He took it from me and I walked away without looking back. Still, that wasn’t the last time he tried to solicit my help. I suppose he saw me as something of a kindred spirit, and that was why he confided in me and tried hard to win me over. Certainly I never encouraged him. It’s true that we were alike in some ways, but there was much more that set us apart. Yes, the school’s strictures could be harsh, and they grated upon me too. And yes, there was always that urge to rebel. But the difference between us was that, deep down, I wanted to be good. I’d come to believe what the deacons and Master ?thelbald said, which was that the temptations that plagued me were a sickness that needed to be cured.
Wulfnoth wasn’t like me. He didn’t have a pious bone in his body. He had no desire to learn, no instinct for hard work or understanding for its value; he didn’t see why it might be useful to know one’s letters or to be able to engage in the art of rhetoric. Everything we did was to him a waste of time. Why his father had thought he should be schooled at the cathedral and train as a priest, I could never work out. Maybe he was hoping that the masters would instil some discipline in his boy. But there was no disciplining Wulfnoth. He was restless and forever in need of something to do, something to occupy his mind.
Many things went missing around the cathedral quarter over the next few months, as the old year went out and the new one began, from candles to gold-spun altar cloths and even the embroidered cushion from the bishop’s throne. None of those thefts were my doing, but I could guess who was behind them.
That never stopped them from blaming me, though.
It was after the cushion disappeared that I was called before the bishop himself. Brihtm?r, it was by then, kindly Leofgar having died the year before. He was a much sterner man, thin like a withy but not nearly as old or as frail as his predecessor. He demanded to know why I continued to defile God’s house with my sins, but when I tried to defend myself, he shouted me down. Leofgar had been too lenient, he said; if it had been his choice he would never have taken on a wretch like me in the first place. A miller’s son, no less. But that was what Leofgar had done, and so Brihtm?r owed it to his predecessor to try to cleanse my soul and rid it of evil. He lectured me for the better part of an hour, warning me that my obsession with worldly goods would condemn me to eternity in Hell if I didn’t mend my ways. He told me that if anything else went missing, I would be expelled from the school and barred from receiving communion.
I tried to explain that it wasn’t I who had taken his cushion, or the candles or the altar cloth, and that if I knew where they were I would say. He was deaf to my protests. I knew then that I had to do something. I couldn’t allow them to send me away, back to work under my father’s eye, assuming he still lived. The cathedral school was all I’d known for so long, and it was still preferable to labouring with my hands out of doors, hefting sacks of grain and flour from storehouse to mill and from mill to kitchen, bending my back to the plough under the blistering sun and the driving rain. That was not the life I wanted. At least in the Church I could live in some comfort.
Which meant that Wulfnoth had to go.
I knew I couldn’t wait long. If I didn’t get rid of him soon then it would be too late. And so almost from the moment Bishop Brihtm?r dismissed me I started plotting.
It had to be something truly terrible, some act for which there could be no forgiveness. The masters never liked to give up on a student, you understand. No matter how wayward he was, they always made their best efforts to bring him back within the fold, as they did with me. It was almost unheard of for any boy to be sent away. They preferred instead to impose penance and to pray fervently for the salvation of the souls in their care.
Remember I said I used to be a keen climber when I was young? Mostly it was trees that I climbed – that oak was my favourite – but sometimes it was buildings too. Often, back when I was living with my father and wanted some time alone with my thoughts, I used to climb the mill itself, just so that I could watch the stream glistening in the sun, the wheel turning.