Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

We were not afraid to use these places for they were almost always empty, and when they were not we moved on, cither making shift in other ways or walking until we found one that was. We attempted to question Enoch as to why such provision had been made for so many lepers when there appeared to be remarkably few. He struggled with his affliction in his attempts to tell us, but whether or not he had it right we never found out, because any matter that required more than a basic understanding, anything involving speculation or theorising, was beyond us – he through his muteness, we through our lack of anything beyond basic Inglysshe. Months later I was able to question a learned friar, of whom more later, on the subject but even he was uncertain, so short is the memory of a people when civil disturbance and lawlessness stalk the land: the clear reduction in the numbers suffering from leprosy had begun before he was born and was complete before he grew to manhood. However, he speculated that plague was at the root of the matter: lepers, he guessed, were peculiarly susceptible to it, and while one in three of the population had been wiped out in the plague years, the epidemic had taken almost all the lepers.

Meanwhile, Enoch's first priority was to get us to the western coasts of the island before Lent began so that he could hire himself out to a master fishmonger, practise his trade, and earn enough money to see him and his family through the leaner months of summer when fish goes bad quickly and fish-eaters rely on fish smoked, dried, pickled or salted during the winter months. For this reason we headed more west than north.

It's not my intention, my dear Mah-Lo, to give a minute account of every step of our travels, but I must dwell for a moment on a school or college we passed since it represented the first solid evidence we had of the King's madness. Set outside a large village, in the midst of a water-meadow, at the time partially flooded and frozen, was a pair of large red-brick buildings, each forming a square, the south side, nearest the river, of one of them being a big barn of a church, not yet fully finished.

The road we were on passed between the church and the water-meadow, and was tilled at the time with an unpleasant mixture of frozen, dirty snow and hard, churned-up mud. Pollarded willows, their stubby branches like clenched fists against the stone-like sky, edged the river. On the further bank beyond the wide, full, slowly swirling grey stream, there was another small village, but this one was huddled around a castle, quite a large one, with weighty towers that looked like drums. The cawing of rooks floated across the icy spaces between. There was a bridge but whether or not it was in a good state of repair we did not stay long enough to discover.

The first thing that happened was that our ears were assailed from the interior of the church by a mournful chanting, very high, produced by unbroken voices, a sort of continuous wailing, like the keening of distressed women. We paused to listen to it and were standing thus when a cloud of young boys, about twenty of them, in black velvet gowns, with white collars on their shoulders and velvet caps on their heads, came streaming round the far corner behind us.

'I say, chaps, look at this,' a slender but tall fifteen-year-old called. 'Three lepers by the look of it.'

In common with most people we met he had taken Enoch for a leper too, perhaps only in the early stages of the disease and his blemishes not yet significant, for why else would he remain with us and risk infection?

'Look here,' he yelled at us, 'just you clear off, if you know what's good for you. Come on, get a move on, show us your heels.'

Not understanding clearly what he was saying we did not move quickly enough for him. He picked up a handful of grit and snow, compressed it into a ball and hurled it at us. Clearly he had been trained to throw balls accurately for it struck me hard on the side of my face. Involuntarily I raised my staff and moved towards him. Uma stretched out a hand to restrain me but then she, too, received a snowball in the face, flung by another boy from behind the first. This incensed me further. I snarled, and pressed on.

For a moment I thought he would run, but his friends were all behind him and I could sense that he durst not appear a coward in front of them. Instead he stooped and picked up another ball of snow, hurled it. This one hit me full in the chest, and since I was at that moment crossing a frozen puddle, my feet shot out from under me and I went down on my backside in a fall heavy-enough to knock the breath out of me. Now all of these young hooligans followed their leader, picked up snowballs and hurled them at me, and at Uma and Enoch, who would have run had I not been grounded. Some even, wishing to show bravado in front of their companions, found sticks with which to prod me, and, once I was on my feet again, trip me too, so I tumbled back into the snow and mud. And all the time they shouted, 'Dirty old man, take that! Come on, you nasty bag of bones, get a move on. Unless I'm not mistaken he's some sort of darkie, a gypsy perhaps. Filth like that always catch diseases…' and so on, mostly in high voices like those that still sang on within the church.

Well, no harm came of it in the end. They chivvied us as if they were dogs and we sheep until we were clear of the buildings then took themselves off back inside, leaving us to examine ourselves to see if we had sustained any real hurt, which we had not, and recover our breaths and tempers.

Now, Mah-Lo, this incident had its interesting side, which Uma and I pieced together later. It was indeed a school, but an odd one. First it was only open to the so-called best in the land, judged by birth. The rest were excluded. Next, the pupils were torn from their families at a tender age and made to live there for the best part of the year, sharing large dormitories, eating together, the young made to serve the older like slaves, and frequently beaten by both older pupils and the adult masters; not only beaten, but often forced to submit to all sorts of cruelty including anal rape. I repeat, this was a school! Not a barbaric prison or a barracks. Finally, the strangest anomaly of all, this place had been founded and funded by none other than the King himself, as a place where the offspring of the best families might learn how to behave properly and assist him and his successors in the governance of his country! This, as I have said, was the first and by no means the last example we came across of his madness, and although we had had no choice in the matter and it was no concern of ours at all, I was glad we had found ourselves allied to the faction dedicated to depriving him, if not of his crown, for these people were superstitious about crowns believing they came from God, then at least of the power and rights that went with it.

The river now took a loop to the north-west at the top of which we came to a small town called Marlow! Just like your own name. No, dear friend, I am not making this up. Here, having seen the name on a signpost, Enoch got it into his head that he wanted to go to Oxenford. He tried to explain why but we could make nothing of his grunts and retchings. However, we were in his hands, and since this meant leaving the river and heading north-west we were happy to comply – at least we would be going more or less in the direction we wanted.

After walking through hills and woodlands for a day the landscape suddenly opened out in front of us below a steep hill, which dropped again into the wide river-plain of the Thames – the same river, but it had apparently taken a wide loop to the south-west before turning back north, making a quarter-circle across whose arc we had walked. And far in the distance, lit by the last shafts of golden sunlight making a fan-spread of beams from behind a low bank of cloud, we could see a city of spires and towers, which seemed to hang like a dream of the lost city of paradise above the mists rising from its river. Then the sun was obscured and all turned to black like the cutouts in a shadow play.