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with their fingernails, examining the hollows for food, but finding nothing there, they began to weep. Then one of the kitchen maids swept the stalks aside and showed them how to crack open the pods. She prised out a row of naked beans, and the children gasped and thrust their hands out for them. The kitchen maid insisted on softening the beans in water first, and then, with great relish, the children devoured them. For several days after they would eat nothing else.
    It was Martin, the tanner’s son, who told me that the girl had spoken her name. He arrived at the river one evening carrying a palm-shaped basket of green reeds raddled so carelessly together that the fringe twisted in every direction. “Our fire went out,” he said. “My dad told me to go get some more.”
    “Climb on,” I said, and he shinnied up to my shoulders. As we crossed the water, he asked me whether I had seen the boy and the girl yet.
    “I have,” I told him.
    “Did you know the girl’s started talking now? Real words, I mean.”
    “What has she said?”
    “She can say ‘water,’ and she can say ‘hungry,’ and she can say ‘more.’ The boy hasn’t said a damned thing, though.” We had reached the shore by then, and I lifted him from my shoulders, straight into the air, so that he spat the word “Jesus” and then laughed as I planted him upright on the bank. “That’s what my dad told me, anyway,” and he ran up the trail into the village.
    When he returned some short time later, there was a small heap of orange coals smoldering inside his basket. Each time the breeze touched them, they glimmered brightly for a moment, then gently dimmed. “You’re not going to spill those on me, are you?” I asked. “Because if you do you’ll be walking home wet.”
    “I promise,” he said, and so I carried him to the other shore.
    As I stood him on dry ground I asked, “Has the girl told her name yet?”
    “Seel-ya,” he said. “That’s how she pronounced it, too. Funny.” He set his basket of coals on the grass and pulled a coin from the inside of his shoe: it was clinging to the skin of his foot, and he had to peel it loose before handing it to me. I took the coin and dropped it in my satchel, heavy as a fist from the day’s business.
    “Goodbye, then,” he said.
    “Goodbye,” I answered.
    He marched off toward home, carrying his pocket of light into the graying air.
    It was no later than the hunter’s moon when the first travelers began to arrive. They came from the east and the south (those from the west and north having no need to cross the river) and asked how to find their way to the green children they had heard tell of. They referred to the children as oddities, or marvels, or curiosities. Some of them had been given to believe they were bedded down like goats or cattle in a grain-crib or a stable somewhere, though in truth de Calne was housing them in one of his servants’ rooms. “You’ll find them over there,” I told them, gesturing obscurely beyond a spinney of thin, girlish elm trees. “A large house past a row of small ones. You can’t miss it.” I offered to ferry them to the opposite shore of the river on my back. “Only two coins,” I would say—my new fee for pilgrims. “Or you can try to push your way across without me.” At this I would toss a stick into the water, dropping it midstream so that the current gripped it immediately, wrenching it away. “There’s an outcropping of rocks downstream where we usually retrieve the bodies.”
    The travelers all carried parcels and walking sticks, and after scouting along the bank for a time they always accepted my offer.
    The green children had quickly become commonplace to the people of Woolpit, just another feature of the landscape, like the bluff above the maple thicket, shaped like the body of a sleeping horse, or the trio of stone wells outside the marketplace, but as the story of their discovery spread, the people who came to see them