he couldn't believe that girls' voices were coming from men's bodies.
As Raffe watched the girl-men saunter from the church, the last one turned and seemed to be staring right at the dark corner where Raffe was hidden, and then he smiled and winked. Only a demon could have the power to see him in his hiding place. Terrified, little Raffe scrambled to his feet and fled down the church yelling for his mother, not caring that the few people remaining all turned to stare as he tore past them.
His mother was deep in conversation with one of the priests, and she turned in horror and shame at her son's sacrilege in such a holy place.
The priest stared down, frowning. 'Is this the boy?'
'Yes, Father, but I swear he is usually so well behaved. He's never before . . .'
But the priest silenced her with a wave of his hand. He grasped Raffe's chin, turning his face towards the candlelight. Whatever he saw in it seemed to satisfy him. He ran his fingers over Raffe's throat and down his chest, back, belly and groin. The priest pressed him hard between his legs. Raffe squirmed and tried to wriggle away, but his mother held him firmly.
Finally the priest straightened up. 'Promising, definitely promising,' he said to Raffe's mother, who beamed back at him.
The priest looked down at Raffe once more. 'Now, boy, kneel and make your prayers for your father's recovery to health. See you pray in earnest, for God knows if you are not paying attention and praying with all your might. Little boys who displease God go straight to hell; you know that, don't you? But St Gregory will listen to the prayers of children if they are pure and without sin.'
Raffe's mother pushed him down on to his knees, before a mass of tiny burning candles. The heat from them was so fierce that Raffe felt as if his own face would melt like the wax which ran down from them.
'You heard, son, pray hard for your father. He is depending on you.'
If they are pure and without sin. The whole weight of his father's sickness seemed to be crushing down on Raffe's tiny shoulders. All his guilty sins began dancing round him in the candlelight, tiny imps of flame, mocking and jeering. The stolen peaches; the lie about working when he was really climbing trees; the torn shirt he'd tried to hide; the countless nights he'd sworn he'd said his prayers when he hadn't. As he knelt there, each and every one of those wickednesses was leaping around him, rolling their eyes and thumbing their noses at him.
Little Raffe was certain that when they reached home the next day, his father would be dead. His mother's precious amber necklace that even now dangled beneath the saint's reliquary would have been sacrificed in vain. St Gregory had refused to listen because Raffe had sinned. God would kill his father to punish him. His mother would sob. His family would starve and all of it, all the misery in the whole world, would be his fault.
But his father did not die. In fact, he made a full recovery and little Raffe almost cried in his relief that his sinful state would not, after all, be revealed to the whole village.
He thought he had escaped God's punishment, but he hadn't. Two years later, the whole family retraced their steps to the abbey church. And it wasn't until that day when they handed Raffe over to the priest that he learned that, just like his mother's amber necklace, he had been part of her deal with God: her son for her husband's life. Only then was he told how mortal men could conjure those soaring angelic voices. And only on that morning, standing there in the abbey, did he finally realize why it was they had mutilated him.
The door was flung open and Elena burst through it in a flood of sunlight. Her copper hair gleamed in the light and there was such an expression of eagerness and joy on her face that Raffe almost started up and ran towards her. But as she caught sight of him, she stumbled backwards, the light instantly snuffed out in her eyes. After the briefest of moments, she tried to smile, but he knew it was courtesy, nothing more. That smile hurt him more deeply than he could ever acknowledge.
She looked much better than the last time he'd seen her when he'd thrust her wet