Angels in the Architecture (11 page)

‘Aye,’ slowly
, ‘you be tellin’ ’im then.’ Gamel was stern, staring the young man back to his mount.

Gerard Archer
thought better of showing the recognition he had of the despair across Gamel Warriner’s face. He made a barely audible acknowledgement towards Gamel and Alice and strode quickly to his horse, leapt on, and gee’d the animal away as fast as he’d come. A cloud of yellowy brown dust inflamed the air, dissipating slowly as the Warriners looked in the direction of Gerard’s trail.

Still
no Warriner moved; parents weighted as they were. And the boys there, noting that anchor, knew it was not theirs to make the first movement or word, excepting to look cautiously towards each other and then away. Alice likewise waited for her husband to speak. Thomas cocked his head to one side and back again, as if he too was waiting for someone to say something, but this was simply coincidence.

‘Dem!’ Gamel called around gruffly to his second eldest boy. The small explosion of his name put the boy on alert. ‘Go ‘n’ get yer brothers!’

Dem Warriner put aside the hoe he’d leant on the last few minutes and hurried away to the fields where he knew Gree and Thurston were repairing a stone wall shaken down in parts two days prior. Dem knew this injunction from the Friary implied some prospect of adventure, unheard of to him or his brothers, and he was scarcely able to control his eagerness as he bolted away.

When his eldest sons
returned, Gamel knew Dem would have told them of their ‘good fortune’ as they would no doubt view the arrangement. But he didn’t care for their adventure. He had shooed his younger boys away and stood just as he had when he’d listened a few minutes ago to the Friar’s young emissary.

‘Yer to go t’Lincoln, to cathedral, to work.’
He told in a loud and dismissive tone. ‘Friar’s bid ya’ go ‘n’ tha’s as it’ll be. So ya’ can gor now,’ looking round to challenge any alternative expectation, and seeing some of the elation subside. ‘Nothin’ for i’. You won’ be needin’ anythin’, so bes’ ya’ star’ out. So orf ya’ gor then.’ He didn’t so much look at his sons now as his eyes lit on parts of them and the air around them.

The boys stared
open-mouthed and unbelieving at their father, stupefied by this apparent urgency with which they were to take their leave of their family and their home. The news from Lincoln, of death and the Cathedral, had passed by them in their anticipation of an adventure, but now some more unrest returned with this abrupt announcement. They glanced to their mother who’d stood again, also manifestly taken unaware by the suddenness of her husband’s dismissal of three sons from their home, desperate to seize hold of them now, desperate to wonder aloud to her husband. She had no reason to fear him but still she would not challenge him. No righteous woman would.

‘Per’aps . .. .
,’ Gree braved, the excitement gone out of him. He was assuming he and his brothers would collect a few meagre things, some bread and water for their journey.

‘Ye’ll go now!’
boomed Gamel, the ground threatening to shake anew.

And with this different kind of
an earth-shattering announcement, time stopped for this one peasant family. It was not a comfortable moment in time, but oddly, it was the juncture of the Warriners’ greatest unity, and even concord. The anguish they felt – all except Thomas – at their powerlessness, at their parting, at the boundary-slicing necessity of their father’s temperament, inflated around each of them as a bubble, a blister of blackness, until each dark orb collided with the next and the family existed momentarily inside their own tiny, isolated planet of suffering. And with this, each one – father, mother, and sons – acknowledged what he owed the other, a sad litany of duty, loyalty, respect and love, and above all of unquestioned submission to providence. Momentarily they were whole, a unique and intimate grouping of humans who depended on each other. In that space, all the forces, pressures, potential and Energy of their lives, that pushed and pulled them, that dictated their direction, their orientation, and their bias, all these forces now dwelt momentarily and forcefully in the space they occupied together, and each of them felt its invisible density.

The material of them united with the emotional of them, and there was no gap between these, uniting all the forces of all the particles that moved their bodies and moved their spirits, creating a unity none understood.

As this act of Nature failed to be defined, so too were the Warriners’ unable to keep alive their meagre nexus. As the grief of their attachment threatened one simple man beyond his endurance, he turned his back to his sons, rupturing the unified darkness that held them. He walked to his wife and the idiot child and bid the woman gather him up and go inside, and then he followed her and whipped a sack curtain across behind them. Not a look. Not a reassurance. They were riven, as the split of an axe, as an army breached in two and destined for a certainty of death.

Shock wave upon shock wave settled on each boy’s being and registered on their faces, the more on
young Thurston, just fourteen and only recently allowed to take the Monday cart ride to Torksey’s market with his elder brothers. A moment ago the three had come running from the fields whooping and yelling, bounding walls and stiles, full of questions for their elder brother who’d once already voyaged to the massive walled port at Lincoln. That frenzy stuck in their throats now like a delirium, confused and knocked over.

Geoffrey put his hand to his younger brother’s shoulder and steered him away.

‘Bu’ we can’t, Gree. Iz madness. Wo’ ’bout Ma? We can’t gor without a kiss. Gree? Gree?’ he pleaded.

‘This is the way
’tis with him. We have t’go now. It’s what’s needed,’ pleading back at his brother, but commandingly.

Thurston’s tortured face beseeched his eldest brother even though he allowed himself to be tugged gently away to the road
.

How could they be going? How could they be going like
this
? How was it so?

Although Geoffrey
’s eyes were cast down to the ground, he kept his firm embrace about his young brother’s shoulders. What they had come to rely on was no longer. In its place was a new reliance, on himself and his authority and power to keep intact and unassailed this small company of youths. This new exigency seared into him and he knew that some position as this had been ordained and fixed in his birthright, and he assumed it now as a load, with all the obligation and guilt that implied. He no longer had a father or mother. He eschewed their place in the narrow vista of his world view, erasing them as if from a sketch.

‘C’
mon, Dem. There’s a long walk to take. There’s hope I s’pose we’ll sleep over friary tonight ‘n’ take to cathedral tomorra’.’

‘We’ve no water anythin’ to sup on
way, Gree.’ Dem’s fear and surprise was still apparent in his voice and face.

‘Nothin’ for
it, Dem, as to keep movin’ now. We’ll manage.’ He could see his brothers already finding purchase for their souls with their eldest brother’s reassurance.

‘D’ya think this is doin’ of dead
swan, Gree? Is anybody’d say t’were, all earth rumblin’s and what-no’. ‘S’got be some’t in i’, don’ ya think, Gree?’ ‘S’no’ roight we’re a-goin’ off loi’ this, is i’? ‘S loik i’s forever an’ no way art’iv i’. Whoi, Gree, whoi?’

But Gree
couldn’t explain to his brother, even if he’d had words to do it. He felt that some shadowy force unknown had crashed into their lives and turned things on their end. He had only one training in his life, only one way to respond, which was to go as directed and without query, because query anyway did not draw much breath in their world.

As the boys traipsed on
to the thin road, turning towards the town, Geoffrey took his arm from his brother’s shoulder and trod on, walking between his brothers, ready to place a reassuring arm about them again if there was need. It was for certain there would be.

Inside their small
house, Gamel Warriner had sat down in a large chair by his hearth and stayed there staring into the ashes. He had few choices with which he could assert control of his own life and had been forced to exercise one of those now, or so he thought best, to make clear quickly and definitively the way things were to be. If a direction and rule were to be set, then best he have a part in it and make it his own. That at least would secure him some place of certainty and strength in his own existence.

Alice
sat Thomas inside a padded wooden enclosure, away from his father. She’d had her husband and sons build this to keep Thomas in when she didn’t feel she could always watch him. He was happy here, as though the close walls of its surrounds gave him a particular warmth and security. Old cloth was knotted around wooden slats to prevent Thomas from harming himself when he came to bang his head repeatedly as he did some evenings. Was he tired at the end of the day to make him hurt himself, or was it the noise of so many that somehow provoked him? Alice didn’t know, but she wouldn’t have him bruised, nor would she tie him up to prevent it either, as some had told her she should.

She searched her small house, its divisions and its corners, for any menial task to which she could apply herself with force and dedication, if just to slow a pain capable of slicing her in pieces from overtaking her ability to act or speak, not least since to speak, to speak
up,
was not a right available to her. Spying a long brush, she began an earnest motion to and fro that may ultimately have promised to clear the floor clean away, and she remained at this activity till the dust and the day’s heat forced her back out to the air outside, where only a short time since her reality had been less dark than she found it now.

When laughter came from a small way away to her ears, a slim and tenuous ray of light briefly showed itself in her soul before fluttering away as if a mirage all along. But her three younger boys appearing –
Alard, David, and Michael – did though take her thoughts away from her eldest boys, all but dead to her as she knew they may soon be, as she meted out chores and left the telling of their brothers’ going from them for at least a while longer, till she could bear it even just slightly more.

It was in this way that she survived the loss now of eight children. For it wasn’t just the three boys just gone that anguished her want to live in joy, but the five infants long gone now redoubled their memories to her. And her living boys just departed all became babes again
, and Alice wondered where these many wee darlings had gone. The pain in her chest caused her to hunch her shoulders a little to cope, but she paid her heartbreak little mind since there was no point to do so and cause it to be an obstacle in an already harsh life. It was a large burden, but then burdens were God’s and life’s way. She would bear it; she was strong enough to do so, and not let their faces sneak into her mind’s eye or the memories of their laughter to her ears. If her heart broke ... well, it was her soul that mattered more. Without her thinking so much though, Alice’s being began to focus more upon her youngest child.

Her husband’s way was to rise up each day from the corner where he slept, work himself and his younger boys in the fields and garden
– herding, hoeing, mending, and building, till these younger boys too knew that their position was changed and they were now men.

Thomas though, unaffected by the storm that had blown through his family, held even less attention from his parents or brothers than usual. There was no reason to notice whether he had suffered or changed in any way following the tempest, and so, ergo, no
one did.

A little while
later, Thomas sat with his mother outside as she sewed and repaired some much-worn garments. Alice put her attention to her finger work to keep all else from her mind. Thomas picked up his stones and held them in his hands, feeling their roughness or smoothness in his palms. He wondered what they would like to do this day. He thought he would prefer to do as they wished. A most insistent but narrow beam of light, barely a whisper, reached out a cobweb-delicate tendril into Thomas’s tiny realm, and with this merest suggestion Thomas touched upon a message of hope. He recognised anew the reflection of another just like himself, and from this he understood how to become more like himself than he already was. It was like an equation of the light, multiplying itself to create a mirror image and then adding light upon light through different layers of being to create a new reality, which was always there anyway if one was able to see it, and Thomas was.

Alice looked down at her son on the ground by her feet and noticed that instead of his usual
straight-as-an-arrow line, Thomas had arranged a group of pebbles in a nose-to-nose perfect circle. For just a moment this struck Alice as something a little bit magical, and a new hope wafted briefly through her heart.

And what is happening in your small piece of heaven and earth, my son?

Thomas looked up at the reflection he’d noticed – his new friend – and blinked in the sunlight. They were playing a game now, he and the light, and each would try to be the first, but helping each other to be first also. Thomas was very pleased with the new game.

Is there more that you know, my love, than we would think? Perhaps there is more that you can be, for your father and brothers
.