The Abbot's Tale by Conn Iggulden

Author:Conn Iggulden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

22

‘I won’t go, Dun! You can’t ask me to. You’ve seen the life I’ve built here. You’ve seen my wife and my daughter, the way the shop runs.’

‘Pay another to manage it, or bring Alice and the girl with you. I need someone I can trust to oversee three hundred and sixty hides of land, Wulfric! Someone who won’t steal half the rents.’

We were walking along a street thick with filth that defied description. I imagine the Romans were cleaner, honestly. The north wall lay ahead and, in our argument, I realised we’d walked at least a mile. I turned to go back, fed up with London’s noise and reek. Wulfric took me by the arm.

‘It’s a life’s work, Dun,’ he said faintly. ‘What you’re asking. So many farms, the crops and mutton, timber, charcoal burners, hunting and poaching, quarry and fishing rights . . . I could not do so much and still run the shop here for my wife and our mother.’

‘I have not asked you to,’ I said firmly. ‘I’ve said Mother can find someone else to run her . . . cloth business. Or you can persuade her to sell the share you own. I’ll have a house built for you and Alice, don’t fear for that. Or I’ll buy our old home, whatever you want. I have won a huge holding for the abbey, Wulfric. I just need a good man to make it work.’

‘You do it, then,’ he said mulishly, surprising me.

‘I cannot! I am an abbot – and my concern is the king. If I can leave you in charge, I’ll know the work will go on, that I won’t come back to Glastonbury and find the place looted and abandoned. Those are the stakes, Wulfric. Come home.’

‘I can’t do it. This is my home now.’

I didn’t want to make my claim on him, but the ‘T’-shaped scar on his head had darkened pink in his anger, so that it drew my eye.

‘I climbed the tower and brought you down, Wulfric, in the rain.’

‘Dunstan, please,’ he said, groaning as we stood facing each other in the street.

‘I cut that pulley out of you in pieces.’

He pressed the heel of his hand into his eye, making a sound more like anger.

‘I let Encarius cut off your arm,’ I said, ‘because you were dead if I didn’t. Because I made the choice to have you in the world, but wounded, rather than not in the world.’

‘I know I owe you my life,’ he said. ‘But I have left all that behind. The shop is doing well, Alice is a fine wife and we hope to be blessed with more children. Alice wants a son as well. I’d like two or three, to be brothers to one another.’ ‘Wulfric,’ I said gently, as if to a babbling child. ‘I cut threads into iron. You bear the scars still.’

‘And you killed Godwin in revenge,’ he said. His eyes opened and he glared at me, though I felt sick and cold.

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