Remembrance

“Unhand me, you…you…farmer!” Edward shouted at him, trying to recover his dignity.

“Aye, I am that,” Will said, unperturbed. “Now, what’s this about?” he asked as he set the boys to the ground.

“They stole my horse,” Edward said, pulling down his doublet, dusting himself off.

“This horse?” Will asked. “They stole this horse that’s standing here? You mean they took it away from you?”

“No, I…There was a mishap. It was not my fault but I landed on the ground.”

“So they stole it after it tossed you off and ran away? And where did they take the horse after they stole it? To London? Shall we send the sheriff to pursue them?”

Meg knew she had never loved Will so much as she loved him at that moment. He was so very sensible. He treated boys as boys, no matter what their status.

When the young gentleman looked confused by this, Will slipped his arm around the boy’s shoulders as easily as he did with Talis. “Now, where do you live?”

When Meg saw quick tears come to the boy’s eyes, she knew that he was lost.

“Meg!” Will said sharply. “Is there more of that beef pie left? And what of a berry tart? Callie, get down off that animal and bring it home. All of us are hungry.”

What was nearly a disaster, and would have been had it been left to Meg, she guiltily thought, turned into a lovely day. After the initial hostility between the boys passed, they found they were interested in each other. Both of them were very proud and hated to ask each other questions, but at Will’s urging, they soon warmed up, with Talis showing Edward his wooden sword. Edward laughed when Talis punched the air with it and was soon giving lessons on how a real knight correctly held a sword.

Will instructed Meg to try to keep the boys interested in each other while he made some inquiries and tried to find out the direction of the boy’s home. As far as he could tell the boy was at least twenty miles from his home. Finding this place was not going to be easy, since the villagers considered any man who had traveled more than six miles from his birthplace a world traveler. Meg had no doubt at all that Will would find where the boy lived. After this morning she knew that Will could do anything.

After Will left, Meg watched Talis’s concentration, seeing that Talis studied the boy, studied his clothing, his walk, even a couple of times mimicking his way of talking.

What was sad was Callie’s face, the way she watched the two boys, feeling left out and alone. It was Talis who invited her into their world as they sat under a shade tree and drank Meg’s sweet cider. “Tell us a story, Callie,” Talis said.

Smiling, feeling confident, Callie started one of her best stories, a story she had been working on for days about a dragon, a horse, and a witch with green hair. But she was hardly into the story before Edward yawned and said, “I’ve read much better than that. Isn’t your father going to come back? I wanted to…to say farewell before I left.” He wasn’t about to admit that he wanted to ask a farmer how to get home. Not that he thought a peasant would know where a house as rich as his father’s was, but perhaps he might know something.

Because he was thinking of his own problems, Edward did not see the look of shock on the faces of Callie and Talis. He wouldn’t have known what caused it had he seen it.

Read a story, Callie thought. Only the village priest could read. He said it wasn’t good for any but men of God to read. Reading took great thought, so the priest would read the Bible and tell the villagers what it all meant. Ordinary people, people not chosen by God, could not read.

“What do you read?” Callie whispered, her knees drawn into her chest. “The Bible?”

Edward looked at her out of the corner of his eye. He was at the stage where he wasn’t sure whether girls were good or bad. And he was especially unsure about this girl. She wasn’t pretty and never would be no matter how old she got; her face was too pale, too colorless, the features too plain. Her hair, however, was glorious, now pulled back into a fat braid hanging down her back. What was odd about her was the way she followed this boy about, this black-haired Talis who dressed and spoke like a peasant but carried himself as though he were a king’s son.

The girl followed him about as though she were his shadow and he never seemed to be aware of her—except when she so much as took her eyes off of him, then he would whip around and frown at her. Talis seemed to know exactly when her attention was on something other than him, even if his back was to her.

It was very strange to Edward, since in his house, boys and girls were kept separate from one another. They wanted to be. Who wanted a stupid girl hanging about all the time? And why was this girl so silent? The girls Edward knew chattered all the time. The only time this Callie had opened her mouth was to start some boring story about flying animals and witches. He had tired of those stories years ago. Now he liked real stories, stories of knights and kings and wars—something this peasant girl could know nothing about.

Edward opened his mouth to tell her this when Will reappeared, and moments later, he was being sent on his way. He didn’t know how to say good-bye. He couldn’t very well say thank you to peasants, could he? What would his father do in this situation?

Edward mounted his horse and looked down at the four of them. Now that he saw them all together, they were a curious-looking lot. The two adults had the sun-weathered looks of farmers, but the children were…Well, dress them richly and they would fit into the queen’s court. Especially that boy (Edward could afford to be generous, now that he had found out he was f

our whole years older than Talis). If Talis were dressed in velvet instead of leather, he would be a very handsome lad.

Suddenly, Edward didn’t care what his father would say or do. His father was going to kill him as soon as he got home anyway so what did it matter what his last act alive was?

Gallantly, he swept off his hat, placed it on his heart and gave a bow to the four of them. “Thank you one and all for a splendid afternoon.” On impulse, he opened the leather bag attached to the back of the saddle and withdrew a leather-bound book of tales of the knights of the Round Table—a book that belonged to his father. “For you, my lady,” he said to Callie as though he were a courtier at Queen Elizabeth’s court, then tossed the book down to her eager hands before dramatically reining his father’s horse to the left and speeding away down the road—in the direction Will had said his father’s house was.

After the boy was gone, three of the people left standing in the front yard felt as though something had changed in their lives. Will just thought of the chores that had gone undone while he’d been chasing about trying to find where some lost boy lived. But Meg knew that never again would she see “her” children in the same way. For all that she and Will had raised them to this age, they were not like Meg and Will. She had felt less than that rich boy, but Callie and Talis had known from the start that they were equal with him.

As for Talis he had seen a world that he somehow knew he belonged with. He had told Callie that the reason he spent so little time with the village boys was that he felt sorry for her being alone (he loved to make her feel guilty; she was nicer to him when she felt he had done something just for her). But the truth was that the village boys bored him.

But today! Ah, today, he had not been bored. This Edward was a fearful snob, of course, but he knew things that Talis would like to know. He knew about horses and swords and about how a knight obtained his spurs. He even knew gossip about the queen’s court, had even once seen the Great Leicester, a man many said should be king.

As for Callie, she clutched the book to her flat, child’s bosom and dreamed of every word the boy had said. Read, she thought. He had read stories like hers. Stories better than hers.