Skull figure with hat and rose on thigh

The man came up the causeway on the feast of Saint Giles with the tide still standing in the reeds, a grey beaver hat pulled low over a face that had been worn down to its bones long before he arrived. He asked for no bed. He asked only for the cloister garden, and when Brother Anselm refused him, he sat on the wall anyway and laid a single red rose across his knee as though it were a sword he meant to return to its sheath.

I have watched a great many men come to these gates wanting something they could not name. This one named it at once. Beneath the hat hung a beard of black wire that crept down over his collarbones, and he told us he had been paid in silver by the wool merchants of Wisbech to cut a path through the old orchard, and that the orchard had refused him. He tapped the blade at his hip and laughed like a rook.

On the third morning the rose had opened and the bells were ringing for Prime, and the stranger was gone. In the frost on the wall we found four small stars pressed into the stone, each the size of a thumbprint, and beside them a single leaf, green as a holy thing. The orchard trees have not been touched since. I have decided I will not touch them either.