The Forest (24 page)

‘So far, so good,’ Adam told them, as soon as he had checked for signs of pilfering or illicit drinking. ‘Now I will see the barn.’

It was strange, he reflected, that although, for years, he had seen the lay brothers every day, he had never really known them. The huge
domus conversorum
of the lay brothers might take up the whole western side of the cloister, but it was also completely separated even from the cloister wall by a narrow lane. One had to go right round the outside to reach the
domus
. In church the monks sang in the choir, the lay brothers in the nave. They ate apart.

Until now, he had never realized that he looked down upon them. It was true that he had found it necessary to treat them a little like children, to ensure discipline in the granges. Yet they were also men. Their commitment to the abbey was no less than his. They think less intensely than I do, he considered: each day I measure my life by what I have thought, about God, or my fellow men, or the world around the abbey. Yet their way is to feel these things and they remember the days by how they felt upon them. It may even be that, by thinking less, and feeling more, they remember more than I do.

If the dwelling house was modest, the rest of the farm buildings were not. There were cattle yards and cowsheds – even St Leonards often had a hundred oxen and seventy
cows to take care of. There were sheepcotes and piggeries. But towering over everything was the huge barn. It was the size of a church, built of stone, with massive oak rafters. The wheat and oats they harvested were stored there in huge piles of sacks; so was all the farm equipment. On one side was a mountain of bracken, used for bedding. There was even a threshing floor. And at the moment, in the middle of its cavernous space, lit dimly by some lamps, stood Tom Furzey’s recently started cart.

Peering across the shadows, however, it was something else that caught Adam’s eye: a figure beside the peasant in the half-light. Unless he was mistaken, it was a woman.

Women were not allowed in the abbey. A great lady might visit, of course, but she was not supposed to stay the night even in the quarters reserved for royal guests. The womenfolk of the hired hands might visit them at the granges but, as the abbot had particularly stressed to him, ‘They’re not to hang about. And never, on any account, to stay the night.’

He went over to them at once, therefore.

She was sitting beside Furzey on the floor. As he approached, they both got up respectfully. The woman had a shawl of some kind over her head and as she was looking down modestly he could not see her face very well.

‘This is my wife,’ the peasant said. ‘She brought me some cakes.’

‘I see.’ He did not want to offend Furzey, but he thought it best to be firm. ‘I’m afraid she must leave before dusk, you know, and it’s already getting dark.’ The fellow looked sulky, but although she did not look up, it seemed to him that the woman did not mind. ‘Your husband’s cart will be magnificent,’ he said in a friendly tone, before turning back to the others.

He spent some time in conversation while he went round the barn, so he was not surprised to see, when he finished, that the woman had left. Intending to trudge back to the
abbey himself, now, he went to the small door in the huge barn entrance and opened it.

The blizzard hit him like a blow. He could scarcely believe it. The thick walls of the barn had completely muffled the sound of the wind as it had grown: in the little while that he had been inside the flurries had turned into gusts and the gusts into a howling storm. Even by the shelter of the barn the snowflakes lashed his face. Turning into the wind, he had to blink to see. To go even the three miles to the abbey seemed a foolish idea. He’d better remain at the grange.

Then he remembered the woman. Dear heaven, he’d sent her out in this. And how far did she have to go? Five miles? Nearer six. Across the open heath into the mouth of the blizzard. It was outrageous; he felt a sense of shame. What would her husband think of him and of the abbey? Ducking back into the barn, he summoned Tom and two of the lay brothers. ‘Wrap yourselves quickly. Bring a leather blanket.’ Only pausing long enough to find out which path she would have taken, he dashed out into the snow, leaving them to catch up with him.

According to the hour, it was still afternoon. Somewhere above, the darkness had not fallen. But here below the light had been expunged. Before him, as he plunged forward, there was nothing but a blinding whitish fury, attacking his face as though God had summoned up some new plague of locusts for the northern lands. The snow came almost horizontally, enveloping everything so that, only yards ahead, the world seemed to vanish into a grey opacity.

Dear Lord, how was he to find her? Would she die? Would she join the deer and ponies who, several dozen to be sure, would be found, stiff on the ground, after a night like this?

He was quite astonished, therefore, having left the last hedgerow behind, to see just in front of him a dark shape, like a bundle of clothing, struggling forward into the
blizzard. He cried out, taking a dozen snowflakes into his mouth; but she did not hear him. Only when he came up with her and put his arm protectively round her shoulders did she realize his presence as, feeling her start with fright, he turned her away from the driving fury of the storm.

‘Come.’

‘I can’t. I must go home.’ She was even trying to push him gently away and resume her impossible journey.

Almost surprised at himself, however, he held her firmly. ‘Your husband is here,’ he said, although they could not see him. And guiding her path, he led her back.

The blizzard that night was the worst that anyone in the Forest could remember. Down by the coast the snowstorm seemed to have become one with the churning sea. Around St Leonards Grange huge snowdrifts piled up along the hedgerows, covering them right over. The wind over Beaulieu Heath was either a searing whistle or a great white moan. And even when a faint greying in the darkness indicated that morning must have come, the blizzard continued, blocking out the light.

To Brother Adam his duty was clear. He wasn’t returning to the abbey; he must stay in the grange and give what spiritual leadership he could.

On the way back to the barn he had recognized the woman as the one he had spoken to about Brother Matthew. He was glad it should turn out to be such a good soul that he had saved from the storm.

The arrangements were simple enough. He had them set up a brazier filled with charcoal in the barn. Furzey and his wife could spend the night there well enough, while he and the others remained in the dwelling house. And in order that there should be no misunderstanding of the situation he called everyone together in the barn after the evening meal and, having said some prayers, he made them a little sermon.

On this cold night close to Christmas, he told them, as they found shelter, like the Holy Family, in a humble barn, he wished to remind them that everyone had a proper and honourable place in God’s plan. The two categories of monks in the abbey, he told them, were like Mary and Martha. Mary, the prayerful, had perhaps the better part, like the choir monks. But Martha, the loyal worker, was necessary too. For how would the abbey keep up its life of prayer without the hard work of the lay brothers? And did not they, too, need help, from the good peasants who lived outside the religious order? Of course they did. And last of all, did not the good peasant Tom need the support of his wife, humbler still but equally beloved of God?

‘You may wonder’, he said, ‘why this woman is allowed to remain here this night. For the abbot’s rule is not to be ignored. No women in the Great Close.’ He looked at them severely. ‘But’, he went on, ‘Our Lord also enjoins us to show mercy. Did not he himself save the woman taken in adultery from being stoned? And so it is, on my authority given me by the abbot, that we allow this good woman to remain here this terrible night and seek shelter from the storm.’ Then he blessed them and retired.

When the next day the blizzard continued unabated – at times it almost knocked him off his feet when he opened the door – the poor woman grew very agitated about her children. But Furzey assured him that his sister and the other villagers would be taking care of them, so he forbade the woman to leave. And thus, with the brazier providing heat and Tom at work on his cart, she remained while, three times during the day, Brother Adam led them all in simple prayers.

How she longed to go back. She didn’t really want to be with Tom. Her eldest girl would see the younger children were safe, but they would all be frightened that something had happened to her. Above all, there was Luke.

What would he do? He’d have wondered where she was when she failed to appear in the evening. Would he try to investigate the cottage? What if the children saw him? All day she waited anxiously for the blizzard to abate.

There was nothing much to do. Now and then Brother Adam would appear and she found herself watching him with interest. The lay brothers, she could see, found him distant. Tom just remarked, with a shrug: ‘He’s a cold fish.’ But then Tom never thought much about people if they didn’t belong to the Forest.

The monk came from another world, certainly. Yet, as she thought of the way he had brought her in from the blizzard, she didn’t think he was cold. She said nothing, though. When he led them in prayer, in the half-light of the great barn, his soft voice carried such quiet conviction that she was impressed. She supposed he must be so much more intelligent than simple folk like her; yet perhaps, deep inside her, a small voice might have suggested: you, also, could read and write, and know what he knows too. If so, however, she could only answer with a sigh: in another life. Until then, the monk had something she did not. She did not say it to Tom, but she thought Brother Adam, in his way of course, was rather fine.

She was entirely caught off guard late in the afternoon, when the small door of the barn opened with a brief moan from the wind and closed fast again behind the monk who, advancing to within a few feet of the brazier, beckoned to her. She went to him obediently. There was nothing else she could do.

For a moment he stood there, looking at her curiously. He was stoutly built, like Tom, she realized, but a little taller. In the glow from the brazier behind them that warmed her back, his eyes looked strangely dark. Tom, working a few yards away by the lamplight, seemed separated from them, in another world.

‘I did not realize, when you spoke to me at the abbey
gate …’ He remembered her then. ‘I have just been told that Luke, the runaway, is your brother.’ She noticed that he spoke quietly, so that Tom could not hear them.

A stab of fear went through her. She could not meet his eye. Her relationship was common knowledge, of course, but in the hands of this clever man it seemed more dangerous. She hung her head. ‘Yes, Brother. Poor Luke.’

‘Poor Luke? Perhaps.’ A pause. Then, very quietly: ‘Do you know where he is?’

Now she looked him straight in the eye. ‘If we knew that, Brother, you’d already know. You see, I think he shouldn’t have run away, being innocent. And my husband would turn him in anyway.’ She could look him in the eye because, technically, she had just told the truth. She had said ‘we’.

‘
You
might know, though, mightn’t you?’

She was conscious of the smell of his habit. There was a scent of wax candles in the damp wool. She could smell him, too. A nice smell.

‘He could be the other end of England by now.’ She sighed. This, too, was true. He could have been.

Adam looked thoughtful. When he asked a question the lines on his broad forehead wrinkled. But when he was thinking he tilted his head slightly back and the lines smoothed in a way that was pleasing.

‘You said to me that morning at the abbey’, he said carefully, ‘that it might have been an accident – that he might not have meant to strike Brother Matthew.’ She was silent. ‘If so, I think he should come and say so.’

‘He’ll never return here, I think,’ she answered sadly. ‘He’ll have to walk to the ends of the earth.’ She wasn’t sure this satisfied the monk.

And then she did something she had never done before.

How does a woman let a man know that she desires him? It can be done with a smile, a look, a gesture. But these outward and visible signs would have been off-putting to a monk like Brother Adam. So she just stood in front of him
and sent out that simple, primitive signal: the heat from her body. And Brother Adam felt it – how could he not? – that invisible, unmistakable, radiating, warmth that came from her stomach to his. Then she smiled and he turned away, confused.

Why did she do it? She was an honest woman. She didn’t flirt. She acted from a primordial instinct. She wanted to suggest an intimacy and attraction that, even if it shocked him, would divert the monk’s attention. She had to lay a false trail to protect her little brother.

Moments later, Brother Adam left the barn.

The storm did not abate. They put charcoal on the brazier for a second night. Once again, after the evening meal, Brother Adam led them all in prayer. But some hours later, alone with her husband and only the glow from the charcoal showing in the great barn’s cavernous dark, she allowed herself a faintly ironic smile when, as Tom raised his stocky haunches over her, she closed her eyes and thought secretly of Brother Adam.

It was deep in the night, about the time of the night office, when Brother Adam awoke from a fitful sleep and became aware that the moaning of the wind outside had ceased and that all around the grange was quiet.