Edvane Stories

During the reign of King Stephen, two children of strange green hue were discovered near Woolpit in Suffolk, speaking in an unknown tongue and refusing all common food save raw beans. In time, the boy died, but the girl lived on and was said to speak of a dim country called St Martin’s Land. What follows is not a retelling of that story, but an imagined prelude to it, set in the shadow of Bury St Edmunds Abbey and the wild woods beyond.

At the edge of Bradfield Wood, where the tilled strips gave way to scrub and alder, Ann kept a ramshackle hut with a leaky roof. In winter, the cold stayed in the floor, and in summer, the flies found everything. It was no place to raise children, though she had done so these seven years and more with little besides her hands, her temper, and whatever she could coax from patchwork labour.

The monk came after dusk with his hood up, though there was no one on the track to see him. Brother Stephanus of Bury St Edmunds Abbey had soft hands for a man who preached mortification. Ann watched him from the doorway while the children crouched by the hearth behind her.

“You have left it long enough,” Ann said. “They grow. They ask questions. The village asks more.”

Stephanus lowered his hood and gave her the look he used when he wished to seem grave. “Then you must answer less wildly.”

She laughed. “Wildly. You came to me often enough when your own wildness pleased you.”

He glanced past her, toward the children. “Keep your voice down.”

“No. You will hear me. I am done with waiting while you hide behind saintly walls. I cannot feed them. I cannot clothe them proper. If I take them to the abbey gate and name you before witnesses, perhaps then you will remember your Christian duty.”

For the first time his calm slipped, and she saw it, but Stephanus was no simple contemplative. He was shrewd

“Ann,” he said, almost gently, “do not ruin them for the sake of anger. If scandal touches them, they will carry its mark for life. Let me place them quietly in care. The abbey has tenants and almoners. Good people who owe us favour. They will be fed, taught, and kept better than you can keep them here.”

Ann stared at him a long while. “You swear it?”

He placed two fingers against his breast. “Before God, I will see them provided for.”

And because hunger wears down pride faster than winter, she let herself believe him.

Brother Stephanus came for them at first light three days later with a small cart and a worn sack. Ann had washed the children as best she could the night before. Stephanus said little while she kissed them, and even less when she asked where they would sleep. He only told her that good order required quiet beginnings and that tears would unsettle them.

The girl cried before the hut was out of sight. The boy did not. He sat with one hand closed around a crust Stephanus had given him. He offered to share it with his sister, and she ate through her tears.

They went first by the common track, then by narrower paths between hedges, and finally under the trees where roots broke the earth. Stephanus answered questions with nods or scraps. Yes, they were near. Yes, there would be food. No, their mother would not come yet. All the while, he looked ahead, never back.

By noon, the path was little more than a deer run through hazel and bracken. The girl stumbled. The boy asked where the abbey was. Stephanus said there were men ahead, and they must wait here while he fetched them. He pointed to a fallen oak half furred with moss and told them not to move from it.

He handed them the sack. Two crusts, a turnip, and a few apples. Then he went.

They listened to his footfalls until they could no longer hear them. Still they waited, little realising that they had been thrown away.

At first, the girl only asked when he would come back. The boy told her to hush and listen for the monk’s tread emerging from the trees again. Now and then, some branch clicked in the wind or a bird broke from the undergrowth, and both of them started, thinking it must be him. By the time the shadows lengthened around the fallen oak, the girl had begun to cry with the tired, hopeless sound of one who knows it does no good.

The boy opened the sack and examined the contents. He broke a crust and gave the larger piece to his sister, then changed his mind and made them equal. She chewed slowly, trying to be obedient. Neither spoke of their mother.

When the day failed, they understood that Brother Stephanus was not returning. The girl said she wanted to go home. The boy stood, turned once among the trees, and saw only wood upon wood, every path alike, every shadow dark and menacing. He chose a direction and they walked until bramble caught at their ankles and branches struck their faces.

They did not go far. Dark in the wood was not the dark of a hut, where walls held it in place. This dark moved. Sounds came out of it, too. Something padded somewhere beyond sight. Something cried in a voice too shrill to be a man’s and too wild to be anything kindly. The girl clutched at her brother so hard that when he tried to pull free, the cloth twisted in her fist.

They found shelter beneath the roots of an overturned beech where old earth had heaved up and left a hollow beneath. The boy crawled in first, and the girl followed, shaking with cold. They ate the apples in the dark, each taking bites where they could not see the other’s face.

Sleep came, but it was scarcely restful. The girl whimpered and kicked. The boy stayed awake longer, staring out through the mesh of roots into a blackness that seemed to stare back. In the night, he heard breathing and not their own. He held his sister so tightly she stirred and complained, but he did not release her. Whatever stood outside did not enter. Eventually, it moved away, and he heard the soft crush of leaves underfoot.

Morning did not bring sense, only light and hunger. Their throats were dry. The turnip was half their food now. The boy said they must find water before they ate it. They wandered until the girl began to lag, then stumbled upon a runnel sliding brown and shallow over stones. They knelt and drank, heedless of mud or of anything. The water tasted of roots and rocks, but it was the best thing they had ever known.

After that, they searched for berries, but the first ones they found puckered their mouths and made the girl spit and cry. The boy flung the rest away. Later, they dug in the earth with sticks for anything that might be eaten, but found only grubs and white things that wriggled in the soil. The girl would not touch them. The boy tried, gagged, and stamped them flat.

By the second day, they were cured of the belief that someone might come. They called once or twice for their mother, but the trees gave them only the caw of a crow or the whisper of high leaves in reply. Rain came near evening, and they huddled again under the roots, teeth knocking together, while somewhere not far off, the wolves called to each other deep in the forest.

The girl buried her face against her brother and said she did not want to die there. He did not tell her they would not. He just listened to the wolves and to the rain ticking through the leaves. He kept his eyes open as long as he could.

On the third day, the wood began, in small ways, to answer them. The children moved slowly now, dulled by hunger and poor sleep. They had eaten the turnip raw that morning, splitting it with numb fingers, and it had done little but wake the ache in their bellies. By noon, the ache had become something mean and constant.

It was then that the boy saw the first sign. At the foot of a birch, on a stone washed clean by rain, lay three green pods split neatly open. Inside each was a row of peas, fresh and bright as spring. He looked up, expecting some woodman or a child to take them, but there was no one. The girl fell to her knees and seized one. He slapped her hand away, remembering the bitter berries, yet when he sniffed the pods, there was only the smell of fields and rainwater. He ate one pea, then another. Sweetness spread across his tongue, and they devoured the rest together.

That evening, when darkness loomed again, they heard laughter. It drifted between the trees like the clink of little bells, then stopped so suddenly that both children were instantly stilled. The girl pressed against her brother. Ahead, a pale shape moved and was gone. Then another, lower to the ground, quick as a stoat.

They might have run, but the wolves had come that same dusk. The first sound was a low rustle in the ferns, then the heavy tread of something circling wide. The boy caught the rank animal smell before he saw the eyes, two pinches of amber in the undergrowth. He dragged his sister back, but there was nowhere to go. Then from their left came a trilling cry, strange and high, repeated twice.

The pale shapes were there again, among the trunks. One perched on a root, thin as a child, with hair hanging in wet ropes and eyes too wide for any human face. It bared little pointed teeth and hissed at them, then jabbed one long finger toward a stand of thorn beyond the oak’s shadow. Another cry rang out from deeper in the wood.

The boy understood enough to move. He hauled his sister with him and flung both of them behind the thorns just as the wolf broke cover behind. It lunged and snarled, but the thorns were thick and cruel. The children crawled through mud and bloodied twigs until they found the hollow beneath, while outside the wolf paced and snapped. Above its growling came that same laughter again.

When morning came, a heap of nuts had been left beside them.

After that, the wood no longer seemed empty. The children seldom saw the pale creatures clearly, and when they did, it was never for long. A face between leaves. A hand withdrawing behind bark. Signs of them began to appear wherever hunger or danger pressed. A cluster of hazelnuts lay on a flat stone. Mushrooms untouched by slugs were set where the girl would notice them. Once, a strip of bark peeled back to show the sweet pith beneath.

The boy ceased asking who left such things. The girl, after the first fright subsided, began to listen for them. They taught as wild things teach. When the boy reached for red berries, a pebble struck his wrist from nowhere. When the girl put her foot near a patch of foxglove, a shrill clicking rose from the hazel until she stumbled back. They learned by error, warning and repetition.

The creatures had a language of their own. It was not speech as their mother had used. It was made of brief, crooked words, strange to the ear and stranger still upon the tongue. One word meant come away. Another meant be still. A third warned of danger above, hawk or owl or some other winged death that dropped without cry. The girl learned the words first, she was always the quicker. The boy held back longer, but in time he spoke them too.

More days passed than either child could count. Sun broke through and failed again. Rain came and went. Their cheeks hollowed. Their hair tangled into knots that twigs and burrs made denser still. The green cast came on them so slowly that neither would have seen it in the other at first. Whether it came from the peas they found, the herbs they were shown, the dimness under the leaves, or something that lived in the soil and the air, neither knew.

The creatures did not draw near often, but when they did the children ceased to think of them as ghosts. They were real enough, just not human. One had ears that tapered too finely and turned like leaves in the wind. Another moved with arms too long for its body and feet that seemed like hands when it gripped a branch.

Human words began to leave them. At first, they lost only the less useful ones. Pot. Door. Stool. Chimney. Then names began to blur. Their mother remained longest, her face and the warmth of her hand cupping the back of the girl’s head. The smell of her dress, the roughness in her voice when she tried not to weep. Brother Stephanus returned too, though in uglier fragments. A dark sleeve. Mudless shoes. Fingers laid solemnly on his breast while he lied. The boy held to anger because it was easier than memory. Yet even that became watchfulness and silence.

Only once did the children reach the forest edge and turn back. They had followed a line of hazel and emerged into rough pasture, where far off a bell was tolling and smoke climbed from a cottage. It looked strange to them, too bare, too exposed, with nowhere close to hide and every sound travelling too far. Behind them, from the shade, came a whistle, and they went back under the branches.

By then, the wood was no longer the place that had almost killed them. It was the place that had taken the killing in hand and taught them how to refuse it. The creatures did not love them, they corrected them, fed them and warned them. Yet that was enough, and when autumn deepened, and the first true cold came creeping through Bradfield Wood, they no longer thought of themselves as lost.

It was hunger that finally drove them out. The cold had become bitter, and the wood that had once fed them now yielded less. The nuts were gone. The berries had blackened and fallen. Even the pale creatures kept themselves farther off, glimpsed only now and then, watchful but withholding now.

So the boy led his sister along a game track sloping a grey light beyond. Neither spoke much now, and when they did it was in the forest’s own crooked language. They came out near the wolf pits in the weak light of the afternoon. Men were working not far off, and one of them saw movement at the edge of the trees and shouted.

The children shrank back, but too late. The men came toward them, calling out in voices the children no longer understood. The girl clutched at her brother. He bared his teeth like a cornered animal and pulled her away from the nearest outstretched hand. Their clothes hung in rags. Mud stained them to the knee. Their skin was green enough in that pale light to turn wonder into fear.

One of the men crossed himself. Another said something urgent, and more came running. They offered bread first, then a strip of cheese, but the children recoiled and would not take it. Their eyes moved from face to face in mute alarm. When at last the girl answered some question put to her, she answered it in those brief, eldritch words the wood had taught them.

To the men, they were a tale stepping out of the forest and becoming flesh before them.

Behind the children, the forest stood dark, saying nothing.

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this story, then you might also enjoy The Broomfield Witch