Eighteen.

The night passed. Selden felt the restlessness that burned off the boy, who was wrapped up in his cloak in a far corner. It was Selden who suggested the boy sleep away from the draft of the shuttered door. Instead, the older man took the space by the square-shaped door where the hay and straw might be easily loaded into the loft. The barn was built into a low hillside and the door, just large enough, looked out away from the barnyard and the farm’s cottage, a building smaller in fact than the barn. The boy would have a small measure of privacy.

The master was soon asleep. The small shifting of the milk cows below seemed to lull him like a mother’s lullaby might. The plop of manure and faint rustling of mice bothered him not the least. “This is how I always slept as a boy,” he told Geoffrey when they turned in, after their prayers. Except on the coldest nights, he remembered, when my brother would consent to my sharing the bed, head to toe and shivering as the wind blew through any chinking we could manage between the logs of the cottage. My father would sleep next to the fire in our one chair. He’d feed the fire through the night–we never lacked for wood–while my mother slept with her latest swaddled child.

We were a large family, he almost said aloud. Branches! He nearly exclaimed. And who am I talking to? Selden chided himself. As he got older, he noticed, he conversed with nearly anything. At the school, he would complain to a small portrait he hung on one wall, an image of a church father whose writing Selden especially enjoyed. He wrote almost as one might really speak and in these written sermons confessed to nearly every sin. He was a sainted man.

That dawn came without interruption was something that pleased the master. He rose out of the tangle of his cloak and scarf and the blanket the farm family insisted he take. He scratched and shook his head. Squeezed a louse. (Damn things.) And half considered unshuttering the hay door so he might relieve himself with ease. Instead, he headed down the ladder from the loft and found the edge of the mews in the half-light.

The village priest must be no worse. Someone would have come for me otherwise, he thought. Uninterrupted sleep, that’s a blessing, too. Maybe today will be manageable, though an ember day. “No disappointments, Father; it will be a long enough day.”