“What age are these children? Have you see them?” Greybeard asked.
“Oh, yes, I’ve seen them all right. Everyone’s seen the Balliol children. I wouldn’t miss them. The girl’s a little beauty. She’s about ten, and was born of an imbecile woman living at Kidlington, which is a village away in the woods to the north. The two boys, I don’t know where they come from, but one had a hard time before he got here, and was displayed by a showman in Reading, I heard tell.”
“These are genuine normal children?”
“One of the boys has got a withered arm, a little arm that finishes off with three fingers at his elbow, but you wouldn’t call that a proper disfigurement, and the girl has no hair and something a bit funny with her ear, but nothing really wrong, and she waves very pretty to the crowd.”
“And you’ve actually seen them?”
“Yes, I’ve seen them in ‘The Broad’, where they parade. The boys don’t wave so much because they’re older, but they’re nice fresh young chaps, and it’s certainly good to see a bit of smooth flesh.”
“You’re sure they’re real? Not old men disguised, or anything like that?”
“Oh no, no, no, nothing like that. They’re small, just like children in old pictures, and you can’t mistake young skin, can you?”
“Well, you have horses here. Perhaps you have children.”
They changed the topic then and, after some discussion, the porter’s son advised Greybeard to go and speak to one of the college Students, Mr. Norman Morton, who was responsible for employing people in the college.
Martha and he made a frugal meal of some tough cold beaver and a hunk of bread that Martha had bought from one of the stalls the previous evening; then she and Greybeard told Charley and Pitt where they were going, and headed for Norman Morton’s rooms.
In Peck, the furthest quadrangle of the college, a fine two-storey stable had been built, with room to house beasts and carts. Morton had his suite of rooms facing this stable. In some of these rooms he lived; in others, he kept animals.
He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and stooped, with a nervous nod to his head and a countenance so lined it looked as if it had been patiently assembled from bits of string. Greybeard judged him to be well into his eighties, but he showed no sign of intending to give up good living yet awhile. When a servant ushered
Martha and Greybeard into his presence, Mr. Norman Morton was engaged with two cronies in sipping a hot spiced wine and demolishing what looked like a leg of mutton.
“You can have some wine if you talk interestingly,” he said, leaning back in his chair and pointing a patronizing fork at them. “My friends and I are always happy to be entertained by the tales of travellers, lies though they generally are. If you’re going to lie, have the kindness to make them big ‘uns.”
“In my childhood,” Martha said, nodding gravely to the other gentlemen, whose mouths worked busily as they returned the gesture, “hosts were expected to entertain visitors, not vice versa. But in those days, seats of learning housed courtesy rather than cattle.”
Morton raised a pair of feathery eyebrows and put down his glass.
“Madam,” he said, “forgive me. If you dress like a cowherd’s woman, you must be used to being mistaken for a cowherd’s woman, don’t you know. To each his or her own eccentricity. Allow me to pour you a little of this negus, and then we will talk together as equals – at least until it is proved otherwise.”
The wine was good enough to take off some of the sharpness of Morton’s speech. Greybeard said as much.
“It drinks well enough,” one of the Fellows agreed carelessly. He was a tallowy man, addressed as Gavin, with a yellow face and a forehead from which he constantly wiped sebum. “It’s only a home-grown wine, unfortunately. We finished off the last of the college cellars the day the Dean was deposed.”
The three men bowed their heads in mock-reverence at mention of the Dean.
“What is your story, then, strangers?” Morton asked, in a more unbuttoned fashion.