Remember Me (25 page)

Intrigued, John looked at him. “Do you know, nobody but you has ever said that to me in my whole life—with the possible exception of my mother. How strange. Thank you, William. Thank you very much. One more thing then. You have never lived with women, have you? I think you had no brothers and sisters—am I right?”

William nodded in affirmation.

“And you have lived the whole of your life from the end of your boyhood in a community of men. William, it's different living with women. Are you sure you're ready for it? Women are not the same as we are. I may have lived here for all my adult life, but I've certainly not forgotten what living with my mother and my sister was like. And you may take it from me that however dear they may be to you, women are surely not easy to live with. A man may do his level best to please them, and he still won't get it right. They ask you to make a stew and you set to it—and then they taste it and say, ‘
What
did you season this with? Oh.' And they smile, and you can see you got it wrong. And you go to the market for them and toil up the hill with a great basket of provisions and they go through it all while you stand and watch—and every time they look surprised and a bit put out. You got the wrong kind, the wrong size, the wrong amount; it's always the same! And women—intelligent women—can somehow never let anything go. You have an argument, and past sundown you'll be hearing reasons why she's right and you're not. You upset her and have to stand and hear a recital of every character flaw you have and that you're always like this. At the end of every spat you feel chastened and ashamed and wonder how they can put up with you in the noble and long-suffering way they do. The marriage bed may look attractive from the cloister, but monastic life looks like heaven sometimes to a married man. Are you
sure
this is what you want? I tell you now, you fall out with Madeleine and she won't kneel and kiss the ground and beg your forgiveness—more likely she'll slap your face!”

As William listened to John, the practical words of ordinary domesticity steadied him.

“I do hear you,” he said in reply. “I have no doubt in my mind that adjusting to this will take everything I have. For sure we shall have our misunderstandings and find ourselves glaring at each other and hating each other and thinking we must have been mad to take each other on. I can see that coming and I'm not looking forward to it, but… Yes, to be candid with you, I'm terrified, but… I feel embarrassed saying this, it's not really my way of talking, but she is my destiny, John. She has my heart. There has been so much in my life… you know most of it, but not all. So much that I've been ashamed of or afraid of. It's damaged me, all of it—I thought, beyond repair. But when I am with her, something in me wakes up; it's as though I remember the man—and even the boy—I was meant to be.”

Looking at him, thoughtfully, considering, John believed him. There was no more to be said.

“Well, then—are you composed? Shall we go? In answer to your question about chapel, I should strongly advise you to stick to Holy Redeemer for a year; after that you can come to us if you want, for Vespers, but only for Mass if you do not receive the sacrament—because I cannot dispense you from your vows, and that puts me in an impossible position pastorally if you marry. At Holy Redeemer, my counsel to you is simply not to discuss your history with the priest. He does not know you. Then what you choose to do at Mass will be between you and God. And I shall not forget your offer about accounts, and on our previous record I imagine I'll be glad to take you up on it. And—yes, you are forgiven. In fact—” he hesitated, unsure if he ought to say this, but decided he'd stepped so far beyond how he, as William's abbot, should have handled this that it no longer made much difference. “I'll be proud to have you as a brother-in-law. So, shall we go and find you some secular garb while they're saying Sext and eating lunch?”

The bell was ringing for the midday office as they walked across to the almonry rooms in the gatehouse. William knew exactly what was there because he had examined, valued, and catalogued it all. He found himself some sober, decent clothes—“Keep your shoes,” said John—and a cap to cover his tonsured head.

He stripped himself of Peregrine's habit, folded it up, looked at it for a moment, and then kissed it. “Goodbye, my beloved enemy,” he said. “I didn't stay long enough to wear out your shelter and your embrace—maybe I never could have.” He gave the habit into John's hands. “Such curious legacies,” he said. “Columba left me love, and Ellen Cottingham left me freedom.”

“Don't forget,” said John quietly, “that Christ has left you his peace as well, not as the world gives; he makes his own gifts, and he said with that gift there is no need to be afraid. Oh, I'm sorry—I'm starting to talk in homilies the whole of the time. Look, obviously you won't be needing his habit, but do you want to keep Peregrine's belt? As a keepsake.”

He pulled it free of the bundle William had handed him, held it out, and William accepted it with delight.

“Now then… here's your money. Be on your way. Don't delude yourself for a minute you will be forgotten. We shan't speak of you—you know the custom—but how could anybody not remember you? Oh—you can have your horse back, too. You brought her; she's yours.”

It was a valuable gift, worth a year's salary for a working man, and William was grateful indeed, especially to have his own palfrey—for they knew each other's ways, and the familiarity was comforting. The two men went together to the stables. William saddled up his palfrey and swung up easily into the saddle.

“Are you in one piece?” John asked, squinting up at him, his eyes against the light.

“A bit shaky, but this is the right course,” William replied.

John nodded. “I shall be praying for you. I shall keep you both in my prayers.” He watched as the palfrey responded to her master's touch, and they began to move off under the gatehouse arch. “Oh—William!”

William reined the horse in and looked back, eyebrows raised in inquiry. He had mastered himself and managed to restore a veneer of complete composure. His vulnerable soul had been furled back out of sight. John stood looking up at him, the folded habit held in his arms. “Have you anywhere to stay but this house of Madeleine's?”

William shook his head.

“Then you should be wed. I will obtain permission from the priest of Holy Redeemer to come to the lych-gate there and consecrate your marriage this coming Saturday two hours after noon, if you wish it. I am empowered to write the license; you can do this quietly and without waiting for banns to be read. If we do the thing thus discreetly, I think no one will be asking questions. You will be a married couple, that's all. You have been known as a man in orders in the religious houses, true enough—but as a layman, I doubt you will be recognized.”

“You would do that? You would consecrate our marriage yourself ? Oh, God bless you! God reward you!” The smile that lit up William's face shone with such sudden radiance that John was quite taken aback. “Till Saturday then; we shall be there!”

John felt glad to his core that he'd found the grace to make the journey it took to release such a dazzle of joy. He held open the gate for his friend to ride out and fastened it behind him. As he turned to go back to his house, listening to the hooves of William's palfrey striking the stones of the road beyond the gate, the sound carrying in the clear, cold winter air, he reflected soberly on how burdened William must have been for most of the time, that he had never even guessed he had the capacity for such a shining radiance of joy.

And so it was that William rode out of St Alcuin's in peace, comforted—his heart light, eager to find Madeleine, and to see the place that would be their home. And his happiness was John's gift to him. Without that willingness to understand and forgive, he knew he would have been stumbling away free, but wretched and broken.

Within the walls of the abbey, John walked back slowly to his lodging. Once inside, he went into the inner chamber and sat down on his bed, still with the habit that had been Peregrine's and William's held tight in his arms. He needed to be alone for a little while.

He sat quietly, his eyes fixed steadily on the crucifix hanging from its nail in the wall of his chamber, opening his heart to Christ in stunned confession of what he had done. He knew that as the abbot of a religious community, he had transgressed in condoning this marriage—and worse, in offering to consecrate it. He knew his tradition demanded that he dismiss William coldly, reminding him that his solemn profession was irrevocable, that his vows were binding unto death. He knew that in showing him the pathway forward—to marry Madeleine without seeking permission or dispensation, and in so doing create a suspension of the active state of his vow—he had himself committed a grave offence. He should make a clean breast of any sin he committed either to his brethren in chapter or to his confessor—his prior, Father Chad. John ran through the scenario of kneeling to inform the community that he had just blessed William on his way to marry Madeleine, and in addition offered to consecrate the marriage, and rejected it as a possibility. He could not even contemplate telling Father Chad. He wondered if he might make his confession to Father Theodore.

He sat thinking about the influence we have, each one of us upon the other. He faced the reality that the piece of casuistry he was presently engaged on was entirely consistent with William's character and not at all with his own. But nor had William left his mark without being changed himself. The honest repentance, the tears of sorrow, the agony of love that had worked their way into his heart, he had found in this place; the months he had stayed under its shelter had transformed him.

John accepted that somewhere the rule book had got thrown out of the window, but he believed in spite of that they had managed to hang onto the Rule. And he couldn't make proper sense of that, but he felt sure it was true.

He bent his head to rest his cheek on Peregrine's habit, still clasped to his breast. “What would you have done?” he whispered, “what would you have done?”

Thinking about it, he acknowledged that Peregrine would probably not have budged an inch to condone what William was doing. He would certainly have made no plans to be consecrating his marriage. Even so, the conviction persisted that he had done the right thing in forgiving him, in being willing to bless their new beginning.

He kissed the habit he held in his arms and laid it down on his bed. Resolutely he went out of his lodge into the cloister and up the stairs to the novitiate, where he found Theodore going through some difficult Latin with Brother Robert.

“Father, I need to speak with you,” he said abruptly. While he waited as Theo quietly arranged to see Robert later, John thought he'd better try very hard after this to get his life back on track. Using his position as abbot to disturb an obedientiary's fulfillment of his vocation was not an exemplary way to be spending the afternoon. Darting a worried look at him, Brother Robert hurried away.

“Who's in trouble?” asked Theo with a smile once they were alone, “you or me?”

He listened carefully as John poured out to him all that had happened; he confessed how, though he had acted with integrity until today, he had wobbled at the last and sent William away with the kiss of peace, advice to get married quietly, and a promise to be the celebrant of that marriage, under license discreetly obtained. He felt guilty, and less certain of the rightness of his course, as he told the tale.

“Is that all?” asked Theo gently when he had finished. “Yes,” said John, “that's all. I need your counsel, brother.”

Theo thought quietly for several minutes. “Well,” he said then, “I do see what you mean. You have bent the rules into some very interesting shapes, my father. But then again, God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. Salvation tangles with the human, gets its hands dirty. Condemnation never does. And I guess that's the difference.”

He did not need to look at the letter again. He had remembered precisely the directions Madeleine had sent him to find their house. It lay just over ten miles south of St Alcuin's, on the outskirts of the village. Low Street, then Bakehouse Lane, then a left turn by the great oak tree where the road divided, then about a quarter of a mile after that, a low stone wall and a wooden barred gate. The trees intertwined their fingers over the lane. Mud laced hard by frost lay underfoot. Scarlet berries brightened the dark of evergreens and flamed among the yellow of a few last pointed leaves. The dead broken stalks of nettles and cow parsley poked from the long, dying grass at the edges of the way. On the grey stone of walls, lichens and mosses shone in vivid patches of colour. Clear of cloud, on this noon all the world was alight with the bright cold of winter. There would be a hard frost again tonight.