France, 1440.

  The distant screams of children jolted Anjou awake. He sat upright, startled, heart galloping… listening…

  He was at home, he realised, sitting by the crooked hearth of his old, rock-topple cottage in Pouzauges.

  Of course I am. Where else would I be now?

  Yet there seemed something curiously heartening about it, his being here at this moment, as if for years he’d been at sea (Anjou had never been to sea) or lost in the wilderness (he’d once spent a difficult afternoon stuck in a hedge), as if he’d feared at some point during those years he might never find a way home and now he had. But, then, Anjou often experienced feelings he didn’t understand and any attempt to do so only frustrated him… although he wasn’t sure why (which really frustrated him).

  The screams had gone. A nightmare banished.

  I’m still half asleep is all.

  Dozily, waiting on his senses to return like the colour to a convalescent’s cheeks, Anjou watched for a moment the fire that crackled in the hearth before him, the many tongues of its flames licking the blushing andirons and working between the grate. He felt the fire’s warmth prickling the skin beneath his hose and, like a cat, he stretched his stubby legs towards it and curled his cherry-plump toes. His buttocks were numb from the stool beneath him. The short splat burrowed into the fat of his back and, yes, it was indeed gratifying—the familiarity of home… like slipping on a well-worn pair of shoes or reuniting with a dear friend, or both if shoes counted as friends (which for Anjou they did).

  Except, something was wrong. There was blood on his hands—he saw it now in the flickering firelight. Not much… just a few dark flecks beneath his fingernails and a rusty smear across his palm.

  I had a run-in with some thorns, perhaps. I skinned a rabbit. It’ll come back to me.

  Slack-jawed, perhaps drooling slightly, he allowed his eyes to close again and heard then the strains of the sparrows nesting in the rafters, the breeze whispering in the strings of onions and sprigs of thyme hanging by the window, and Marguerite, their black nanny goat, snorting beyond the partition and her hooves crunching in the straw. He smelt the hens and the wood burning and — ah! — the warm scent of freshly baked bread. He was hungry suddenly. His belly growled. But, wait … he had food: in his fist there was a spoon and balanced on his paunch was a bowl of steaming pottage.

  Eagerly, he shovelled a goodly helping of it into his mouth and savoured the burn on his tongue… the hot rush down his throat…

  The response from his gut, though, was not the usual cheerful gurgle to which he was accustomed but a sickly, unnerving sense of déjà vu (or the French equivalent thereof) that began like a gurgle then bubbled up into his chest where it sat, heavy and uncomfortable, like trapped wind.

  He’d lived this moment before, he was sure of it… he’d woken at home by the fire, surprised to be there, then tucked into a bowl of pottage he’d found resting on his belly… pottage that had tasted exactly like this.

  Shaking his head, Anjou chuckled to himself. Of course he’d lived it before. Every day for Anjou was the same. Every day he’d return home from tilling the fields, or reaping crops, or whatever it was peasants did in the olden days, plonk himself down by the fire and be swiftly rendered powerless by the warm arms of slumber. His wife would bring him supper and, not wishing to disturb him, leave it somewhere within easy reach, and that supper (always pottage) always tasted the same. Besides, wasn’t trapped wind his constant companion?—not trapped enough, his wife would lovingly jibe, it’s disgusting, I’m being serious, you make me sick.

  He tried to remember where he’d been, what he’d been doing, but the day now seemed so long ago. Fishing again in the bowl with his spoon, he smacked his lips and hesitated. It was missing something—that bread!

  Letting his nose guide him, he jockeyed his stool in a half-turn only to find his wife, Blanche, watching him coldly from the middle of the room. Her wimple was drawn and her sunset-red hair tousled. Her crooked arm rested on the tip of an upright broom.

  The sight of her there took him by surprise. He hiccoughed and babbled something about water:

  The water…

  I have to take the water…

  They’re waiting for me…

  The words spilled from Anjou uncontrollably as if he were speaking in tongues. The second he said it, he wondered why. To where? To whom?

  “To the pigs?” Blanche cocked her head, her coldness shifting to scorn with an almost imperceptible tweak of an eyebrow. “They’ve been rained on all day, you old dollop. Their trough is overflowing. You see?” She wagged her broom at him. “I told you not to go out. But, Oh, ThE MiLLeR iS ExPecTinG mE, My PLuM PuDDinG. I MuSt PiCk ThE WeEviLS fRoM ThE GrAiN, My SwEeTMeAt. Now look at you: the rain’s got into your brain and made it soppy.” (Obviously, such an unenlightened understanding of medical particulars and human anatomy is laughable to our modern sensibilities, but people of this benighted epoch put great stock in all manner of claptrap. Consequently, they didn’t share the same freedoms afforded us today by our superior intellect. They didn’t pass underneath a raincloud without first crossing themselves for fear it might fall on them. They weren’t able to push an old woman over in the street for no reason for fear she might be a witch. People’s lives in medieval Europe were tyrannised by ignorance and superstition, and old women everywhere toddled around like they owned the place).

  She was right, Anjou realised. He had been to the granary. He had been caught in the rain. It explained why his tunic was still heavy and sodden.

  Picking weevils, yes…

  It explained the blood on his hands. It was the blood of crushed bugs.

  On the Sabbath too!

  “Why can’t he pick his own weevils?” Blanche continued. “On the Sabbath too. You should be ashamed.”

  The old fart hadn’t even paid him.

  “I’ll wager the old fart didn’t even pay you.”

  “No, but…” The words came easily to Anjou now, as if he’d spoken them before. “He said I did a good job… with his eyes. From the window. It was quite a distance. He looked at me anyway.” He brought another spoonful of pottage to his lips, blowing and sipping this time, not wolfing it down now he knew his wife was watching him. Marguerite watched him too. She always stared at him when he ate, her expression shifting with his every mouthful from longing to anguish, from anger to despair… although, on the face of a goat such expressions appeared the same.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “That’s your problem,” Blanche insisted. “You’re too eager to please everyone all the time. You’re diffident. I said as much when I married you. Like a mangy, old, mistreated cur.”

  Anjou nodded, gulping down another spoonful of pottage. Outside the window, night was drawing in and the rain still dripped from the eaves. “The priest said your vows were most original, my pepper-pot.” (Like most peasants in the Middle Ages, Anjou and Blanche weren’t really married by a priest. Their fathers simply came to an agreement over a mug of ale and that was that: three turnips and a radish in exchange for a smelly, half-brained, swag-bellied mule (which both men understood to mean Anjou)).

  “I had hoped you’d change, but here we are, all these years later, and you’re still relying on others to tell you what to do… what to think… because you’re too meek to know your own mind.”

  “No, I’m not…” Anjou frowned. “Am I?”

  “It’s no wonder we’re still childless. Your seed must be the same: meek. Look at me… I’m formidable. I need gutsy seed. My body rejects anything less. My insides spit it out.”

  Anjou lowered his gaze, resting his chin on his chest the way he always did when Blanche belittled his bodily fluids. The warmth of the pottage drifted up from the bowl and over his face, and, though he would have liked to keep eating, he paused for fear his gulping would antagonise her (invariably it did).

  I have to be more commanding.

  Blanche began to sweep the floor again and the dust lifted in little eddies about her feet. As much to herself as to him, she grumbled: “You have to be more commanding.”

  Sometimes I have to grab the bull by its horns.

  “Sometimes you have to grab the bull by its horns… that’s what Papa used to say. Before he was gored to death. You have to grasp the nettle, husband. Push the orphan

  down the well. You have to…”

  There it was again: that awful feeling of déjà vu. Except this was more than déjà vu, wasn’t it? Anjou knew precisely what his wife was going to say before she said it. He knew his every response too. He knew that, any moment now, Blanche was about to take away his supper and feed it to Marguerite.

  Blanche stood over him. She wrested the bowl from his fingers. “If you’re not eating it, the goat might as well.”

  She marched across the room with his bowl in one hand and the broom in her other. Leaning into Marguerite’s pen, she emptied the pottage into the trough, and Marguerite reared up on her hind legs, the rope around her neck pinching into her fur. Poking her toe through the partition, Blanche prodded the trough within a tongue-flick of the goat’s snout, and Marguerite flumped to her knees, dipped her head inside and the room filled with the sound of her lapping and slurping in a way that to Anjou sounded excessively gleeful.

  Unwittingly (as if such things were decided by someone else), Anjou felt his eyes drawn to that corner of the room beyond Marguerite where the light never touched, where the silvery tendrils of cobwebs grew from the gloom like the overgrown shoots of a ghost tree, where a musty smell persistently lingered, no matter how much dill and woodruff he chucked at it, and the straw that coated the floor would forever wither and blacken a day hence from being laid. That corner had always made Anjou uncomfortable, admittedly, but it had never filled him with the sense of dread it did now, the sense that it was somehow slowly eating away at the room and, with it, all he held dear. Something about everything was wrong.

  He considered his bed, the bed he had himself cobbled together from the timber of an old plague-cart… although he’d told his wife he’d built it with the finest wood sourced from the most reputable merchants and that, no, he didn’t know what those ominous-looking stains were either, but, look, he’d constructed a headboard.

  Had it always been on that side of the room? Hadn’t they moved it to the opposite corner when the thatch had started to leak? He thought about Blanche. Wasn’t there something different about her, too? Didn’t she seem younger, less grouchy?

  At the same time, though, everything felt just right… the fire, his cherished spot beside it, the waft of bread and the sound of his wife pottering around, grumbling to herself. He should’ve been happy… he was happy. Blanche was about to say it, wasn’t she? She was about to say the nicest thing she’d ever said to him. She was about to, in her own way, yes, tell him that he too was loved.

  When his wife turned back to him, Anjou saw the bib of her apron was flecked brown with pottage. She looked suddenly much older… white hairs streaked her temples, wrinkles frilled her mouth and eyes, and her brow was fraught with a thorny temper.

  Beyond Blanche, Anjou saw the dark corner, no bigger than before and no less abysmal. When he saw their bed, he gasped, sucking in the air as if dunked neck-deep into icy water. Their bed had moved. No longer was it in the corner where he’d seen it before. Now, incredibly, it occupied the corner on the far side.

  Anjou rubbed his eyes, certain they must have been deceived by the half-light… hoping. But, alack, the bed had moved. The blankets were neat and unruffled, not a single feather or wisp of straw disturbed. His hands trembled. Quite despite himself, a muted whimper escaped his lips.

  “Don’t sulk about it, husband. I don’t want you to sulk.” Blanche returned to him by the fire. She placed her strong, leathery hand on his shoulder. “I want you to change. I have to believe you can change… you’re my lot, so what choice do I have? I have to believe you can be someone better, someone more commanding, more virile, someone…” She shrugged and puffed out her cheeks. “…less like you, I suppose.”

  Her hand slipped from his shoulder, and she ferried his bowl to the washtub. Numbly, he listened to her clattering around, clapping pots in the water.

  That was it… the nicest thing she’d ever said to him (those who didn’t know Blanche the way Anjou did might’ve missed it). She believed in him. He was her lot. That’s what she’d said, and she’d said it again.

  A smile broke across his face that pinned back his jowls and pushed all worries aside. Gone was the hunger, the feeling of trapped wind, the confusion and distress. Now all that remained was a warmth that flushed through every part of his being, a warmth that did not come from the fire, but that radiated from somewhere buried in his chest.

  She believes in me! I’m her…

  “Husband…” There was an unwonted trill to Blanche’s voice that startled Anjou. She was standing by the window, her hands anchored in dishwater. Her eyes were fixed on the dusk outside. “There’s a boy standing in our blackthorn,” she said, “watching the house. Come and see. He’s looking right at me.”

  Anjou pushed himself up from the stool. His knees creaked. His girdle slipped beneath his buttocks, and he shimmied a little as he hitched it back up.

  He joined her by the window and saw it was already dark. Moonlight danced in the puddles. The trees by the road swayed as one shadowy clump. A fresh breeze carried the smell of basil and mint from his herb garden.

  Beyond the wattle fence, the pigs were restless, squealing and butting their flanks against the sides of the sty. The hens inside the cottage were becoming agitated too, hopping around and flapping their wings. Anjou followed his wife’s gaze to the blackthorn and, squinting, picked out the pale face of a boy peeping out from the dark of the spines and the sloes. His wife was right: he was just standing there watching the house, wreathed in the thorns and the dusk, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And Anjou knew this boy… he knew him in the pit of his stomach before his mind alighted on a name. When that name came, his knees buckled. His head spun. He leant forward on the worktop and the wood-joints yawned beneath his weight.

  “It’s Jacques,” he croaked.

  Blanche looked at him, accusingly. “Who’s Jacques?”

  “No, it can’t be. It’s impossible.” Anjou stumbled back from the window, shaking his head. But it was.

  It was.

  He dropped to his knees, that sense of déjà vu utterly absent now. How he longed for its return, to feel again the bloated belly of its simplicity. None of this was familiar, all of it forbiddingly new.

  Burying his face in his hands, he met his wife’s eyes through his webbed fingers. She was waiting. He shuffled on his knees towards her. “Jacques is dead.” He grabbed at her skirt and pulled the wool over his eyes. “He’s dead.”

  And from somewhere far away (but not that far) there came the sound of a cowbell ringing, of hands clapping rhythmically, and of children’s muffled screams.