*
‘He took you with him, just like that?’ Merewyn asks. ‘For no other reason than because he thought you’d found his ring?’
‘Why not? He was a generous man, and kind-hearted too, a great giver of alms.’ Guthred sighs. ‘I ought to have learned from his example. Maybe if I had, then things would have turned out differently.’
*
In some ways life at the church school in Licedfeld was not so unlike life at home. The other children all came from noble families; their fathers were lords or priests or deacons. I was the exception. The outsider, the country boy. The bishop’s favourite, they whispered behind my back, and sniggered and made snide remarks.
I won’t bore you with the details of my first years there, but suffice to say I made few friends. I didn’t miss home, my father or my brothers, but I did miss my mother. Years later, when I did happen to return, I discovered that she’d died only a few months after I’d gone away.
I was lonely, but I managed to survive. I concentrated on my studies and, at least to begin with, tried not to draw too much attention to myself. For three years I managed to resist the temptation to steal or do anything that might bring me trouble. The last time had been too close. Now that I’d been granted a chance to better myself, it was only right that I made the most of it.
After three years at the school my perseverance was rewarded and I was made an ostiary, which is to say a doorkeeper, holder of the keys to the church. I was responsible for opening the doors before Mass and for ringing the bell, and for tidying away the incense and the candles and the altar cloth and locking the building again when I left, which meant that over the months I spent many hours in there by myself.
Alone, with no one watching over me save for the Lord himself.
That was when I succumbed.
My master in those years was a priest named ?thelbald, a humourless man who must have been a little younger than I am now. He was all of six feet tall and maybe more. Thin in the face. Quick to anger. I saw him once tear the wax tablet from a pupil’s hands and strike him around the head when he thought he wasn’t trying hard enough. That said, he was a pious man, eager for us not just to study God’s word in the schoolroom but also to witness how his work was practised in the wider world. Each month he would take his older students with him out from the minster into the shire to help him spread the holy truth and deliver Mass to the folk of the surrounding villages. Everywhere we went there’d always be wise women and superstitious folk looking to obtain pieces of the consecrated Host for their own ends: to ward off evil, or to use in magic rituals or in remedies for ailments of various sorts, because of the power they were convinced it possessed. People would often ask if they could have additional wafers to take away with them – for their small children who were too sick to come, they said, or for their cousins in the next village – and when Master ?thelbald refused they’d try to bargain with him, offering all manner of favours in return. His patience thinning, he would try to explain that to employ Christ’s body and blood for such heathen practices was not only foolish and misguided, but sacrilege too. But they didn’t understand.
And so I had my idea.
As ostiary I was one of only a few with access to the strongboxes where the communion bread and wine were kept. All I had to do, if I wanted any of those things, was take them. And that’s what I did. Before each journey I’d make sure to slip half a dozen or so wafers – never so many that they’d be missed – into my coin pouch, and sell them quietly once the Mass was over to those who seemed most desperate, in exchange for a silver coin if they had one, or else for trinkets: a beaded necklace, a clutch of coloured stones, a bone flute, some fishhooks, a pewter brooch – whatever they had to offer. Within a few months I’d acquired more things than I knew what to do with, most of which I had no use for. But I held on to them nonetheless.
Why did I do it? Out of frustration, I suppose, more than anything.
For three years I’d worked patiently and without complaint, learning my Latin and the psalter and then the teachings of the Church Fathers, but there was little joy in any of it. Certainly not how Master ?thelbald taught it, anyway. After all that time, I felt I deserved more. We weren’t supposed to have many possessions save for what we needed for our studies; our clothes were simple and the food was always plain: barley bread, cheese, stewed cabbage and boiled carrots, with fish or salted bacon if we were lucky. To have all those things I’d come by, then, made me feel like a lord. Some could be traded at the market, or else they made useful gifts if there was a girl in the congregation who caught my eye.