He looks beside him, to Kit’s shaggy blond head and wide smile. Then back, to dark, sharp little Peter, riding the fat little pony they all call Goblin because she isn’t nice for anyone other than him.
Both are attractive men, in their way. Harry can admit that. He can also admit he feels nothing for them, other than a vague kinship.
Harry exhales in relief. He’s not … he’s not a sodomite.
He remembers riding through Salisbury Market a year ago with Sir Simon, and there was a man being hung for sodomy. When the body stopped jerking, the executioner had cut his genitals off, and then they had quartered him. The crowd had cheered at the butchery.
Harry realises he’s faded away, lulled into a trance-like contemplation by the steady rhythm of Nomad’s hooves on the road, when Kit’s voice snaps him back to the present. ‘Sir Harry? We stopping at Exeter Market?’
Harry blinks. The villages are getting closer together and larger as they approach the port city; Harry can already make out the stone roof of Exeter Cathedral looming over the thatch and tile of meaner buildings. The soaring grey stone calls out to him, promising peace, and guidance.
‘Yes, we’ll stop and get dinner in the market,’ Harry says. They’ve been on the road for six hours, and Nomad isn’t a long-haul kind of horse. ‘Kit, you stay with the cart and horses. Peter, I have something to take care of, but after we eat I want you to go to the horse-sellers and pick out a couple of possibilities for my new palfrey. I’ll come and make a final decision after my business is done.’
Peter’s face is awestruck at the responsibility he is being given. ‘Uh … yes, sir!’ the boy babbles. ‘Any preferences? Mare or gelding? Colour?’
‘Just a good horse that’s strong enough to carry me over distances,’ Harry says. He’s tall and solidly built, with the broad shoulders and muscular chest of a man who swings a longsword for a living. Star had been big for a palfrey, at sixteen hands, but she’d been nimble.
He misses Star still. He can feel the weight of her head on his lap, her last night in the stall. The look in her once-bright eye when he raised his sword, as if to say, I know this must be done, and I forgive you.
Harry sighs. He supposes they’re lucky, that the only casualty of Iain’s first months had been a horse. But everything now seems to come at the cost of a life. His mother’s, for the chance to go to war. Sir Simon’s, for becoming a knight. And Star’s, in exchange for gaining a friend.
For gaining Iain. Mysterious, lost, wild Iain.
Liquid fire courses through Harry’s veins as his mind throws up sounds of flesh on flesh, long dark hair and pale eyes half-lidded in pleasure, plush lips spit-slick and kiss-bitten—
Harry chews the inside of his cheek until he can taste blood. He spurs Nomad on faster; the big horse tossing his head in annoyance at the increase in pace. ‘I’m riding on ahead,’ he calls back to a perplexed Kit and Peter. ‘I’ll meet you at the market.’
Harry rides straight to the cathedral. The huge stone palace of God terrifies and thrills him. He has made the journey dozens of times into its cool interior, past the crowds milling on the sunlit steps. Yet each time, its size and splendour shock him anew. His heart shivers as his eyes take in the long, soaring vaults of the ceiling and the great explosions of colour and image from immense stained-glass windows. The midday sun sends beams of dappled light filtering through forms of martyrs and kings onto the huge flagstones of the central aisle. Further up, rosy light from the nave’s great window glints off the dark wood of the bishop’s throne, fifty feet tall, taller than Dartington Manor itself.
The very first time Harry had seen window glass had been in Exeter Cathedral, one Easter Mass with his mother. Neither Dartington nor any of the surrounding manors had glass. Not even Rabbie’s. Shutters and a hearth and heavy curtains round the bed kept them mostly warm in winter, and open windows caught what breeze there was in summer.
Only the Church and the greatest of lords have the incomes to build these soaring, arching confections of stone and inlay their windows with mosaics of coloured glass. The great cathedral is a testament both to the forbidding majesty of God and the serenity which He could bestow.
A serenity Harry desperately craves.
He ducks to the right, pacing past the side chapels until he finds the confessionals. There’s a short wait until a booth becomes free, so Harry leans against one of the tall stone pillars supporting the roof, breathing in the cool, incense-tinged air as he organises his thoughts.
An older man, a merchant by the looks of him, exits the endmost confessional. The heavy curtain doesn’t stop moving before Harry pushes it aside and sits down in the little wooden enclosure. He doesn’t look at the priest through the metal screen; he doesn’t want to know the man’s face. It would make what he has to do harder.
‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sanctii, Amen,’ says an older, tired voice from the other side of the screen.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ Harry begins. And in this smallest of chambers in the greatest of churches, in the dark, seen by nobody but God and His agent on earth, Harry’s guilt tumbles out of him. In the strict format of church confession, the description of his sin feels to him like an iceberg, barely hinting at the vastness of his transgression under water: ‘It has been three weeks since my last confession. I have committed the sin of masturbation once and the sin
