Grandfather’s second wife had no sons and five daughters. Aunt Lavvy, at fifty-eight, is the youngest of them. Aunt Love is sixty. Aunt Terror is sixty-two. Aunts Bas and Marj are twins of sixty-five. I am almost sixteen, and the difference in our ages (as well as their reticence about things I want to know) seems an impenetrable barrier between us. They often fail to perceive the things I perceive, and this makes communication between us exceedingly difficult. I cannot say that there is more than a superficial affection on either side of our relationship. Father Raymond talks about filial duty, but it seems to me there should be something more in a family than that.
Grandfather’s third wife, my father’s mother, died soon after Grandfather vanished, of grief it is said, though in my opinion she died of simple exasperation. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be wife to a man and mother to a son who are always off on pilgrimage, as well as being stepmother to seven daughters, all of them considerably older than I. I would die of it, I think, just as Grandmama did. She was only fifteen when she married Grandfather, after all, and about thirty-five when he was killed. What had she to look forward to but decades more of the herbal sisters, all of them dedicated to eccentric celibacy? Buried among all those stepdaughters, Grandmama would have been unlikely to find a second husband, especially since there was nothing left of either her dowry or her dower. Grandpapa used everything rebuilding Westfaire: all the dowries of his three wives, all his own money, and all the considerable fortune he had somehow obtained in the Holy Land, about which people say very little, making me believe Grandfather may not have been quite ethical in amassing the treasure. Grandmama was left with nothing to attract suitors, and death might have seemed a blessed release. At least, so I think.
I spend a lot of time thinking about people. If one leaves out religion, there is very little to think about except people. People and books are just about all there is. I don’t have anyone much to talk with and only Grumpkin to play with, so … so I spend a lot of time thinking. It comes out in words. I can’t help that.
I do read everything I can get hold of. Books and my own writings are a comfort to me in the late hours of the night when all in Westfaire are asleep but me, and I am awake for no reason that I know of except that my legs hurt (Aunt Terror says it is growing pains) or the owls are making a noise in the trees, or my head is full of things I have do not have enough words for yet—there must be such things!—or my chest burns as it sometimes does, as though I had swallowed a little star. It burns and burns, just behind my collar bone, as though it were trying to hollow me out to make a place for itself. I do not know what it is, but it has always been there.
So, I sit up in my bed with the bed curtains drawn tight, the candle on one side and Grumpkin snoring into his paws on the other, and make lists of new words I have heard that day or write pages to myself about all the things I do not understand. Grumpkin lies on his back with his tummy up, his front feet folded over his chest or nose and an anticipatory smile on his face, as though he is dreaming of mice. I wish I could sleep like cats do.
2
DAY OF ST. PATERNUS, BISHOP, CONVERTER OF DRUIDS, APRIL, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1347
When I was quite young, about eight or nine, I purloined some boy’s clothes from a line near the woodsman’s hut, leaving a silver coin in their place. I had gone out of my way to steal the coin, too, because I had no money of my own, and I thought that though God might forgive my robbing the well-to-do, he would not forgive my increasing the distress of the poor. Dressed in these uncouth garments, dirt on my face, and with my hair twisted up under a grubby cap, I presented myself at the stables asking for whatever work Martin, the head groom, could give me. I am fairly sure Martin knew who I was, but we both preserved the fiction that I was a boy from the countryside, one Havoc, a miller’s son, whom Martin employed in order to take advantage of youthful enterprise. If we had ever been found out, I would have sworn on the Holy Scripture that he was guiltless, so grateful to him I was, and I believe he relied upon my protection in the event our game was discovered.
It was in the stable I learned to ride long before the aunts had me dressed in voluminous skirts and perched upon a sidesaddle, one of Grandfather’s inventions. I do not think the sidesaddle will catch on. Most women ride sensibly astride, and I cannot imagine their giving it up for something both so uncomfortable and of such doubtful provenance. According to the stable boys, the sidesaddle was designed to protect a maiden’s virginity, while risking the maiden’s neck. Risking rather much for rather little, I thought at the time, though of course I knew nothing practical about the matter then and scarcely more today.
Martin sometimes asked me to exercise the horses and take them down through the little wood to the stream for water. It
