The Breath of Peace (10 page)

Madeleine rolled onto her back, away from him. She wished she hadn't said anything. She wished she'd stayed asleep. ‘That sounds… I don't know what… chilling… miserable… It sounds like a world in which no one could possibly flourish or be happy.'

She could still feel the scary eyes watching her.

‘No. Well, I wasn't happy.'

She frowned.

‘But… have you never thought that it wasn't the scary world you'd fallen into that made you unhappy, but the scariness you brought to it that made it unhappy?'

He rolled back to lie flat beside her on the bed. The space between them was narrow, but it felt to him to be expanding like a tundra. He didn't speak for a while.

‘We need to take a broom to those cobwebs in the rafters,' he said then.

She made no reply. The silence widened further. Something she appreciated in William was his ability to bear silence – to let it question and challenge him, make him uncomfortable, examine him. Aware of him allowing the waves of silence to conduct their usual rigorous and merciless inquisition, she wondered briefly if her questions and observations were torturing him. ‘Am I bullying you?' she asked him, very simple and direct.

He sighed; not, she thought, in impatience or irritation, but just because whatever was happening was cutting very deep.

‘Just going into the middle of me with a ploughshare, I think. The pain's only incidental, not the point of it.'

‘Tell me, then: does my brother keep peace at St Alcuin's by scaring people?'

‘Yes. To some extent he does and he has to. But he is also loved, and with every good reason – which I was not, for equally good reason. He can be intimidating, and he knows it, and he doesn't hesitate over it. But there is nothing cruel in him, and there is a strong streak of cruelty in my nature. I am not a good man, Madeleine. I have hurt people in my life, and thought nothing of stepping on them for my own ends with no regard at all for what it did to them. Perhaps that's what you can see in my scary eyes.'

‘Ah! No!' His honesty moved her, and she admired the courage it took to admit his own shortcomings as frankly as he always did. She lifted herself up to lean on her elbow, looking down at his face, bringing her hand to trace his features, her fingers exploring the ridges and hollows. ‘Your eyes are scary because they are light and changeable. It's hard to say what colour they are – green, grey, blue? Who can say? Like the sea, like the sky above the moor when the light is changing. It's almost impossible to know what you're thinking. But at the same time, they aren't vague. Your gaze is as focused as a hunting animal, like a fox or a cat creeping up on its prey. I should think anyone that gaze fell on knew a sudden urge to run.'

He turned his head towards her, and his eyes met hers.
That's what I meant
, she thought,
light and shadow like a storm sky gathering over the hills – what am I seeing? Have I hurt you? Are you angry? Are you sad?

‘Run?' he said. ‘Do you want to run from me?'

He brought both hands up to his face suddenly then, pressing his fingers to his temples. ‘Oh, for the sake of all that is holy, Madeleine! I have known enough of fear and destruction. Can you not try to understand me? Or if not that, at least accept me as I am… whatever that is…'

He let the heels of his hands sink down to cover his eyes, and kept them there.

‘There's work to be done,' he said, his voice dull. ‘It's well past daybreak, for all it looks so dark out there this morning. Those poor beasts will be wondering where we are.'

He took his hands from his face and swung up and round to sitting on the edge of the bed in one movement.

‘Hey! Wait!' Madeleine scrabbled across the tumbled blankets after him. She knelt behind him on the bed, her arms enfolding him, her hair tumbling soft round his shoulders and his breast.

‘You don't make
me
want to run!' she reassured him. ‘
I'm
not afraid of you.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No, I can tell. It's of no great moment, my sweet.' He put his hands up to her encircling arms. ‘Let me go, then, my love – let's get everything here fettled up and in good order, then mayhap you can take off for the abbey sometime in the next few days, if today's dark clouds come to nothing and the weather stays passably fair.'

He twisted round and kissed her lightly, with the kind of smile that is a gift of love rather than spontaneously arising.

‘William,' she said in a small voice, kneeling on the bed still in her shift, watching him as he pulled on his clothes, ‘you're not angry with me, are you?'

He shook his head. ‘I am not. I've slept badly and spent most of the hours of darkness dodging nightmares. It does me no good to talk of my childhood as we did last night. Those demons are best left in the bowels of hell where they belong. And I'm concerned that once again the sun is well risen with the fire not lit and the oatmeal not soaked, and nothing attended to outside. I'm turning into a sluggard and a lie-abed, and I feel guilty about it. But I'm not angry, not with anyone – and most certainly not with you.'

He reached across and rumpled her hair with a quick smile, and then he was gone.

Chapter
Three

Abbot John looked up at the rooks startling into cawing flight from the bare branches of tall trees encircling the burial ground. It occurred to him that the rooks might be watching the brothers too. Same view. A community in black braving the weather.

The clouds massed forbiddingly today, and the wind bit cold.

‘Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace.
'

The monks gathered round the grave responded, ‘Amen.'

‘Anima ejus, et animæ omnium fidelium defunctorum, per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace
.'

‘Amen.'

And so they laid Brother Ambrose in the ground, facing east to await the coming of his Lord on the Last Day. It had taken Brother Thomas all of yesterday plus some of the afternoon before to dig the grave, for the earth soaked from rain and snow this hard winter had frozen solid. He'd had to take a pickaxe as well as a shovel. Filling in the grave looked like no task for the faint-hearted, either. Everything was damp all day and nobody could think straight. It felt too cold to pray, too cold to work. The men in the scriptorium and the robing room found their fingers too clumsy for precision. Theodore had the fire banked high in the novitiate after he found one of his novices huddled in his cell weeping with cold, in the semi-dark that prevailed even at midday.

All day long the wind blew off the moor from the north-east, bitter cold. It smote against the brow like a blow and nibbled painfully round the edges of unprotected ears. Anyone breathing through an open mouth, the wind slid straight in like a knife into the throat. Huddled birds crouched pitifully among the bare twigs of shrubs and low trees, waiting for Brother Cormac to throw them bread because the ground was frozen, the seeds and berries all gone from the bushes now.

The abbot gave orders for fires to be kept alight everywhere, and for the men to break their fast with porridge every day, not just bread and water.

‘Look out, abbot's on the prowl,' Brother Cedd warned Colin, one of the two new postulants. ‘You'll bring trouble on your head if he sees you handling wood without mittens.'

The words had barely left his mouth and Colin was still in the act of straightening up stiffly from bending over the frame he was filling with logs for the infirmary, when Abbot John came round the corner of the wood yard, and stopped, his attention caught.

‘Brother, what are you doing? Show me your hands. Look at that, will you? Blotched purple and orange and white – it's too cold. You'll be getting chilblains. That's how they come – when you get your hands and your feet too cold, and then you go back inside – likely as not into the warming room to hold your fingers to the fire because they hurt so from the cold. The sudden alteration is too much. You must take care of your hands. Go back inside and get some mittens. Yes – now! I don't want to see you –
any
of you – working out in this weather with bare hands. Brother Cedd, you should have reminded him. It is a neglect of charity to let him put his health at risk like that. You should be ashamed of yourself.'

He spoke with more severity than he normally would, because he felt anxious and guilty. This was not a good time for his cellarer to die. The extra fires, the extra food – he needed advice to reassure him of the boundaries between necessary charity, advisable leniency, and extravagance that must stop. And a visitation from the new bishop looming later in the spring. He cursed himself that Brother Ambrose's death had caught him on the hop like this. He acknowledged the truth of it was that William had left everything in such good order that, with the bequests from old Mother Cottingham's will just over a year ago, he had felt the constant nagging concern over their financial state lift, and relaxed too much. He knew Brother Ambrose was very old, knew he had to find another cellarer – but none of the men seemed just right for the work, and the easing of the situation allowed him to believe everything could roll along for another year or two. Just as soon as he'd caught up with the pastoral needs of vocational oversight, and improved his skills in the area of biblical exposition, and got to grips with the complexities of the abbey's role as a landlord, and paid some heed to whatever was happening in the school, he could turn his attention again to the task of replacing his cellarer.

And then Brother Ambrose had died; a sudden, quiet, unexceptional death. The old man had slipped out of this world in his sleep, his face peaceful and innocent in repose, wearing his stockings and a shawl tucked around him because the night was cold. When they called him, Abbot John had taken a moment to look with reverence on holy death and commend his brother's soul to God in prayer, twenty minutes to organize the laying out and removal of his body and the thorough cleaning of his cell, and then made himself look steadily at the dilemma he had created in not acting more timely, not finding someone to learn the work while the system ran smoothly and there remained an obedientiary alive to pass on what a cellarer needed to know.

The worst of it was that it made him face up to a further problem he had been avoiding: in Father Chad he had the most awful prior. An abbot needed at his right hand a man of authority and effectiveness, someone with enough confidence in his own judgment to allow humility and decisiveness to co-exist comfortably in his personality. A prior had to be like a rock. There must be no shifting ground in his soul. He must be shrewd, capable, unflappable, likeable, thick-skinned, and have his hand on the pulse of the abbey's life. With a really good prior, the unexpected demise of the cellarer would be an inconvenience but not a disaster. With an insecure ditherer holding the obedience, they had a problem as big as all three ridings of Yorkshire. John felt ashamed and embarrassed that this was compounded by his own unworldliness. He was no aristocrat. He had not been born to ruling men and managing wealth and administering great swathes of farmland and governing the decision-making processes that would affect the lives of scores of tenants in addition to the sons of his house and the various other inhabitants of the abbey's demesne.

Even so, out in the woodyard his conscience pained him like a bit of gravel stuck to the sole of his foot. He shouldn't have spoken to a postulant with such asperity. The young man had looked more frightened than chastened. Abbot John turned back, and followed the mittenless miscreant all the way to the novitiate.

‘I'm sorry, Colin,' he said humbly when he caught up with him. ‘I didn't mean to speak so sharp. I had something on my mind – felt a bit burdened. But I shouldn't have taken it out on you. You must protect your hands though, in this cold, or they will be damaged – and that's pure misery. That's all I meant.'

And having attended to that, he returned to his own lodging, recognizing that the extent of their predicament was exposed by the fact that he knew he would seek Brother Thomas's advice, simply because from Tom he would hear better sense than he could expect from Father Chad.

‘Tom, I don't know what to do,' he admitted. ‘The bishop will be here digging into every nook and cranny if all I've heard of him is true. It's imperative we have everything in order. Brother Ambrose was old. I've had a year to prepare myself, and done nothing. I have to confess, I think I may not have the stature of spirit for what I've taken on in this obedience.'

‘Nay, neither you nor any man!' Tom responded stoutly. ‘That's why we pray. There will be a solution. In this case, if the rumours I've heard are true, it probably lives ten miles to the south-west.'

John stared at him, taken aback. ‘You… you think I should seek the help of William de Bulmer? I must admit, it had crossed my mind, but…'

Tom watched his abbot wrestling with his uncertainties as to the propriety of this possibility. ‘Look,' he said, ‘all you have to do is call on him and ask his advice. If you judge it right to let him loose here again, well you'd stand within your rights to do so; but meanwhile you can slip out quiet-like and just see if he has any helpful guidance to offer, can you not? He may have flown the coop and made his roost in the wilderness, but he's got his head screwed on even if his wings weren't clipped. If you see what I mean.'

‘Er… yes, I think so… Well, I'll consider it.'

Abbot John tried without success to attend to other matters awaiting his attention, but his mind was riveted onto this central dilemma of having no cellarer. At this precise minute it posed no grave problem, but once the spring came all that would change. It would be unthinkable to have nobody holding that obedience when the Easter triduum faced them with its influx of guests and pilgrims, and impossible to manage the wave of administration around Lady Day when all the rents were due in. Happily Easter fell late this year, which bought them a little time, though it meant the new bishop's visit would be on them before they had time to catch their breath after the pilgrims had departed. Lent did not begin until the second week of March, and they had not yet seen out January. Ideally he needed to see a new man in place by Candlemas; but it would be unfair – and unrealistic – to expect anybody, however capable, to get a handle on so complex an obedience very quickly, even if he'd had someone primed to step up to the appointment tomorrow. They needed every flying minute of the time they had to get this space filled.