The Heretic's Apprentice

by Ellis Peters

  Prior Robert had written them down, and delivered them with a neutral voice and impartial countenance, as if even he had felt how the very atmosphere within the enclave had changed towards the accused.

  ‘My lord, in sum, there are four heads: first, that he does not believe that children who die unbaptised are doomed to reprobation. Second, as a reason for that, he does not believe in original sin, but holds that the state of newborn children is the state of Adam before his fall, a state of innocence. Third, that he holds that a man can, by his own acts, make his own way towards salvation, which is held by the Church to be a denial of divine grace. Fourth, that he rejects what Saint Augustine wrote of predestination, that the number of the elect is already chosen and cannot be changed, and all others are doomed to reprobation. For he said rather that he held with Origen, who wrote that in the end all men would be saved, since all things came from God, and to God they must return.’

  ‘And those four heads are all the matter?’ said the bishop thoughtfully.

  ‘They are, my lord.’

  ‘And how do you say, Elave? Have you been misreported in any of these counts?’

  ‘No, my lord,’ said Elave firmly. ‘I hold by all of those. Though I never named this Origen, for I did not then know the name of the elder who wrote what I accepted and still believe.’

  ‘Very well! Let us consider the first head, your defence of those infants who die unbaptised. You are not alone in having difficulty in accepting their damnation. In doubt, go back to Holy Writ. That cannot be wrong. Our Lord,’ said the bishop, ‘ordered that children should be allowed to come to him freely, for of such, he said, is the kingdom of heaven. To the best of my reading, he never asked first whether they were baptised or not before he took them up in his arms. Heaven he certainly allotted to them. But tell me, then, Elave, what value do you see in infant baptism, if it is not the sole way to salvation?’

  ‘It is a welcome into the Church and into life, surely,’ said Elave, uncertain as yet of his ground and of his judge, but hopeful. ‘We come innocent, but such a membership and such a blessing is to help us keep our innocence.’

  ‘To speak of innocence at birth is to bring us to the second count. It is part of the same thinking. You do not believe that we come into the world already rotten with the sin of Adam?’

  Pale, obstinate and unrelenting, Elave said: ‘No, I do not believe it. It would be unjust. How can God be unjust? By the time we are grown we have enough to bear with our own sins.’

  ‘Of all men,’ agreed the bishop with a rueful smile, ‘that is certainly true. Saint Augustine, who has been mentioned here, regarded the sin of Adam as perpetuated in all his heirs. It might be well to give a thought to what the sin of Adam truly was. Augustine held it to be the fleshly act between man and woman, and considered it the root and origin of all sin. There is here another disputable point. If this in every case is sin, how comes it that God instructed his first-made creatures to be fruitful and multiply and people the earth?’

  ‘It is nevertheless a more blessed course to refrain,’ said Canon Gerbert coldly but carefully, for Roger de Clinton was on his own ground, noble, and highly regarded.

  ‘Neither the act nor abstention from the act is of itself either good or bad,’ said the bishop amiably, ‘but only in respect of its purpose, and the spirit in which it is undertaken. What was your third head, Father Prior?’

  ‘The question of free will and divine grace,’ said Robert. ‘And namely, whether a man can of his free will choose right instead of wrong, and whether by so doing he can proceed one step towards his own salvation. Or whether nothing can avail of all he does, however virtuous, but only by divine grace.’

  ‘As to that, Elave,’ said the bishop, looking at the resolute face that fronted him with such intent and sombre eyes, ‘you may speak your mind. I am not trying to trap you, I desire to know.’

  ‘My lord,’ said Elave, picking his way with deliberation, ‘I do believe we have been given free will, and can and must use it to choose between right and wrong, if we are men and not beasts. Surely it is the least of what we owe, to try and make our way towards salvation by right action. I never denied divine grace. Surely it is the greatest grace that we are given this power to choose, and the strength to make right use of it. And see, my lord, if there is a last judgement, it will not and cannot be of God’s grace, but of what every man has done with it, whether he buried his talent or turned it to good profit. It is for our own actions we shall answer, when the day comes.’

  ‘So thinking,’ said the bishop, eyeing him with interest. ‘I see that you can hardly accept that the roll of the elect is already made up, and the rest of us are eternally lost. If that were true, why strive? And strive we do. It is native to man to have an aim, and labour towards it. And God he knows, better than any, that grace and truth and uprightness are as good aims as any. What else is salvation? It is no bad thing to feel obliged to earn it, and not wait to be given it as alms to a beggar, unearned.’

  ‘These are mysteries for the wise to ponder, if anyone dare,’ said Gerbert in chill disapproval, but somewhat abstractedly, too, for a part of his mind was already preoccupied with the journey on to Chester, and the subtle diplomacy he must have at his finger-ends when he got there. ‘From one obscure even among the laity it is presumptuous.’

  ‘It was presumptuous of Our Lord to argue with the doctors in the temple,’ said the bishop, ‘seeing he was human boy as well as God, and in both kinds true to that nature. But he did it. We doctors in the temple nowadays do well to recall how vulnerable we are.’ And he sat back in his stall, and regarded Elave very earnestly for some minutes. ‘My son,’ he said then, ‘I find no fault with you for venturing to use wits which, I’m sure you would say, are also the gift of God, and meant for use, not to be buried profitless. Only take care to remember that you are also subject to error, and vulnerable after your own kind as I after mine.’

  ‘My lord,’ said Elave, ‘I have learned it all too well.’

  ‘Not so well, I hope, as to bury your talent now. It is better to cut too deep a course than to stagnate and grow foul. One test only I require, and that is enough for me. If you believe, in all good faith, the words of the creed, in the sight of this assembly and of God, recite it for me now.’

  Elave had begun to glow as brightly as the sun slanting across the floor of the chapter-house. Without further invitation, without an instant’s thought, he began in a voice loud, clear and joyful: ‘I believe in one God, the Father, the ruler of all men, the maker of all things visible and invisible…’

  For this belonged in the back of his mind untouched since childhood, learned from his first priestly patron, whom he loved and who could do no wrong for him, and with whom he had chanted it regularly and happily for years without ever questioning what it meant, only feeling what it meant to the gentle teacher he adored and imitated. This was his faith for once not chiselled out for himself, but received, rather an incantation than a declaration of belief. After all his doubts and probings and rebellions, it was his innocence and orthodoxy that set the seal on his deliverance.

  He was just ending, in triumph, knowing himself free and vindicated, when Hugh Beringar came quietly into the chapter-house, with a bundle wrapped in thick swathes of waxed cloth under his arm.

  *

  ‘We found him,’ said Hugh, ‘lodged under the bridge, caught up by the chain that used to moor a boat mill there, years ago. We have taken his body home. Girard knows everything we could tell him. With Jevan’s end this whole matter can end. He owned to murder before he died. There is no need to publish to the world what would further injure and distress his kin.’

  ‘None,’ said Radulfus.

  There were seven of them gathered together in Brother Anselm’s corner of the north walk, but Canon Gerbert was not among them. he had already shaken off the dust of this questionably orthodox abbey from his riding-boots, mounted a horse fully recovered from his lameness and eager for exercise, an
d set off for Chester, with his body servant and his grooms, and no doubt was already rehearsing what he would have to say to Earl Ranulf, and how much he could get from him without promising anything of substance in return. But the bishop, once having heard of what Hugh carried, and the vicissitudes through which it had passed, had the human curiosity to wait and see for himself the final outcome. Here with him were Anselm, Cadfael, Hugh, Abbot Radulfus, and Elave and Fortunata, silent, hand in hand though they dissembled the clasp reticently between their bodies in this august company. They were still a little dazed with too sudden and too harsh experience, and not yet fully awake to this equally abrupt and bewildering release from tension.

  Hugh had delivered his report in few words. The less said now of that death, the better. Jevan of Lythwood was gone, taken from the Severn under the same arch of the same bridge where he had hidden his own dead man until nightfall. In time Fortunata would remember him as she had always known him, an ordinary uncle, kind if not demonstrative. Some day it would cease to matter that she still could not be certain whether he would indeed have killed her, as he had killed one witness already, rather than give up what in the end he had valued more than life. It was the last irony that Aldwin, according to Conan, had never managed to see what was within the box. Jevan had killed to no purpose.

  ‘And this,’ said Hugh, ‘was still in his arms, lodged fast against the stone of the pier.’ It lay now upon Anselm’s work-table, still shedding a few drops of water as the wrappings were stripped away. ‘It belongs, as you know, to this lady, and she has asked that it be opened here, before you, my lords, as witnesses knowledgeable in such works as may be found within.’

  He was unfolding layer after layer as he spoke. The outermost, scorched and frayed into holes, had already been discarded, but Jevan had given his treasure every possible protection, and by the time the last folds were stripped away the box lay before them immaculate, untouched by fire or water, the ornate key still in the lock. The ivory lozenge stared up at them with immense Byzantine eyes from beneath the great round forehead that might have been drawn with compasses, before the rich hair was carved, and the beard, and the lines of age and thought. The coiling vines gleamed, refracting light from polished edges. Now at last they all hesitated to turn the key and open the lid.

  It was Anselm who at length set hands to it and opened it. From both sides they leaned to gaze. Fortunata and Elave drew close, and Cadfael made room for them. Who had a better right?

  The lid rose on the binding of purple dyed vellum, bordered with a rich tracery of leaves, flowers and tendrils in gold, and bearing in the centre, in a delicate framework of gold, a fellow to the ivory on the box. The same venerable face and majestic brow, the same compelling eyes gazing upon eternity, but this one was carved on a smaller scale, not a head but a half-length, and held a little harp in his hands.

  With reverent care Anselm tilted the box, and supported the book on his palm as he slid it out on to the table.

  ‘Not a saint,’ he said, ‘except that they often showed him with a halo. This is King David, and surely what we have here is a psalter.’

  The purple vellum of the binding was stretched over thin boards, and the first gathering of the book, and the last, when Anselm opened it, were also of gold on purple. The rest of the leaves were of very fine, smooth finish and almost pure white. There was a frontispiece painting of the psalmist playing and singing, enthroned like an emperor, and surrounded by musicians earthly and heavenly. The vibrant colours sprang ringing from the page, as brilliantly as the sounds the royal minstrel was plucking from his strings. Here was no powerful, massive Byzantine block colouring, classic and monumental, but sinuous, delicate, graceful shapes, as pliant and ethereal as the pattern of vines that surrounded the picture. Everything rippled and twined, and was elegantly elongated. Opposite, on a skin side smooth as silk, the title page was lined out in golden uncials. But on the following leaf, which was the dedication page, the penmanship changed to a neat, fluent, round hand.

  ‘This is not eastern,’ said the bishop, leaning to look more closely.

  ‘No. It is Irish minuscule, the insular script.’ Anselm’s voice grew more reverent and awed as he turned page after page, into the ivory whiteness of the main part of the book, where the script had abandoned gold for a rich blue-black, and the numerals and initials flowered in exquisite colours, laced and bordered with all manner of meadow flowers, climbing roses, little herbers no bigger than a thumbnail, where birds sang in branches hardly thicker than a hair, and shy animals leaned out from the cover of blossoming bushes. Tiny, perfect women sat reading on turfed seats under bowers of eglantine. Golden fountains played into ivory basins, swans sailed on crystal rivers, minute ships ventured oceans the size of a tear.

  In the last gathering of the book the leaves reassumed their imperial purple, the final exultant psalms were again inscribed in gold, and the psalter ended with a painted page in which an empyrean of hovering angels, a paradise of haloed saints, and a transfigured earth of redeemed souls all together obeyed the psalmist, and praised God in the firmament of his power, with every instrument of music known to man. And all the quivering wings, all the haloes, all the trumpets and psalteries and harps, the stringed instruments and organs, the timbrels and the loud cymbals were of burnished gold, and the denizens of heaven and paradise and earth alike were as sinuous and ethereal as the tendrils of rose and honeysuckle and vine that intertwined with them, and the sky above them as blue as the irises and periwinkles under their feet, until the tips of the angels’ wings melted into a zenith all blinding gold, in which the ultimate mystery vanished from sight.

  ‘This is a wonder!’ said the bishop. ‘Never have I seen such work. This is beyond price. Where can such a thing have been produced? Where was there art the match of this?’

  Anselm turned back to the dedication page, and read aloud slowly from the golden Latin:

  Made at the wish of Otto, King and Emperor, for the marriage of his beloved son, Otto, Prince of the Roman Empire, to the most Noble and Gracious Theofanu, Princess of Byzantium, this book is the gift of His Most Christian Grace to the Princess. Diarmaid, monk of Saint Gall, wrote and painted it.

  ‘Irish script and an Irish name,’ said the abbot. ‘Gallus himself was Irish, and many of his race followed him there.’

  ‘Including one,’ said the bishop, ‘who created this most precious and marvellous thing. But the box, surely, was made for it later, and by another Irish artist. Perhaps the same hand that made the ivory on the binding also made the second one for the casket. Perhaps she brought such an artist to the west in her train. It is a marriage of two cultures indeed, like the marriage it celebrated.’

  ‘They were in Saint Gall,’ said Anselm, scholar and historian, regarding with love but without greed the most beautiful and rare book he was ever likely to see. ‘The same year the prince married they were there, son and father both. It is recorded in the chronicle. The young man was seventeen, and knew how to value manuscripts. He took several away with him from the library. Not all of them were ever returned. Is it any wonder that a man who loved books, once having set eyes on this, should covet it to the edge of madness?’

  Cadfael, silent and apart, took his eyes from the pure, clear colours laid on, almost two hundred years since, by a steady hand and a loving mind, to watch Fortunata’s face. She stood with Elave close and watchful at her shoulder, and Cadfael knew that the boy had her by the hand still in the shelter of their bodies, as fast as ever Jevan had held her by the arm when she was the only frail barrier he had against betrayal and ruin. She gazed and gazed at the beautiful thing William had sent her as dowry, and her eyes were hooded and her lips set in a pale, still face.

  No fault of Diarmaid, the Irish monk of Saint Gall, who had poured his loveliest art into a gift of love, or at least a gift for marriage, the loftiest of the age, a mating of empires! No fault of his that this exquisite thing had brought about two deaths, and bereaved as well as endowed th
e bride to whom it was sent. Was it any wonder that such a perfect thing could corrupt a hitherto blameless lover of books to covet, steal and kill?

  Fortunata looked up at last, and found the bishop’s eyes upon her, across the table and its radiant burden.

  ‘My child,’ he said, ‘you have here a most precious gift. If it pleases you to sell it, it will provide you with a rich dowry indeed, but take good advice before you part with it, and keep it safe. Abbot Radulfus here would surely hold it in trust for you, if you wish it, and see that you are properly counselled when you come to deal with a buyer. Though I must tell you that in truth it would be impossible to put a price on it fit for what is priceless.’

  ‘My lord,’ said Fortunata, ‘I know what I want to do with it. I cannot keep it. It is beautiful, and I shall always remember it and be glad that I’ve seen it. But as long as it remains with me I shall find it a bitter reminder, and it will seem to me somehow spoiled and wronged. Nothing ugly should ever have touched it. I would rather that it should go with you. In your church treasury it will be pure again, and blessed.’

  ‘I understand your revulsion,’ said the bishop gently, ‘after all that has happened, and I feel the justice of your grief for a thing of beauty and grace misused. But if that is truly what you wish, then you must accept what the library of my see can pay you for the book, though I must tell you I have not its worth to spend.’

  ‘No!’ Fortunata shook her head decidedly. ‘Money has been paid for it once, money must not be paid for it again. If it has no price, no price must be given for it, but I may give it, and suffer no loss.’