Read John Saturnall's Feast for Free Online Page B

pennants while the book's black lines broke out in a hundred shades of green.
    John scrambled up and down the terraces and banks, hunting out the secret breaks in the thickets or crawling through hollows woven from sharp-spined stems. Blackberries lured him into sun-pricked chambers. Old byways closed and new ones opened, drifts of nettles surging forward then dying back. The sun beat down until the grass on the green parched. But on the high slopes the rank stems sprang up as lush as ever. Springs ran beneath the turf, his mother told him. Enough water to fill a river.
    Together they pulled peppery watercress from the edges of marshy puddles and grubbed up tiny sweet carrots, dark purple under the dusty earth. Clover petals yielded honey-beads and jellylike mallow seeds savoured of nuts. Tiny strawberries sheltered under ragged leaves and sweet blackberries swelled behind palisades of finger-pricking thorns. John licked the blood-red juice off his hands, his demon savouring the taste.
    ‘The gum from these will take away any pain,’ his mother told him in a high meadow of poppies. ‘You mix it in a draught. Just a little, mind. People dream themselves mad.’
    Cow parsley was just as dangerous. ‘Tug any harder on that,’ his mother told him, ‘and one of us'll drop down dead.’
    John snatched back his hand but his mother began laughing. ‘Don't pull up any mandrakes either,’ she wheezed. ‘Or wish too hard on any four-leaved clovers. Don't believe every old story you hear.’
    She meant the witch, he knew. But his mind went back to Ephraim Clough's claim and wherever they might have been before the village. For behind that question John sensed another mystery. A face whose features never resolved. He had asked her only once who his father was. Her reply had been given so bitterly he had never dared ask again. I never knew, she had told him. He couldn't speak his own name without lying . . .
    Each day they climbed higher. The ridge of the Spines looped in from the west, the hillsides dotted with sheep. From the foot of the hills, the marshlands of the Levels stretched south and west. Zoyland Tor rose among distant peat-fire plumes and flat pastures cut by the long channels of the rhines.
    Christ stopped at Zoyland, Father Hole had told them once. He planted a thorn with Joseph of Arimathea. Now herds of wild buffalo grazed the marshes. So Jasper Riverett said. The Romans had left them behind. To the south, the Vale of Buckland stretched away, dotted with villages which followed the meanders of the river. The higher John climbed, the further he saw until, reaching the banks of thorns, he and his mother looked out over the whole Vale.
    John had never seen so far or imagined there was so far to see. His eye followed the river's wide meanders until they narrowed then thinned to a silver thread. In the furthest distance, a ridge rose and a tiny gatehouse broke the tree-line. Then, framed between the squat turrets, he spied a greater structure.
    A great house seemed to break through the verdure and stretch two wings like a vast stone bird struggling free of the earth. Tiers of windows rose to a bristling plateau where domes and little towers jostled with cupolas and spires or dropped to invisible courtyards. Behind it rose a taller tower, its steeply raked roof pointing up like a blade. A church steeple, thought John. He turned to his mother.
    ‘What's that?’ he asked.
    ‘Buckland Manor,’ she said shortly.
    ‘Where Sir William lives?,
    ‘I reckon he must. No one's seen him outside it in eleven years.’ Eleven years, marvelled John. His entire life. ‘Never?’
    ‘Aren't many who've seen him inside either. He forbids his servants to look at him. So I heard.’
    John looked out again at the house, his gaze fluttering over the ledges and eaves as if he might catch a glimpse of the elusive Sir William. But there were so many distant windows and tiny roofs. Another mystery, he thought. Like the book. Like the names