Trout, to cross the bridge and call at the priory.

  He knocked on the kitchen door and went in to find Sister Fenella scraping some potatoes. There was a neater way to deal with potatoes, as he knew from his mother's example, and given a sharp knife, Malcolm could have shown the good nun, but he held his peace.

  "Have you come to help me, Malcolm?" she said.

  "If you like. But I was really going to tell you something."

  "You could prepare those Brussels sprouts."

  "All right," said Malcolm, finding the sharpest knife in the drawer and pulling several sprout stalks across the table in the pale February sunlight.

  "Don't forget the cross in the base," said Sister Fenella.

  She had told him once that this put the mark of the Savior on each sprout and made sure the Devil couldn't get in. Malcolm was impressed by that at the time, but he knew now that it was to help them cook all the way through. His mother had explained that, and said, "But don't you go and contradict Sister Fenella. She's a sweet-hearted old lady, and if she wants to think that, don't upset her."

  Malcolm would have put up with a good deal rather than upset Sister Fenella, whom he loved with a deep and uncomplicated devotion.

  "Now, what were you going to tell me?" she said as Malcolm settled on the old stool beside her.

  "You know who we had in the Trout the other night? There was three gentlemen taking their dinner, and one of them was Lord Nugent, the lord chancellor of England. Ex-lord chancellor. And that's not all. They were looking across here to the priory and they were ever so curious. They asked all kinds of questions--what sort of nuns you were, whether you had any guests here, what kind of people they were--and finally they asked if you'd ever had a baby staying--"

  "An infant," put in Asta.

  "Yeah, an infant. Have you ever had an infant staying here?"

  Sister Fenella stopped scraping. "The lord chancellor of England?" she said. "Are you sure?"

  "Dad was, because he saw his picture in the paper and recognized him. They wanted to eat by theirselves in the Terrace Room."

  "The lord chancellor himself?"

  "Ex-lord chancellor. Sister Fenella, what does the lord chancellor do?"

  "Oh, he's very high up, very important. I wouldn't be surprised if he had something to do with the law. Or the government. Was he very grand and proud?"

  "No. He was a gentleman, all right, it was easy to tell that, but he was nice and friendly."

  "And he wanted to know..."

  "If you'd ever had an infant staying at the priory. I 'spect he meant staying here to be looked after."

  "And what did you tell him, Malcolm?"

  "I said I didn't think so. Have you, ever?"

  "Not in my time. Goodness me! I wonder if I ought to tell Sister Benedicta."

  "Prob'ly. What I thought was, he might be looking for somewhere to put an important infant, if it was convalescing, maybe. Maybe there's a royal infant that we don't know about because it was ill, right, or maybe got bitten by a snake--"

  "Why bitten by a snake?"

  " 'Cause its nursemaid wasn't paying attention, prob'ly reading a magazine or talking to someone, and this snake comes along and there's a sudden scream and she turns round and there's the baby with a snake hanging off it. She'd be in awful trouble, the nursemaid--she might even go to prison. And when the baby was cured of the snakebite, it'd still need convalescing. So the king and the prime minister and the lord chancellor would all be looking for somewhere to convalesce it. And naturally they wouldn't want a place that had no experience of babies."

  "Yes, I see," said Sister Fenella. "That all makes sense. I think I really ought to tell Sister Benedicta, at least. She'll know what to do."

  "I should think that if they were serious, they'd come and ask here. I mean, we see a lot in the Trout, but the real people to ask would be here, wouldn't they?"

  "Unless they didn't want us to know," said Sister Fenella.

  "But they asked if I ever spoke to you, and I said I did, quite a lot, being as how I work for you. So they'd expect me to say something, and they didn't ask me not to."

  "That's a good point," said Sister Fenella, and she dropped the last scraped potato into the big saucepan. "It does sound curious, though. Perhaps they'll write to the Lady Prioress rather than call in person. I wonder if it's really sanctuary they're asking about."

  "Sanctuary?" Malcolm liked the sound of the word, and he could see how to spell it already, in his imagination. "What's that?"

  "Well, if somebody broke the law and was being hunted by the authorities, they could go into an oratory and claim sanctuary. That means that they'd be safe from arrest as long as they stayed there."

  "But that baby couldn't have broken the law. Not yet anyway."

  "No. But it was for refugees too. People who were in danger through no fault of their own. No one could arrest them if they were in sanctuary. Some of the colleges used to be able to give sanctuary to scholars. I don't know if they still do."

  "It wouldn't be a scholar either--the baby, I mean. D'you want me to do all these sprouts?"

  "All but two stalks. We'll keep them for tomorrow."

  Sister Fenella gathered up the discarded sprout leaves and cut the stalks in half a dozen pieces and put them in a bin for stock.

  "What are you going to do today, Malcolm?" she said.

  "I'm going to take my canoe out. The river's a bit high, so I'll prob'ly have to be careful, but I want to clean it out and make it shipshape."

  "Are you planning any long voyages?"

  "Well, I'd like to. But I can't leave Mum and Dad, because they need my help."

  "They'd be anxious about you too."

  "I'd send letters."

  "Where would you go?"

  "Down the river all the way to London. Maybe as far as the sea. I don't suppose my boat'd be very good at a sea voyage, though. She might overturn in a big wave. I might have to tie her up and go on in a different boat. I will one day."

  "Will you send us a postcard?"

  "Course I will. Or you could come with me."

  "Who'd cook for the sisters, then?"

  "They could have picnics. Or eat at the Trout."

  She laughed and clapped her hands. In the weak light that came through the dusty windows, Malcolm saw how chapped and cracked the skin of her fingers was, how red and raw. Every time she puts them in hot water it must hurt, he thought, but he had never heard her complaining.

  --

  That afternoon, Malcolm went to the lean-to beside the house and hauled the tarpaulin off his canoe. He inspected it from stem to stern, scraping off the green slime that had accumulated during the winter, examining every inch. Norman the peacock came along to see if there was anything to eat, and shook his feathers with a rattle of displeasure when he found there wasn't.

  All the timbers of La Belle Sauvage were sound, though the paint was beginning to peel, and Malcolm thought he might scrape off the old name and go over it again, better. It was in green, but red would stand out more clearly. Maybe he could do a few odd jobs for the boatyard at Medley in exchange for a small tin of red paint. He pulled the canoe down the sloping lawn to the river's edge and half thought of going down the river right then and bargaining, but put that aside for another day and instead paddled upstream a little way before turning right into Duke's Cut, one of the streams that connected the river and the Oxford Canal.

  He was in luck: there was a narrowboat about to enter the lock, so he slipped in beside it. Sometimes he'd had to wait for an hour, trying to persuade Mr. Parsons to operate the lock just for him, but the lockkeeper was a stickler for the regulations, as well as for not doing more work than was necessary. He didn't mind Malcolm having a ride up or down if there was another boat going through, though.

  "Where you off to, Malcolm?" he called down as the water gushed out at the far end and the level sank.

  "Going fishing," Malcolm cal
led back.

  It was what he usually said, and sometimes it was true. Today, though, he couldn't get that tin of red paint out of his mind, and he thought he'd paddle along to the chandlery in Jericho, just to get an idea of the price. Of course, they might not have any, but he liked the chandlery anyway.

  Once on the canal, he paddled steadily down past garden allotments and school playing fields until he came to the northern edge of Jericho: small terraces of brick houses where the workers from the Fell Press or the Eagle Ironworks lived with their families. The area was half-gentrified now, but it still held old corners and dark alleys, an abandoned burial ground and a church with an Italianate campanile standing guard over the boatyard and the chandlery.

  There was a towpath on the western side of the water--Malcolm's right--but it needed clearing. Water plants grew thickly at the edge, and as Malcolm slowed down, his eye was caught by a movement among the reeds. He let the canoe drift to a halt and then silently slipped in among the stiff stems and watched as a great crested grebe scrambled up onto the towpath, waddled ungracefully across, and then dropped into the little backwater on the other side. Keeping as quiet as he could and moving very slowly, Malcolm wedged the canoe even deeper into the reeds and watched the bird shake its head and paddle across the water to join its mate.

  Malcolm had heard that there were great crested grebes here, but he'd only half believed it. Now he had proof. He'd definitely come back a little later in the year and see if they were breeding.

  The reeds were taller than he was as he sat in the canoe, and if he kept very still, he thought he probably couldn't be seen. He heard voices behind him, a man's and a woman's, and sat like a statue as they walked past, absorbed in each other. He'd passed them further back: two lovers strolling hand in hand, their daemons, two small birds, flying ahead a little way, pausing to whisper together, and flying on again.

  Malcolm's daemon, Asta, was a kingfisher just then, perching on the gunwale of the canoe. When the lovers had passed, she flew up to his shoulder and whispered, "The man just along there--watch...."

  Malcolm hadn't seen him. A few yards ahead on the towpath, just visible through the reed stems, a man in a gray raincoat and trilby hat was standing under an oak tree. He looked as if he was sheltering from the rain, except that it wasn't raining. His coat and hat were almost exactly the color of the late afternoon: he was almost as hard to see as the grebes--harder, in fact, thought Malcolm, because he didn't have a crest of feathers.