I HARDLY KNEW WHAT TO SAY. I felt a desire to speak about who I was and what had happened. Yet it did not seem proper. He was, after all, my master. I was his servant. We were not equal.
But before I could think more on it he said, “When did your mother die?”
“A … short time ago,” I said.
“May the blessed Saint Margaret care for her in Heaven,” he said, crossing himself. “What manner of woman was she?”
Since no one had ever asked me about my mother, it was difficult to know where to begin. Just to think of her brought pain to my heart. “She was shunned by the others in our village,” I said. “Nor did she talk very much. When she did, she was bitter.”
“Why so?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I thought it was because she was slight and frail. The steward, the bailiff, and the reeve always set her difficult tasks. More often than not they made her work alone. But though she worked as hard as she could, she received little thanks.”
To my surprise there was a relief in speaking. How strange it was to have someone listen to me.
I went on: “Sometimes she would hold me to her. At other times she seemed to find me …repulsive. Sometimes I thought I was the cause of her misery.”
“And your father?”
“He died before I was born. In the pestilence.”
“No other kin?”
“None.”
His eyes narrowed. “How can that be?”
I shrugged. “My mother said they also died in the Great Death.”
“A common enough story. I escaped it.”
“How?”
“By running as far north as I could go, to Scotland’s wild northern isles. Had your mother no surname?”
“I never knew it.”
“Do you ever want to know these unknown things? About your name? Your mother? Your father?”
“I do,” I said, “but I don’t know how.”
He was quiet for a while, as if thinking on what I said. Then he said, “Now, Crispin, tell me of how you came to be proclaimed a wolf’s head.”