Remember Me (4 page)

Brother Martin laughed. “That should fetch him quick and make him happy—and there's not much does; he isn't the most cheerful soul on any day of the week. Yes, I'll tell him for you, Mother, never fret.”

“Thank 'ee kindly, tha's a good lad.” And Mother Cottingham made her slow, creaking passage back to her cottage. She saw no sign of her neighbour as she hobbled slowly by, for Madeleine had gone out to take her goat to new pasture and then had a visit to make to a newly delivered mother in the village.

Brother Martin proved faithful in his errand, and William, being not behind with any matters needing his attention, had time that same afternoon to visit Mother Cottingham in her home.

He walked briskly along the close without even turning his head to look at Madeleine's cottage—which did not mean he didn't see it and note the closed air that signalled she was out—he just didn't turn his head. Mortifying the eyes while still noticing everything was an impossibility that had been required of him from his first days under novitiate discipline. It no longer seemed difficult now.

Mother Cottingham's house looked as neat and trim as any in the row. He had instigated a programme of repairs himself, to be done once the harvests were in, but before that Brother Ambrose had been conscientious in his duties and looked after the buildings well. Inside was another matter—what happened indoors was the responsibility of each tenant. Mother Cottingham could no longer manage the housework she might once have done, and he knew from his visits to check for repairs needed that her home was grimier than it could have been, but not too bad. Even so, he did not especially look forward to this call. He tapped on the cottage door and waited respectfully to be invited in. It took the old woman a long time to answer his knock, as he knew it would, but still he waited because that was what she preferred. He noticed as he stood there patiently that her garden had been weeded.

When at last she opened the door to him, he saw that the room inside looked cleaner and brighter than last time he'd been in it. The floor had been swept and the ledges dusted, the pewterware scoured bright, and the pots set neat on the shelf. Momentarily puzzled, he quickly concluded that the difference between now and his previous visit was that Madeleine had moved in next door. Evidently she had spread a sheltering wing over her aged neighbour, and perhaps it gave her some comfort and filled a void somewhere, for she had loved her mother and so suddenly lost her.

“Come in, lad. Come in and sit thee down.”

William could think of a hundred and one things he'd rather be doing than whiling away the afternoon in what threatened to be an extended visit. He was on the verge of saying he wouldn't sit down because he couldn't stay long, when he remembered Abbot John counselling him earlier in the spring to take the love that ached in his heart for Madeleine and lavish it on those who needed it and otherwise had nobody to love them. He had admired this line of thinking but had so far ignored the advice. With the wound of grief at what he had done Thursday night still open and wet in his soul—the agony of parting from Madeleine forever sent him dizzy with sorrow if he let his mind dwell on it—he thought this might be a good time to allow the love that still overflowed inside him to be channelled in a direction where it might do some good.

“Thank you, my lady,” he said therefore, with the gentle courtesy of a knight addressing a queen. Ellen's sharp glance searched for cynicism or mockery, it being her experience that old women are usually treated more patronizingly than that by such middleaged men as notice them at all, but she saw none on his face. She saw sadness though, the fine-drawn skein of suffering indefinably incorporated and revealed in his features.

“Tha looks unhappy. Art tha unhappy?” she asked him bluntly. She had found that though old age brings little to recommend it, one of its few privileges was the advantage of being indulged in speaking her mind. She had given up trying to please others in her late seventies, and nothing caused her to miss the habit or experience the slightest twinge of regret at its cessation.

She regarded William calmly; he looked lost for words. It was not the monastic way for the brothers to discuss personal matters with anyone outside the community, and she saw that her question embarrassed him a little. That did not trouble her. She loved the abbey, and she loved God, but she did not feel bound herself by the customs of monastic tradition.

Mother Cottingham had two chairs, old and beautifully crafted, set to either side of an equally old cherrywood table. Moving slowly from the door, she took her seat in one chair and gestured that he should take the other. Grateful for an escape from her initial scrutiny, he was glad to make a task of its own out of thanking her and sitting down.

“I have a small gift to make to the abbey,” she began, and he murmured his thanks.

“Why art tha not happy?” she persisted unexpectedly. William hesitated, then decided to go for evasion.

“But, madam, we are more grateful than I can say for your gifts to us. Your kindness is neither expected nor looked for; even so, it means a lot and is always appreciated. I should not wish you to think I am not pleased at your gift—I value it immensely.”

“I'm sure tha does. Thy unhappiness has nothing to do with me and mine; it's all thy own. Why art tha not happy?”

Unaccustomed to finding himself caught on the back foot in this manner, William regarded her mutely for a moment, then dropped his gaze. It crossed his mind that he had travelled further than he might ever have imagined from the suave, assured, indifferent man he used to be.

“No matter,” the old woman continued. “Tha doesn't want to tell me. But I do see.”

Startled by the assurance and meaning in her tone, William looked up at her again. Her gaze, bright eyed and unwavering, met his.

“I want to give thee five shillings for the work of the abbey,” she said.

His eyebrows rose. “Are you sure? That's as much as a month's rent for a farm!”

“Aye, I know,” she said serenely, “and it's what I want to give.” “That's very generous, Mother Cottingham. It will be a great help to us… if… if you're sure it will not leave you short.”

“I have it here; there's the bag—take it. I can spare it. And then, Brother Cellarer, I also have a question for thee.”

He drew the purse of money toward him with a quiet repetition of his thanks as her wrinkled and age-freckled hand, misshapen with rheumatism, pushed it across for him to take. But he let the bag lie on the table while he waited to hear what she had to ask.

“I would like to know, Brother Cellarer, what tha was doing leaving Mistress Hazell's house before sunup this last Thursday and stealing so silent away along the close.”

William felt his heart, his chest, his throat constrict. Mother Ellen watched the slow flush of colour in his face. His eyes, pale lamps, intelligent, met hers. He did not speak. Nor did she. She waited, the alert surveillance of her small eyes giving no quarter as she observed his consternation. He dropped his gaze to his hand as his fingertip traced a knot of wood in the polished top of the table.

“What you saw,” he said at last, quietly, “is what you thought you saw. I was doing what you think I was doing. Except, you should know this…” He glanced up at her; serious, earnest, she thought. “Whatever you may be assuming, I want you to know: what you saw was not the usual caricature of a lusty monk stealing forbidden goods in the bed of an easy woman. I love Madeleine. I love her with everything in me. I did her no dishonour, nor would I ever. What should be saved for marriage will remain so. But it was indeed for love that I came to see her.”

Mother Cottingham weighed these words. William, waiting for her reply, noted his own responses of tension, fear, and foreboding twitching along every muscle. He felt sick.

“But tha art a monk,” she said simply.

He nodded soberly. “Well, and here's the difficulty of it: before I am a monk, I am a man. And in trying to hold the two together I have failed completely. I am clothed. I am vowed. I am professed. I am committed. And still I have fallen utterly, hopelessly in love. Madam, I do not need you to point out to me there is an inconsistency; I am racked on it every hour of every day. My abbot had seen the way my heart was tugging, and he has forbidden me to see Madeleine or speak to her, and very wisely too. So I have kept away, until last Thursday, when I could no longer bear the longing or suffer being parted from her anymore. I thought if I came to her, I could explain why I had stayed away, I could hold her in my arms just the one time and make a clean break of it, and the thing would be done. But I never thought anything could be so painful as this has turned out to be.”

She watched his face, miserable as he considered his options, which seemed devastatingly few and bleak. He toyed absently, unseeing, with the twisted strings of the linen money bag. Then at last he raised his eyes to meet hers.

“I have no right to do this, but I am begging you not to tell my abbot. I fully realize that will implicate you in my deceit and in my sin, but… oh God… if you knew how this has felt… I have given my word to Madeleine that I will not go to her again. It was only for once. And I pray I may have the strength to keep to what I said. Although…” With a gesture of hopelessness, he waved his hand in dismissal and looked away from her eyes again. “I can see no hope… no light…” He shook his head, despairing. “But I will try to be faithful. I promise you I will. It's my misfortune you were awake to watch me stumble and fall. Mother, if this becomes known, Madeleine will lose her home here, and I will be turned out. And I… it's complicated… the world outside here is not a safe place for me to be.”

She watched his misery, the haggard lines of his face, the tremor in his hands.

“You are asking me to lie for thee?”

He shook his head. “If it comes to that—no. Only to keep close the truth you know.”

He swallowed. “Please. Please. I am begging you. I cannot take care of her. I cannot provide for her. We have nowhere to go.”

“Tell me,” said Mother Cottingham, “are all the monks in this abbey like thee? Are they none of them what they seem?”

Again he shook his head. “Nay; they are not—not like me, I mean. In every community there will be men who have their secrets, their liaisons, their clandestine passions and hidden griefs. But that said, this house is a place of integrity. Where I was before, every man in the priory was like me. And the villagers burned the place down. You have met Father Oswald? He escaped with me. I dodged the rough justice better than he did, but our refuge is here.”

Mother Ellen considered him, then she made up her mind.

“Thy secret will be safe with me, child. But there are conditions to my silence.”

There would be. There always were.

His sense of relief at her promise of discretion was substantially diminished by his apprehension about the demands she might seize her chance to make. William had never imagined himself becoming vulnerable to blackmail, but he saw that was exactly what he'd done.

Child
, she had called him. He wondered how old she was, this ancient hag, to think of a man of fifty as a child. He thought of the age of time that must pass before he reached the fullness of years she had now and realized he had set himself to trudging that road one weary step at a time, with nothing but the memory of a furtive, stolen hour to keep him going. The reflection opened in him an awareness of a reservoir of grief so black and wide and so impossibly deep it could never be fathomed or contained. It must overwhelm him, and for a moment it almost did.

But he recollected himself, recalling that all of us think principally of ourselves, and he did not delude himself that his private agony would be the first thing on Mother Cottingham's mind. She had a deal to strike. She wanted something out of this. This withered old woman was of an age to be his mother, and William's memories of childhood recollected neither clemency nor understanding; he was not expecting either to be offered him now.

“I imagined it would be so,” he responded, addressing himself with an effort to her talk of conditions to be met. “Well?”

“Tha hast no idea what tha's looking at, not at all, hast tha? Tha thinks, ‘spiteful old crone, gossip and hunger for power'. But tha's wrong. Look again, for I'm not what tha sees. Still alive in me is a girl crazy with love, her heart beating like a drum, full of longing, full of life. There's the wild tearing of sorrow as I laid the last of my infants in the ground, and then my son, the only one that lived, snatched from me still a boy in his twentieth year. I am not only what's given to thy eyes to see, Brother Cellarer. As tha'rt a monk but tha'rt also a man, so I'm a crone, withered and halfdead—but I'm a woman, and I remember. I remember the look in thy eyes today, for I've seen it before. I know the longing, and I know the sorrow. I don't want to keep thee on a string or wring thy heart fiercer than the pain that's wringing it now. Only this I am asking—wilt tha promise me, lad? When I lie dying, I would have it be thee that brings me the Viaticum and says the prayers for my soul. And between that day and this, I would have thee be my confessor. Those are my conditions. If tha wilt do that for me, I'll keep silence for thee.”

This struck William as so very unlikely that he could find no immediate reply. The idea that anybody who knew anything about his personal history, from his childhood up to the present hour of the present day, could place into his priestly hands the care of their soul struck him as incongruous in the extreme.

“Couldn't you find somebody more faithful? I should have thought you could choose any brother at random in this abbey, starting with the newest postulant and going all the way up to the abbot, and you couldn't help but pick a more virtuous soul than mine.”

Ellen Cottingham listened to the bitterness and the incredulity in his voice. “I doubt I'd find one more human,” she said, “and that's why I'm asking thee. Because I am human, too. Tha gives me hope.”