The Anchoress, page 24
One morning there were sharp words. ‘What’s this here? No one told me aught of this.’
I recognised Gwylim’s voice, but there was no answer, only grunting and the clink of metal on stone.
‘Bill, I said to you, what’s this here? What’s a wall for?’
‘For the anchoress, steward. A garden. Any more, you’d need to ask Father Ranaulf at the priory.’
‘Don’t doubt I will. But you can stop work now. No building without Sir Thomas agrees. You’ll be needing to get back to the fields, lads.’
‘No, this be church work, Gwylim. You well know it’s ours to do and pay for. Speak to what man you choose, it’s no matter to me, but we’ll build this wall.’
‘We’ll see, then, won’t we? Like I said, no building without Sir Thomas agrees.’
There was no more talk after that. I sat in the silence, chilled at the thought of Sir Thomas telling the men to stop. My garden so close, would he punish me and take it away? He had been concerned for me, in the darkness, so he’d be pleased, wouldn’t he?
The second time I went outside I walked the length of my cell’s outer wall, but stopped when I could see the dark gap where the garden door would be fitted. Even though the wall was not then as high as my waist, it saved me from falling out into the village — that dark gap would not.
The ground near the wall was mud, rough and trodden; in some places it piled up and in others ditches and troughs had filled with water. By the light of my lamp I could see the shape of a boot pressed into the dirt. I looked over at the village; blackness, with here and there a flickering light.
I ran my hand along the stones. Anna would have brought me rosemary and chamomile to plant. But she was in her grave, not far away. Would Thomas come again and peer over my wall? Was his desire gone? Or was it anger? They seemed so akin. Louise had told me he would come to the village with Gwylim sometime soon to check accounts and unresolved arguments about land boundaries. My first thought had been to be sure to stay inside, but slowly, as I touched that familiar tender place, I realised that I felt no fear, only grief. Anna was dead; there was nothing more that he could do to me.
Stepping between the puddles, though still I sank into the mud, I put my hands on the top of the wall. I could climb over it if I wanted. It would be so simple; I wasn’t strong anymore, but a foot in this gap, one on the jutting stone above. I thought of Isabella; now I had the choice, and I wanted to stay. I turned, stepped over the mud and onto the grass, spread my arms and took weak steps, but as big as I could manage, as if I were a child. In spite of the wet ground, I lay down. The cold and damp pulled at my back, dragged me toward them. The scrape of bones, that scratching voice. Agnes; I shook her off and looked up, the clouds like a ceiling above me. I remembered the picture of angels in my Breviary when I was a little girl, so many that their wings covered the sky with feathers.
THE SKY WAS BLACK; the new moon a thin crescent. The wall was not finished, but was high enough for me to be able to sit outside, unobserved, at night. Scat strutted along the top of the stones, found a smooth place and lay down. Her contented purr made me feel brave, so I walked to the gateway, still without its gate. It was a dark hole, opening onto the places I had seen only once: the river, the green, Cram Hill. A familiar breeze, the rich scent of moss. I smiled, and Isabella was gone. I could go out with her if I chose; three steps and I would be on the path where everyone walked. I had learned to go places in my mind: to my left, the church and the bridge; to my right, the mill, the duck pond, the villagers’ houses, and finally, up on the hill, the manor house.
Of a sudden Scat hissed. A strange crackle … no, deeper than that, a growl, an animal of some kind. A flash of eyes, a long tongue. I spun around to Scat, but she was still on the wall, ears up, tail weaving, looking into the distance; behind her, a yellow glow in the sky. A bonfire, I thought, though why this night? A shout, tight strings of panic. I climbed onto a pile of unused stone and peered through the branches of the oak, its leaves but round buds. On the rise, orange flames leaped and danced, shooting tiny sparks into the sky, but I couldn’t see what was burning. In the eerie light I caught flickering glimpses of people running out their doors, alert to that sound in their wooden houses, always vulnerable to fire. They stopped, looked, then sharp shouts, voices jumping, darting back and forward. The manor. It was the manor, they said.
More shouts: Hugo? Mary? Alyce? Wymon? Sir Thomas was still inside, perhaps Gwylim as well. The black shapes of people, some running toward the manor, some running away from it. Villagers bent over, coughing. A woman’s voice screamed, ‘Alyce, Alyce, get her out.’ The night became a mass of horror: flames writhing into the blackness, sparks like laughing demons, moans, calls, a name, a sob, babies crying, the bone-breaking sound of timber falling, an ugly smell floating toward me. Even inside my wall I felt it, the swirl of disaster and panic.
A high animal scream, a movement from within the flames, a horse flickering red and yellow, and I gasped. For a moment I thought that it was burning. It jumped the fence and ran along the river road toward Cram Hill. And another shape, following. A crash as the manor began to collapse. The fire a thing alive, a creature opening its enormous mouth.
In the morning the air was sharp with the smell of ash, even inside my cell, and there were none of the usual noises outside; all was strangely quiet. I had often thought how different silences can be. An anchoress, I suppose, is a student of silence, its forms and shapes. That day after the fire, the silence was one of shock and bewilderment, full of the questions of what was to come, but there was something else binding us. As I prayed, flickers of orange writhed before me, and though I asked God’s comfort for all who suffered, I kept my mind away from names. Or faces. I worried for the villagers, but I was also afraid that if I looked more closely, I might discover that I felt relief, or worse.
Louise had been out of her room much of the morning, but she knocked on my shutters to tell me the news. The manor was stone on the first floor with a wooden second floor, and the flames had taken hold most strongly up there.
‘Sir Thomas got out, or downstairs, but he collapsed, his clothes alight. Hugo was sleeping in the stables with a sick horse and helped drag him out. The men carried Gwylim’s body down this morning. Alyce, Mary, and Wymon were asleep downstairs in the hall. Poor Alyce, Wymon said she was with them as they ran, but a burning beam fell on her. Nothing they could do.’
‘Alyce! She’s dead? She was young, wasn’t she?’
‘A few years older than Eleanor. She worked in the kitchen when Sir Thomas stayed at the manor. Thank God, Lady Cecilia stayed at Friaston and wasn’t here. Course, she never came when it was for accounts and business.’
Later in the day Maud came to visit. My Rule would have called it gossip, but Maud thought of it as something else, and I had begun to agree. Sir Thomas had been taken to Friaston, badly injured, and Bill had gone to tell the priory. Three horses had escaped — Hugo had managed to unbolt some of the doors — but one had been caught in the flames; the animals in the barn were trapped and died when the stored hay caught alight; feathers lay charred among the rubble of the dovecote.
After a silence, Maud added, ‘And who knows how these things start. Happens so easy: a spark, a candle, may be; something in the kitchen. Our young Fulke, you know him — well, not really so young — he was out setting rabbit traps on the lord’s forests last night and he says he saw a woman coming out of the manor, her hair alight, he thought. Until he recognised who it was. An’ I teased him, he’s such a head for fancy, our Fulke. He should write stories, he should.
‘Anyhows, Sister, my Billy found us a handmill that wasn’t all smashed in the pile of them at the back of the kitchen. Just needs a bit of work to set it right. That’ll suit us until the next steward comes on his high horse.’
When she left, I sat at my desk. I had not wanted Thomas to die, had not even thought of it, but I had to confess that for a moment, as the manor collapsed, I thought God might have been declaring judgement. Instead, poor Alyce had died. And Gwylim.
Burned and ill, Sir Thomas demanded compassion and prayers for his suffering. I would pray for him, because I had vowed to do that, though I would have to trust the words to say what my heart would not.
IN THE DAYS THAT followed the fire, more men came to finish my wall. With no steward, and the lord so ill, the usual obligations to the manor were in confusion, but each family still had their own land to tend, especially with the coming of spring, planting seeds and weeding, so I was surprised. There was an air of waiting to know if Sir Thomas would live, a kind of indrawn breath among us all, and perhaps it was easier to be together, working.
‘Maybe they want to be sure you stay now, after so much,’ Louise said. ‘Make sure you have all you need. Maybe they have some thoughts of Anna.’ She paused and I heard her breathe out heavily. ‘I wonder what will happen to us, Sister, if Sir Thomas doesn’t live? Lady Cecilia is a pious woman, and she would look to your care, but she is a woman, after all. I don’t know what laws they have for rich folk inheriting land.’
I hadn’t let myself think of what might happen to Louise and me. The corrody was signed, the priory had the land as agreed, so it seemed that all should continue as it was. But what of the village without a lord?
‘We will pray each day for Sir Thomas to recover, Louise.’
I could hear the men chipping and cutting stone, talking seriously, sometimes laughing and humming. It was the first time so many had gathered by my parlour without whispering or shushing one another. It seemed that they wanted to include me in their lives. Their talk roamed around everyday matters: the state of the newly planted soil, newborn lambs, feed for grazing.
‘I’ve taken me sheep from the demesne land, put ’em back to graze on the corn stubble. And I’ve taken a few from Sir Thomas’s flock as well — not to keep like, but what’s left fallow needs the manure. Fair’s fair when he made us pay to graze on his land.’ It was Roger. ‘Who’s to stop us? For now, anyway.’
Grumbling began again, words rising and falling, short bursts of bitter laughter, plans to return the boundary stones that Sir Thomas had moved, grumbling about the smashed handmills, voices I didn’t know. Words drifted like a squally day.
‘The man deserves to suffer.’
Silence for a time. ‘I cursed him too, but we can’t wish him to suffer. No. Not right.’
‘There’s Alyce in the ground just there, and Anna, and Sam. We can’t wish more death.’
‘Anna. Think of the maid and why she died. And he’d have bled us dry and thrown us off our land, given it to the sheep.’
‘Strange to think: for all a man’s money, all it takes is a spark.’
‘And so we must pray for him. He’s a man just like us.’
The next morning Louise told me that Roger and Bill had hung the gate. I had opened my door before, but going out in the day was different. I stood from my squint after Terce, turned the key in its lock, and pushed open the door. Even though the morning was dull, I could see nothing but a strange shifting of light and shadows that hurt my eyes. I put my hand up to shield them. Slowly, as they adjusted, I saw my wall, three or four steps in front of me, stone on stone, rough but laid snugly together. I stepped forward to touch it, and walked to the corner running my fingers across its roughness, as if holding a friend’s hand. Despite its height, well above my head, I felt that the village could see me, the recluse breaking her Rule of life, opening herself to the sight of others, so I stayed close by the outer wall, pacing slowly along its length. There were the tree, the stones and the mud that I had seen in darkness, but they had been as ghosts to what I now saw: stronger, brighter, more threatening than anything I had known before. When the tree moved it seemed alive and the mud looked as if it could shape itself into a man like Adam.
Towards the corner of the outer wall and the front wall I stopped; Father Ranaulf had told me that Gilbert and Cuthbert had made a bench for me from the thick branch of the oak tree that grew low and long in the churchyard, and had been cut off to make room for my wall. They’d set the bench just below where the branch had once stretched out, a step or two from the corner. It was shaped and rounded, worked smooth, and at each end there was a round face wreathed in carvings of oak leaves and acorns: one face laughing, one serious. I ran my fingers over the serious one and sat down. I was on churchyard ground, above the graves of those I had never known; inside, Agnes ground her dry teeth.
I looked across to my cell wall, slick with green moss. It joined the parlour wall with a rough seam of stones and extended farther to escape the church’s shadow. At the corner there was a gate into my garden with a bolt on the inside. I could pull back the bolt and open it, walk by the river, along the village lanes, or into the forest, may be find Isabella.
Perhaps things would change, but I didn’t want to go out there. I had barely seen the village, but after more than a year in my cell, its paths, its woods, and its full river were traced inside me. They flowed through my body and I roamed around them, enclosed and unsealed.
RANAULF
RANAULF STOOD AT THE gate. The wood was worn, but solid — and without a handle on the outside. He thought about the first day he had visited the anchorhold and peered around the side of the parlour to the dank shaded grass and the stones of the cell. The new wall would not change that, but he could see that some sun would fall inside the garden, at least in spring and summer.
He moved to the parlour door, pulled at it as he always did, and almost fell backwards when it opened easily. Roger had fixed it, he remembered, though he felt uneasy, unsettled by all the changes. His reaction made no sense, he knew; he had complained of the door, had argued for Sarah’s garden, and all had been made good. Still, this was not the anchorhold — nor the anchoress — he had visited that cold winter’s day a little more than a year past. He had never seen inside the cell and he would not see the garden, that second space where she would dwell. Irritated at his own lack of reason, he walked into the parlour and closed the door behind him.
‘God bless you, Sister Sarah. Good morning.’
‘Father Ranaulf. God be with you.’
Her voice was familiar, soothing. He felt himself relax. ‘I see that your gate is finished. Your garden is complete.’
‘Yes, Roger and Bill came earlier this morning.’
‘I had hoped to look at the garden before it was sealed. To see it done at last.’ He paused but there was no response from behind the curtain. ‘Forgive me, Sister. It’s your garden. I suppose because I arranged for the stone and the men, I hoped I might view it. Of course, we couldn’t stand in the garden together, or see each other, but if you opened the gate, perhaps—’
‘Father.’
It was the old silence, but now they understood each other.
‘You’re right. I did no more than was needed. I pray that the garden will bless you, Sarah.’ The word came so easily. Sarah.
The ritual of confession and absolution, that well-worn path, helped to settle him and he sat quietly for a time before he spoke again. ‘We at St Christopher’s are praying for Sir Thomas. The prior has visited Friaston and says he’s very ill. The physician does what he can, but we must wait on God. The thought of Sir Thomas and his pain stays with me, whatever else I have thought of him.’
‘Louise and I pray for him, and Father Simon says Mass for him. It’s all we can do,’ Sarah said.
‘It is.’ Irritation rose in his throat again, pushing him to argue at such simple words, however true they might be. Nothing was simple anymore. He had thought his anger at Thomas had been in defence of the young maid, anger purified because it was on behalf of another. But the flames accused him, the spectre of the burned man followed him as if the fire had sprung from his own desire for revenge.
‘God is merciful,’ Sarah said. He looked at the curtain, wondering if she was speaking of Thomas, or of him, her confessor. But it did not matter; her words were a consolation.
SARAH
ELEANOR WAS QUIETER THAN usual. I thought perhaps it was the fire, and so many deaths in a short time: Anna, Alyce, and the baby bird she had buried, even Gwylim. She had seen him often and had been scared of him, his big hands and his voice that shouted even when he was talking, she had said. She had little to do with the manor, but she understood enough to know that Sir Thomas controlled the villagers’ lives, even if from a distance.
I asked about Anna’s baby because I knew it would take her mind off all that had happened.
‘She still cries, but she looks at me now, and I can make her laugh. And, Sister, when she laughs she makes her hands like stars too.’
‘She must like you, Ellie.’
‘Mmm. Has Gillie brought her to see you yet? She said she was going to.’
‘Lizzie came to see me and give me some herbs for my tea, and she asked if Gillie could bring Stella the next time she comes. And I said yes.’
‘Good. It’s mean if you miss out, just ’cause you’re here. And can I see your garden, Sister? Has Father Finnegan seen your garden?’
‘Not yet, Ellie.’
I was embarrassed still at the luxury of my garden, and apart from Louise, Eleanor would be my first visitor. I had wondered if Father Ranaulf and I might speak together in the garden, but then I remembered the words of the demon in the story of St Margaret. A man and a woman might sit together, thinking they were safe because they were speaking of God, but the Devil would use that to tempt them. By looking at each other and then by touching they would sin. I loved my books, but I had been thinking carefully about their words and about who had written them. Not all words are to be read in the same way.
