Fool - By Christopher Moore Page 0,8

climbed from the bastard's back and walked to the laundry doorway where he could see me. "What you want is property and title. Do you imagine that you will get it by begging?"

"The letter's not begging."

"You want your brother's fortune. How much better would a letter from him convince your father of your worth?"

"He would never write such a letter, and besides, he does not play for favor, it is his already."

"Then perhaps the problem is moving favor from Edgar to you. The right letter from him would do it. A letter wherein he confesses his impatience with waiting for his inheritance, and asks for your help in usurping your father."

"You're mad, fool. Edgar would never write such a letter."

"I didn't say he would. Do you have anything written in his hand?"

"I do, a letter of credit he was to grant to a wool merchant in Barking Upminster."

"Do you, sweet bastard, know what a scriptorium is?"

"Aye, it's a place in the monastery where they copy documents - bibles and such."

"And so my accident of birth is the remedy of yours, for because I hadn't even one parent to lay claim to me, I was brought up in a nunnery that had just such a scriptorium, where, yes, they taught a boy to copy documents, but for our darker purpose, they taught him to copy it in exactly the hand that he found on the page, and the one before that, and the one before that. Letter to letter, stroke for stroke, the same hand as a man long gone to the grave."

"So you are a skilled forger? If you were raised in a nunnery how is it you are a fool and not a monk or a priest?"

"How is it that you, the son of an earl, must plead mercy from under the arse of an enormous nitwit? We're all Fate's bastards. Shall we compose a letter, Edmund?"

I'm sure I would have become a monk, but for the anchoress. The closest to court I would have come would have been praying for the forgiveness of some noble's war crimes. Was I not reared for the monastic life from the moment Mother Basil found me squirming on the steps of the abbey at Dog Snogging[17] on the Ouze?

I never knew my parents, but Mother Basil told me once that she thought my mother might have been a madwoman from the local village who had drowned in the river Ouze shortly after I appeared on the doorstep. If that were so, the abbess told me, then my mother had been touched by God (like the Natural) and so I was given to the abbey as God's special child.

The nuns, most of whom were of noble birth, second and third daughters who could not find a noble husband, doted on me like a new puppy. So tiny was I that the abbess would carry me with her in her apron pocket, and thus I was given the name of Pocket. Little Pocket of Dog Snogging Abbey. I was much the novelty, the only male in that all-female world, and the nuns competed to see who might carry me in their apron pocket, although I do not remember it. Later, after I learned to walk, they would stand me on the table at mealtime and have me parade up and down waving my winky at them, a unique appendage in those feminine environs. I was seven before I realized that you could eat breakfast with your pants on. Still, I always felt separate from the rest of them, a different creature, isolated.

I was allowed to sleep on the floor in the abbess's chambers, as she had a woven rug given her by the bishop. On cold nights I was permitted to sleep under her covers to keep her feet warm, unless one of the other nuns had joined her for that purpose.

Mother Basil and I were constant companions, even after I grew out of her marsupial affection. I attended the masses and prayers with her every day from as long as I could remember. How I loved watching her shave every morning after sunup, stropping her razor on a leather strap and carefully scraping the blue-black whiskers from her face. She would show me how to shave the little spot under your nose, and how she pulled aside the skin on her neck, so as not to nick her Adam's apple. But she was a stern mistress, and I had to pray every three