Fire Bed and Bone Read online

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  About the Author

  For my father

  FOREWORD

  I am delighted that Henrietta Branford’s Fire, Bed and Bone is going to be re-published. Her early death was a cruel loss to the world of children’s books, and although her name lives on in the Branford Boase Award, a whole new generation will now be able to read and enjoy her marvellous novel. This powerful tale with its unusual viewpoint is as fresh and exciting today as when first published. Set at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt, it brings this remote period of history to dramatic life. Cleverly original, the deceptive simplicity and economy of style makes it immediately accessible to any young reader.

  Fire, Bed and Bone was enormously influential. One of the books to bring the historical novel back into contention.

  Henrietta Branford was a trailblazer. Every writer of historical fiction for children and young adults owes her a debt.

  Celia Rees

  CHAPTER ONE

  The wolves came down to the farm last night. They spoke to me of freedom.

  I lay by the last of the fire with my four feet turned towards the embers and the last of the heat warming my belly. I did not listen to the wolf talk. This is no time to think of freedom.

  Tomorrow, in the morning, I will choose the place. Out in the byre, where the bedding is deep and the children cannot find me.

  My back aches from the pull of my belly. However long I lap from the cold cattle trough I am still thirsty. I think tomorrow is the day.

  I rest. The fire ticks. Grindecobbe grunts in her stall. Humble creeps in through the window and curls beside me, soft as smoke.

  I can smell mouse on her. She has eaten, and come in to the fire for the warmth.

  Rufus snores on his pallet of straw. Comfort, his wife, lies curled around him, dreaming. Down by their feet the children cough and fidget in their sleep, as children do. Only Alice, the baby, is awake. Only she hears, with me and Humble, the wild song of the wolves.

  I heave my belly up and hobble on splayed feet to stand beside the cradle. Alice reaches her small, red fist towards my ear and smiles. She does not fear the wolves. Their voices come to her from far outside the house, which is the only world she knows.

  Thin, frail, far off and going further, their call wavers back from where the snow lies deep under the pine trees. The grey rock pushes like bone through the cold hide of the earth and the moon hangs over all.

  I know the world beyond the house. I know Rufus’s byre. I know Joan’s house, which stands beside the village field. I know all the village. I know the Great House barn and sheep pens; I know the Great House fields. I know every small place where oats and beans and barley grow.

  I know where the rabbits creep out from their burrows. I know where the wicked wildcat leaves her stink on the grass as she passes. I know where foxes hunt, where deer step out on fragile legs to graze. I know where the wild boar roots and where the great bear nurses. I know where the little grey bear with the striped face digs for bluebell bulbs in springtime, when the woods are full of hatchlings that fall into your mouth, dusted with down, and the rabbits on the bank are slow and sleek and foolish.

  I am a creature of several worlds. I know the house and the village and have my place in both. I know the pasture land beyond the great field. I know the wildwood. I know the wetlands all along the river, where every green leaf that you step on has a different smell. I know the high, dry heath.

  Soon now I shall climb into the bracken stack next to the medlars that sit in rows, skins wrinkling while they ripen and decay. I’ll make a bed there, like the soft bed Rufus made for Comfort at the time of Alice’s birth.

  I shall not groan, as Comfort did, nor beg Rufus to rub my back. I shall push and wait and push again, three, four, maybe five times.

  Move over, Humble, let me uncoil my aching back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Old bitch looks ready to drop her pups.”

  That’s Rufus talking. He bends down and rubs his hard hand down from the base of my skull to the root of my tail. Again. Again.

  Comfort looks my way and smiles. “I wonder where she’ll hide this time? Why won’t she stay beside the fire, Rufus?”

  “She knows what’s best for her.”

  Rufus is a good man. When Comfort hollered from the pain of the baby before Alice, he put his weight behind her and his strength and his voice, put everything he could behind her, tried his best to coax that child out.

  In the end he ran for help. I stayed with Comfort while he went for Ede. They always go for Ede when they need help of this kind.

  The child was out and dead before they got back. There was a smell of blood. Comfort lay very still. Her twins, Wat and Will, sat by the fire with their fingers in their mouths, not looking. The new one didn’t move, not even to draw breath.

  Poor Comfort. That was the year two of mine were born blind. Rufus took them. I bit his thumb near to the bone.

  Next year came sweet Alice.

  “Give the old dog a dish of milk, Rufus.”

  Rufus shook his head. “Do you think I’m a rich man, Comfort, to feed my dog on milk? Not I. I work for what I get.”

  Comfort smiled, because he had already lifted the crock that holds the milk down off the windowsill.

  “And so do I,” she said. “And so does the old dog. That’s the best hunting dog we’ve ever had. Best in the village and you know it. Everybody knows it. She does you credit, Rufus.”

  Rufus poured my milk.

  “Wolves were close round the farm last night, Comfort. I saw their tracks in the snow when I went out this morning. It’s good that we mended the Great House sheep pen.”

  “I will keep the boys close by until the snow lifts.”

  “Wolves won’t take a child. Not while there’s lambs to take.”

  Comfort did not reply. She disagrees with Rufus on the matter of what wolves will and will not take. And so do I. Only a wolf knows what a wolf wants.

  I slipped away from the fire while they were talking, and made my way across the yard to the byre. There is more snow to fall. It will overlay my footprints.

  It was hard work, to drag my belly up the wooden steps and into the bracken Rufus cuts for bedding. The chickens squawked each time I slipped; the goat watched with those yellow eyes of hers. They winter in the byre with the sheep. Grindecobbe lives indoors with us.

  I pushed in under the wooden platform where they store the medlars. The place was perfect. Dark, hidden, high. Not safe. Nothing is safe. But easy to defend.

  I could hear the sheep moving down below, and the goat fidgeting. I smelled the bracken. Clean. Dry. I turned around and around, treading my nest. As I lay down, satisfied, the pit of my belly started to tighten.

  One of the hens has flown up here to watch me. Her fierce round eye stares at me and her head tilts to one side. A long, slow cluck escapes her throat. Hens know how to hatch eggs and how to keep a clutch of chicks warm under wing and how to scratch for food, but they are ignorant of anything beyond their own concerns.

  Oof!


  Hens do very well as hens. They are not stupid. But they are no good at any but hens’ business. Sheep are the same. There are two in the stall below me waiting to lamb. I hear them now; they grind their jaws from side to side, working the cud.

  Horses, now —

  Oof!

  Horses are different. Mullein the Great House horse is a good-hearted beast, patient and strong and brave.

  Oof!

  Welcome, my sweet. Soft yellow gold, like me.

  Burdock the ox is strong, but foolish. He can pull the plough and take the cart to market. But I do not like him.

  Oof!

  Welcome, damp wriggler. Lie still beside your sister.

  There’ll be no market while the snow blocks the road. There’ll be no coming and no going. Burdock will champ in his stall.

  Oof!

  Welcome. Are you the last and latest, small one, smudged smidgen of a puppy?

  I think so.

  Yes. Just three.

  One golden brown. One black, like Swart, your father. One smudged. Two dogs and a bitch. Lie still and let me clean you. Oh, the sweet, soft smallness of you under my tongue. Suckle, and I’ll name you.

  Squill, my little black dog, Swart’s son. Your nose shines like a wet black leaf. Parsnip, small daughter, yellow like me. Little two-colour fellow, I shall call you Fleabane.

  Go, hen. You’ve seen them now. Go down and tell your sisters that my pups are born. Call out the news. Let Swart hear it too, over the hills.

  Squill, your small teeth prick like pine needles. Stop that, Parsnip, and let your brother Fleabane feed beside you.

  Night comes again. Snowfall and darkness and the quiet wind. I’ll make a circle round my pups, and sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Days and nights we stayed up in the bracken pile, curled round one another, while I gave suck and licked and settled squabbles. They fed and slept and fed and squabbled and I watched their small, sleek bodies plumping up with milk. Their eyes were shut, their small heads pushed into my flank, muzzles butting, jaws working hard in the rhythm of life, which is, at first, no more than suck and swallow.

  I went down by night to drink at the trough. Comfort put bread and milk for me inside the byre door, and now and then a bone. She knew where I was, though she pretended not to.

  Then the cold bit hard, the last cold of winter, and the trough froze solid right down to the bottom. The hens stuck their feathers up and the goat complained. Only the sheep seemed not to feel it.

  No more snow fell, but that which lay about the yard rang like iron under Rufus’s leather boots. Frost silvered the hills and made the trees shine. Even the bracken where we lay grew a white bloom, and crackled.

  Fleabane, my smallest, began to whine and shiver, so I picked him up and bumped him, dangling from my jaws, down to the ground and across the yard. I scratched at the door till Comfort let me in. I put Fleabane down under Comfort’s stool, told him to stay, and went back to fetch Parsnip and then Squill.

  Rufus found an old sheepskin that was badly cured and stank. He put it down on the earth floor for us and there we lay, wrapped round about with warmth and woodsmoke. He set up a wooden board so Grindecobbe could not reach the puppies if she blundered through from her stall.

  It was a long, cold spring. I lay by the fire with my puppies and I heard much talk. Rufus liked to talk and Comfort liked to listen. They were close and comfortable.

  “There is trouble coming,” Rufus said one evening. He was carving a spoon for Alice. “It follows from the great plague, Comfort, as flies follow rubbish to the midden.”

  “How so, Rufus?”

  “The plague killed so many, Comfort, labour was scarce, good fields were left untilled. Poor folk like us began to know our worth and ask for better wages. That angered King Edward, our king’s father. When the strong grow angry, Comfort, the weak will suffer.”

  Rufus was young, just married to his first wife, when the great plague came to the village. Comfort was not yet born.

  “My first wife, Joan, and our child, Clary, both took ill at the start and died within a week. Next died my father. After him my mother. I lost my brother, too, who was a shepherd, and his wife and all their children. More than half the village died.”

  “What did you do, Rufus?” Comfort would ask. Stories so full of sorrow need retelling.

  “I ran off to the wildwood with two other lads.”

  “You left the village, Rufus, and your home?”

  “Best go, we told each other, while yet we lived. But it wasn’t fear of death that drove us, Comfort. It was the lonely quiet of the village with all our people gone. Houses empty. Doors banging. Fires out. No smoke rising. Starving dogs dragging themselves from door to door. Beasts out on the meadow lowing to be milked. Crops in the fields and nobody to harvest them. Thieves and murderers on every road and highway. Nobody even in the church. Priest died early on. And the next one, sent to us by the Lord Bishop, soon ran off. Comfort, it felt like the end of the world.”

  “Tell me how it was, out in the wildwood, Rufus.”

  “Clean and green, Comfort. Clean and green. And we stayed there, hunting King Edward’s deer and burning King Edward’s firewood, through five summers and four winters.”

  “Did you meet outlaws, Rufus? And wild men? And witches?”

  Comfort loved stories.

  I lay beside the fire, with Squill and Parsnip and Fleabane suckling in a row, or sleeping, or squeaking and nuzzling one another. I loved to hear Rufus’s slow voice.

  “After the worst of the plague was gone, I came back to the village. That was a bad time, Comfort. The plague had carried off half the people. The King laid new laws on those who were left, making life harder even than God had made it. The plague came back each year and killed a few more people. I mended my father’s roof and tended my father’s field and lived alone as best I could. Till you passed by my door.”

  Next came the part of the story that was Comfort’s favourite: how Rufus couldn’t rest until he found out who she was and where she came from, how he courted her, how everybody said he was too old for her and her own father said she needn’t wed him if she didn’t want to, although his house was fine and his field fertile; and how she said she would; and how she did.

  I lay by the fire and listened. Next they spoke about a poor preacher who had come to the village last summer. The priest wouldn’t let him in the church, so he spoke out under the trees, at the edge of the wood. I remembered it myself, because of the preacher’s dog.

  It was a summer evening, hot and dry and still. The leaves hung quiet on the trees, the grass was burned and bleached; it crackled when you stepped on it.

  Rufus and Comfort sat on the hard earth, their brown faces smeared with sweat and dirt from the long day’s labour. They had worked all hours cutting hay for the Great House and had their own small crop to fetch in later. Now they were thankful to put down their long scythes and rest their aching shoulders and feel their swollen feet come back to life as the day’s weight was taken from them.

  The younger people would rather have been dancing, but they listened. Out on the fringes of the groups, we dogs drowsed, and scratched for fleas.

  “Do you believe,” the preacher asked, “that God made the poor to be the servants of the rich?”

  Nobody answered. The preacher’s dog caught a flea, cracked it between his teeth, and glanced up at his master.

  “What did He make Adam? Rich man? Poor man?”

  Still nobody answered.

  “I will tell you,” the preacher said. “I will tell you what the Bible says about it.”

  The preacher’s dog shut his eyes. He’d heard it all before.

  “The Bible says that God told Adam he must sweat to eat. Do you see my Lord Bishop sweat for what he eats? Do you see the Lord of the Manor, whose harvest you are bringing in just now, sweat for what is laid upon his table? Or do you rather sweat to lay it there?”

  “It’s our sweat lays his table,” Ru
fus said. “And fills the Church’s money box.”

  Rufus would always speak his mind.

  The preacher nodded. “Adam planted oats and beans and barley, just as you do. He pastured his cows, he led his sheep onto the hills to graze. God gave no serf to Adam to till his field. God gave no shepherd to Adam to pasture his flocks. God gave Adam a strong back and told him to get on with it.”

  “Adam was a sinner,” Will Cudweed, the miller, said. “Any fool knows that.” He was standing behind the others, with his dog Avens cringing behind him on the end of a cord.

  Beton, the miller’s wife, sat away on her own. Beton was Comfort’s sister but she had few friends in the village. Too many people feared her husband. She often bore the marks of his bad temper herself. That evening, I remember, she had a bruise on her cheekbone, just under her eye.

  “Adam was that. Like you and me,” the preacher granted. “But tell me, miller, who did God send, to save us all from Adam’s sins? Was it a king?”

  The miller shook his head.

  “A baron, then? A knight? A handsome miller, maybe, with a sack of coin to his name?”

  A chuckle rippled round the crowd. The miller scowled and jerked at Avens’s cord.

  “God sent a carpenter, as you should know, Sir Miller. Someone who works for what he gets.”

  One or two people nodded.

  “Why should the rich folk ride on your bent backs? Is that the way God made the world? There’s nothing in the Bible says so!” The preacher sighed and looked around. “As you would know,” he said, more quietly, “if you were let to read it.”

  The moon rose and the young people slipped away into the wood, and the crowd dwindled down to half a dozen men and women drinking in the preacher’s words. Rufus and Comfort were with them.

  My eyes closed and I dreamed of a young rabbit, jinking ahead of me over close-cropped grass, fast, but not fast enough. I seemed to feel the snap of my teeth on the small bones of its neck and its good weight dangling from my jaws; to taste the rich, moist flavour of it slipping down my throat. It was a good dream, but something woke me from it.