“Just what were you doing with my daughter, Fairchild? How dare you try such an outrageous—such a villainous, two-faced—and after I took you into my home, you damned pup!”
I waited to see if Stephany would defend me, but she stood quietly in her father’s arms, her eyes downcast. In the dim light I couldn’t tell if her cheeks were bruised, or merely reddened by a fierce shame.
“We’ve all learned quite a bit tonight, haven’t we?” the professor said. “Not about these foolish ghosts of yours, Buzby, but about each other. Come along, Stephany. As for you, Fairchild, I’ll thank you and your friend to leave my home first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll be glad to, Professor, but not until you’ve heard what I have to tell you. It’s important that you listen to me.”
“I’ll be damned if I will,” the professor said, and led his daughter away.
Can you see him? Can you see how he watches at the window, alone in his cell at dusk? The evening star glimmers above the fens like a light upon a tower, only to be extinguished by the rising mist. The cell is small and damp. There is a pallet of straw, a heavy wooden stool, a crudely fashioned table on which sit scraps of vellum, writing implements and a chessboard. The tall, gaunt man paces back and forth before the table. He scarcely glances at the chessboard. It has been weeks since the last move, yet he ponders still the complexities of power laid out on the pale squares. There are no moves he has not considered. He has memorized the distribution of pieces, the intricate combinations, the spheres and corridors of his enemy’s strength. He could shut his fierce eyes, red from their nights of watching, and see the game imprinted on the underside of his lids, just as he saw it diagramed in the stars. He knows it is hopeless, yet still sometimes pauses to study the board again, almost believing that by some fantastic oversight he has missed the move which can save his soul.
Twice he had won! Twice!
The slap of sandals in the corridor. Gervaise straightens, turns his face to the door. It is Brother Anselm, with a candle whose flickering light turns his sanctimonious smile to an evil leer. Gervaise imagines hell as an assembly of such grotesque faces, goading him with Brother Anselm’s smirk as the ages of torment slowly pass.
“You have no light,” Brother Anselm says.
Gervaise has learned to see in the dark. He had not noticed. “My light, Brother, has gone out long ago.”
“Christ’s blood, can’t you damned mystics ever speak plain English?”
Brother Anselm puts the candle down on the table, glances disinterestedly at the chessboard, then squats on the low stool. Gervaise goes to the window.
“Watching for that wench from the village, Brother Geoffrey? Or your old comrade the devil?”
Gervaise turns upon his tormentor. “Do you still take the sacraments?”
“Of course. I eat my Savior’s body each sunup, regular as the cock crows. A tasty morsel, though rather meager for a man of my appetites. It’s a pity Our Lord didn’t institute the sacrament with a hunk of rich red meat.”
“It’s a wonder the Host doesn’t burn your blasphemous tongue,” Gervaise says. “How can you receive Him, when you don’t believe?”
“How could I if I did?” Anselm laughs.
“The hypocrisy of this monastery,” Gervaise says, turning back to the window. “I’ve traveled the length of England and seen nothing like it!”
“We know all about your travels. We know how you scattered miracles about this island like the Second Coming. But you must admit it’s a bit hard for us to take you seriously as a saint when you spend your afternoons mounting the mistress of the manor.”
“That has ended,” Gervaise says. ‘‘I have not seen her—’’
“—since her husband began to suspect it was something more than piety that made the lady’s eyes shine and her hands tremble whenever she set out for her devotions. They say you knew the slut at court. Is that true?”
Gervaise considers a lie to spare the lady’s honor, but sees no point to it. Annjenette has never cared for honor.
“Yes; I knew her there.”
“And you knew Becket, and John of Salisbury, and Peter of Blois? And the king? You even supped with the king?”
“I dined in the great hall. The king’s table manners are no better than yours, Brother Anselm. Though his conversation is more civilized.”
“So I’ve heard. What I wouldn’t give to visit the court! To travel with His Majesty to foreign lands, to lord it over the peasants, to sample the sweets of Normandy and Anjou and even glorious Aquitaine.”
“You would be happy at the court, Anselm. You have the character for it, being a born schemer, intriguer, hypocrite and kisser of royal behinds.”
Anselm’s eyes flare up. “Watch yourself, Gervaise! Remember whose guest you are. If it weren’t for us, you’d have burned to please the bishop a long time ago. Ely considers you a monster of villainy and a scandal to the Church. And the peasants in the village tell the wildest tales about you. That you converse with the devil and raise the dead—that you fly through the skies at night on a demon horse and ride the waves in a ghostly boat. Now they’re dying by the score all over East Anglia, and some superstitious fools say it’s God’s wrath visited on this part of the realm because we have given you shelter.”
“I can’t believe that God would punish others for my sins,” Gervaise says. “There was a time, Brother, when I could have cured those people, when a touch of my hand would have quelled the disease and brought them back from the brink of death.”
“What miracles have you performed lately?”
“The power was taken away from me,” Gervaise says quietly.
“I wonder why. Could it be that God likes your pompous zealotry no more than I do?”
Gervaise whirls from the window. “Leave me, fiend!”
Brother Anselm rises quickly and retreats toward the door. “Your piety does grow tiresome, Brother Geoffrey. I’ll try you again tomorrow . . . Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot. There was a peasant girl here this afternoon to buy some prayers for her dead grandmother. She asked after you. I told the wench you were at your devotions and couldn’t be disturbed. She said she’d wait for you tonight out on the fens—at a certain shed you know of, by the big windmill. I told her you’d sworn off that sort of thing, but I pass on the message.”
“Tempter,” Gervaise says. “Serpent!”
“A pleasant night, Brother Geoffrey. Don’t let the moonlight fall upon your pallet. I hear that makes a fellow mad.”
And laughing, he exits from the cell, taking the candle with him.
Gervaise stands brooding at the window. The moon rises above the mist, a naked goddess pale and dripping from her bath. Within the depths of the abbey, the nocturnal ritual has begun and Gervaise is reminded of the voices heard once, long ago, in the courtyard at Wellesford, that memorable night when he became old Eadmer’s charge. I was happy there, Gervaise thinks—as happy as I’ve ever been.
But no; there were times when he was happier. In sweet Margarette’s arms, clinging to her small body as they listened to Satan’s eerie call . . . and in the fierce embrace of Annjenette, when all gods and demons seemed but the fancies of the monkish mind. Yes, and at the chessboard those first two times, when, fairly beaten by a skill greater than his own, Satan acknowledged his defeat and acceded grudgingly to the victor’s demands . . .
He lies upon his straw mat and promises himself that he will remain safe within his cell, yet all the time knows that he is only delaying that inevitable foray to the cowherd’s shed where warm and ample flesh awaits him. Sins which are simple and honest and human—for which a man might easily be forgiven. Gervaise takes consolation in them now. A lustful man may always repent. Only pride and hardness of heart can damn a soul. Gervaise’s heart is petrified; on the rock of his heart’s mad pride, he shall hang for an eternity.
Perhaps another shall hang with him. “I’ll never let you go,” Annjenette had said at their last parting. “Not even death shall take you
away from me.”
“Why do you speak so foolishly?” Gervaise asked her. “You don’t love me. You have never loved anything but pleasure.”
Her teeth pressed hard against his lips; her nails dug into his flesh. She pulled back from the kiss to gaze at him with eyes which have always betokened for Gervaise the triumph, even the deification, of carnality. “Do you call this pleasure—this agony we’ve shared since we were young?”
“You were never young, bitch. I was young once, but you have made an old man of me.”
“And was it I alone who did this to you? Your faith has brought old age upon you—this jealous God of yours who will not let you give yourself to me, fully and truly, as lovers should.”
“No doubt He has had a hand in it. I defy Him even now by holding your soft white hand.”
“And yet your hatred has only made me love you more. You think me vain and foolish—you think me corrupt—and yet I have suffered much for you, Geoffrey. I shall never let you go”
She wrapped her arms around him and forced upon him once again her frantic kiss, in which Gervaise felt his soul devoured. “I’ll come for your kiss,” she promised him, “from the grave.”
Oh God, Gervaise thinks, stretched out upon his pallet, the moon’s white light on the stones just above his head. What might my life have been, if I could have made that woman’s god my own?
He rises from the pallet, sweeps the chessmen from the board in a burst of anger and leaves his cell. As he proceeds along dark corridors, the Latin chant grows louder, then softer. He is crossing the courtyard when a monk steps quickly from the shadows.
“Father Geoffrey!”
It is Brother Terrence. His youthful, beardless face appears pale and saintly in the moonlight. He puts a soft hand on Gervaise’s arm.
“And why are you not at your devotions, my little friend?”
“Please, Father, I must speak with you. I have heard rumors. The villagers are angry because we have given you refuge, and the lord of Abbotswold has sworn to kill you. Yesterday one of his knights came to speak with Brother Anselm—”
“And does Anselm mean to betray me? I suppose he would.”
“Do not leave these walls, Father. Your life may depend upon it.”
“My life ended some weeks ago. Look. Do you see that one bright star shining to the north—there, hard by the constellation of Auriga?”
Brother Terrence looks up. “The one that appeared a few weeks ago? Some have taken it as a sign.”
“A sign it was—a sign of my defeat. Had that star not blazed forth—and who could have predicted it?—the devil would bow down before me and put his head beneath my heel.”
“Then it’s true that you have made a blasphemous wager with Satan. How could you have done such a thing?”
Gervaise puts his hand on the boy’s shoulders. “You are young and innocent, Terrence, and fortunate in that evil has never touched you as it did me when I was a boy even younger than you. For some of us—for those whom Satan has defiled—blasphemy becomes a kind of worship. I loved God and longed to serve Him, but—’’
“Surely your love will save you. God would not damn a faithful servant!”
“In this case, Terrence, I’m afraid He must, and will. God cannot save me if I reject His forgiveness.”
“Then repent,” the boy cries, “and accept what He freely gives you.”
“Satan owes me one more move. He has promised a way by which my bondage may be broken. While that possibility exists, I cannot admit defeat. I will not be driven from the field by”—Gervaise’s eyes fasten on the brilliant star—“a trick played upon me in the heavens.”
“But how can you win if you fall into Lord Michael’s hands?”
Gervaise thinks for a moment. “Do you know those manuscripts I keep in the chest in the corner of my cell? Here is the key. Take it. If I do not return from the fens tonight, you must transport the chest to the monastery at Blackstone. I have friends there who will understand what I have written. Tell them they must study each line carefully. ‘Your own words,’ Satan told me when he last appeared, ‘conceal the prize.’ And now I must go. God be with you, Terrence—if you can accept the blessing of the damned.”
“Father Geoffrey, wait!”
But the tall, gaunt man is already striding across the courtyard toward the abbey gate. The bar slides back, the heavy gate swings open. Brother Terrence watches as Gervaise passes beneath the arch and steps across the threshold into a ghostly world.
Brother Terrence can no longer see Gervaise, but we can. We see him hurry across the fens, down soggy paths, beneath the twisted branches of stunted trees. All around, the land is flat and marshy, its empty distances veiled by moon mists. A riverbank, a sluggish current, a crude wooden bridge. Low stone walls and hedgerows, no barrier to Gervaise’s growing lust. A windmill stands dim and formless, its arms suspended like the wings of a monstrous bird. Behind the windmill there is a shed, a place where hay is stored and animals fed. The door stands open. Gervaise enters its darkness and senses rafters just above his head. He smells the sour density of rotting hay, domestic animals, and another scent which tells him the woman is already there. The goat-keeper’s daughter, heavy-breasted, with broad and fleshy bottom, a peasant’s sturdy thighs. He gropes for her, pulls her to him. His mouth fastens savagely on hers. She is pliant, submissive to this violent union. He pushes her down into straw, tearing at her clothes. He hoists his own robes up to his waist and tears apart her thighs. She cries out once at the ferocity of his entry, but moments later she responds, thrusting hips upward to meet his onslaught. Oh, yes, Gervaise thinks. Oh, yes. After all these years, after faith, madness and despair—nothing but this. A knot of madness gathers and swells within him and he hurls himself toward the fire, the release, the cold clear light of perfect sanity as the wave recedes.
Lost in his ecstasy, Gervaise doesn’t see the sudden brightening of the shed, the torches at the open doorway, the men crowding in with swords and clubs and a heavy chain. Rough hands grasp his shoulders. He clings to the woman, on the verge of release, but they yank him away and his loins burst at the moment of separation. As he falls back in their grasp, his seed spurts futilely across the woman and the hay and the coarse woolens of his captors. It is, Gervaise thinks, a last gratuitous victory for Satan.
“The filthy beast—he’s got his dirty stuff all over me,” the woman exclaims.
“Don’t worry, slut,” cackles one of the men. “We’ll burn your clothes and the shed too. Be thankful you haven’t got this devil’s spawn inside you.”
And we see Gervaise in chains, bits of straw still clinging to his robe and to his tangled hair, as he is pushed out of the shed and led away across the fens. We wish to see no more. There is nothing but horror to come.
The lights of Abbotswold greeted us as we came up the drive; in fact, there was light blazing at every window, as if an all-night party raged within. No cars were parked before the house, however, and the front door stood open.
We followed the professor into the anteroom, from which we could see the great hall filled with light, its old pieces of furniture pushed helter-skelter, as if abandoned in the midst of a general housecleaning.
“Mortimor!” the professor shouted. “What’s been going on here?”
Mrs. Archer appeared in the library doorway. “In here, sir. Your mother wants to see you.”
The old woman sat waiting for us in her wheelchair. The library furniture had been similarly shoved about, leather sofa cushions on the floor, books tumbled from the bookcases, papers strewn around the desk, so that the matriarch looked like the miraculously unscathed survivor of a hurricane.
“Mama! How did you get downstairs, and where are the Mortimors?”
The professor’s mother glared at him with a determination to answer none of his questions until he’d answered hers. “You’ve been to the abbey? Where is Stephany? Is she unharmed?”
‘‘Here I am,” Stephany said.
&nbs
p; The old woman extended a pair of scarecrow’s arms. “Come to me, child. Thank God you’ve not been injured!”
Stephany knelt beside the wheelchair. At the touch of the old woman’s hands, she broke into tears and hid her face in her grandmother’s blanketed lap. It was the first emotion she’d shown since coming out from behind the chapel altar.
“You are a great fool, Kenneth,” Mrs. Trevor-Finch said. “Whatever possessed you to expose this child to those horrors?”
“Mother, please! It wasn’t what you think. I had . . . something to prove. Now, for heaven’s sake, tell me what’s happened.”
‘‘Your servants have ransacked the house and fled,” the old woman said. “Just after you left, the old man and the boy began tearing the place apart. They even forced their way into my apartment and turned it upside down.”
“But what on earth . . . ? Did they take anything?”
“I know what they were after,” I said. “When did they leave?”
“Not more than half an hour ago. I overheard the old brute say you were all at the abbey, so I prevailed upon Archer to help me down the stairs. I tried to call the police, but the phones are dead. You see what your stub-born disbelief has led to, Kenneth. You knew what the Mortimors were, yet you refused to fire them. You knew the danger to Stephany, yet you deliberately took her to the abbey. Will you not be satisfied until you’ve destroyed this family?”
“Mother, not in front of the others, I beg of you. I’ve made mistakes, I admit, but my worst mistake was in bringing this charlatan”—he pointed at me—“into my home.”
“Well, young man?” the old woman said. “Have you forgotten your promise?”
“No, I haven’t. And if the professor will listen to me—”
“I will not listen to an arrogant scoundrel who has abused my hospitality—’’
“He may be that,” the old woman said, “but he’s also the only one who can help us. I’ve told him everything, Kenneth. Things even you don’t know. Now I insist that you listen to him and do what he tells you to do.”
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