Chapter 17: The Book of Hours

The morning came grey and bitter, the frost lying thick as salt on the thatch. Tom woke in the loft above the barn, his breath clouding before his face, and for a moment he was simply a warehouse manager checking the temperature of his stock. Then the smell of woodsmoke and cattle and damp earth brought him back to the fourteenth century, and he rose to meet it.

Joan was already in the yard, her hands red from the pump, a shawl pulled tight about her shoulders. She looked at him with that mixture of wariness and curiosity he had come to know—the same look she had worn when he had first shown her the willow-bark tincture, the same look she wore now when he spoke of things she could not place.

“Wat is inside,” she said. “He has been there since first light, staring at the books as if they might speak.”

Tom nodded. He had made a decision in the dark hours, lying awake and listening to the wind rattle the barn’s timbers. The bishop’s steward was asking questions. Sir Hugh wanted a full accounting. The battery was dying. If he was to leave a legacy, it could not be one of steel and seed alone—it had to be one of words.

He found Wat in the corner of the barn, crouched before the crate of veterinary books, his finger tracing the gold lettering on a spine as if it were a relic. The boy looked up, guilty, and Tom smiled.

“You want to read them,” Tom said. It was not a question.

“I want to know what they say,” Wat said. “The pictures. The horses. I’ve never seen drawings like that.”

Tom lifted the book—a treatise on equine medicine, printed in a language Wat could not know—and set it on the workbench. “Reading is not sorcery,” he said. “It is just marks on a page, and each mark makes a sound, and the sounds make words. I can teach you.”

Wat’s eyes widened. “You would do that?”

“If you swear again—by whatever you hold sacred—that you will use it for good, and that you will teach others when you can.” Tom paused. “And if you promise not to tell anyone where the books came from.”

“I already swore,” Wat said. “I meant it.”

“I know. But I need you to mean it more.”

They began that afternoon, in the thin light that slanted through the barn’s cracks. Tom had no hornbooks, no primers, only the books themselves and his own memory of how he had learned. He started with letters, scratched into the dirt with a stick, and Wat repeated them back with a ferocity that surprised him. The boy was quick—quicker than Tom had expected—and by the time the sun had sunk behind the wood, Wat could sound out his own name.

Joan came to watch them, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. She said nothing, but her eyes followed every movement, and when Wat stumbled over a letter, she was the one who whispered the sound—as if she, too, had been listening all along.

“You’ll make him a scholar,” she said later, as they walked back toward the manor house. “The priest will not like it. A boy of his station, reading.”

“The priest can burn the book if he can read it,” Tom said. “He cannot.”

Joan laughed, but it was a thin sound. “That is the kind of joke that gets men hanged.”

They reached the yard just as Baldric came riding in from the fields, his horse lathered and blowing. The reeve’s face was grey beneath its scars, and he swung down from the saddle with a stiffness that spoke of bad news.

“The muster,” he said. “Hugh’s steward has sent word. We are to provide twelve men for the king’s wars by Michaelmas, and a wagonload of grain besides.”

Tom’s stomach tightened. “Twelve men? This village has barely thirty households.”

“And half of those are women and children now,” Baldric said. “The plague took the rest. Hugh does not care. He will take the men, and the grain, and whatever else he can squeeze from us before the winter.”

Joan stepped forward. “And if we cannot give it?”

“Then he will take it anyway, and call it theft when we complain.” Baldric’s jaw worked. “I have seen this before. In France, when the lords ran short of silver, they bled the peasants and called it patriotism. Hugh is no different.”

Tom looked at the barn, where the steel ploughshares lay hidden behind the false wall, where the turnip seed waited for a spring that might never come. He thought of the battery, dying cell by cell, and of the books that held more knowledge than any man in this kingdom could imagine.

“The grain,” he said slowly. “We can give him the grain. But the men—he cannot take men who are dead, and he cannot take men who are gone.”

Baldric frowned. “What are you saying?”

“I am saying that the muster is in three weeks. I am saying that some of the men who would be taken are not fit to march—they are sick, or crippled, or too young. I am saying that we know which ones are which, and Hugh does not.” Tom met Baldric’s eyes. “You were at Crécy. You know what happens to men who are sent to war without food, without weapons, without hope.”

The reeve was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “You are asking me to lie to my lord.”

“I am asking you to save your people.”

Joan moved between them, her face sharp. “And what will you give him instead, Tom? He will want something. He will want the steel, or the seed, or the secret of the warehouse itself.”

Tom shook his head. “He will not get it. But I can give him something else—something that might buy us time.” He turned toward the barn, toward the crate where the books lay. “I can give him the promise of a better harvest. I can give him the knowledge of new crops, new methods, new ways to feed his armies. He is greedy, but he is not stupid. He will listen.”

“And if he does not?” Baldric asked.

Tom looked past him, toward the road that led to London, toward the bishop’s steward and the questions that were growing like thorns. “Then we will have to hope that the plague takes him before the winter does.”

Joan laughed again, but this time there was no warmth in it. “You have a dark heart, Tom Ashwick.”

“I have a warehouse full of light,” he said. “And I intend to use it.”