And beyond the rhythm of the monastic hours was the private prayer of each man, the moments in which his heart became the hallowed ground where he tasted the Love beyond all loves that he had sworn to serve—sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, sometimes full of dread like an ember that threatened to scar and sear his soul, occasionally blissful, sometimes a time of tears and seeing his own shame.
Every one of them knew that prayer would be the lifeblood of the way he had set himself to walk; without it his heart would wither and his soul would die.
So on the other side of the choir from the Lady Chapel, the south side, an inconspicuous door led into a small oratory for private prayer—a simple, quiet chapel set apart for silence and meditation even on feast days when the place bustled with visitors. There were times when the whole church was a waiting space empty of people and full of light and holiness; other times it filled up with footsteps and song, the leisurely river of chanting and the musical murmur of liturgical responses. Whatever the case, the small oratory remained folded away as a place of prayer, the heart hidden inside the ribs of this living place of worship, where a man might quietly and privately seek his God.
To the small oratory came the kitcheners or the infirmarians or the guest master, when their duties had obliged them to stay at their place of work and fail in their attendance in chapel for the office. Especially this was true for the infirmary brothers when anyone in their care was critically ill or an emergency arose; and of the kitchen brothers when, despite their best efforts to plan ahead, they had to skip Sext because it fell just before the midday meal or missed Vespers because it fell just before supper. Then they would come quietly into the small oratory and say the office alone as opportunity permitted.
The oratory was for anyone. People in the parish bearing burdens of grief or troubled mind would come and sit there in its hush, allowing the prayer that had seeped into the wood and the stones and hung upon the air to seep in its turn into their own souls, strengthening them. The small chapel was always open.
On that summer afternoon Madeleine found herself with no particular task urgently pressing, and she came with her rosary to the little oratory, to sit for a while and allow the gaze of Christ to search her heart. Father Theodore was her confessor now, and tomorrow she would go to him, as she had a month ago in mid-July, to seek his good counsel for her life. There is no point in having a confessor from whom one keeps secrets, and part of what had drawn Madeleine to the small oratory today was the difficult decision of how much it might be advisable to tell Theodore, and how much to keep to herself.
She had asked Father Theodore to be her confessor when she had been about three weeks at St Alcuin’s because she liked his face, and she saw that he was shy and gentle. She thought he would be an understanding man. She had met with him for the first time in mid-June, when her heart had been filled with mixed emotions: profoundly thankful for the security of her new home; still reeling from the horrors of the night after which she had fled her burnt cottage in Motherwell; and comforted and cheered by the new friendships she had found—especially with Father William, who was so good to her.
A month later when she saw Theodore in mid-July, the nightmare memories of Motherwell—and indeed almost everything else in life—had blurred into a vague backdrop roughed into the perimeter of her days. Her thoughts, her dreams, and her longing were filled incessantly by the bond that had grown between herself and William, overwhelming and unexpected. She felt like someone standing thigh deep in a place where the pounding breakers crash upon the shingle in the wild high seas of spring, struggling with only partial success to keep her footing, every moment increasing the likelihood of being swept away completely.
She knew she had come to live here as a blameless and godly spinster, to go unobtrusively about her calling of healing the sick, living under the shelter of her brother’s integrity, eminence, and magnanimity, with humble gratitude. She understood very clearly what was expected of her, and nothing in her remained at all blind to the obvious unspoken condition that under no circumstances would it be thinkable that she should even give houseroom in her fantasies to the prospect of having an affair with one of the brothers of John’s house.
Madeleine was grateful. She trusted in God, and she took seriously Christ’s standards of honesty and good faith. She grasped the implications of her position, and she loved her brother. She had been glad to come to St Alcuin’s, glad of the chance to work among the villagers keeping mothers and babes safe when a child was born, easing the path out of this world for the dying, curing the ailments and crises of those who fell ill. She had not meant to fall in love, nor had she been discontented to live as she was. It felt lonely sometimes, but she had found companionship among her neighbours, especially old Mother Cottingham in the cottage next door—she had never in her life been restless or unhappy without a man of her own. The prejudice against her and her mother had forced upon her the vulnerability that threatens a woman with no wealth and no husband in any community. But though she had sought protection and security, it had never occurred to her to look for a husband, nor had she imagined that in her early forties she would have been successful if she had. Madeleine was not a natural celibate; she was not indifferent to the comfort and companionship of marriage, or its pleasures. It was just that her path had not travelled that way. Until now—when by some cruel twist of circumstance, she found herself wholly, completely, irrecoverably in love with a man she could not have.
In July when she had met with Father Theodore, she had thought it prudent to confide in him nothing of this. She had expressed her thankfulness at her new situation and told him that the memories that had tortured her had faded with remarkable speed—for which, thanks be to God. She had chosen not to say that what made her new home a heaven, made her days sweet and healed her soul of every wound, were the daily visits to her cottage of Father William. Madeleine knew well that all of us see what we want to see and reconstruct reality according to our own point of view. She knew that of no one is this more true than a man or a woman in love. She had accordingly hung onto enough common sense to accept that her feelings might not be reciprocated, and she knew that a feeling is not a sin. She was not obliged to confess it therefore, and she kept it to herself.
Now in mid-August as she prepared again to meet with her confessor, everything had changed. It was not about feelings anymore but about love expressed in a passion of kisses. Lodged in her heart was William’s groan of longing as he held her close in his arms, his body melded to hers in the utter surrender of his love and the irresistible ardour of his desire. There was not a shadow of ambiguity in which to take refuge, no question at all concerning the nature of their relationship. There was no point in having a confessor if you kept something of this magnitude hidden from him. Presumably William was supposed to confess his state of soul to his abbot; Madeleine felt entirely certain that he would not be saying anything at all of this. So she did not know what to do, and she came to the small oratory to prepare for her confession and think through the implications both spiritual and practical of the possibilities open to her. One thing that she considered to be of crucial importance was that she absolutely trusted Father Theodore. She could read the faces and weigh the souls of her fellow human beings, and she knew in her bones that whatever she told him, he would not give her away. That meant her dilemma was not further complicated by uncertainty about her confessor’s reliability. On the other hand, if she had not trusted him to keep silence, it would have made the decision easier; she would simply have kept silence herself.
Something else puzzled Madeleine, which was that Mother Cottingham had somehow changed. She had made Madeleine welcome from her first arrival, and a firm friendship had been forged between them. But recently something had been different. When the old woman looked at her, Madeleine detected something unspoken in her eyes. The friendship had not suffered from this; if anything, Madeleine saw a conspiratorial twinkle that had not been there before, and she could not
help wondering if her ancient neighbour had somehow discerned what had passed between herself and William—but she did not see how this could be. Not by the least syllable or meaning look had Madeleine hinted at any kind of a special relationship, and she knew that neither William nor any other monk of St Alcuin’s would be seeking out an old woman to entrust with the secrets of his heart. And yet… Madeleine felt increasingly certain that Ellen knew something and wondered if, choosing her words carefully so as not to give anything away, she ought to ask her.
So she sat in the little oratory, turning over these things in her mind, praying the rosary and searching deeper, deeper … to find the right way forward, to keep her footing on a path of honesty in this treacherous and precarious country.
She had closed and latched the door when she came in. When anybody from the parish entered, the iron latch rattled loudly as they opened the door. Hearing but the faintest, barely audible click behind her, she knew it was one of the brothers who had entered. For a moment she felt guilty, lest she be unwelcome to a monk’s need for prayer in the peace of solitude; but as she sensed the man hesitate on the step, then heard his feet make up their mind and come quietly along the aisle toward her, she knew exactly who it was. So she was not surprised when he came to stand just behind the bench where she sat, and she felt the feather-light caress of his hand on the back of her head.
Everything went on alert in Madeleine then. This, she knew, was courting peril beyond all good sense. Danger throbbed in every warning system of her soul and body. They must not be discovered. They must not. But at the same time, she yearned for his touch, to hear his voice, to spend even one snatched minute in his company.
He stepped over the low bench to sit beside her. She glanced at him, and her heart bucked and flipped when she saw the tenderness in his eyes and the defenceless self-offering of his love.
“William, this is unwise!” she whispered fiercely. “This is most unseemly!”
But she said nothing else because he took her in his arms and closed his mouth on hers in the slow, sweet rapture of his kiss. For that brief moment both of them stopped caring: he knew nothing but her; she knew nothing but him. Neither of them knew anything of Brother Cormac entering through the unlatched door and withdrawing as quietly as he had come in, on seeing his presence there to be inappropriate.
Not many minutes later, someone fumbled at the catch. By the time Brother Walafrid entered to spend a while in the quiet and say his rosary, there was nothing to see but Mistress Hazell sitting with head bent demurely in prayer and Father William doing his routine check of the altar silver. That done, William backed away, with a deep bow, from the altar and left with light, quiet step, without glancing at either Madeleine or Brother Walafrid.
William took his turn as a reader at the evening meal that day, and so he came into the kitchen afterward for the supper set aside for him by those who had prepared it.
Brother Conradus nodded to him pleasantly as they passed each other, Conradus with a heaped tray of bowls on his way to the scullery.
Brother Cormac stood by the table where meals had been set aside, and he picked up a bowl of food and a plate of bread and butter at William’s approach. He stood holding these, and as William reached the table and he gave them into his hands, he did not release them immediately. Very direct, very level, his blue gaze met William’s eyes. He said, in an undertone that nobody else could possibly have heard, “I had to miss the midday office and so came for my prayers into the little oratory after the meal, but I found I was intruding. You are skating on very thin ice, Brother. Our abbot is open and gentle, patient and kind, but he will not countenance this. Besides, he deserves better from you, and you are abusing the trust of all of us. I shall not rat on you, but I counsel you to think again.”
William felt the familiar grip of terror in his belly and the slow flush of blood in his face.
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said as Cormac released the bowl and the plate into his hands.
William retained enough sense of perspective to feel very grateful to Cormac for his manner of responding to what he had seen, and he hung on to that focus. But he also felt cornered, and wretched, and anxious. Since it was no longer in use for meal preparation, the readers and servers usually ate with the kitcheners at the big worktable in the kitchen, for a small group of men it felt more friendly than the spacious refectory. But William took his supper through to the frater, walking the length of the oak table to the most retired corner, where he could recover himself in solitude. He sat with the food before him on the table, but he could not eat a single mouthful. He faced the fact that the occasional stolen kiss was far, far too risky. There was no practical course to take other than absolutely renouncing this love in totality. He toyed with his bread, breaking it absently, but gazing beyond it at nothing, wondering hopelessly how to get out of this mess. He had no solutions and no expectation of finding any. He had nothing to offer Madeleine and nowhere to go. Nothing had changed since the last time his mind went round this treadmill. There was no way out. He was gradually realizing that what he had set himself to do was too much for him. He just could not renounce this love. It ached in him until he felt physically sick with longing, but whichever way he looked at it he was in no position to do anything other than give it up. He thought Madeleine deserved something better than the furtive deceit of stolen kisses; he was quite certain she deserved a better man than a monk breaking his vows while he exploited the goodwill of the community for his bed and board, took advantage of his abbot’s belief in him, and tangled her in his net of lies with the direct intention of duping her brother who trusted her.
When he brought his mind back to the present moment, on a lesser level he also felt ashamed that he had taken the supper, then simply wasted the food. It was hard to get rid of it without the kitchen brothers, whose duty required them to stay in the kitchen until all had been cleaned and tidied away, seeing him dispose of it. He wished they’d go away. He wished it was possible to do anything at all without being observed by eyes that cared and would be bound to have an opinion. He wished his confessor was anybody but John. For a fleeting moment he wondered if it would have been better that he had never met Madeleine, but his heart cried, No! No! No! Somewhere deep in his gut he descended into frantic blind panic at the prospect of being torn apart from her. “Please,” he whispered with bent head, his elbows on the table creating a tent of privacy as he put his hands to his temples, “Please don’t take her away from me.” He tried to set his lips firm and stare at nothing, to hold back the tears that usually waited until nightfall and the seclusion of his cell, and he felt like an animal in a trap. He knew that he could not face going back through the kitchen, and he could not stay here like this, and he could not eat this food. In the end, he swung his legs over the bench, got up leaving the plates of uneaten food behind for someone else to find and deal with, and left by the door that led out to the kitchen garden and the orchards, and from there to the path rising up to the farm and the burial ground. He walked swiftly, possessed by the need to be on his own, before the black flood of despair inside him swelled to the point where the dam must break.
Brother Conradus had worked extremely hard that day. He had made some excellent blackberry pies for supper, which had been well received—but he noticed to his disappointment that Father William had not even touched his bread and hearty bowlful of vegetable soup, nor even troubled to clear it away, which Conradus found irritating. And if he hadn’t liked the soup, well he might still have fancied some blackberry pie. It took quite some effort for Brother Conradus to clear away the wasted food without comment when he went to wipe down the tables, and he had to say three Hail Marys before he could bring himself to add even an attempt at a charitable attitude to the already considerable self-discipline of refraining from passing any kind of remark to Brother Cormac. Brother Conradus knew from past experience that Brother Cormac’s blistering turn of phrase could be very comforting when the best efforts of the kitch
en went unappreciated, but only that morning Father Theodore had spoken to his novices about the forbearance that wants to go deeper than what we say or do, sinking right down inside to mature into an attitude of gentleness, a heart that understands and forgives. Conradus had thought that sounded so beautiful, and he could see that caustic observations about men who took good food and didn’t eat it, and furthermore couldn’t even be bothered to clear their own dishes, would not square with that beautiful spirit of forbearance. He threw the bread out for the birds, scraping the butter carefully back into the dish it had come from, tipping the soup into the pot with what already remained to be reused tomorrow.
He and Brother Cormac had washed up after the meal, and after they had left the kitchen all tidy, Brother Cormac had gone up to the guesthouse with some provisions needed there while Brother Conradus went to clear the scraps from the infirmary meal. Then it was time for Vespers—and afterwards, Conradus thought if he didn’t manage to get some time out of doors he would just burst. He had spent the morning on his novitiate studies as usual and the afternoon reading The Cloud of Unknowing (incomprehensible) in his cell without once dozing off; he felt the day owed him an hour in the fresh air.
It was a beautiful evening, and he went into the kitchen garden to dig some weeds that were threatening to get out of hand. The low, slanting sun gave out a surprising amount of heat for the hour of the day, gladdening his spirit; he loved the sight of the small clouds drifting lazily across the still blue of the evening sky.
After a while he put down his gardening tools and washed his hands carefully in a bowl of water. He had brought the bowl out with him specially for this purpose, so that he wouldn’t soil the well bucket, which should be kept completely clean. He had seen Brother Cormac in similar circumstances simply brush the surplus earth off by rubbing his hands on the skirts of his habit or giving them a quick wipe on his scapular, but though he held the professed brethren in the highest esteem, Brother Conradus knew for a fact that this was inadequate hygiene for a kitchener. He shook the shining drops of water from his hands and waved them about a bit to dry in the air, tossing the muddied water in the bowl onto one of the vegetable beds. Then he took off for a walk down the slope from the kitchen to the river. He could see it sparkling where the breeze rippled the surface and reflecting the colours slowly forming in the changing sky. He thought he had time to go for a stroll up the hill before Compline, and he walked along the riverbank from this broad stretch of water, up toward the narrower tumbling waters that splashed over the stones. Higher still and the river narrowed to a stream. The source of it was up on the moor, but Brother Conradus liked this particular part that ran through a belt of woodland circling round from behind the burial ground all the way to the edge of the farm. Ferns grew among the rocks, and birch and rowan trees sprang graceful from the peaty earth. As he climbed higher, the path took him into the trees. The birch leaves, little serrated arrowheads of summer green, flirted with the dappling light; the evening sunshine penetrated through the trees as an amber glow, finding a way into the depths of the wood with a sense of such timeless peace. He stopped walking and looked all around. He looked back the way he had come, down on the abbey nestling in the curve of the hills, its lichened roof and honey-coloured stone lovely in the golden light. He looked down at the beck, jumping and gurgling, freshening the air. He looked into the wood that, though it was no more than a coppice really, still had enough depth for mystery.
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