Free The Boy's Tale by Margaret Frazer

initial; he wasn't all that good with printing yet, usually blotting his letters when he struggled with pen and ink, so he might do even worse with wood and knife. He'd never had a chance to try his dagger even once before Hery Simon had taken it, and now Hery Simon and his dagger were both gone.
     
    "I'll tell," he said. It was an idle threat; neither of them ever told anything on the other. Edmund went on carving. Jasper kicked him again.
     
    Edmund shifted away to be out of reach without giving up his work, and Jasper was considering shifting down the bed to be in reach when someone else said, "I shall tell."
     
    He and Edmund both looked to see Lady Adela in her plain gray gown watching them from the doorway.
     
    "I shall tell," she repeated.
     
    "You won't," said Edmund definitely. He had discovered he could sometimes change people's minds if he said things definitely enough.
     
    "Not if you come out to play," Lady Adela returned with equal assurance.
     
    "There's no place to play here," Edmund said and went back to his carving.
     
    "Outside the cloister there is."
     
    "We can't go outside."
     
    "Into the garden."
     
    "That's outside."
     
    "It isn't."
     
    "It is."
     
    "It isn't. The nuns go there all the time."
     
    'They don't."
     
    "They do. There's a passage right from the cloister into it. It's called the slype," she added, to give her assertion authority.
     
    Jasper knew the passageway she probably meant, a dark, narrow opening on the far side of the cloister walk from their room. Jenet had said it was a back way to the kitchen and they should stay out of it. Since they knew the front way to the kitchen, it had been easy enough to agree to obey Jenet in this one thing at least and so they had never gone all the way to its farther end. But Jenet was one of those people who thought it all right to lie to children to make them do what she wanted, so maybe the slype did go where Lady Adela said it did.
     
    But Edmund was shaping to quarrel about it just for the pleasure of quarreling, and once he started they'd never be out of here. Jasper jumped to his feet. "Show us," he said, moving toward the door. Behind him, Edmund scrambled to his feet. If they were going instead of staying to quarrel with him, he might as well go with them. Lady Adela put her finger to her lips and led the way.
     
    There was no one in the cloister walk. With the speed and silence of accomplished fugitives, they reached the slype without being seen and dodged into its shadows, Lady Adela still leading. Its far end opened into a wide walk between the back of the cloister buildings and a high wall running to the children's left. Rightward the nunnery thrust out a room's width further, with a door into it just beyond the slype's end.
     
    Adela peeked out with elaborate care. Edmund demanded, "Where's that door go?"
     
    "The stairs up to the necessarium."
     
    "Not the kitchen? Jenet lied," Edmund said with great satisfaction.
     
    "From the other end there are stairs down into the kitchen and others up into the dormitory," she said impatiently.
     
    That would be why they had not been shown the necessarium; it went too many places they weren't supposed to go—including out. Adela led them leftward, away from the necessarium, toward a gate in the wall that blocked their view of what lay beyond. It was a wicker gate, chin-high on Jasper if he went on tiptoe to see over it, and as Lady Adela had promised, there was a garden beyond it. He could see at a glance there was no one there and that it was only an ordinary garden, with neat little paths and proper little flower beds, an arched green arbor along one side, and turf benches built against the tall stone wall that closed off all view of the world beyond. It was far smaller and plainer than any of his mother's gardens, without even a fountain.
     
    Impatiently, Edmund reached for the gate's latch. Lady Adela said, "Oh, let's not go here. They'll find us too soon. I know something