FOR THE REST OF THE DAY I remained in the hiding place, thinking. In doing so, I continued to piece together the fragmentary bits of my life and place them together until they became a mosaic.
I kept asking myself if I felt different, if I was different. The answer was always yes. I was no longer nothing. I had become two people—Lord Furnival’s son … and Crispin.
How odd, I thought: it had taken my mother’s death, Father Quinel’s murder, and the desire of others to kill me for me to claim a life of my own.
But what kind of life?
I supposed some might have considered me blessed in that I was of high blood. But I knew that blood, as Widow Daventry had said, to be nothing but venom. That Lord Furnival was my father had been but a cruel burden. Bear—in the short time I had known him—was a thousandfold more a faithful father to me.
For the first time, I began to think upon John Ball’s words. They made sense. For what I recalled most was his saying “that no man, or woman either, shall be enslaved to any other, but stand free and equal to one another.”
I recalled too, what Bear had told me, that he was a fool because he should “like to be in Heaven before he died.”
I saw it then: Bear and Ball were talking about the very word Father Quinel had used, freedom. Something I had never had. Nor did anyone in my village, or the other villages through which we had passed. We lived in bondage.
To be a Furnival was to be part of that bondage.
As time passed in the darkness of my hiding place, the one thing I knew for sure was that as Bear had helped to free me, he had given me life. Therefore I resolved to help free him—even if it cost me that new life to do so.