Read John Saturnall's Feast for Free Online Page A

for John to understand. Then Abel added his voice.
    ‘Well, John?’
    He played drop-cap and catch on the green then fives with Seth's ball against the back of the church. He ran races around the pond and played hide-and-seek among the trees of the Chaffinge orchard. When the shadows from the well lengthened, he walked up the back lane with Cassie and Abel and it felt as if his feet barely brushed the ground. He floated over the stile and the clods of Two-acre Field. As they rounded the far corner, Cassie reached down and picked a pebble from the soil. She took out a purse embroidered with crosses and put the pebble inside.
    ‘That was good what you said,’ John said shyly.
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘About praying for me.’
    ‘I did pray for you, John.’ She gave him a smile. ‘You want to know what God said?’
    John nodded.
    ‘He said you'd help me.’
    ‘Help you how?’
    ‘He said you'd help me find the witch,’ said Cassie.
    ‘What witch?’
    ‘The witch that took our Mary. Up there.’
    Cassie looked up, above the hedge that marked the edge of the field, all the way up the slope to the dark line of trees at the top. But before John could ask more, the clanging of Marpot's hand-bell came from the direction of the green. Abel trudged up, his boots crumbling the clods.
    ‘Brother Timothy's calling,’ he told his sister with a grin. ‘Don't want to keep him waiting do you, Cass?’
    Cassie gave her brother a pitying look then turned without another word. The boys watched her run off across the field, her brown wool dress flapping about her legs. Abel turned to John.
    ‘She tell you she talks to God?’
    ‘She said she prayed,’ John said awkwardly.
    Abel snorted then shucked off his blue coat. Picking up a stone, he weighed it in his hand.
    ‘You know how to throw?’
    John shook his head.
    ‘Want to learn?’
    ‘This was a garden once,’ John's mother told him. ‘A long time ago. Everything a body could need grew here.’
    The dew soaked their legs, their limbs casting long shadows in the early morning sun. His mother carried the book in her arms. The promised lessons had begun.
    ‘Whose garden?’ John asked, looking up the slopes to the wood. ‘Buccla's?’
    His mother shook her head. ‘There was no Buccla.’
    ‘But the witch . . .’
    ‘There was no witch.’
    ‘But people say . . .’
    ‘People say lots of things. I knew a man once, he could say what he wanted in every tongue under the sun. None of them were true. Come on.’
    They climbed until the trees in Joan Chaffinge's orchard looked like sprigs of clover. Beside the stocks, the animal-pound seemed hardly big enough for an ant. Tiny cottages and houses fringed the wedge of the green where the old well stood like a thimble. Around it the bare patches of Saint Clodock's Tears pocked the grass. Across from Old Holy's house, people waited by the new well with their buckets and churns. Behind them, a row of beech trees screened Marpot's house and the Huxtable barn at the back. His mother opened the book.
    ‘Look here. Foxglove.’ Her finger circled a cluster of trumpet-like forms then pointed to a nearby stalk of purple bell-flowers. ‘Foxglove's for the heart. This one beside it, that's lady's bedstraw. Good for cuts. Here's tansy, and juniper, and rue. There's meadow saffron. That's for gout. Self-heal flower soothes burns. Loose-strife calms oxen. You drape it on their horns, so people say. Do you believe that, John?’
    He smiled and shook his head.
    ‘That's right. Now look how it's written . . .’
    They sat together high on the slopes, heads bent over the pages while her finger traced the alien shapes, her soft voice sounding them out and making him repeat them.
    ‘See? It's not so hard.’
    As their expeditions multiplied, his mother's herbal became his horn-book where he learned his letters, matching names to the pictures in its pages. His schoolroom was the overgrown slopes. There roots and stems hoisted their bright