John nodded. “Come then, Brother. I’m glad we were in time.”
William stood holding the things, his face reserved and set. He did not reply nor did he look at Madeleine. His abbot stood back to allow him to go first down the stairs, and William did not even risk a glance in her direction as he passed her.
She stayed where she was. The staircase creaked slightly under their tread. As they reached the room below, John called up, “I’ll leave the fire to go out, yes?” And she spoke in affirmation.
She heard the latch lifted. She heard John say pleasantly to William, “She loved you more than I had realized. You must have become like a son to her, from the way she spoke your name.”
The latch clicked again, and she did not hear William’s reply. She sat down on the stool at the bedside and reached down to the basket of herbs, taking a bunch of lavender and tucking it into the limp, dead hand of her friend. Madeleine had been many years familiar with death, and this passing brought no tears. Even so, she would have given more than she could express to feel William’s arms close around her in comfort in this moment. She stayed there only a few minutes. She wanted to wash Ellen’s body and lay her out before the corpse began to stiffen. She went downstairs to warm some water on the fire.
As they reached the abbey, going in through the abbot’s house where Tom had set a lantern burning against his abbot’s return, John paused and looked at William.
“Do you know,” he asked as he closed the door behind them, “why Ellen Cottingham was angry with me—on your account, she said?”
William paused before replying. He had hoped John hadn’t heard that said. He had no wish to add to the lies that already separated him from his friend. He looked up at John, and his eyes flickered though his tone remained neutral.
“She didn’t say, did she?” he said. “Father, I must take these things back to the chapel before I go to my bed—if I have your permission?”
John considered this. He could feel that both Madeleine and William had firmly shut him out. Uneasy, he weighed up whether there would be any point in pursuing it further and decided he would probably make things worse. It would be better to trust them.
“Oh—yes, by all means take those bits,” he said. “If you can see, that is. It must be getting late by now.”
He opened the door to the cloister, and William went quietly on his way. Have I lost him? John prayed silently as he held the lantern and watched him gradually disappear into the shadows between the moonbeams. Have I lost one of the sheep you gave into my care?
Madeleine, in Ellen’s cottage, went about her tasks with patient care. She washed the old woman’s body and laid her out, weighting her eyelids and twining her feet in place, plugging every orifice, dressing her for burial, brushing her hair and composing her hands. She covered her with the top sheet of her bed, folding and setting aside the blankets. She snuffed out the candles but left the fire to die out by itself; soon enough the room under the roof would become cold, and she thought it as well to keep the cottage dry—it would not stay warm for very long.
She took the key from the hook and wrapped her cloak around her, locking up the cottage and returning to her own home next door. She had made up the fire before she left to see to her neighbour, and the downstairs room still felt comfortingly cozy.
She pushed off her clogs and took off her cloak, hanging it up on the nail near the chimney beam, where the warmth of the embers would air it, and took the key for safekeeping to the box she had for important documents and valuable possessions. As she lifted the lid, she remembered that it actually had something in it. All her own valuables, and the one precious letter she had treasured from her father, had been lost with the cottage at Motherwell; this box had remained empty for several weeks. But at the beginning of October, Mother Cottingham had given her a letter addressed to Abbot John. “This must not be given to him yet,” she had insisted, “he must not even know of it. But when I die, tha must put it into his hands with no delay.”
Madeleine touched it, wondering what it said. She laid the key to Mother Cottingham’s house upon it and closed up the box until the morning. Then she bolted the door to her house, used the poker to drag out the hot stone from the ashes, wrapped it in the linen towel she had ready, and took it upstairs to warm her bed. Fitfully, as the clouds scudded across the face of the moon, enough light came into the cottage that she could manage without a candle. She took off her dress and stood in her shift and woolen stockings, considering changing into her nightgown. It felt forbiddingly cold to her touch. So she took the soft shawl that William had procured for her when she left the Poor Clares and wrapped it around her, burrowing under the blankets. She curled around the cloth-wrapped stone that she kept near her belly as a talisman of comfort and hope and friendliness. Her feet stayed warm enough with her stockings still on.
She lay awake for some time, unmoving, aware of the moonlight through the window, the different influences of warmth and chill around her body. She saw again, vivid in her mind’s eye, William bending, gentle, over Mother Cottingham, the evidence of the bond of love that had grown between them so clear. She relived the washing and laying out of her friend. The smell of aromatic herbs that filled her own cottage recalled the fragrance she had achieved in the house next door, subduing any contagion, bringing peace and serenity to the hour of death. And like a series of portraits she saw William’s face… William coming swift to discover her need in the chapel… William listening intently to her trouble… William casting an appraising eye over the cottage as he came in through the door—and evidently approving… William, his expression serious and reverent, absolving her friend, by the power vested in him as a priest, from all earthly sin… William, his eyes lowered, his face set, disciplining himself not to look her way as he left the house. And he looked very thin, she thought, and not very well. She worried about that for a few minutes, but weariness overcame her then; it was late, the moon well advanced on her journey across the night sky, and Madeleine drifted off to sleep.
When the morning came, though she rose with first light to milk her goat and let the hens out of their little wooden house, she heard the Mass bell ringing almost before she had them fed and the goat tethered out on the border of greensward within the abbey walls. This privilege felt uncomfortable at times. It had struck other inhabitants of the close as a good idea, and they had petitioned the cellarer for permission to do the same.
“No.” William’s response had been unequivocal.
“But Mistress Hazell has a goat out there.”
“She does. But you may not.”
“‘Why can we not have goats there if Mistress Hazell does?”
“Because it is not within the terms of your corrody.”
They invariably argued, and always to no avail.
“No, no, and no. You are wasting your time on this, and mine. It is not permitted. Mistress Hazell’s situation is not the same as yours. She has one goat, she will never be allowed more than two at the most, and it is out of the question that goats should proliferate within the abbey walls. Absolutely not.”
“That man’s as hard as nails!” they muttered, but they bore neither Madeleine nor the abbey any ill will, only William. Madeleine was good to them and seemed to have a solution for every ailment; the abbey was a just and responsible landlord. But William, they agreed, had a heart as soft and yielding as black granite.
Madeleine couldn’t help smiling over this as she hurried to Mass, having ducked back into her cottage to snatch up the letter to give to John. It seemed so incongruous to juxtapose the face William turned to the world with the vulnerable, tender man who had stood in the darkness of her cottage and poured out his love.
She slipped into a place near the back, for they were reading the epistle already when she came into church.
After Mass she walked round to the abbot’s lodge, where Brother Tom answered her knock at the door.
“Wes hal, Madeleine—I’m sorry to hear of Mother Cotti
ngham. Father said her passing was peaceful, and you had cared for her as if she’d been a queen. I’ve to dig the grave for her this morning—in our burial ground, Father Abbot says, for we were her family really, and she never went to church anywhere else. He’ll be in very shortly if you care to wait here out of the cold—he’s only struggling out of his vestments; he’ll be along in just a moment.”
He had hardly finished speaking and she had barely entered the room when John came through the cloister door, and she gave him the letter. He broke the seal, asking her, “Is all well? You are not too cast down after yesterday? Oh—this is telling me I must inform her lawyer and giving me the address. Joseph Haydon. It means someone will have to go to York and let him know. She says we can find him in a yard off Goodramgate. Brother Ambrose or Father William, I suppose. Or Father Chad. He might do it. Did you know Mother Cottingham could read and write, Madeleine? There was more about her than I realized, I think. Thank you, sister—I’ll take this to the checker, and we can act on it at once.”
They went together, he to the checker and she beyond to the close. The grave would be ready by the afternoon, he said. They could bury Ellen after Mass the day following. He had spoken to Brother Michael after Chapter, and a winding sheet would be made ready and brought across to her during the afternoon. Someone would bring the bier round tomorrow, in the course of the morning. John wanted to know if she thought Ellen had died of old age alone—there had been no sign of plague or any contagion that might give cause for alarm? She reassured him, no; only the natural course of things had had their way. All was well.
Then as their ways parted, John stopped and looked her in the eye. “Sister, I hope you don’t feel I’ve been too harsh about you and William. It would never be my wish to hurt you.”
Madeleine hesitated. She had never expressed anything to her brother of her love and the hardship of separation. William had no opportunity to tell her of what he might have communicated to John. She was fearful lest this prove a trap—not that her brother would make it intentionally so, but she must be cautious in reply.
“William?” she said. “De Bulmer? How might you have been harsh?”
She knew her brother well; he did not take kindly to being deceived. He spoke evenly in reply, but she could tell he was displeased with her. “Yes, de Bulmer. Good day, sister. Brother Michael will come with that cloth for you later on. It’ll take Brother Thomas most of today to dig the grave. We can bury her tomorrow.”
They laid Mother Cottingham’s earthly remains to rest under a graceful beech tree, a little apart from the brothers’ graves in the burial ground. The night rain had cleared away, and the day turned out mild, except it was windy up there on the hill. Brother Ambrose and Father William attended her burial, and Brother Thomas who would stay behind to fill in the grave again. Brother Martin had come up from the porter’s lodge—Brother Richard had promised to watch the gate for him. Father Chad would have come, but he had set off directly after Chapter to York, taking word of her decease to Mother Cottingham’s lawyer. It occurred to Madeleine that Father Oswald would have stood beside her today, for he had spent time in her cottage often and had got to know Ellen better than most while he was there. His grave, still mounded and bare of grass, lay only a few yards away, near the lichened drystone wall that bounded the graveyard.
The abbot spoke the words of blessing, reciting the psalm and the Pater Noster and committing her soul to God as they lowered her into the earth. Observing from a discreet distance as Abbot John said the burial prayers, Madeleine watched William’s face, very pale against the black of his cowl. He shed no tears for this old woman; his expression remained impassive, but then neither did Madeleine weep—it was a timely and natural death. Even so, something in her felt profoundly sad. She would have given much to ask him what his heart held and what the still mask of his face hid, and what the friendship had been between himself and this ancient widow that brought such a radiance of love to her face in the hour of her passing as she bade him farewell.
Then the rite came to an end, and after a natural interval of silence, the brothers turned away from the grave. Brother Thomas waved to Madeleine and went to fetch his shovel from behind the tree.
Brother Martin and Brother Ambrose started down the hill together, their boots and the hems of their habits already sodden from the wet grass of the track.
John and William came across to where Madeleine stood. “Are you bearing up?” asked John kindly, and she nodded. Evidently he had forgiven her prevarication of yesterday.
She looked at William then, and as he met her gaze, she saw a whole sky in his eyes—not the harmless blue and white of this day, but his own sky: storm clouds and drizzling rain. What kind of man, she wondered, carries his own sky in his eyes?
“It’s been a year for burials,” he commented, his voice empty of emotion. “First your mother, then Oswald, now this.”
John, beside him, lifted a hand to his shoulder and held it there, comforting. “Yes. A great deal of sadness. Still, we clawed you back twice from the edge, my brother.”
“You did,” replied William quietly, “and for what?”
John squeezed and patted his shoulder. “Nay, don’t say that.” He cast about for something to add, along the lines of You’ve been a blessing to us or We wouldn’t be without you. But William knew well enough with what affection he was and was not regarded, and John knew it would ring false. The community understood its duty to a man, and would stand by him, but the privations of loss of income were beginning to bite. William was not popular.
“To be what Mother Cottingham said, maybe?” Madeleine said into the silence. “‘God’s gift of a son’? Your friendship laid a salve for her on many years of pain. It was not a little thing.”
William’s face twisted, and she saw then that he was hurting through and through.
“Everywhere I look, there is nothing but things dead and lost and broken and…”
He shook his head and lifted his arm up across his chest, gently closed his hand round John’s to remove it from his shoulder, and walked away from them, setting off back down the track.
“Skin and bone is that man,” remarked Madeleine. “What’s the matter with him?”
John looked at her, disconcerted. “Do you truly not know?”
“I think I’m asking you what you know,” she replied.
“I know he has lost his peace because he has walked in ways he was not called to,” John answered her.
She turned her face to let the wind blow her words away as she said, “Yes. But which way do you mean?” And she started down the hill. John followed her. He could see there would be no gain in pursuing this conversation. He had never expected the abbacy would make his life easy, but this was not the kind of impossible knot of difficulty he had been imagining.
“Madeleine—my sister,” he said as they reached the bottom of the track and the ground broadened out. “Please—I beg of you—don’t seek a quarrel with me. There is only so much I can do, and I don’t see how… it’s… I am caring for him the best ways I know. That’s all I can say. What would you have me do? Give him into your care?”
Like the clash of two wooden Saxon shields in battle, their eyes met.
“’Tis I could heal him,” she answered softly.
For a moment John looked down at the ground. “I am choosing not to hear that,” he replied then. “You are here as this abbey’s guest, and I am its abbot. It is my misfortune and my obedience. Before I am your brother, I am the abbot here. Before I am his friend, I am his abbot. I have to choose and decide in faithfulness to that. You will have to be content with knowing that with things as they are, you might not have been suffered to stay on. You have your welcome still, but tread carefully, for it cannot weather everything. ’Tis Christ can heal him; there is no other herb of grace to touch the heart’s true core.”
She nodded. “I can’t gainsay that. Well—God give you good day, Abbot John. But I have to say—the contentment
I am finding is as good as the peace I can see in you and the healing I can see in him. There should be a better way. There really should. Nay, it’s all right. You were seeking my confidence, I think; well, there, you’ve had a little of it, and it only made you chide me. I know my part. I shall not disgrace you.”
Help me, John murmured under his breath as he stood still and watched her walk away. Help me. Help all three of us. Find us a solution, my good Lord. I can stand firm, but this is driving pain in deep. Look into our hearts, of thy mercy, and help us find a way out of this quicksand we seem to have stumbled into. For Christ’s sake. Please.
The day did not improve. Brother Stephen looked glum at the midday meal, and inquiry discovered they had a cow with mastitis, and a fox had taken one of the geese in broad daylight. Brother Thomas seemed preoccupied with his thumb at None, and when John asked to look at it afterward, the swollen sullen purple alarmed him.
“You’ve got something in there. Go straight to Brother Michael for some drawing ointment and get it bandaged. I’m sorry—I’d not have let you handle graveyard dirt if I’d known you had that. No—it is not nothing, and I’ll warrant it’s hurting bad.”
When the bell rang for Compline and the day came down to night, John was glad to see the back of it. He prayed desperately that tomorrow would bring something better and that they could find some upward path out of this dreary sequence of disasters.
Through the next morning he prepared a talk for the novices about different kinds of prayer, as Theodore had asked him to do. John thought the young men would hardly be delighted to find that instead of a siesta, they had to come straight back from the frater to hear their abbot blundering through the steep places of a landscape he felt ashamed to pretend he knew. He recognized it must be done and picked up the texts he’d brought from the library to show them, when someone knocked at the door from the abbey court. He hesitated and decided he at least had the time to tell them to go away. Brother Martin stood on the step, wanting to tell him that Father Chad had returned, bringing the lawyer from York with him, and should they come straight over?
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