“Daddy—what’s wrong? You’re as white as a sheet!”
Trevor-Finch shook off the spell and smiled weakly. “Nothing, dear. Just my stomach. That Yorkshire pudding of Mrs. Mortimor’s really is a bit rich.”
“Can I get you anything?” Stephany asked. “Perhaps you’d better lie down for a while.”
“No, no—I’m all right. It will pass in a minute.”
The presence had departed, but Trevor-Finch was so devastated that he finally had to admit that he could not continue the duet. Stephany said she would see him off to bed. “You will excuse us, won’t you, David?”
The professor looked at me like a man caught exposing himself in public, and a wordless recognition passed between us.
Stephany turned back from the door. “By the way, the weather forecast for tomorrow is quite promising. Clear skies and warming temperatures. Perhaps you’d like to turn in early yourself. I have a full day planned for us.”
“Good idea,” I said, and smiled them out of the room.
I poured myself another glass of port and relit my cigar. I had several things to think over, including the fact that on both occasions back at Cambridge, when the apparition I now believed was Gervaise had appeared to me, the professor had been near. Had Gervaise been waiting for me that night beneath the archway, or for the professor? Was my own haunting then but a by-product of his, or was there some other reason why we two had been singled out for such visions?
Suppose Gervaise and this other ghost had something they wanted to tell us, or something they wanted to ask of us . . . would that not account for the impression I’d had on each occasion of an attempt to violate—or perhaps only to penetrate—my mortal shell? So far the effort had been all on their side, but what if it were reciprocated? This line of thought smacked of self-willed hysteria, and there was an embarrassing absurdity in the experiment I was tempted to try. Yet what other way was there to get to the bottom of this thing, and could Gervaise help me if I was not prepared, at least a little bit, to help him?
I sank back in my chair and closed my eyes, summoning echoes of Mozart and trying to recreate the moment at which the ghost had made its presence felt. All right, I thought, I’m ready for you. Let me know what it is you want.
I gave it several minutes of intense effort, but nothing happened. Feeling silly, disappointed and not a little relieved, I rose from my chair and turned out the lights.
Back in my own room, I dislodged a cat from beneath my dresser with a shoe, got out my notes and sat down at the desk to reread those passages from the poem which I’d translated.
Gervaise had some bitter opinions regarding the female sex, an antipathy extreme even for a medieval ascetic. I had translated only one of his antifemale out-bursts, and it offered no clue to the identity of Abbots-wold’s lady spook:
Lustful cauldron of the ages!
All our nights are spent in cages,
As the fire in us rages,
As we rot and die by stages.
In that foul swamp I’ll dig no deeper.
If God made woman, let the devil keep her!
Scarcely had my eyes skimmed these lines than a draft blew through the room and my blood jumped in alarm. Who is it? I nearly cried aloud, and then saw that the door was open. I must have left it ajar when I put out the cat. I went to shut it and, returning to the desk, noticed that one of the index cards had fallen to the floor. It was lying face up beneath the desk and its lines immediately caught my eye.
Upon this parched and barren ground
Three lonely roses may be found.
One red as blood, the scholar’s whore,
Whose deadly kiss shuts heaven’s door；
One white and pure, the wise man’s dove,
Which leads the saint to God’s own love;
And yet another, both red and white—
The boy’s first love, the man’s delight.
If thou shouldst wander this arid land
Take but the last rose in thy hand.
For though its thorns may prick and wound . . .
But I had been unable to find a modern word to rhyme with “wound” and had left the last line untranslated.
Three roses, I thought, each one symbolic of the poet’s loves. Yet none of the three necessarily referred to specific women. I had already deduced that the “scholar’s whore” was probably chess—a game Gervaise both loved and loathed. The “wise man’s dove” might have been theology or prayerful contemplation, a pursuit for which, in his later years, Gervaise felt himself increasingly unworthy. But what was the third, “both red and white,” a boy’s “first love” and a man’s “delight”? I felt I had been given an important clue—a nudge, as it were, from beyond the pale—yet until I could return to the manuscript and compare my clumsy translation to the original, there seemed little I could do with it.
“Well, thanks, anyway,” I told the ghost, for I wanted to make sure I remained on her good side.
And then I did the bravest thing I’d yet had to do in my brief career as a seeker of ghostly secrets. I got ready for bed, turned off the light and, with barely a trepidation, crawled between the cold sheets and went to sleep.
Einstein has told us that our universe is shaped and defined by light. We live in a visual cage, and what we call time is simply the ever-moving shadow of the bars which confine us. But suppose that by some miracle of technology not allowed for in Einstein’s metaphysic we were able to outrun the waves of light which undulate across the universe. As we leap seven hundred and eighty light-years across the galaxy we overtake and leave behind us the light which left the surface of the earth nearly eight centuries previous. The image of a certain Geoffrey Gervaise has proceeded no farther than this on its heavenly pilgrimage. It will travel forever in this everlasting night, seeking its home among the stars, reaching ever outward toward some hypothetical destination at the universe’s problematic end. Is light then the stuff our souls are made of? And do our smallest and most secretive acts hang forever on display in the celestial gallery, awaiting the verdict of a Cosmic Critic?
Let us pause now somewhere in the Milky Way to allow poor Geoffrey’s laggard light to catch up with us. We are looking back upon the earth of 1165 a.d. It is springtime in Wendlebury. In the fields men plod behind teams of oxen, guiding their wooden plows through loamy soil. In the village the women have swept out their cottages and planted their gardens. Pigs forage in the narrow lanes and cattle graze just beyond the low stone walls which separate, in theory, the life of the men from the life of the beasts. As evening nears, the peasants head home from the fields and the sun dips behind the tall trees across the river. Cooking odors seep from the cottages and black smoke issues from the crude holes in their thatch. The village priest—a tall, thin, black-bearded man in a coarse gray cassock—leaves his cottage and sets out to meet his penitent parishioners at the church. Let’s get a closer look at that priest.
Gervaise (for it is he!), what are you doing here? Fugitive though you are, you need not have come to this primitive backwater to wait out Becket’s exile. Couldn’t you have returned to your Yorkshire monastery, followed Becket to France, pursued your career as legal scholar in Rome or at one of Europe’s great universities? But no, I see now that it’s simply your old madness which has led you to assume the life of a humble country priest. Still trying to save your soul, aren’t you, Gervaise? Still seeking ways to confront the devils that torment you? But what makes you think you will find a less formidable foe here, among these peasants whose ancient servitude to loathsome gods is given testimony in the hoarse, urgent whisperings of the confessional?
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession were just last week, Father, and I’ve been receiving the sacrament regular now for forty year, Father, ever since I were a girl of ten.”
“Yes, daughter. And what sins . . . ?”
“Ah, Father, it’s the very same ones. Satan has come to me again in the night, makin’ me want to run naked thr
ough the village. Someone’s put a curse on me, Father.”
“Now, now—these are only idle thoughts and not sins. The Lord will protect you for your faithfulness, and no curse can harm you if you cleave to the sacraments.”
“Bless me, Father. I killed a chicken and put his entrails in the woodpile to keep away the fairies . . .”
“I used a charm to cure my daughter’s warts . . .”
“I wanted him to touch me . . .”
“I have these wicked dreams . . .”
“And I hit—”
“I struck—’’
“I swore—’’
Gervaise sighs inwardly as the penitents proceed through the confessional. What a scavenger Satan is! What trivial sins he cultivates among the simple; to what lengths he will go to trouble innocent hearts. It is all very sad, and though Gervaise pities these souls, he envies their comfortable mixture of faith and superstition in which the old gods and the new have found a grotesque reconciliation. Surely none of his flock has ever sinned as he himself has sinned, and none of them carries his burden of eminent damnation.
Ah, Annjenette, Gervaise thinks as the penitents come and go. What have you done to me? I am an outrage to the God I meant to serve, a pollution in His holy Church. You bitch, you whore, you sweet morsel of damnation! How I rode you, a Bellerophon astride his Pegasus. How high we soared, and how far we fell. Who humps you now, you bitch?
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Yes, my child. And your last confession . . . ?
“’Twas at Christmastime, Father.”
Gervaise thinks he recognizes the husky female voice which comes to him through the grille. He fights against that image of her dark eyes and rosy cheeks, full breasts and sleek young animal’s body, which the devil promptly provides.
“And your sins, my child?”
“Father, I have committed a most terrible sin, though I didn’t want to. My heart was set against it—I prayed to the Virgin—I begged God for mercy—’’
Another peasant seduction. Lust along the Wendle. Gervaise has learned much about rural rutting since taking up the duties of a village priest. Yet how do they differ, these lecherous rustics, from the bawds and whoremongers he knew at court—except in being more frequently sorry for their sins?
“My child, if the deed was done against your will, there was no sin. If you resisted, you are innocent in the eyes of God.”
“Yes, Father. I heard what you said in last Sunday’s sermon—how the Lord will not condemn those who do evil against their will. And before God I am innocent, but my own father will not think so.”
If this is the girl Gervaise thinks she is, her father is an ignorant brute, a violent, obstinate freeman who confidently calls God’s curse down upon all those who offend his pagan pride.
“You need not tell your father, then,” Gervaise assures the girl. “This matter need never leave the confessional.”
“But, Father, I think I am with child.”
Of course. The innocent ones always nurture the seed. Only whores are barren. Is fertility itself a crime? Increase, multiply, and be damned!
“If you will tell me the boy’s name, I will speak to him. He must accept responsibility—’’
“But, Father, he can’t. He won’t. He is . . . much above me in station. He never would . . .”
At last Gervaise understands. There’s only one nobleman in the parish, and Lord William Fitzjames has debauched peasant maids before. Gervaise’s own father had done the same. The barons sire bastards as they breed dogs and horses—for sport, for sheer idleness, and perhaps even for policy. In some villages, the lord’s bastards are a highly respected class of their own. But in this village, and with this poor girl’s father . . .
“My child, you must give me his name, and your own. If I try to help you, I must be sure.”
The girl whispers the names; the priest’s suspicions are confirmed.
“Daughter, you have been most cruelly used by one who has never understood the Christian duties of his station. There’s little hope, I fear, but I shall talk to him. Perhaps, having brought this trouble upon you, he will be good enough to provide you and your child with his protection, as servants at the manor.”
“Oh, Father, if only he would! I shall have nowhere else to go. It’s been four months now, and soon my father will suspect—’’
“Yes, child. I will come to your father’s cottage as soon as I have Lord William’s answer. And now, though you are guiltless of any sin in this, say your act of contrition and I shall give you absolution.”
“But, Father, my other sins—’’
“Yes, yes, I can imagine what they are. Do not trouble yourself with trifles. Put your trust in God, my child. He is merciful and forgiving.”
As he says the Latin words of absolution—“May God forgive you and by His power I forgive you”—Gervaise wonders if that mercy can extend even to so wretched a sinner as himself. For he knows that his own worst sin is simply his inability to believe in the mercy and love which he preaches to his flock. If I could disbelieve in Satan as I disbelieve in God, Gervaise thinks, I could find peace in indifference. Yet how can one deny the evil which one sees every day, and which one feels within oneself? Though God may or may not be, the devil most certainly is.
~§~
Supper is now in progress at Fitzjames Hall. There is no philosophic discourse here, no ingenious argument over the rights of kings or the intricacies of law. There is no music, no troubadour to sing of Arthurian exploits, though the food is somewhat better than the Spartan fare at Henry’s court, and there is wine and mead in great abundance. The lord and his family sit at the high table. The lord’s retainers and soldiers (for Lord William keeps a small army with which to tyrannize the peasants, harass the neighboring barons and bargain with the king) are gathered at another. At a third table, closest the door and farthest the fire, sit the servants, the field workers attached to the manor, the vagabonds and travelers who have sought a night’s refuge—including, Gervaise sees as he enters the hall, two monks in the brown robes of Cistercians. There is a Cistercian monastery not far away, where the priest has friends.
He sits with the monks and partakes of the meal. These two are new to the order and do not know Gervaise. They ask questions concerning the village, the spring planting, the fish in the river. Gervaise keeps his eye on the lord, who has surely seen his parish priest enter the hall, though he does not beckon to him. Lord William has in general no time for priests, and it was only the abbot’s wealth and influence which persuaded him to give the village church and its meager living to this fugitive. Lord William rather enjoys sheltering an enemy of the upstart king, but he has had reason over the past twelve months to regret his charity. A troublemaker, with a zealot’s righteous fervor . . . Such priests are more than a nuisance. Let the bastard tend his flock and leave the ruling of this fiefdom to its rightful master, the lord thinks, as he continues to avoid the priest’s gaze.
After the meat and bread, after the ale and puddings and cakes, the tables are cleared by the lord’s servants. The lord’s women—a shrewish wife and three shrewish daughters—depart for another chamber. The knights amuse themselves with more drinking, with dice and chess, storytelling and arm wrestling and an occasional outburst of cudgels. The monks leave for whatever humble accommodations the lord has given them, and Gervaise resolutely approaches the high table.
“What is it this time?” Lord William snaps. “You’ve come on some bitter business, I can see that by the hellish glint in your eyes. Which peasant has come whining to you this time?”
“There is a girl, my lord, a peasant’s daughter whom I think you know. Her father is Richard the Red—not a serf, but a freeman in the village.”
“Richard the Red. A pity my father ever gave the rogue his freedom. He’s a villainous fool, and too damned proud of his standing in the village. He still owes me his obedient service and his rent, by God.”
“Yes
, my lord. Hasn’t he paid you?”
“He has, but only with great resentment and ill will. I’d like to set my dogs on him, the insolent beggar.
“You have done worse, I think. This daughter, who has just turned fifteen, and of whose virtue he is so watchful—she is now three or four months with child.”
“Ha! It serves the old fool right. He hates it when his
neighbors get a chance to laugh at him.”
Gervaise grips the back of the lady’s empty chair and leans forward to press his gaze and his words upon the nobleman. “I am not concerned for Richard the Red, my lord. It is the girl who needs our help. She is young and innocent and was taken against her will by a man in station far above her. There is no hope of marriage, so her only recourse is her father’s mercy—which she will not receive.”
“So? What is that to me? These peasant brutes must manage their own affairs. You’re not suggesting that one of my knights . . .”
“No, my lord, not one of your knights. I have married and baptized and buried a good many of your peasants in the past year, and I know the conditions under which they live. I also know who most delights in the defilement of simple maids in this parish.”
Lord William slams his cup down on the table and glares drunkenly at Gervaise. “Christ’s blood! You have the gall to accuse me of siring this wench’s bastard?”
Gervaise finds a certain cruel pleasure in meeting and mastering the gaze of his lord. “I do.”
Lord William reaches for a jug of wine and overturns it. Apoplectic he shakes a bone in Gervaise’s face, then tosses it to his dogs. You mind your tongue, priest, or I’ll have it sent to the Angevin as a proof 0f my loyalty. I’ve taken considerable risk for your sake. A man lacking my boldness wouldn’t have done it. But I won’t have you meddling in my affairs. Your business is with souls, is it not?”
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