Angels in the Architecture (2 page)

My heart is
open Lord. Thy will be done.

Alice lingered, closed her eyes,
and took in the night noises: an owl calling its night sound, a tiny scurry-scurry of rats, trees shushing themselves, a horse snorting, and snoring from a boy or man – each one a silvery mass of light and each a mystery of God’s unseen grace.

Nearby
, several already dried ferret pelts lay nailed to crude boards, leant up against a low stone wall surrounding. They would be taken to market tomorrow, along with a small excess of turnips and hay. There they’d be traded, or the meagre earnings would be used for the purchase of some ground wheat and a small weight of rye – the small dealings of small landholders that could make a family’s table more or less redolent for the week. The business was undertaken with due seriousness by all transactors, bargaining almost to the last grain, with generally none feeling wronged or cheated, for there was rarely such intent. And it was an adventure and learning for youngsters to see the village business and its ways, and observe their fathers’ doings. It was most sons who were in awe of their fathers, all solid men of fighting and moral substance that did what they did as they’d learnt from their own fathers.

Alice breathed deeply and felt the air cool her forehead, around her nose as the breath passed the space above her mouth, her eyelids,
and her open eyes.

She turned to a pile of logs by the door. Selecting two sizeable blocks, she tucked them into an arm, stepping back inside. The musty warmth stayed in. The fire was low in the hearth now
, but she knew the logs would take, and her family would stay warm through the coolest hours of the night, although the early morning would bite at them.

Lord protect us.

The air inside was thick with smells of cooking, of animals, mud, sweat, and smoke. The colours of Alice’s life were all around her: grey, black, dirty yellow, brown, and blood-red on filthy cotton. Alice wasn’t even sure what was colour and what was smell – grass stains on worn leather, wrinkled and old, always old, old before you want to be, and old as everything here was old. Even the newborn seemed old, which is to say if they lived at all.

Alice had lost five. The first came dead and too soon. Two might as well have
, for they lasted one an hour, one a day. A little girl passed in the winter, a tiny sweet thing. And Thomas’s twin, a strong boy, as chattering as Thomas was dumb, his leg crushed beneath a cartwheel and unfathomable, unjust pain and fever overtook him after a week. His little eyes wept and screamed and stopped shining back the sun. But no one who saw him or heard him in those days really remembered him anymore, except his mother, and Thomas who was curled up now with his brother’s tunic. And these were Alice’s babes with the Lord’s Mother. But seven lived, and Thomas, he was the seventh, and a nine-year-old baby. Alice prayed for all their souls, because she knew she must. She felt certain that Thomas at least received some blessing and special care from Heaven.

Alice was
sure Thomas saw things as she did, although he could not say so. She saw him look at nothing; although Alice may see a swirl of energy in his sight sometimes, it seemed often to tease him and be playful. Alice knew this was the existence of Angels, as surely as she knew the existence of her own sons. There was a mystery to this that she couldn’t put words to, because she had no such education, but she had more than a sense of it. Alice knew that her Thomas and others such as him were as invisible to most ordinary people as the Angels were, but she did not blame them for that.

Alice kissed her boys and lowered herself to the mat by her husband, cradling
her Thomas, his mouth open a little, catching the stifled air. How was it that these great boys, almost men, looked so sweet and young when they slept, and there was Thomas who looked almost an infant? Alice thought it must be such that their mothers will keep to loving and protecting them, as their sleepy sweetness sang straight to a mother’s heart and pulled on its fibre.

Thomas nuzzled into his mother’s shoulder and hair
.

Thy will be
done, Lord.

Alice held her son close and slept.

The sound of running water turned Thomas around, smiling and giddy with joy. Light bounced around and ricocheted between objects; it was both still and moving, and alive and inanimate, all at the same time.

Water had the most special light. It
told Thomas stories that delighted and excited him. The stories made him jig and shake about, smiling, laughing, and singing in his way. They were full of silliness, caught him up and made him part of their telling. He didn’t know the light told him more than just stories. He knew only to be joyful from it, and that dancing was a response that also spoke of respect and love for the light.

Don’t
run, Thomas. Go calmly. Listen.

The light on the water bounced up
to Thomas’s face and spoke to him directly. This happened often, and Thomas struggled sometimes to hear, to listen, and to take heed, although he knew he was being compelled to do just that. It was finding what response to give; to come to this was a struggle for his brain such were the obstacles of his senses, so he kept on dancing and spinning and laughing.

‘Thomas, ya’ git, sturp ya’ drubble ya’ weed!’

There was laughter amid heavy work. Things were being lifted to the cart for taking to the village; sacks, baskets, wooden this-and-that, some pots of food, pelts, some wool, and a few vegetables were stacked to keep stable along a potholed journey; every item precious and worth food and strength for its owners. Nothing could be lost or broken, or else some boy would pay and none wanted such, nor to go hungry either.

Thump. And again Thomas felt the pain, but only fleetingly. These blows came often to him
, but he didn’t know that pain could last and so it didn’t. There was no sense of wrong, just less that was right.

You’re happy
today, Thomas. We’ll start soon. Are you ready?

Thomas smiled at the words and the something of a sound behind them. He liked these voices more than any other.

‘Wha’ ya’ starin’ at ya’, moron? Look at ’im, Gree, look a’ the empty-headed stink. Wozee grinnin’ a’?’

‘Aye, the turd. Ger’
out, Thom, yer sprayin’ water all over. Ya’ lame pigeon. Ger’ off!’

‘
Ay, Thomas, look over ’ere, look over ’ere!’

Splot
! Mud and tunic meet. Wet and sticky neck! Laughter! Others’ laughter.

But Thomas
laughed with them. He liked the laughter as long as it wasn’t too loud. He sensed when the laughing was callous and when it was just the usual roughness of his brothers.

Thomas hasn’t heard the message yet. It’s difficult to find a way to both his soul and his mind at the same time. They don’t connect.

He will find some Faith along the way. We’ll continue until we’re understood. There are few who can achieve what he can, if he tries.

Thomas felt lights glowing above and around him. It came often now. He liked the lights coming
, and he had learnt how to glide with them. They rested on the air. They moved and they stayed still. If you tried to look at one, it wasn’t there. You could catch it only if you moved with it, as if the only way to catch a fish was to swim with it through the water, which is to say it could not be caught at all. You could just
be
with it for a time, thinking you’d caught it but then having to let it go, unless you wished to drown and lose every sense of the world and that was a frightening thing to do and only for the very skilled. Thomas nestled in its safety and knew the lights were his and that he was one of them. He smiled at the light. The light smiled back, so he smiled even more. He forgot the heavy part of him that had ground to walk on, and unlovely noises to hear, and hard blows on the walls of his Self. But still those things tore at him often, tore him away from the light. And when he couldn’t always keep with the light, he felt this tearing as a real pain, a pain that lasted as a bitter parting.

Perhaps today he will learn something. A connection.

The sun had long risen in the Warriners’ tiny hamlet, and farmers, the Warriners included, were readying their tradable goods to take to town. The elder Warriner boys were loading their family’s cart for the market.

There had already been several hours of work and activity, as there would have been in all the peasant households.
The Warriners were lucky to have so many sons to tend their land; it gave them time to create some other industry, such as the pelts they dried, some furniture made to be sold or traded, walls mended for themselves, and others. But then it also gave them more hungry mouths to feed. Mostly the boys would have said they were hungry most of the time, mostly their whole lives. It was a long-reaching memory of their childhood and youth.

‘Get tha’ mute on the
cart, Dem.’

‘God what’s he lookin’ at, idjit. Some pretty picture in eez noggin, eh.’

‘Mus’ be ’e’s dreamin’ of tha’ Elspeth Draper showin’ ’im ’er ankle in the back pew, loik she did you, Dem.’

Laughter
! Elbows! Thumping!

‘Ow, ya
,’

‘Tha’s enough! Ger’ away ta
ye Ma, ya pickle!’ The biggest voice.

Laughter again.

‘Yay, ye pickle!’ Teasing.

Some boys jumped on
to the cart and some jumped off. Each knew where it was supposed to be.

‘Pickle, pickle,
pic-kle,’ singing.

‘Hyup!’ A whip and a horse gee’d up.

The cart’s wheels winced and groaned and the bodies aboard it jostled, their sweaty stink wafting; the day was hot early. Thomas grinned at the faces left behind on the dirt road – Alard and David and Michael, their names – but they didn’t hold much light, and he looked away. Thomas knew these hulking moving beasts sitting about him. They didn’t move with the light like he did, but they were like a row of simple houses neighboured together, and knowing them was some sort of protection, even if neighbourliness was not a much known about thing among them..

Light flowed through the corridors, gateways
, and river beds of his body. His body became not a body at all but a part of the bodies next to him and a part of their smells. He became the air that he breathed in through his own nostrils, and he was the spark and the crack of the whip, and the flow of it all was warm. The light rewarded his stream of happiness and sent more light, and then he could easily melt completely – first into the space between the planks of the cart and then even into the wood itself and the hard metal nail. And he understood from this the nail’s task, and that it had to stay together with the wood. Some part of Thomas knew this is the way things were, that things had a reason. And then he flew way over the cart and was high, high above it, but a bump in the road carried him back to the space between the others and the light moved out of him. He looked to the very corner of his eye and stayed looking to the furthermost corner of his eye because that’s where the light sometimes came back, and he waited like that. It didn’t hurt his eyes to look like this. He knew just to wait.

Thomas
,
a calm, gentle voice coming from the light,
the joy is just one part, Thomas. You can’t just be in the light. There is a message too. Listen for the message, Thomas. What is the light telling you?

‘Ah
, look, ’e’s doin’ ’eez madman look again.’

‘Don’ i’ hur’ eez oiz doin’ tha’?’

‘Aye, look, Oi couldn’ do tha’ for long.’ The third boy turned his eyeballs to the corner of head and demonstrated. ‘Ugh.’

‘Stop
it, Thom, ya freak. Ye’ll ’ave all ’em ladies in the tarn crossin’ t’other soid of road. Ey, kick ’em, Geoffrey, make ’im stop it, willya?’

‘
Ugh.’ Sharp, from one side.

‘
Oi, Tommy, look ’ere! O’er this way! Tha’s be’er.’

‘Leave
’im be!’ The big voice, deep and loudest. Always loud. Only loud. No light. No quiet spaces between the sounds, where the light comes in. But no pain ever came to Thomas from this voice.

The voice occupied the hulking figure
of Gamel Warriner; rough, strong and simple, as straightforward and uncomplicated are simple. He was a man who knew how to work hard, how to grow things and fix things. And he knew what was right and he did it. He was as respected as any other who went about his own business and got things done and provided enough for his family. That his wife was a good woman and a pious one was a further asset to Gamel’s reputation. That he produced so many sons was an indicator of his masculinity, which although of no consequence to Gamel himself, and certainly not his wife, confirmed his power as a man and a citizen and caused other men and women to regard him with favour.

There were four
of Gamel Warriner’s seven sons in the cart that day. Geoffrey, called Gree; Denholm, called Dem; and Thurstan, were the oldest Warriner boys; and Thomas was their mute, idiot last brother. They didn’t mind Thomas, but he wasn’t good for anything and life was to work. It left their mother some sweetness though to have this empty-headed son, and this was better for her since she had no girl.