The Terrace Room

THREE MILES UP the river Thames from the centre of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges of Jordan, Gabriel, Balliol, and two dozen others contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business; and on the opposite bank from the priory there was an inn called the Trout.

The inn was an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place. There was a terrace above the river, where peacocks (one called Norman and the other called Barry) stalked among the drinkers, helping themselves to snacks without the slightest hesitation and occasionally lifting their heads to utter ferocious and meaningless screams. There was a saloon bar where the gentry, if college scholars count as gentry, took their ale and smoked their pipes; there was a public bar where watermen and farm labourers sat by the fire or played darts, or stood at the bar gossiping, or arguing, or simply getting quietly drunk; there was a kitchen where the landlord’s wife cooked a great joint every day, with a complicated arrangement of wheels and chains turning a spit over an open fire; and there was a potboy called Malcolm Polstead.

Malcolm was the landlord’s son, an only child. He was eleven years old, with an inquisitive, kindly disposition, a stocky build, and ginger hair. He went to Ulvercote Elementary School a mile away, and he had friends enough, but he was happiest on his own playing with his dæmon Asta in their canoe, which was called La Belle Sauvage. A witty acquaintance thought it amusing to scrawl an S over the V, and Malcolm patiently painted it out three times before losing his temper and knocking the fool into the water, at which point they declared a truce.

Like every child of an innkeeper, Malcolm had to work around the tavern, washing dishes and glasses, carrying plates of food or tankards of beer, retrieving them when they were empty. He took the work for granted. The only annoyance in his life was a girl called Alice, who helped with washing the dishes. She was fifteen years old, tall and skinny, with lank dark hair that she scraped back into an unflattering ponytail. Lines of self-discontent were already gathering on her forehead and around her mouth. She teased Malcolm from the day she arrived: ‘Who’s your girlfriend, Malcolm? En’t you got a girlfriend? Who was you out with last night? Did you kiss her? En’t you ever been kissed?’

He ignored that for a long time, but finally Asta leaped at Alice’s scrawny jackdaw-dæmon, knocking him into the washing-up water and then biting and biting the sodden creature till Alice screamed for pity. She complained bitterly to Malcolm’s mother, who said, ‘Serves you right. I got no sympathy for you. Keep your nasty mind to yourself.’

From then on she did. She and Malcolm took not the slightest notice of each other; he put the glasses on the draining board, she washed them, he dried them and took them back to the bar without a word, without a glance, without a thought.

But he enjoyed the life of the inn. He especially enjoyed the conversations he overheard, whether they concerned the venal rascality of the River Board, the helpless idiocy of the government, or more philosophical matters such as whether or not the stars were the same age as the Earth.

Sometimes Malcolm became so interested in the latter sort of conversation that he’d rest his armful of empty glasses on the table and join in, but only after having listened intently. He was known to many of the scholars and other visitors, and generously tipped, but becoming rich was never an aim of his; he took tips to be the generosity of providence, and came to think of himself as lucky, which did him no harm in later life. If he’d been the sort of boy who acquired a nickname he would no doubt have been known as ‘Professor’, but he wasn’t that sort of boy. He was liked when noticed, but not noticed much, and that did him no harm either.

Malcolm’s other constituency lay just over the bridge outside the tavern, in the grey stone buildings set among green fields and neat orchards and kitchen gardens of the priory of St Rosamund. The nuns were largely self-sufficient, growing their vegetables and fruit, keeping their bees, sewing the elegant vestments they sold for keenly bargained gold, but from time to time there were errands a useful boy could run, or there was a ladder to be repaired under the supervision of Mr Taphouse the aged carpenter, or some fish to bring from Medley Ponds a little way down the river. La Belle Sauvage was frequently employed in the service of the good nuns; more than once Malcolm had ferried Sister Benedicta down the river to the Royal Mail Zeppelin Station with a precious parcel of stoles or copes or chasubles for the Bishop of London, who seemed to wear his vestments very hard, for he got through them unusually quickly. Malcolm learned a lot on these leisurely voyages.

‘How d’you make them parcels so neat, Sister Benedicta?’ he asked one day.

‘Those parcels,’ said Sister Benedicta.

‘Those parcels. How d’you make ’em so neat?’

‘Neatly, Malcolm.’

He didn’t mind; this was a sort of game they had.

‘I thought neat was all right,’ he said.

‘It depends on whether you want the idea of neatness to modify the act of tying the parcel, or to refer to the parcel itself once tied.’

‘Don’t mind really,’ said Malcolm. ‘I just want to know how you do ’em. Them.’

‘Next time I have a parcel to tie, I promise I’ll show you,’ said Sister Benedicta, and she did.

Malcolm admired the nuns for their neat ways in general, for the manner in which they laid their fruit trees in espaliers along the sunny wall of the orchard, for the charm with which their delicate voices combined in singing the offices of the Church, for their little kindnesses here and there to many people. He enjoyed the conversations he had with them about religious matters.

‘In the Bible,’ he said one day as he was helping elderly Sister Fenella in the lofty kitchen, ‘you know it says God created the world in six days?’

‘That’s right,’ said Sister Fenella, rolling some pastry.

‘Well, how is it that there’s fossils and things that are millions of years old?’

‘Ah, you see, days were much longer then,’ said the good sister. ‘Have you cut up that rhubarb yet? Look, I’ll be finished before you will.’

‘Why do we use this knife for rhubarb but not the old ones? The old ones are sharper.’

‘Because of the oxalic acid,’ said Sister Fenella, pressing the pastry into a baking tin. ‘Stainless steel is better with rhubarb. Pass me the sugar, now.’

‘Oxalic acid,’ said Malcolm, liking the words very much. ‘What’s a chasuble, Sister?’

‘It’s a kind of vestment. Priests wear them over their albs.’

‘Why don’t you do sewing like the other sisters?’

Sister Fenella’s squirrel-dæmon, sitting on the back of a nearby chair, uttered a meek ‘Tut-tut.’

‘We all do what we’re good at,’ said the nun. ‘I was never very good at embroidery – look at my great fat fingers! – but the other sisters think my pastry’s all right.’

‘I like your pastry,’ said Malcolm.

‘Thank you, dear.’

‘It’s almost as good as my mum’s. My mum’s is thicker than what yours is. I expect you roll it harder.’

‘I expect I do.’

Nothing was wasted in the priory kitchen. The little pieces of pastry Sister Fenella had left after trimming her rhubarb pies were formed into clumsy crosses or palm branches or fish-shapes, and rolled around a few currants and sprinkled with a little sugar and baked separately. They each had a religious meaning, but Sister Fenella (‘My great fat fingers!’) wasn’t very good at making them look different from one another. Malcolm was better, but he had to wash his hands thoroughly first.

‘Who eats these, Sister?’ he said.

‘Oh, they’re all eaten in the end. Sometimes a visitor likes something to nibble with their tea.’

The priory, situated as it was where the road crossed the river, was popular with travellers of all kinds, and the nuns often had visitors to stay. So did the Trout, of course, and there were usually two or three guests staying at the inn overnight whose breakfast Malcolm had to serve, but they were generally fishermen or commercials, as his father called them: travellers in smokeleaf or hardware or agricultural machinery. The guests at the priory were people from a higher class altogether: great lords and ladies; sometimes bishops and lesser clergy; people of quality who didn’t have a connection with any of the colleges in the city and couldn’t expect hospitality there. Once there was a princess who stayed for six weeks, but Malcolm only saw her twice. She’d been sent there as a punishment. Her dæmon was a weasel who snarled at everyone.

Malcolm helped out with these guests too: looked after their horses, cleaned their boots, took messages for them, and was occasionally tipped. All his money went into a tin walrus in his bedroom. You pressed its tail and it opened its mouth and you put the coin in between its tusks, one of which had been broken off and glued back on. Malcolm didn’t know how much money he had, but the walrus was heavy. He thought he might buy a gun once he had enough, but he didn’t think his father would allow him to, so that was something to wait for. In the meantime, he got used to the ways of travellers both common and rare.

There was probably nowhere, he thought, where anyone could learn so much about the world as this little bend of the river, with the inn on one side and the priory on the other. He supposed that when he was grown up he’d help his father in the bar, and then take over the place when his parents grew too old to continue. He was fairly happy about that. It would be much better running the Trout than many other inns, because the great world came through, and scholars and people of consequence were often there to talk to. But what he’d really have liked to do was nothing like that. He’d have liked to be a scholar himself, maybe an astronomer or an experimental theologian, making great discoveries about the deepest nature of things. To be a philosopher’s apprentice, now – that would be a fine thing. But there was little likelihood of that; Ulvercote Elementary School prepared its pupils for craftsmanship or clerking at best, before passing them out into the world at fourteen, and as far as Malcolm knew there were no openings in scholarship for a bright boy with a canoe.

One day in the middle of winter some visitors came to the Trout who were out of the usual kind. Three men arrived by anbaric car and went at once into the Terrace Room, which was the smallest of all the dining rooms in the inn and overlooked the terrace and the river and the priory beyond. It lay at the end of the corridor, and wasn’t much used either in winter or summer, having small windows and no door out to the terrace, despite its name.

Malcolm had finished his meagre homework (geometry) and wolfed down some roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by a baked apple and custard, when his father called him to the bar.

‘Go and see what those gents in the Terrace Room want,’ he said. ‘Likely they’re foreign and don’t know about buying their drinks at the bar. Want to be waited on, I expect.’

Pleased by this novelty, Malcolm went down to the little room and found three gentlemen (he could tell their quality at a glance) all standing at the window and stooping to look out.

‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ he said.

They turned at once. Two of them ordered claret and the third wanted rum. When Malcolm came back with their drinks they asked if they could get a dinner here, and if so what the place had to offer.

‘Roast beef, sir, and it’s very good. I know because I just had some.’

‘Oh, le patron mange ici, eh?’ said the oldest of the gentlemen, as they drew up their chairs to the little table. His dæmon, a handsome black and white lemur, sat calmly on his shoulder.

‘I live here, sir, the landlord’s my father,’ said Malcolm. ‘And my mother’s the cook.’

‘What’s your name?’ said the tallest and thinnest of the visitors, a scholarly-looking man with thick grey hair, whose dæmon was a greenfinch.

‘Malcolm Polstead, sir.’

‘What’s that place over the river, Malcolm?’ said the third, a man with large dark eyes and a black moustache. His dæmon, whatever she was, lay curled up on the floor at his feet.

It was dark by then, of course, and all they could see on the other side of the river was the dimly lit stained-glass windows of the oratory and the light that always shone over the gatehouse.

‘That’s the priory, sir. The Sisters of the Order of St Rosamund.’

‘And who was St Rosamund?’

‘I never asked them about St Rosamund. There’s a picture of her in the stained glass, though, sort of standing in a great big rose. I spect she’s named after that. I’ll have to ask Sister Benedicta.’

‘Oh, you know them well, then?’

‘I talk to ’em every day, sir, more or less. I do odd jobs around the priory, run errands, that sort of thing.’

‘And do these nuns ever have visitors?’ said the oldest man.

‘Yes, sir, quite often. All sorts of people. Sir, I don’t want to interfere, but it’s ever so cold in here. Would you like me to light the fire? Unless you’d like to come in the saloon. It’s nice and warm in there.’

‘No, we’ll stay here, thank you, Malcolm, but we’d certainly like a fire. Do light it.’

Malcolm struck a match, and the fire caught at once. His father was good at laying fires; Malcolm had often watched him. There were enough logs to last the evening, if these men wanted to stay.

‘Lot of people in tonight?’ said the dark-eyed man.

‘I suppose there’d be a dozen or so, sir. About normal.’

‘Good,’ said the oldest man. ‘Well, bring us some of that roast beef.’

‘Some soup to start with, sir? Spiced parsnip today.’

‘Yes, why not? Soup all round followed by your famous roast beef. And another bottle of this claret.’

Malcolm didn’t think the beef was really famous: that was just a way of talking. He left to get some cutlery and to place the order with his mother in the kitchen.

In his ear, Asta in the form of a goldfinch whispered, ‘They already knew about the nuns.’

‘Then why were they asking?’ Malcolm whispered back.

‘They were testing us, to see if we told the truth.’

‘I wonder what they want?’

‘They don’t look like scholars.’

‘They do, a bit.’

‘They look like politicians,’ she insisted.

‘How d’you know what politicians look like?’

‘I just got a feeling.’

Malcolm didn’t argue with her; there were other customers to attend to, so he was busy, and besides he believed in Asta’s feelings. He himself seldom had that sort of feeling about people – if they were nice to him, he liked them – but his dæmon’s intuitions had proved reliable many times. Of course, he and Asta were one being, so the intuitions were his anyway, as much as his feelings were hers.

Malcolm’s father himself carried the food in to the three guests and opened their wine. Malcolm hadn’t learned to manage three hot plates at once. When Mr Polstead came back to the main bar he beckoned Malcolm with a finger and spoke quietly.

‘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 recognised 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 travelling 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 so on.’

‘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 travellers 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 – the dark-eyed man – put his knife and fork together. ‘Anyone there at the moment?’ he asked.

‘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 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 dæmon, a gruff and 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.’

The Acorn

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 organisations of the favoured religious kind found their power and influence greatly enhanced, while officials and ministers who had supported the secular line that was now out of favour 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 organisation 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 they carried out all kinds of missions – dangerous, complicated, tedious, and sometimes downright illegal. But they 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 Saviour 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 last 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 recognised 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?’

‘Probly. 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, probly 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 from 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 all the discarded sprout leaves and cut the stalks in half a dozen pieces, then put it all in a bin for the pigs.

‘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 probly 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 pale sunlight 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 shed 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 lock-keeper 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 called 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 down 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 allotments and school playing fields until he came to the northern edge of Jericho: small terraces of brick-built houses where the workers from the 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 on to the towpath, waddled ungracefully across, and then dropped down 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 dæmons, two small birds, flying ahead a little way, pausing to whisper together, and flying on again.

Malcolm’s dæmon 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 raincoat and grey trilby hat was standing under an oak tree. He looked as if he were sheltering from the rain, except that it wasn’t raining. His coat and hat were almost exactly the colour of the late afternoon: he was as hard to see as the grebes, harder, in fact, thought Malcolm, because he didn’t have a crest of feathers.

‘What’s he doing?’ whispered Malcolm.

Asta became a fly and flew as far as she could from Malcolm, stopping when it began to hurt, and settled at the very top of a bulrush so she could watch the man clearly. He was trying to remain inconspicuous, but being so awkward and unhappy about it that he might as well have been waving a flag.

Asta saw his dæmon – a cat – moving among the lowest branches of the oak tree while he stood below and looked up and down the towpath. Then the cat made a quiet noise, the man looked up, she jumped down to his shoulder – but in doing so she dropped something out of her mouth.

The man uttered a little grunt of dismay, and his dæmon scrambled to the ground. They began to cast around, looking under the tree, at the edge of the water, among the scrubby grass.

‘What did she drop?’ Malcolm whispered.

‘Like a nut. About the size of a nut.’

‘Did you see where it went?’

‘I think so. I think it bounced off the bottom of the tree and went under the bush there. Look, they’re pretending not to look for it …’

They were too. Someone else was coming along the path, a man and his dog-dæmon, and while the man in the raincoat waited for them to pass he pretended to be looking at his watch, shaking his wrist, listening to it, shaking his wrist again, taking the watch off, winding it … As soon as the other man had gone past, the grey-coat man fastened the watch on his wrist again and went back to looking for the object his dæmon had dropped. He was anxious, it was easy to see that, and his dæmon had apology in every line of her body. Between the two of them they looked the picture of distress.

‘We could go and help,’ said Asta.

Malcolm was torn. He could still see the grebes, and he very much wanted to watch them, but the man seemed as if he needed help, and he was sure Asta’s eyes would find the thing, whatever it was. It would only take a minute or so.

But before he had the chance to do anything, the man bent and scooped up his cat-dæmon and made off quite quickly down the towpath as if he’d decided to go and get help. At once Malcolm backed the canoe out of the reeds and sped forward to the spot under the oak tree, where the man had been standing. A moment later he’d jumped out holding the painter, and Asta in the shape of a mouse shot across the path and under the bush. A rustling of leaves, a silence, more rustling, more silence, while Malcolm watched the man reach the little iron footbridge to the piazza and climb the steps. Then a squeak of excitement told Malcolm that Asta had found it, and squirrel-formed she came racing back, up his arm and on to his shoulder, and dropped something into his hand.

‘It must be this,’ she said. ‘It must be.’

At first sight it was an acorn, but it was oddly heavy, and when he looked more closely he saw that it was carved out of a piece of tight-grained wood. Two pieces, in fact: one for the cup, whose surface was carved into an exact replica of the rough overlapping scales of a real one and stained very lightly with green; and one for the nut, which was polished and waxed a perfect glossy light brown. It was beautiful, and Asta was right: it had to be the thing the man had lost.

‘Let’s catch him before he gets across the bridge,’ he said, and put his foot down into the canoe, but Asta said, ‘Wait. Look.’

She’d become an owl, which she always did when she wanted to see something clearly. Her flat face was looking down the canal, and as Malcolm followed her gaze he saw the man reach the middle of the footbridge, and hesitate, because another man had stepped up from the other side, a stocky man dressed in black with a light-stepping vixen-dæmon, and Malcolm and Asta could see that the second man was going to stop the raincoat man, and the raincoat man was afraid.

They saw him turn and take a hasty step or two and then stop again, because a third man had appeared on the bridge behind him. He was thinner than the first man, and he too was dressed in black. His dæmon was a large bird of some kind on his shoulder. Both of the men looked full of confidence, as if they had plenty of time to do whatever they wanted. They said something to the raincoat man and each took one of his arms. He struggled for a futile moment or two, and then seemed to sag downwards, but they held him up and walked him across the bridge, into the little piazza below the church tower, and away out of sight. His cat-dæmon hurried after them, abject and desperate.

‘Put it in your insidest pocket,’ Asta whispered.

Malcolm put the acorn into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and then sat down very carefully. He was trembling.

‘They were arresting him,’ he whispered.

‘They weren’t police.’

‘No. But they weren’t robbers. They were sort of calm about it, as if they were allowed to do anything they wanted.’

‘Just go home,’ said Asta. ‘In case they saw us.’

‘They weren’t even bothering to look,’ said Malcolm, but he agreed with her: they should go home.

They spoke quietly together while he paddled quickly back towards Duke’s Cut.

‘I bet he’s a spy,’ she said.

‘Could be. And those men—’

‘CCD.’

‘Ssh!’

The CCD was the Consistorial Court of Discipline, an agency of the Church concerned with heresy and unbelief. Malcolm didn’t know much about it, but he knew the sense of sickening terror the CCD could produce, through hearing some customers once discuss what might have happened to a man they knew, a journalist: he had asked too many questions about the CCD in a series of articles, and had suddenly vanished. The editor of his paper had been arrested and jailed for sedition, but the journalist himself had never been seen again.

‘We mustn’t say anything about this to the sisters,’ said Asta.

‘Specially not to them,’ Malcolm agreed.

It was hard to understand, but the Consistorial Court of Discipline was on the same side as the gentle sisters of Godstow Priory, sort of. They were both parts of the Church. The only time Malcolm had seen Sister Benedicta distressed was when he’d asked her about it one day.

‘These are mysteries we mustn’t enquire into, Malcolm,’ she’d said. ‘They’re too deep for us. But the Holy Church knows the will of God and what must be done. We must continue to love one another and not ask too many questions.’

The first part was easy enough for Malcolm, who was fond of most things he knew, but the second part was harder. However, he didn’t ask any more about the CCD.

It was nearly dark when they reached home. Malcolm dragged La Belle Sauvage out of the water and under the lean-to shelter at the side of the inn, then hurried inside, his arms aching, and raced up to his bedroom.

Dropping his coat on the floor and kicking his shoes under the bed, he switched on the bedside light while Asta struggled to pull the acorn out of the insidest pocket. When he had it in his hand he turned it over and over, examining it closely.

‘Look at the way this is carved!’ he said, marvelling.

‘Try opening it.’

He was doing that as she spoke, gently twisting the acorn in its cup without any success. It didn’t unscrew, so he tried harder, and then tried to pull it, but that didn’t work either.

‘Try twisting the other way,’ said Asta.

‘That would just do it up tighter,’ he said, but he tried, and it worked. The thread was the opposite way.

‘I never seen that before,’ said Malcolm. ‘Strange.’

So neatly and finely made were the threads that he had to turn it a dozen times before the two parts fell open. There was a piece of paper inside, folded up as small as it could go: that very thin kind of paper that Bibles were printed on.

Malcolm and Asta looked at each other. ‘This is someone else’s secret,’ he said. ‘We ought not to look.’

He opened it all the same, very carefully so as not to tear the delicate paper, but it wasn’t delicate at all: it was tough.

‘Anyone might have found it,’ said Asta. ‘He’s lucky it was us.’

‘Luckyish,’ said Malcolm.

‘Anyway, he’s lucky he hadn’t got it when he was arrested.’

Written on the paper in black ink with a very fine pen were the words: