‘I’ve come to be a monk,’ I said, with the silent proviso that hell would freeze and heaven burn before I let them give me the haircut.

The man stood without haste and turned to face me, the window colours sliding across the grey of his habit. His tonsure left a garland of black curls around a polished scalp.

‘Do you love God, boy?’

‘I couldn’t love him any more.’

‘And do you repent of your sins?’

‘What man doesn’t?’

He had warm eyes and a soft face this one. ‘And are you humble, boy?’

‘I could be no more humble,’ I said.

‘You’ve a clever way with words, boy.’ He smiled. The lines spreading from the corners of his eyes declared him given to smiles. ‘Perhaps too clever. Too much cleverness can be a torment to a man, setting his wits against his faith.’ He steepled his fingers. ‘In any event, you are too young to become a novice. Go home, boy, before your parents notice you’re gone.’

‘I have no mother,’ I said. ‘And no father.’

His smile eased. ‘Well now, that’s a different matter. We have orphans here, saved from the corruptions of the road and educated in the ways of our Lord. But most come to us as infants, and it isn’t an easy life, our boys work hard, both in the field and at their studies, and there are rules. Lots of rules.’

‘I came to be a monk, not an orphan, a brother, not a son.’ I didn’t want to be a monk but just being told ‘no’ lit the corner of a fire in me. I knew myself broken, to burn over every refusal, to feel my blood rise at the slightest provocation, but knowing and fixing are different things.

‘A good number of our novices are drawn from boys maintained here.’ If he sensed my anger he showed no sign of it. ‘I myself was left on the church steps as a baby, many years ago.’

‘I could start that way.’ I shrugged as if letting myself be talked into it.

He nodded and watched me with those kind eyes. I wondered if his prayers were still echoing behind them. Did God speak back to him or did the Old Gods whisper from the yew, or perhaps the gods of the Nuban called out to him across the straits from the crowed heavens above Afrique?

‘I’m Abbot Castel,’ he said.

‘Jorg.’

‘If you follow me we shall at least see that you get a meal.’ He smiled again, the sort of smile that said he liked me. ‘And if perhaps you choose to stay we might see whether you really could love God a little more and be somewhat more humble.’

I spent that first day digging up potatoes with the twelve orphans currently under St Sebastian’s care. The boys ranged from five years to fourteen, as mixed a bunch as you could want, some serious, some wild, but all excited to have a new boy amongst them to break the monotony of mud and potatoes, potatoes and more mud.

‘Did your family leave you here?’ Orscar asked the questions and the rest of them listened. A short boy, lean, ragged black hair as if cut in haste, and mud on both cheeks. I guessed him to be eight.

‘I walked,’ I said.

‘My grandpa brought me here,’ Orscar said, resting on his digging fork. ‘Mam died and my father never came back from the war. I don’t remember them much.’

Another taller boy snorted at the tale of Orscar’s father, but said nothing.

‘I came to be a monk,’ I said. I drove the fork deep and turned up half a dozen potatoes, the biggest of them skewered on the tines.

‘Idiot.’ The largest of the boys shouldered me aside and lifted the end my fork. ‘Scratch them and they won’t keep past a week. You gotta feel the way into the ground, dig around them.’ He pulled the wounded vegetable free.

I imagined how it would be to lunge forward and impale him, the fork’s middle tine nailing his Adam’s apple and the other two bracketing his neck. I wondered that the danger didn’t even occur to him as he scowled at me over the weapon, pointed right at him. He wouldn’t keep past a week.

‘Who’d be a monk?’ A boy my age came across, dragging a full sack. He looked pale beneath the grime, his grin fixed, as if he knew exactly what I’d been thinking.

‘It has to be better than this?’ I lowered the fork.

‘I’d go mad,’ he said. ‘Praying, praying, more praying. And reading the bible every single day. And all the copying. All that quill work, copying other people’s words, never writing their own. You want to spend fifty years doing that?’ He hushed as one of the lay brothers stomped over from the hedgerow.

‘More work, less talk!’

And we set to digging.

It turns out there’s a certain satisfaction in digging. Levering your dinner from the ground, lifting the soil and pulling fine hard potatoes from it, thinking of them roasted, mashed, fried in oil, it’s all good. Especially if it wasn’t you who had to tend and weed the field for the previous six months. Labour like that empties the mind and lets new thoughts wander in from unsuspected corners. And in the moments of rest, when we orphans faced each other, mud-cheeked, leaning on our forks, there’s a camaraderie that builds without you knowing it. By the end of the day I think the big lad, David, could have called me an idiot a second time and survived.

We trudged back to the monastery as evening shadows tracked across the rutted fields. They fed us in the fraterhouse with the ordained brothers at one long trestle, the lay brothers at another, and the orphans crowded around a low square table. We ate faggots of potato mash fried in pork fat with autumn greens. I hadn’t tasted anything better in for ever. And the boys talked. Arthur told how his grandpa used to make shoes before his sight got dim. Orscar showed us the iron cross his da gave him when he went away. A heavy thing with a circle of red enamel at the crossing point. For the blood of Christ, Orscar said. And David told how he might sign up to be a soldier for Lord Ajah, like Bilk and Peter who we saw patrolling along the Brent. They all spoke, often at once, laughing, cramming in food past their words, speaking of foolishness, games they played, dreams they had, ‘might-have-been’s and might-be’s’. The easy talk that children share, that Will and I had shared. Strange to think of these boys bound about by so many rules and seeming so free, and my road-brothers, unbound by law or conscience, yet so guarded and bitter in their conversation, each word edged and weighted, as if they were every one of them trapped and seeking escape each moment of their lives.

The orphans slept in their own dormitory, a solid stone-built building, slate-roofed, clean within though bare as a monk’s cell. I lay among them, comfortable on my straw mattress. Sleep found us all quick enough. Honest labour will do that for you. But I woke in the darkest hour and listened to the night, to the skittering of mice amongst our straw, to the snores and the mumbling of sleep-tied tongues, to the hunting owls and the chuckle of water through the mill. I thought of my road-brothers, caught in dark dreams as their bodies lay scattered between the trees. They would wake soon, blood-hungry, and turn this way.

A monk came for us before dawn so we would be washed and ready for matins prayer.

‘No work!’ Orscar whispered beside me as he dressed.

‘No?’

‘It’s Sunday, idiot.’ David used a long pole to heave the shutters open. It made little difference.