The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland Page B

without any idea what to do or what they wanted of me. Panic choked me. I’d always longed to escape from my father’s house, but now that I had, I wanted to run straight back. At least there I knew what to do. But I couldn’t go back; my own father had disowned me and thrown me out into the street as if I was a servant. I had no home and no family. I had nothing but these foreign women.
    Servant Martha, Kitchen Martha, Healing Martha—who were they? My father said they were nuns from some wealthy order. He knew that by the way they threw their money about like pig slops. He could always find a reason for docking a hired man’s wages and he despised anyone who couldn’t.
    He knew all about these wealthy orders, he said. Convents made rich by the dowries of highborn women who were too ugly to be married off, so their families hid them away in nunneries where they busied themselves in needlework and prayer for the souls of their fathers and brothers until they withered up and died quietly. But the first time I’d seen these women I knew that if they were nuns, they certainly weren’t like any I’d ever met before.
    The year they arrived was a bad summer, wet and cold. Crops wouldn’t ripen. The wind and rain beat them into the mud where they stank and rotted away. The servants at the Manor cursed the foreign women for bringing the evil weather with them.
    The first time I saw them close up was at Mass at St. Michael’s Church in the village, standing together, all dressed alike in plain grey kirtles of heavy wool with grey cloaks and hoods drawn about their heads. I couldn’t take my eyes off them; they were so still. My two older sisters, Edith and Anne, were praying piously, moving their lipswith great exaggeration as we’d been taught, so that everyone could see that they were praying. Everyone else in the church was mumbling away to themselves, like my sisters, but not these women. Their lips didn’t move at all. The old priest, the one before Father Ulfrid, was watching them too, and he looked angry. The villagers edged away from them. It was dangerous to be different in Ulewic; everyone knew that.
    A SINGLE BELL RANG OUT over the courtyard. Before I could sit up, the door burst open and the wind flung a child into the room. She raced across the floor and threw herself facedown on her cot laughing and panting, as other little girls chased in after her.
    “I’ve won, I’ve won,” she squealed, then sat up as she caught sight of me in the corner. Her playmates followed her gaze. We stared at one another. I knew I should be the one to speak and explain my presence in the room, but the unsmiling faces of the little girls watching me reminded me of the hostile stares of the servants’ children who always ceased their games when I approached.
    “Are you Agatha? Kitchen Martha said you’d be here,” called a voice from the door. “I’m Catherine.”
    The newcomer shook the rain from her cloak. The girl looked five or six years older than the others, about my age, with skinny brown braids framing a long melancholy face, making it look even longer. She reminded me of my father’s wolfhound.
    “I thought everyone was called Martha here,” I said peevishly.
    “Oh no, everyone has a beguine name—not their old name, of course, a gift name—but if a beguine is elected to help run the beguinage she’s then called a Martha after the blessed Saint Martha who worked for our Lord.” Catherine gabbled so eagerly, I could hardly understand what she was saying. “Servant Martha is the head, then Kitchen Martha runs the kitchen, Shepherd Martha tends sheep—”
    “I’m not stupid; I had worked that out for myself.”
    She looked as hurt as Kitchen Martha had and I felt a little prick of guilt, but not enough to make me care.
    Catherine bit her lip. “You come from Ulewic, don’t you?”
    “What of it?”
    Catherine glanced uneasily at the children, but they had already lost interest in me and were huddled