Remember Me (7 page)

Something else puzzled Madeleine, which was that Mother Cottingham had somehow changed. She had made Madeleine welcome from her first arrival, and a firm friendship had been forged between them. But recently something had been different. When the old woman looked at her, Madeleine detected something unspoken in her eyes. The friendship had not suffered from this; if anything, Madeleine saw a conspiratorial twinkle that had not been there before, and she could not help wondering if her ancient neighbour had somehow discerned what had passed between herself and William—but she did not see how this could be. Not by the least syllable or meaning look had Madeleine hinted at any kind of a special relationship, and she knew that neither William nor any other monk of St Alcuin's would be seeking out an old woman to entrust with the secrets of his heart. And yet… Madeleine felt increasingly certain that Ellen knew something and wondered if, choosing her words carefully so as not to give anything away, she ought to ask her.

So she sat in the little oratory, turning over these things in her mind, praying the rosary and searching deeper, deeper … to find the right way forward, to keep her footing on a path of honesty in this treacherous and precarious country.

She had closed and latched the door when she came in. When anybody from the parish entered, the iron latch rattled loudly as they opened the door. Hearing but the faintest, barely audible click behind her, she knew it was one of the brothers who had entered. For a moment she felt guilty, lest she be unwelcome to a monk's need for prayer in the peace of solitude; but as she sensed the man hesitate on the step, then heard his feet make up their mind and come quietly along the aisle toward her, she knew exactly who it was. So she was not surprised when he came to stand just behind the bench where she sat, and she felt the feather-light caress of his hand on the back of her head.

Everything went on alert in Madeleine then. This, she knew, was courting peril beyond all good sense. Danger throbbed in every warning system of her soul and body. They must not be discovered. They must not. But at the same time, she yearned for his touch, to hear his voice, to spend even one snatched minute in his company.

He stepped over the low bench to sit beside her. She glanced at him, and her heart bucked and flipped when she saw the tenderness in his eyes and the defenceless self-offering of his love.

“William, this is unwise!” she whispered fiercely. “This is most unseemly!”

But she said nothing else because he took her in his arms and closed his mouth on hers in the slow, sweet rapture of his kiss. For that brief moment both of them stopped caring: he knew nothing but her; she knew nothing but him. Neither of them knew anything of Brother Cormac entering through the unlatched door and withdrawing as quietly as he had come in, on seeing his presence there to be inappropriate.

Not many minutes later, someone fumbled at the catch. By the time Brother Walafrid entered to spend a while in the quiet and say his rosary, there was nothing to see but Mistress Hazell sitting with head bent demurely in prayer and Father William doing his routine check of the altar silver. That done, William backed away, with a deep bow, from the altar and left with light, quiet step, without glancing at either Madeleine or Brother Walafrid.

William took his turn as a reader at the evening meal that day, and so he came into the kitchen afterward for the supper set aside for him by those who had prepared it.

Brother Conradus nodded to him pleasantly as they passed each other, Conradus with a heaped tray of bowls on his way to the scullery.

Brother Cormac stood by the table where meals had been set aside, and he picked up a bowl of food and a plate of bread and butter at William's approach. He stood holding these, and as William reached the table and he gave them into his hands, he did not release them immediately. Very direct, very level, his blue gaze met William's eyes. He said, in an undertone that nobody else could possibly have heard, “I had to miss the midday office and so came for my prayers into the little oratory after the meal, but I found I was intruding. You are skating on very thin ice, Brother. Our abbot is open and gentle, patient and kind, but he will not countenance this. Besides, he deserves better from you, and you are abusing the trust of all of us. I shall not rat on you, but I counsel you to think again.”

William felt the familiar grip of terror in his belly and the slow flush of blood in his face.

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said as Cormac released the bowl and the plate into his hands.

William retained enough sense of perspective to feel very grateful to Cormac for his manner of responding to what he had seen, and he hung on to that focus. But he also felt cornered, and wretched, and anxious. Since it was no longer in use for meal preparation, the readers and servers usually ate with the kitcheners at the big worktable in the kitchen, for a small group of men it felt more friendly than the spacious refectory. But William took his supper through to the frater, walking the length of the oak table to the most retired corner, where he could recover himself in solitude. He sat with the food before him on the table, but he could not eat a single mouthful. He faced the fact that the occasional stolen kiss was far, far too risky. There was no practical course to take other than absolutely renouncing this love in totality. He toyed with his bread, breaking it absently, but gazing beyond it at nothing, wondering hopelessly how to get out of this mess. He had no solutions and no expectation of finding any. He had nothing to offer Madeleine and nowhere to go. Nothing had changed since the last time his mind went round this treadmill. There was no way out. He was gradually realizing that what he had set himself to do was too much for him. He just could not renounce this love. It ached in him until he felt physically sick with longing, but whichever way he looked at it he was in no position to do anything other than give it up. He thought Madeleine deserved something better than the furtive deceit of stolen kisses; he was quite certain she deserved a better man than a monk breaking his vows while he exploited the goodwill of the community for his bed and board, took advantage of his abbot's belief in him, and tangled her in his net of lies with the direct intention of duping her brother who trusted her.

When he brought his mind back to the present moment, on a lesser level he also felt ashamed that he had taken the supper, then simply wasted the food. It was hard to get rid of it without the kitchen brothers, whose duty required them to stay in the kitchen until all had been cleaned and tidied away, seeing him dispose of it. He wished they'd go away. He wished it was possible to do anything at all without being observed by eyes that cared and would be bound to have an opinion. He wished his confessor was anybody but John. For a fleeting moment he wondered if it would have been better that he had never met Madeleine, but his heart cried,
No! No! No!
Somewhere deep in his gut he descended into frantic blind panic at the prospect of being torn apart from her. “Please,” he whispered with bent head, his elbows on the table creating a tent of privacy as he put his hands to his temples, “Please don't take her away from me.” He tried to set his lips firm and stare at nothing, to hold back the tears that usually waited until nightfall and the seclusion of his cell, and he felt like an animal in a trap. He knew that he could not face going back through the kitchen, and he could not stay here like this, and he could not eat this food. In the end, he swung his legs over the bench, got up leaving the plates of uneaten food behind for someone else to find and deal with, and left by the door that led out to the kitchen garden and the orchards, and from there to the path rising up to the farm and the burial ground. He walked swiftly, possessed by the need to be on his own, before the black flood of despair inside him swelled to the point where the dam must break.

Brother Conradus had worked extremely hard that day. He had made some excellent blackberry pies for supper, which had been well received—but he noticed to his disappointment that Father William had not even touched his bread and hearty bowlful of vegetable soup, nor even troubled to clear it away, which Conradus found irritating. And if he hadn't liked the soup, well he might still have fancied some blackberry pie. It took quite some effort for Brother Conradus to clear away the wasted food without comment when he went to wipe down the tables, and he had to say three Hail Marys before he could bring himself to add even an attempt at a charitable attitude to the already considerable self-discipline of refraining from passing any kind of remark to Brother Cormac. Brother Conradus knew from past experience that Brother Cormac's blistering turn of phrase could be very comforting when the best efforts of the kitchen went unappreciated, but only that morning Father Theodore had spoken to his novices about the forbearance that wants to go deeper than what we say or do, sinking right down inside to mature into an attitude of gentleness, a heart that understands and forgives. Conradus had thought that sounded so beautiful, and he could see that caustic observations about men who took good food and didn't eat it, and furthermore couldn't even be bothered to clear their own dishes, would not square with that beautiful spirit of forbearance. He threw the bread out for the birds, scraping the butter carefully back into the dish it had come from, tipping the soup into the pot with what already remained to be reused tomorrow.

He and Brother Cormac had washed up after the meal, and after they had left the kitchen all tidy, Brother Cormac had gone up to the guesthouse with some provisions needed there while Brother Conradus went to clear the scraps from the infirmary meal. Then it was time for Vespers—and afterwards, Conradus thought if he didn't manage to get some time out of doors he would just burst. He had spent the morning on his novitiate studies as usual and the afternoon reading
The Cloud of Unknowing
(incomprehensible) in his cell without once dozing off; he felt the day owed him an hour in the fresh air.

It was a beautiful evening, and he went into the kitchen garden to dig some weeds that were threatening to get out of hand. The low, slanting sun gave out a surprising amount of heat for the hour of the day, gladdening his spirit; he loved the sight of the small clouds drifting lazily across the still blue of the evening sky.

After a while he put down his gardening tools and washed his hands carefully in a bowl of water. He had brought the bowl out with him specially for this purpose, so that he wouldn't soil the well bucket, which should be kept completely clean. He had seen Brother Cormac in similar circumstances simply brush the surplus earth off by rubbing his hands on the skirts of his habit or giving them a quick wipe on his scapular, but though he held the professed brethren in the highest esteem, Brother Conradus knew for a fact that this was inadequate hygiene for a kitchener. He shook the shining drops of water from his hands and waved them about a bit to dry in the air, tossing the muddied water in the bowl onto one of the vegetable beds. Then he took off for a walk down the slope from the kitchen to the river. He could see it sparkling where the breeze rippled the surface and reflecting the colours slowly forming in the changing sky. He thought he had time to go for a stroll up the hill before Compline, and he walked along the riverbank from this broad stretch of water, up toward the narrower tumbling waters that splashed over the stones. Higher still and the river narrowed to a stream. The source of it was up on the moor, but Brother Conradus liked this particular part that ran through a belt of woodland circling round from behind the burial ground all the way to the edge of the farm. Ferns grew among the rocks, and birch and rowan trees sprang graceful from the peaty earth. As he climbed higher, the path took him into the trees. The birch leaves, little serrated arrowheads of summer green, flirted with the dappling light; the evening sunshine penetrated through the trees as an amber glow, finding a way into the depths of the wood with a sense of such timeless peace. He stopped walking and looked all around. He looked back the way he had come, down on the abbey nestling in the curve of the hills, its lichened roof and honey-coloured stone lovely in the golden light. He looked down at the beck, jumping and gurgling, freshening the air. He looked into the wood that, though it was no more than a coppice really, still had enough depth for mystery.

Then Brother Conradus saw something. He looked twice because he thought his eyes had deceived him at first glance, but no—he was right. There in that cradled space where the ground rose and dipped, against the decaying trunk of a fallen tree, huddled in the leaves, resting his head against the moss that had colonized the dead wood, one of his brothers sat hunched. For some reason he could not exactly place, Brother Conradus formed the impression the man might be unwell, otherwise he would have assumed him to be praying quietly and respected his solitude.

As he drew nearer, concerned, he saw that the man, curled into a tight ball, had his face in his hands. And then it dawned on Conradus, who almost stood over him by now, that he was sobbing as if his heart would break. And he felt almost sure (though scrunched up like that with his back turned it was hard to say, several men had silver hair) it was Father William, the cellarer—well, the cellarer's assistant, but they all knew he was the cellarer really. Brother Conradus's heart flooded with pity, and he wanted to offer some comfort, but the longer he stood there, the less sure he felt that he ought to be there at all.

“Oh, Christ… my lord Christ… it is too much… too much… I cannot do it…” Conradus heard the muffled groan before the convulsing sobs eradicated any kind of speech, and the conviction came to him that his presence here would be seriously unwelcome. He stepped backward cautiously, onto a large fallen twig that broke with a loud snap. The response this provoked made Conradus almost jump out of his skin.

William (it was he) flinched violently, and with an odd, sudden, sideways movement that reminded Brother Conradus of a frightened crab scuttling to safety in a rock pool, he reacted with alacrity, scrambling away from the sound and flinging himself round to face whoever had made it. This left him crouching like a cornered fugitive, aghast at being thus discovered.