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Authors: Judith Merkle Riley
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huntsmen cut a pole to carry home the stag's quarters, the grooms butchered the creature according to unchanging traditional ritual, first cutting off the testicles and tongue, then cutting away the shoulders, then emptying out the liver and entrails. Hounds gobbled the scraps that were fed to them; a new apprentice was “blooded,” marked in the stag's gore. Dame Petronilla looked on with glowing eyes, her hand tight on the hilt of her little knife. Red puddled into the earth, red stained the butchers' hands and arms. At last the quarters, strung to the pole, were taken up for the return to the manor kitchen.
Far from the bloody ground, the green water bubbled mindlessly, alone beneath the sheltering arch of the ancient yews, where the birds were silent.
CHAPTER SIX
I N THE MONTH OF MAY, BIRDS SING AND SO do all the street sellers and beggars: the hot pie man sings “hot pies, hot PIES, so fine,” right up and down the street, and the blind woman by the church sings, “for the LOVE of CHRIST, a FAR-thing only, have PI-ty” as she rocks back and forth, and wandering down the back alleys where he can be heard by housewives hanging out their wash, the man with the string of dead rats tied by the tail sings the most tunefully of all: “I'm the RAT catcher, I'm the RA-A-A-T catcher.” Then there's baaing and the clank of milk pails as the goat woman comes with her goats and calls out at our kitchen door for our order, and the singing of the woman who bears duck eggs on her head in a basket, who does a good custom in this neighborhood. I tell you, you can hardly even hear the birds for all the noise. The fine day had brought them all out, birds and human singers and dogs and grunting pigs, and the cacophony all came floating in through the open kitchen shutters, mingling with the busy chicken sound from our little henyard and the sound of Master Wengrave's big sorrel mule braying.
We were baking bread that day, cook, the girls and I, and the kitchen was smelling all fine and yeasty as we uncovered the starter. The girls had big aprons on, rolled over at the top several times and tied up high under their arms; to keep hair out of the baking, they each had their hair rebraided in a single long braid down the back, Alison's smooth, and Cecily's fuzzy. They stood over the big wooden bread troughs, their sleeves rolled up, waiting for cook to turn out the dough into them.
“Alison, don't taste the starter. It will grow inside you, and you'll split.”
“Did you ever know anyone who split like that, mama?” asked Alison, who is too fond of ghoulish things for my taste.
“From eating the starter? I'm sure there are lots of greedy girls who've done that. Just look at how it grows in the pan—you wouldn't want that to happen inside you, would you?”
“Then you don't know anyone, do you, mama?” said Cecily, who is horribly hard-headed.
“Don't we have raisins? I want to bake a cake, a sweeeeet one,” announced Alison.
“No raisins, no cinnamon, no pepper until father comes home. They're too expensive.” The sharp cry of a magpie came in on the breeze from the tree outside the window, followed by a sound almost like a human voice, “treat, treat, treat, treat.”
“Oh, there's my wicked pie who flew away when the cage was broken. And he spoke so clearly, too! Now he's learning calls from those bad birds outside. I swear, he's living in the tree just to taunt me.” Cook leaned her head out the window and called, “Come to mama. See? I've put out your treat for you. Treat, treat!” Amid a handful of crumbs on the windowsill she laid a tiny sliver of bacon fat. There was a flash of black and white feathers, and the bird settled on the windowsill, strutting up and down and inspecting the company inside with one beady black eye. We held very still, so that he wouldn't think we were going to try to catch him. First he tilted his head, one bright eye on the treat, then he gobbled it up in a flash. “Treat,
Far from the bloody ground, the green water bubbled mindlessly, alone beneath the sheltering arch of the ancient yews, where the birds were silent.
CHAPTER SIX
I N THE MONTH OF MAY, BIRDS SING AND SO do all the street sellers and beggars: the hot pie man sings “hot pies, hot PIES, so fine,” right up and down the street, and the blind woman by the church sings, “for the LOVE of CHRIST, a FAR-thing only, have PI-ty” as she rocks back and forth, and wandering down the back alleys where he can be heard by housewives hanging out their wash, the man with the string of dead rats tied by the tail sings the most tunefully of all: “I'm the RAT catcher, I'm the RA-A-A-T catcher.” Then there's baaing and the clank of milk pails as the goat woman comes with her goats and calls out at our kitchen door for our order, and the singing of the woman who bears duck eggs on her head in a basket, who does a good custom in this neighborhood. I tell you, you can hardly even hear the birds for all the noise. The fine day had brought them all out, birds and human singers and dogs and grunting pigs, and the cacophony all came floating in through the open kitchen shutters, mingling with the busy chicken sound from our little henyard and the sound of Master Wengrave's big sorrel mule braying.
We were baking bread that day, cook, the girls and I, and the kitchen was smelling all fine and yeasty as we uncovered the starter. The girls had big aprons on, rolled over at the top several times and tied up high under their arms; to keep hair out of the baking, they each had their hair rebraided in a single long braid down the back, Alison's smooth, and Cecily's fuzzy. They stood over the big wooden bread troughs, their sleeves rolled up, waiting for cook to turn out the dough into them.
“Alison, don't taste the starter. It will grow inside you, and you'll split.”
“Did you ever know anyone who split like that, mama?” asked Alison, who is too fond of ghoulish things for my taste.
“From eating the starter? I'm sure there are lots of greedy girls who've done that. Just look at how it grows in the pan—you wouldn't want that to happen inside you, would you?”
“Then you don't know anyone, do you, mama?” said Cecily, who is horribly hard-headed.
“Don't we have raisins? I want to bake a cake, a sweeeeet one,” announced Alison.
“No raisins, no cinnamon, no pepper until father comes home. They're too expensive.” The sharp cry of a magpie came in on the breeze from the tree outside the window, followed by a sound almost like a human voice, “treat, treat, treat, treat.”
“Oh, there's my wicked pie who flew away when the cage was broken. And he spoke so clearly, too! Now he's learning calls from those bad birds outside. I swear, he's living in the tree just to taunt me.” Cook leaned her head out the window and called, “Come to mama. See? I've put out your treat for you. Treat, treat!” Amid a handful of crumbs on the windowsill she laid a tiny sliver of bacon fat. There was a flash of black and white feathers, and the bird settled on the windowsill, strutting up and down and inspecting the company inside with one beady black eye. We held very still, so that he wouldn't think we were going to try to catch him. First he tilted his head, one bright eye on the treat, then he gobbled it up in a flash. “Treat,
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