Remember Me (22 page)

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?

“No—that is—er … no.” John hesitated, but decided the novitiate had priority since the visitor would need in any case to stay overnight. “Refresh the man and make him welcome. I won't be all that long. I'll send word to the guesthouse as soon as I'm free. Ask Brother Ambrose to keep him company to give Father Chad a bit of a break.”

When the lawyer heard that the abbot was busy, he looked irritated. He had to make two calls in the village before his return to York.

“I have to see a woman named Madeleine Hazell as well,” he said. “She dwells in the cottage adjacent to Mistress Cottingham's, I understand? I know my way there. No, I need no sustenance, thank you. We stopped on the way.”

He walked briskly along the abbey close and found Madeleine at home, checking her supplies of herbs and tinctures for winter colds, much depleted by her care in recent weeks of her ailing neighbour.

She invited him in and offered him the comfort of her fireside, amused by his desiccated manner and the prim composure of his face. He looked, she thought, like a man who would regard human emotion as a pointless self-indulgence. He asked to sit at the table instead, where he unrolled and set out the deed and scripts and records he had brought her. She listened intently to what he had to tell her, accepted the documents as he handed each one into her keeping, and then made him go through it all again. Even then, she found it hard to take it in. She asked him a number of questions and was just satisfying herself that she had assimilated the news he had brought her when another knock came at her door: Brother Ambrose this time, telling her visitor that Father Abbot had returned to his house and would see him now.

Thomas Haydon got up from her table. “You understand all, Mistress Hazell? Those were the terms. My instructions were to impart this to you alone. You comprehend what I have told you? Write to me if you have any trouble, or I will be here until the morning, should you need more clarification. And you are alone? You have no husband? No son? No father? This is important.”

“There is only my brother,” Madeleine replied. “I have no other family.”

The lawyer waved this aside. “Your brother does not count. He is a monk. He cannot own property. Well then, good day!”

He dipped his head in a quick bow and turned to Brother Ambrose. “We must go via the guesthouse,” he said. “The documents I need for your abbot are all over there.”

Madeleine stood in the doorway watching them go. She saw them enter the guesthouse, then emerge again shortly after and walk across the court to the abbot's house. She waited until she had seen them admitted and satisfied herself the door was closing behind them. Then she set off along the close as fast as she could go, without drawing the attention of anyone who might notice her by breaking into a run.

She arrived breathless at the door of the checker and glanced back, thanking God with all her heart that nobody was on their way here and William, rising to his feet in surprise as he saw her in the doorway, was alone.

She went in and turned to close the door but changed her mind. It would be immodest indeed to be alone here with one of the brothers.

“Listen!” she said. “No! Listen! Don't touch me, don't kiss me, don't speak to me—just
listen
! I don't know how much time we have, and you must take this in.”

He had come forward to greet her, but perched on the edge of the table. “Go on then,” he said.

Hardly reaching her conscious mind, an arrow of gratitude whizzed through Madeleine's soul that she had found a man who could take a woman seriously enough not to bluster when she told him (imperiously) what to do.

“'Tis Ellen's will. She has left me riches. There is a house and eight pounds a year settled on me, but she has also left me a second sum in trust. From that sum I may take the interest only, until I marry, when it passes to my husband as an annuity. If I never marry, I can have the interest of it until I die, and then the capital sum goes here to the abbey. Do you see? Do you see what she's done? William, she has set us free! She has given us a house and an income, a way clear to be together!”

Breathless, excited, she stopped and tried to calm her breathing. William had his hand at his mouth, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as he considered what this meant.

“When will you go?” he asked. She saw with surprise that he weighed this news cautiously. The sunburst of eagerness and delight she had expected did not come.

“I don't know—straightaway—I don't know—what shall we do?”

“The thing is…” He hesitated, and she saw the struggle in his face. “I don't know if you have heard about this, because I told Mother Cottingham but I've not seen you to tell you, but I made a huge, huge blunder in the spring—with the money—and I have brought this house to the edge of complete downfall. I think I can turn things round again, but I'm certain no one else can. I don't really see how I can leave them now. In another year, possibly—not certainly, possibly. But not now.”

She stared at him in dismay. “You mean—she has done this, given us a hope and a future, and you
won't come
? Do you not—have you misgivings—have I mistaken you?”

He shook his head slowly, no, and she saw the hardship of it in his eyes, leaden now and drained of every joy. “You have not mistaken me. I have no misgivings. But I have been the worst kind of fool, and I just have to stay here until I've put it right. Will you… can I ask you… will you go ahead and wait for me, if I come as soon as I can?”

Madeline felt the amazement of hope and freedom starting to bleed away. Unbearable this, to have so near within her grasp the love she had yearned for, only to find it must be deferred by months and months and months.

“Oh you complete… dolt!” she exclaimed, glaring at him in absolute frustration.

He nodded. “Indeed. You have it right. That's what I am.”

Then as approaching footsteps sounded on the gravel of the abbey court, he slipped back onto the stool behind his desk, and she found herself looking down onto an upraised face saying to her with pleasant expression and neutral tone, “No, there is no question of it at all. Two goats at most, Father Abbot said, and yours only. It is entirely unfair that they should have sent you thus to speak on their behalf. It is a fruitless inquiry, and they already know the answer to their request. It is the same as when they asked me back in October. I have—oh, good day, Brother Ambrose, that took very little time.”

“Trouble about that goat of yours?” Ambrose smiled kindly at Madeleine. “Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but can it wait? This man from York insists he has to have you present, Father William, before he will go through with Father John what he needs to say. I can't think why.”

“I'll be getting along,” Madeleine said as she stepped back toward the doorway.

“Madeleine—I will do what I can. I will do my best.”

Brother Ambrose's cheery laugh split the air and made them both jump. “That's a promise to beware of, Mistress Hazell! This brother's best is sometimes more than meets the eye!”

Seeing his joke found no favour whatsoever with William and raised only a distracted smile from Mistress Hazell, Brother Ambrose felt embarrassed and guilty. Perhaps he had been unkind.

“Well, anon—they will be waiting,” he said more soberly, and they went to the abbot's house while Madeleine returned to her cottage, with nothing to hurry for now.

“Ah! Here he is! Good. Bring a stool to the table here, Father William,” said his abbot.

Down in the village at Motherwell, when John was a boy, there had been a man who was viciously cruel to his dog. He kept it for ratting. It had been kicked and sworn at, beaten and starved, until it lost the will for anything at all. Dull of eye and cowed in manner, it no longer cared about life. It was past biting or begging; it no longer chased interesting smells; it just lay outside its master's hovel in the cold with its face turned away from the world and toward the wall, completely defeated.