He laid his cheek against her cheek, and their bodies melded together as if nothing could ever separate them; he tried to burn this moment so deep into his memory that no matter how much time passed it would never be erased again.
“When I first met you,” said Madeleine then, moving her head to look at him as the first barely discernible beginnings of dawn lifted the dark, “I thought what a hard man you were—face like granite, eyes like flint I thought, no hope of give or take of any kind. But right in the middle of you there is this wellspring of such tenderness, isn’t there? Something so delicate and gentle.”
She saw the movement of his half smile, and the grey twilight delineated the beloved contours of his face.
“It used not to be the case,” he said. “And even now, I think there might be only one soul in all the world who could find that upwelling and see it for what it is.”
He kissed her mouth, so full and soft, and groaned with longing: “Oh God, I cannot let you go! I cannot give this back! Oh my sweet, my dearest—remember me. I shall live on this memory for the rest of my days. And if I ever find a way to you, if I can puzzle out any means for us to be together, I will come back for you. But do not wait, for that may never be. Truly, if you do find a chance of happiness with someone else, in heaven’s name take it and that with my blessing. But even then, dearest, I beseech you—please—remember me.”
And he enfolded her close, close against him, so that she felt the agonizing tenderness of his longing and his love. Then as the grey in the east lifted another shade toward light, knowing he must be back in the church before daybreak in time to mingle with the main ingress of brothers coming to prayers, he drew back from her, pressed his lips to her brow in one last kiss, and let himself silently out of the cottage with no further farewell.
“No…” she murmured, left standing by herself in the middle of the empty room, which never had felt lonely until now, “No… oh Jesu, mercy! Of your mercy, find us a way! Oh God have mercy! I cannot bear to lose this, too!”
Do not wait for me… he had said. Madeleine wondered whatever chance he thought there would likely be, for a woman of forty-three living on the charity of a monastery, to pick and choose a spouse. She knew that if this one chance with him was not given, she would never know the comfort and companionship of marriage at all. And she knew that even if by some miracle another suitor came her way, that could never be anything better than second best. She wanted this man: this complex, sardonic, guarded man with his complete disregard of rules, and his cool detachment, and the flame of absolute passionate tenderness that hid at the core of him.
The snatched hour had vanished more quickly than he could believe, and William left Madeleine’s cottage later than he’d meant to. It had been his intention to return well before dawn and be in his stall in choir before any trace of sunrise coloured the sky. His brothers coming down for the daybreak office would think—if they thought anything at all—that he had been unable to sleep and had come down early to win the first blessing and spend some time in private meditation. But already, as he latched the garden gate behind him, the stars were fading and the grey lifting every moment, tinged faintly with rose above the eastern rim of the hills. William felt the familiar contraction of anxiety in the hard muscles of his belly and his chest and his face. He could not afford to enter the chapel late, not for this morning office that offered no possibility of a man having been detained on the legitimate occupation of his daily duties.
Keeping close to the yew hedges, still blocks of darkness in the receding shadows of night, he skimmed noiselessly around the open spaces to the small door in the wall of the church that he’d left on the latch for his return. In a moment of panic he thought it had been locked, but steadying his hands to try the catch again, the second time it lifted properly; and he was inside, aware already of the distant but increasing rumbling reverberation of the community descending the night stairs in the clumsiness of waking recently and incompletely. He felt his heart thumping painfully as he disciplined himself to latching the door, sliding the bolts home, with the slowness of absolute silence.
Tension gripped him like a vice as he forced himself to walk soft and slow along the arcade of the side aisle, cursing himself for a fool as he heard the brothers already entering the choir from the night stairs that led down into the south transept. He felt his mouth go dry and his chest constrict as he slipped like a ghost across the north transept, trusting to the shadows to keep him hidden at this early hour. He had to hurry now. Going foxfoot along the narrow ambulatory that curved behind the high altar past the sacristy and little devotional shrines, he sped toward the south transept. He flattened himself against the cool stone of the wall, hardly breathing as the last of the brothers came down into chapel. Then he made himself wait for a slow count of ten, following the last man in from the general direction of the night stairs with all the flustered appearance of someone who has rolled late out of bed, just as the abbot gave the knock and the community rose for the cardinal office of Lauds.
The brothers were sleepy. Theodore, who sat opposite him in choir and occupied the cell next to him in the dorter upstairs, had a sharp eye for how things were with a man but was unlikely to take any notice of anyone fractionally late. William thanked God from the depth of his soul that he seemed to have gotten away with it. With difficulty he gave his attention to the psalm.
He was grateful, too, for the shelter of the Grand Silence extending beyond chapel to the refectory as the brothers broke their fast, with bread and ale in these warmer months—they would have porridge to start the day once the frosts began.
As he stood in the frater with the others, keeping custody of his eyes, eating bread left over from yesterday with Brother Walafrid’s ale—always more successful than his wines—William felt something in his soul clutch hungrily at the sense of peace and security in this house. They had allowed him in. They had accepted him. It was true that Abbot John’s wise stricture against allowing too close an intimacy to develop between himself and William had hurt. William knew well that no personal attachments were permitted to him and that the abbot’s friendship must be for all of them in general and no one of them in particular, but he also knew the affection that had grown between himself and John was real. Severing it might be inevitable, but it was still painful. Even so, the dull ache of that faded into the background compared with the red-hot pain of renouncing Madeleine’s company. He could not deny that John had been entirely right in insisting William visit her no more. As he chewed the bread and swallowed the ale, he reflected on what he had begun in going to her cottage and declaring his love. Until then, relinquishing her friendship had been the necessary sacrifice of a faithful monk. Its pain had felt intolerable, but the bitter taste had been sweetened by the upholding of his integrity. He had given up John; he had given up Madeleine—he had stayed faithful to this house and to the monastic way. The perpetual light of Christ’s presence in the oratory of his heart’s innermost chamber had burned on. It was different now. He had broken his vows. He had no claim on Madeleine nor hope of seeing her; he must make no claim on his superior but back off to the distance every brother must keep. All that was hard enough, but now he had thrown away his integrity as well.
He wiped his mouth on the napkin, his face morose. The security and peace of acceptance in this safe place had been besmirched and trampled on by his own deceit and by—he did not know what to call it—the thing that had taken place between him and Madeleine. He thought he should call it sin, but something in him, deeper than that framework of belief could touch, cried out against such a judgment. As he held her in his arms, as he kissed her, as he revisited the brief time they had shared and touched it again in memory while he sat in the frater now, chewing dry bread, all he could discern was the simplest, purest love. All he could feel was that he had been made to love her, born to love her. To call it temptation and sin fitted in with everything he’d always been taught, but it made no instinctive, intuitional sense
at all.
In the Morrow Mass and at Chapter, he moved through the same grateful insulating cloaking of silence, glad of its protection.
After Terce, he went out into the abbey court and to the checker. Brother Ambrose came in after him, in a cheerful mood.
“Overslept, did you?” he inquired, his tone playful. “The day rises still so early it’s hard to be up with the lark!”
William lifted down the receipt book from its place on the shelf. He could see that he had set himself up for a whole tangle of lies and covert deception.
“It certainly is,” he replied. “Did you pay the man for laying the hedge at St Mary’s graveyard, or hasn’t he been for his money yet?”
He worked steadily then through the morning. It took him some time to discern the intended meaning of Brother Stephen’s spelling on the chit from the farm, but eventually he managed to grasp that a saw had cost them tenpence and a hatchet ninepence ha’penny, and the smith would be calling to collect threepence ha’penny for mending something he couldn’t read that seemed to have to do with a plow.
Conradus had asked for sieves to be mended and requested any cord they could spare for stringing herrings. It had cost him threepence to have some tankards bound and a guinea for several pots to be mended and bound. William frowned at the account. He hoped the novice hadn’t been too zealous in his standards of improvement. He wondered how many pans it had been; Conradus hadn’t made that clear.
He looked at the carpenter’s and cooper’s bills and the amount they had paid out to Jenny Tiler for the work her husband had done on the dovecote roof and wondered about the skills of the young men Theodore had in the novitiate. He thought they could do with a few more like Brother Thomas and rather fewer sensitive musical scholars in their next intake of postulants. It seemed ridiculous to him that they were now nearer forty than thirty monks living here in community and still paying someone else to tan the hide of the horse that died of colic after it broke into the feed store.
He accepted that clearing the ditches and scything the grass in the land they owned beyond the village was an inevitable expense. They couldn’t be sending monks all that way over there to do the work, nor to make charcoal in the coppices. But surely they had enough pairs of hands for the work in their own farm and garden. And rabbits? “Upon my soul, this is extravagance!” he exclaimed aloud. “We have paid someone for rabbits? I must have words with our kitcheners about this; that won’t do. It won’t do at all. Have we no traps of our own?”
“It’s Brother Cormac,” explained Brother Ambrose. “He won’t set traps.”
“Won’t set traps but he will buy rabbits, eh? Not anymore! I’ll see him about it this afternoon.”
He was as good as his word. After the midday meal he waited until the noise had subsided of the servers and kitcheners clearing tables and eating their own food and washing the pots from the meal. Then he went through to the kitchen where Brother Cormac and Brother Conradus were putting away the last few utensils to leave all the work surfaces uncluttered and clean.
“Brother Cormac,” he said, “have you a moment?”
“For sure.” Cormac gave the big bread bowl to Brother Conradus and came to hear what William had to say.
“Going through the accounts this morning, I see we’ve a recent item of rabbits purchased in the market.”
Brother Cormac nodded. “For the guesthouse.”
“Why are we buying rabbits? Up on the hill by the burial ground, up on the farm on the edges of the wood, are there not enough rabbits to supply our pot?”
Brother Cormac said nothing. He looked at the ground. He folded his arms self-protectively across his chest, his hands holding his upper arms. William waited, but no answer seemed forthcoming.
“Brother Ambrose says it is because you won’t have traps set.”
Cormac still neither looked up nor replied.
“For what possible reason can you justify buying rabbits from the market and not setting traps for our own? How do you think they caught the rabbits in the market?”
Cormac moved one hand to his brow. He looked as if he would have liked to obscure the whole of himself from William’s scrutiny if he could.
“I know,” he muttered. “I do know. We have rabbit because it’s cheap, and they like to offer meat to the guests. If I asked for mutton, it would be more expensive, and you’d be asking me why we couldn’t give them rabbit. But if we trapped them here… Oh, God, William—it would be me would have to set the traps!”
He took his hand away from his face then and stood, still hugging himself in protection, but his blue eyes looked straight into William’s in appeal. “And even if you said you’d set the traps for me… Well… they scream when they are caught in the snare, and I couldn’t… I just couldn’t… Please—please can’t we just buy them from the market?”
That blue gaze, seeing no answering recognition or compassion, dropped to the floor again.
William, exasperated, had actually opened his mouth to tell Cormac not to be so childish, when it was as though something in the depths of his heart moved in sudden protest. He stopped, surprised, and listened to his heart. Vividly, unexpectedly, he remembered Peregrine’s face, everything exactly as it had been, at William’s great refectory table in the days when he had been prior of St Dunstan’s. Peregrine, humiliated, cornered, reduced to complete vulnerability, while William pushed him further and further until he could bear no more. And William’s heart said to him, This is why people hated you.
As the silence between the two men continued, Brother Conradus made himself as unobtrusive as he possibly could while he set about measuring out the ingredients for the pies they had planned for supper. He wondered if maybe he should just leave the pies for later and go away.
“What are we going to feed them, then, if we do not give them rabbit?” William asked. Brother Cormac looked up at him, the relief in his face more than William would have thought the situation warranted.
“Couldn’t they eat fish, as we do? Or pigeons?”
“And if the guests clean us out of pigeons—I’m not being fanciful, we have a big influx at times—what do we eat?”
“Well… couldn’t we eat beans… and eggs maybe… and cheese?”
William realized that he was not listening to a man who had given little thought to the matter; this came from the centre of Cormac’s heart.
“Brother Cormac,” he said with a sigh, “you go on ordering your rabbits from the market. Do as you think best. Don’t you worry.”
As he turned and left the kitchen, and Cormac picked up a cloth to wipe down the table that was already clean, Brother Conradus kept his eyes focused firmly on his pastry, doing the best that he could to be there and yet not there at all.
William walked back to the checker, the encounter oddly clear and powerful in his heart. He felt as though his soul had become a battleground between faithfulness to the Christ who prioritized love above all else and the habits of cynicism and—he didn’t like the idea but made himself face up to it—bullying, which he had always found worked well enough for him in the past. But if the Christ who prioritized love was the Lord of this community and the Lord of his own life, what he couldn’t disentangle was where his feelings for Madeleine fitted in. He thought the only way he could cope with shutting her out of his mind would be if he barred the way to every impulse of tenderness and humanity, reverting to the arid state he’d been used to before he came here. The more he went on thinking about it, the more clearly he realized that was no longer an option for him. His heart had been broken open to life and love, and he didn’t think he could seal it up again, even if he wanted to. And, he had to admit in the still small voice of his innermost being, he didn’t want to, not when it came to it. And he thought that might be his salvation, but it was not unconnected with being in love.
This was not the first time in his life that William had used account books as a refuge from thinking about things that threatened and confused him.
“Any joy with Brother Cormac?” Brother Ambrose asked him cheerily as he walked through the door.
“I said he could go on ordering the rabbits from the market.” Brother Ambrose had to strain to hear him, and William did not look at him.
“Oh. I see.” Ambrose thought it wisest to withdraw from further discussion of the matter. “Never mind,” he said sympathetically. “We all have that trouble with Brother Cormac.”
William did not reply. He sat down at his table and picked up the next scrap of parchment from the pile of notes jotted down by the brothers, and receipts and bills from tradesmen. He looked at it in bafflement. He simply couldn’t read this monk’s handwriting at all.
“I would speak with thy cellarer.” Old Mother Cottingham accosted Brother Martin on his way back to the gatehouse after the midday meal.
“Brother Ambrose?” He regarded her with kindly amusement, this diminutive ancient lady, bent and leaning on her gnarled stick, her wild grey hair in disarray, her shawl awry, only a few teeth left in her jaw, but her eyes as bright and sharp as ever. Eyes that saw everything—on the inside as well as the outside. There was nothing wrong with her hearing either, remarkably.
“Nay, not Brother Ambrose. The other one. Lean, wiry fellow with a swift step; hard, sallow face, and silver hair. Him.”
Brother Martin grasped whom she had in mind.
“He should be over at the checker this afternoon, good mother. You should feel free to speak to him there.”
Mother Cottingham stood up as straight as she could, the better to look Brother Martin uncompromisingly in the eye. “I don’t want to speak to him at the checker,” she said. “I want to speak to him alone, and I want him to call at my cottage. Will tha ask him for me?”
Brother Martin could think of no reason why not. Mother Cottingham, who must have seen eighty years a while back and stopped counting, presented no danger of either temptation or scandal. She had lived there from time immemorial. Her husband, knowing his days numbered, had secured her a dwelling in the safety of the abbey ground during the early days of Abbot Gregory’s time. Father Peregrine, who disliked the selling of corrodies and thought the abbey was best inhabited by the monks (and nobody else), had left the cottages empty when their residents died. Father Chad had filled them again, to raise funds urgently needed, after Peregrine had become too ill to contemplate any realistic prospect of resuming office. But whether the cottages in the row stood filled or empty, Mother Cottingham stayed put in her house, the fifth in the row, next door neighbour to Peartree Cottage. She was not thought to be poor, for she gave generously to the abbey coffers and did not depend on the community for her daily necessities; it was only the house and the proximity to the brothers that her husband had wanted to provide, for they’d had no family beside each other, and he would not think of her all alone in the world after his death. The brothers knew nothing of her earlier history; there remained not one of them now who remembered Ellen Cottingham as a laughing young woman, the beauty of the village and the apple of her husband’s eye. There was no one left who recalled the griefs she had lived through: bearing four sons, three of them dying one after another as babes and her firstborn taken with lockjaw at nineteen years old—a swift and hideous death. She had gone almost mad with grief for her lads, and her man who loved her so had grieved over her grieving. It had taken a long time, but somewhere in midlife she had finally made her peace with God, and she became very devout. St. Alcuin’s grew to be a home from home for her. Simon Cottingham knew she would be all right without him if he could leave her a little nest under the eaves of the abbey church, and he had gone to his rest in peace when it had been finally arranged. Whatever else he had to bequeath her was long forgotten; her affairs were managed by a lawyer in York, but she seemed to have enough to get by.
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