‘And then?’ Adam said at last, in a voice which sounded to himself as louring as the brow of Bardon Hill to the north. ‘Would
you dissolve the marriage, then? The succession—’
‘Nay, that I’ll not – did I say that? The succession’s a bauble against such a diamond as my lady, most gentle Adam for that,
as for much else, I’m in thine eternal debt. But who’s to have it? Not Salisbury surely, and there’s no earl of Chester now.
Best to defer to Cornwall, as is meet for a brother-in-law.’
‘But how? Richard too is childless.’
‘Ah,’ Simon said, smiling, ‘there’s an art to deference, most gentle Adam; I’ve explored the matter. Richard’s the brand ready
to be cast, that much is plain. Yet consider: Should he set England aflame like the earl-Marshal before him, it must be against
the King his brother; and will some child of Richard’s be king of England thereafter, cant thou conceive? Nay, not from this
present quarrel, unless I’m fond altogether; the barons need the mob, and the mob’s not so easily to be embroiled in more
wars of succession, not so soon after King John, howsoe’er it mutter and mowe.’
‘I defer to thee,’ Adam said. ‘Lately I am affrighted by the ignorance from which I meddled. But doth Cornwall see tomorrow
as thou dost?’
‘I’m prepared to prove that question,’ Simon said, not smiling now. ‘I’ve sent him a letter, saying I will retire from the
royal council. This will suffice, I am sure.’
‘But shall hardly morsel the King, Simon; it is as good as admission of wrong on his part, to have sponsored the marriage.’
Simon shrugged. ‘I’ll please the King again in some other season, so only it shall go on raining rain in this one, and not
blood. Let’s put it to the test, and make of Henry a second question, once he sees his realm subside. He’ll love me less shall
I pit him against his barons with his own brother bearing their pennons.’
He paused and lowered his head until his long, hatchet-like face seemed about to split Adam’s skull with the intensity of
its closeness.
‘My countess asks for thee, most Christian Adam,’ he said. ‘And thou hast absented thyself from me as well no little while.
Bethink thee, while I repair my temporal faults, of those absolutions I’ll have need of ere all this be ended; for I’ll best
be my own governor forenenst Richard Cornwall, but thou’rt my minister afore God to reckon it all up; otherwise I am done.
With thine help I shall be God’s instrument, Adam. I trust thee for this, wherein I am all otherways helpless; be not removed,
I beg of thee.’
Thus capped and shod with lead, Adam Marsh stumbled like an old man back to Oxford, and prematurely to his confession before
Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln; and got therefrom his early reward.
‘These are sins grievous and multiple, yet am I confounded to condemn thee,’ Grosseteste said in a heavy voice. ‘I foresee
many such I shall commit, and wonder what penances to give for sins I know to be grave, yet might enlist the princes of the
earth in the army of God. These are the sins of prelates who serve princes, as thou and I must do, Adam; let us not be bewildered,
but act as we are counselled to do in 1st Corinthians:
Let no temptation take hold on you, but such as is human.’
‘A text without a gloss,’ Adam whispered. ‘Art not all human – or all demoniacal?’
‘Adam,’ Grosseteste said, ‘despair thou not of God, which is verily a demoniacal temptation; or thou shall tempt me too, and
I am as vulnerable as thou. We know well enough what “human temptation” is. It is when one sees no escape from danger by man’s
help, and so suffers it humbly for God’s sake, confiding in His help. Only thus could we trust ourselves to serve the princes
of this world – even such as Henry, or Simon.’
‘Then is Simon so great a sinner? His heart is large, Capito, if I am any judge of men, and certes he means to serve God in
every way a prince can. Nor loves England any the less, ne more than do thou and I. How shall I absolve him of sins lesser
than mine – or thine, as thou wouldst have it?’
There was no answer for a long time. Grosseteste leaned his head into his head, so that his eyes were covered; but Adam could
see the corners of his mouth turning down and his lips firming, gently, but implacably. At last the bishop said:
‘Simon’s marriage is an abomination to the Church as well, Adam. I though thou knew’st this, else why didst seek absolution
for thyself, not first for him? Because in the matter of his wife, thine eye offended thee? In plucking out thine eye, thou
hast fostered mortal sin among thy parishioners; it is not thus that we are instructed to cure souls.’
Stunned, Adam shook his head. His hope of being unburdened in this confession had never been great enough to help him toward
it, but this blow was from the only quarter whence succor might have come. ‘Dear Christ forgive me; I did not know. Tell me,
where doth the fault lie?’
‘In thee, Adam; it was to this that I thought thee confessing, until now. Thou shouldst ken full as well as I that Eleanor
vowed a chaste widowhood on the death of William Marshal—’
‘Capito, Capito, dost think so little of thy student?’ Adam cried in anguish. ‘That’s a very commonplace;
couldst believe I’d ignore it? Eleanor herself hath assured me that there was no such vow, long ere I broached to her the
first whisper of my brokerage.
‘Women see the truth in strange lights when marriage is in question,’ Grosseteste said with a heavy frown,’ ‘and stranger
still if the marriage be of great advantage. Hast no better warrant that no vow exists?’
‘Nay, and ne more requireth I,’ Adam retorted. The lady hath been my penitent these many years, and I say she hath it not
in her to speak untruth to very strangers, namoe to kinrede.’
‘Let be; thy lauds become thee, Adam, but suffice not for the hour nor th’offence. Well, I must ponder this; let’s to lighter
business for the nonce. It was misfortunate that I could ne attend the ceremonies of thy brother’s degree, most gentle Adam;
but ordain him priest was I able, and have done, as thou asked me; I see he’s told thee that. For now, I propose him to be
of my
familias
under canon Robert of Cadney, who hath resigned his deaconry at Kelstern in suit for the rectory of Heckington, to which
he’ll sure be instituted be he not superseded. Be this stile o’er-passed, I’ve in mind to make Cadney precentor of Lincoln
in due course; doth this make a suitable tutor for thy brother, think you?’
‘That is most generously done,’ Adam said. ‘As always, thou givest with both hands, Capito. I am more than abashed, and pray
thee use my brother henceforth on his merits, not as my kinsman.’
‘Assure thyself, ne more have done algates. Now, as for Simon: Meseemeth this a matter for Rome, he being beyond my dispensation
as the husband of a sister of the King; nought can serve here but papal absolution, and sanction of the marriage.’
‘Which he will but purchase, as thou knowest,’ Adam said hoarsely, breathing again the fumes of the pit reopening at his feet,
‘and it be worthless thereafter at Rome’s whim.’
‘Nothing is more likely,’ Grosseteste agreed, but his voice was gentle, almost serene. ‘Yet there is but one Holy Father,
most gentle Adam, and he is Gregory until God wills it
otherwise. The corruption of the Lateran is a stench even in our northern nostrils; yet it is from thence that Simon’s absolution
must come. Naught else is possible, but that we must eat of the dish that is set before us, or starve. And this be thy special
penance, Adam: That thou shalt bear this rede to Simon thyself, in thy proper person.’
Adam swallowed. It was an irregular penance, reflecting Grosseteste’s odd notion that atonements for sins ought also to do,
when possible, some positive good; the bishop was famous for them. For an instant Adam was moved to protest that such an errand
was in itself an occasion for sin in the present matter, but the words stuck in his throat, for-why he had failed even now
to confess the root sin; that word he had been unable to utter even to himself, as though the very sound in the inner ear
would crack all dams. Nothing would do now but that he help himself, wearing such armour as he could scavenge from the waste
countryside of his own soul.
‘That me regards,’ he said. ‘But I will bear it.’
Though it was not the errand itself that Adam feared, but rather its certain consequences; which indeed followed with the
implacable logic of evil, whose arrangement of events is without those catastrophic breaks with the past which, because they
are unpredictable, men called Providence. In brief, Simon acquiesced to the pilgrimage on which he was bidden, as aforetime
in draughty Beaumont he had indeed said he would do at the first necessity. He was embarked for Rome within the fortnight.
Thus when Adam found himself for the third time that year riding under Bardon Hill, it was with Eleanor and her retinue –
and Simon in Italy. It had been from the need of any further such encounter that Adam had been seeking all along to withdraw,
a fact which, he suspected, with wretchedness, she had smelled out at long last. In consequence their conversation was very
strange.
Simon characteristically had left almost all his knights at home, and they saw no reason to let autumn wither in neglect of
the hunting; the undulating tablelands of the
Montfort holdings were particularly rich at this season in stag and other game. Priests and women being wholly unwelcome even
as spectators at such work, Eleanor and Adam were left to ride the more open aisles of Charnwood forest near the lodge, with
no company but that of her ladies.
She rode looking straight forward, her eyes calm and contemplative, her profile in an exquisite balance of awareness and repose
upon which Adam could hardly bear to look. Off, there were sometimes the calls and cracklings of the hunting, but they were
muffled and carried no meaning here. The day, too, was curiously muffled; for though the sun was brilliant, in the tall Charnwood
aisles there was a diurnal dusk, paved with flickering many-pointed little suns like a spatter of golden tears.
Their confession was already over. It had been brief, for Adam had aforetime given Eleanor his last word of secular counsel
in the confessional – and this impasse was what it had come to. As for Eleanor, such sins as she had to offer were never very
deadly, beyond perhaps a touch of pride too pathetically close to trust in the goodness of others to be censurable by anyone.
He had tried to fatten somewhat the unusual brevity of this confession with a special pleading, secular enough in intent to
be sure, but bearing closely enough upon the cure of souls to pass over the sharpening edge of his scruples; but to this Eleanor
had responded so little that he found himself unable to press it further.
And now there was the rest of the day to pass, for Adam could not leave for Oxford until the next noon, when some of the knights
would again be available to convey him,
as
Simon had ordered. He would have been glad enough to leave all by himself, but Simon would hear of it and Simon’s household
would suffer; in such matters the new earl, like the old, was cold to anything but instant literal obedience.
‘Tell me of thy brother, Father Marsh,’ Eleanor said after a while. ‘Is he as gentle as thou art?’
‘That I hardly know how to answer, my lady. I’ll bring him thee, an thou’lt have it so, and thou canst examine him at pleasure.
Is a scholar of parts, so I think, and firm in piety.
Yet ’tis but a young man; I’ll not abuse thee with o’ermuch praise of what’s unproven.’
‘Doth he favour thee?’
‘Why, perhaps. None could deny us our father. Other-ways the resemblance is not strong, I am persuaded – though the Bishop
doth insist it is uncommon close for brothers with so many years between ’em. Again, be thou the judge; for I’m of such a
mind as fails to recognize its very image, more than not.’
‘So do I mine,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’d not have it that there could be another such as I, nay not even in a glass. I think verily
I’d not seek God Himself, did I believe his to be mine own image and likenesse, as is written; but I am wicked, I think that
impossible entire, and that is my small salvation.’
‘Certes – He is not the image; we are. That “wickedness” is but the glass between, which shows the left hand where the right
should be—’
‘I know these significations,’ Eleanor said. ‘Give me leave, Father, to be weary of them today. ’Twas I spoke of them first,
but I was ambling. Thou shalt instruct me in them later, let me pray thee.’
Adam bowed his head. ‘Command me.’
‘Tell me then of Robert of Cadney.’
Now he could see where she was going: she had reversed him, and brought his last plea out of the confessional into the dappled
secular day.
‘Forgive me, my lady, but I do not know that priest. I’ve told thee all I know, which I have from the Bishop; all else is
hearesay.’
As she made to speak, there was a faraway shouting, and then just ahead something started up of a sudden, thrashing in the
underbrush. Their horses balked, almost together, and peered about with bulging eyes, tossing their heads as if hoping to
feel the reins go lax enough for a bolt. Adam pulled to, sharing their caution; were it a boar, there might be danger.
But it was only a sheep – a squat, short-legged ram of that immemorial race peculiar to dark Charnwood forest, which
had probably stared up at the first Roman invaders of its aisles with this same expression of idiocy, blank, furious and sinister.
For a moment it stood with its legs spread out, like a mismade four-legged stool; then it spun, with astonishing swiftness
for so clumsy-looking a beast, and disappeared with a scrambling bound.
‘Belike he thought us alnagers, come to collect the wool-tax,’ Eleanor said.
‘Smalwe thought in that skull, I ween,’ Adam said. Something in the animal’s face had shaken him, though he could not say
what it was: as though all his life he had been reading in a
roman,
and closing the book, had looked up into the eyes of a headsman. ‘Yet I’m persuaded we should turn back, my lady.’ Tis clear
we’re verging on the marches of the hunt, and our next visitant may be not so benign – or so timid.’