Weighed down with outrage and ledgers, the two of them walked from the checker to the abbot’s house, where they found only Brother Tom.
“Come in,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m assuming Father John’s still over at the guesthouse with Brother Cassian’s family, and Father William’s not here yet. But I’ve lit the fire for you, so make yourselves at home. Shall I take those books and put them out ready on the table?”
On this autumn afternoon, the daylight shone mellow, but the air was chilly, and the two men welcomed the sight of the fire. They sat in the two chairs that Brother Tom had set ready by the hearth, Father Chad leaning forward to spread his hands toward the warmth of the flames, Brother Ambrose sitting back with his feet on the hearth. Steam began to rise from his boots.
A quick, peremptory knock on the door that opened in from the cloister announced William’s arrival.
“I’m sorry to keep you—where’s Father John?”
He addressed these words to Brother Ambrose and Father Chad, with a brief nod of greeting to Brother Tom, who thought he saw courage protected by the armour of brusque concision.
Neither of the senior monks at the fireside turned to look at him as he brought the two stools that remained to sit on, placed them to make a group of four, and joined the other men as he seated himself on one of them.
“He is with visitors, we believe,” Father Chad said eventually. Then he turned to look at William.
“Is that all you have to say? I’m surprised at you. I understand you have not been in the checker all this day. I should have thought you owe Brother Ambrose an apology, do you not, for this debacle? You should be ashamed of yourself ! Father Abbot was merciful to you—remarkably merciful—in Chapter this morning. I would have expected a man to be scourged for such an offence as you have committed. It seems to me he let you off very lightly indeed. You ought not to take his leniency as a matter of course or conclude that what you have done is something of little moment. Have you nothing to say to me or to Brother Ambrose here? After acting behind our backs in the way you have, and now making yourself scarce all this morning once it’s come to light?”
Brother Thomas, sitting on the scribe’s stool at the far end of the room, could not see William’s face but saw his body freeze as if he had been turned to stone. Some minutes elapsed in which William did not speak.
“Well?” Brother Ambrose joined in. “Have you nothing to say for yourself ?”
William spoke then, softly, as soft as velvet, and for a moment his voice brought back with startling recall to Brother Tom the appalling stay he had endured with Father Peregrine in St Dunstan’s Priory. There was somehow something dangerous in William’s tone, for all he spoke so very gently in reply.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, my brothers, you have every right to question me. What have I to say for myself ? Well, to you Father Ambrose, I think I have to say that if I had been the cellarer of this abbey, we should not have got from Lent to nigh on All Hallows with five hundred pounds gone adrift unnoticed; I’d not have been relying on another man to supply me with the information. I beg your pardon that I was not available for censure earlier in the day. I’d had enough. I hoped you might understand. And in response to your various questions, Father Chad, yes, I am most deeply and bitterly ashamed of myself. Not because what I have done has flouted your authority, for I feel no more respect for you than I would for a rabbit, but because what I intended as good work in gratitude for kindness shown me has grievously damaged and imperiled this house as things have turned out. I am not insensible. I am painfully aware of what I have done. I hoped I’d managed to communicate that this morning in Chapter, where you both were. And Father John—you are half-right: it is not that he was lenient as you thought, but that he was indeed—as you said—merciful. I fully expected myself that I would be scourged. But he knows that I… that there are… he knows me better than you do. And, thank God, he is not as absorbed with his own self-righteousness as you are.”
“How dare you!” Quivering with indignation, his face crimson, hardly able to speak, Father Chad, who was not easily moved to anger, rose from his chair and stared at William in complete outrage. “How dare you suggest that Father John is self-righteous? After all he’s done for you!”
What? thought Brother Thomas, bewildered. Then—when William replied in that same provocative, suave purr, “I didn’t say Father John is self-righteous; I said you are”—Tom slipped from his seat, let himself quietly out of the room, and went with all speed to the guesthouse where he found his abbot making his farewells to Brother Cassian’s family.
Brother Tom stood just within the doorway, saying nothing, but he looked very directly at his abbot, who surmised that all was not well and left his visitors at once.
“Father, I think you’d better come,” Tom said quietly as his abbot joined him.
“Oh, my Lord!” was the only thing John had to say as Brother Tom apprised him of the exchange that had taken place in his absence. Walking with all speed across the abbey court, Tom felt slightly surprised to discover himself put to it to keep pace with his abbot’s stride.
“What’s going on?” demanded Abbot John with no preliminaries as he walked through the door that led in from the abbey court, followed by Brother Thomas who shut the door behind them and unobtrusively resumed his earlier seat.
William was on his feet the instant his superior entered the room, and Father Chad and then Brother Ambrose followed his example without delay.
“Sit down!” John instructed them, and they did. “Tell me what’s happened! Brother Thomas has called me from our guests because of ugly antagonism here, and I would like your account of it, please.”
“Father, would you prefer to take this chair?” Father Chad asked him meekly.
“No. I’m perfectly happy on a stool. Father William? Tell me, please.”
Somewhere below conscious awareness William registered that the tic that had begun in his face in Chapter was still plaguing him and that he felt suddenly extraordinarily weary.
“It was me,” he said, his voice flat and defeated. “I was asked for an apology for the disrespect I have shown and the damage I have caused to Brother Ambrose and Father Chad, reprimanded for my failure to come to the checker this day long, and my response was discourteous and inflamed indignation into anger. I ask your pardon, Father, and I am sorry to have encroached upon your conference with your guests.”
He stopped. Brother Tom felt, as though it had been in his own body, the tremendous effort it took him to add, “And I ask your pardon, Brother Ambrose, and… and yours too, Father Chad, for my churlishness and extreme discourtesy. Please forgive me.”
Neither Brother Ambrose nor Father Chad said anything in reply to this.
“Thank you.” Brother Tom saw the gentleness with which John spoke to William hit him like a springy branch flicking back in his face. He reflected how odd it is that a man braced for pugnacity or blame will be completely undermined by kindness, and so it was now. William turned his head away, and Tom saw that his face had become a mass of tics and twitches. Holy saints, he thought, this is starting to be too much for him. He saw that their abbot had observed it, too. John drew the attention of the other men away from William.
“We have to pull together in this, my brothers,” he said, his voice calm and reasonable (infirmary voice, thought Tom). “This spat between you three here is the querulous bickering of worried men, and we can’t afford it. This is no time for blame now, for we have serious work before us. It is nobody’s fault anymore. Father William was grievously out of order in what he did, but he knows it. Keep before your minds that though the result has been calamitous and his actions could not be condoned by any of us, his intentions were motivated by love for this community and gratitude, and surely we would want to treasure that.
“Besides all that, I am surprised to hear that you sought an apology from him. You had no business, either of you, to upbraid him in this way. You had your chance to have
your say in Chapter this morning. Were you not there? Did you not see him? Was it not apparent to you how filled with shame he was, and how penitent? Have you not remembered that the offence was forgiven? It’s done with. It’s over. That’s our Rule, our life, our faith, our gospel. The difficulties we are met to resolve will not disappear, but the sin is done away with. The problems we face now belong to all of us, but they are nobody’s fault anymore. You are grown men, not children, and you are monks, servants of Christ who chose to accept the sin of us all. What are you doing, pointing the finger and recriminating and squabbling?”
His senior brethren accepted this rebuke with wooden faces. Tom thought they did not look entirely convinced. But they said nothing.
“Let’s get to it then. You have brought the ledgers? Oh yes, your pardon, I see them on the table there. Let’s take our chairs to the table and look at practical possibilities, work out the sums involved. Father William, I think we are relying on you for some guidance and suggestions.”
As he said that, Tom’s heart went out to William, who looked as though he could hardly carry his stool across to the table, let alone find his way out of a complex financial crisis. As he sat down to comply with John’s request, a picture came unexpectedly into Tom’s imagination of a worn cloth in the last stages of disintegration, left hanging out to dry long ago, rotted by fierce sunlight, blown by the wind onto snagging thorns, soaked by rain and stiffened by frost, forgotten.
William took a deep breath and reached for the ledger on the top of the pile. “It’s not very difficult,” he said quietly, “but it will take discipline and tenacity and mindful attention to detail—and those are the things it’s ambitious to expect a community of this size to remember or sustain. One man on his own can be ruthless with himself to get where he means to be; it’s not so easy to achieve the same result with a group.”
Tom watched him. He looked almost dazed, and his hands shook. His face still twitched unremittingly. Tom listened with increasing respect and admiration as, despite this, William took them through every single aspect of the abbey’s finances with a clear grasp of the exact extent of the capacity and potential of every area of work and resources both within the abbey buildings and in every further reach of the estate.
When he had done, Tom saw from their faces that the three men listening to him had taken in probably a scant half of what he’d said, but that they felt cautiously encouraged. They admitted a hope that he would be able to pull them through.
The afternoon office had been delegated to Father Theodore’s capable hands. It was nearly time for Vespers when they stacked the account books again and stood to go.
“Shall I take them back to the checker?” William asked Ambrose, his voice humble and low. But Brother Ambrose said he thought he’d take them back himself, if Father Chad would help again. The prior readily agreed.
“Would you like to dine with me tonight?” John asked William quietly as the two senior monks departed with the ledgers. He meant it as a kindness, to protect William from the further society of his brothers on this difficult day, but William looked at him with something approaching incredulity. “I… Father… I mean, thank you—but of your charity, please will you excuse me? Can I—may I have your permission to go to my bed?”
His abbot instantly gave his permission.
Half an hour later, his handkerchief bundled against his mouth to keep his torment silent and private, William curled into a ball under his blankets in the austere, narrow haven of his cell and gave himself up to the convulsion of grief that had waited all day to have its way with him. He watched the carrion feeders of self-hatred and despair close in to tear his soul apart as he faced what he had become and what he had done. Every man entering monastic life renounced personal wealth and status, but there were other currencies than social standing and bags of gold. Trustworthiness and integrity; obedience, truth and humility; authentic chastity and simplicity—these were the treasures of monasticism. As William dodged and stumbled and lost his footing in the futile flight from obliteration, the ghouls that harried him overwhelmed him and began to devour his living spirit. He had been arrogant and deceitful and dishonest; he had disregarded his abbot’s authority and flouted the principles of his obedience; he had thrown celibacy out of the window and traded simplicity for the twisty, winding ways of his own cunning. His integrity was shredded into filthy rotting tatters, and the light of Christ that had with such unexpected sweetness illumined his soul was nothing now but a broken lamp and a spreading stain of spilt oil on the floor of his darkness.
His last coherent thought was the dawning horror that word of the loss of the ship and the ruin it had brought would inevitably somehow reach Madeleine; there was discretion and kindness here, but there were never any secrets for long. He knew he must find a way to let her know himself. Groping for some kind of possibility, he thought he would go in the morning and tell Mother Cottingham what he had done. He imagined seeing the disappointment in him clear in her face, but thought he could cope with even that better than wondering every day if the news had reached them. After that his soul crashed completely. Talons of self-loathing ripped and lacerated his mind; paroxysms of sobbing twisted his belly into agony. He was lost; he had become devilish to himself.
“Oh Jesu, mercy… have mercy on me… oh Jesu help…” he moaned softly, pulling the handkerchief away from his mouth after an hour of this, so that at the very least he could pray.
“Have mercy on me… have mercy on me…” he whispered over and over, his soul crawling out of the filthy degradation it had slipped into, to the only sanctuary he could still find: the inexhaustible pity of Christ that turns no one away. He didn’t know what happened to him then; his bankrupt, bleeding soul managed by some means to crawl out of what he had fallen into and beach itself on the shores of God’s infinite love. He could do no more. Shuddering with the cold of complete prostration, he fell asleep there.
While William faced his personal demons in the loneliness of his cell, Abbot John dined alone in his house, feeling the need for the solitude to frame his homily for the following morning, and glad to turn his thoughts to something other than accounts. He allowed the complexities of pressing concerns to recede from his mind, turning his attention to the preparation of his thoughts for his duties tomorrow. He had been thinking about the Eucharist all that summer and was still bringing its myriad aspects and insights before the faithful at Chapter Mass now in October. His novice master’s request that he address the community on that subject had set him off along that train of thought, and he was still turning it over and over. The longer he gazed on the rich and intricate tissue of grace and redemption he saw there, the deeper and more beautiful it seemed to become in his eyes. He found himself falling in love with Christ in the Eucharist in a new and more profound way than he had experienced before, and this he hadn’t expected. He had accepted the obedience of the abbacy as God’s call on his life, but out of a sense of duty rather than any kind of enthusiasm. He found it humbling and daunting and hard. As his personal agonies of grief gradually settled and healed over, he had focused on learning the shape and rhythm of his work—and fielding the earth tremors that William sent his way, of which this last was surely the worst. So it took him by surprise to discover that in the midst of all of it he still heard the song of God’s love, still experienced the wonder of the story of salvation as it unfolded in the everyday life of his community.
He found himself tracing the skein of resonance running from the telling of the Last Supper to connect with other moments and events in the New Testament. Alongside giving his mind to untangling St Alcuin’s financial dilemmas as he slowly chewed the raised pie and bean salad of his supper, he allowed his soul to expand into the glory of God’s loving-kindness, the grace that reaches down and touches every living soul.
“I don’t flatter myself for a moment that you stow away in your hearts every homily I offer you,” he said to them at Mass the next morning, by which time the thoug
hts that had been developing had distilled into definite form. “But maybe you recall me speaking to you a while back about the Eucharist and how Christ’s command, ‘Remember me’, is obeyed in the living fabric of our lives in community.
“His words have stayed with me, ‘Remember me… Remember me…’ and then I came across them again in my own devotional reading in the Gospels, ‘Remember me’, in a connection I had never made before.
“Jesus ripped the bread apart and poured out the blood-red wine in that last supper with his friends, and the grisly death he foretold caught up with him swiftly enough. Mocked and tortured, nailed by his hands and feet to the cross, he was raised up and left to sweat out his agony in the blistering heat of the sun. Crowned with thorns, blood trickling down into his eyes, a notice tacked above his head, Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews, Pilate’s strange acknowledgment of what had happened. Either side of him, two thieves endured the same execution, in punishment for what they had done. Punishment in their case deserved—inasmuch as anyone deserves punishment more than understanding, or a human being can do anything that deserves being nailed to a cross.
“And the Gospel story relates that one of the thieves mocked and jeered at Jesus. Personally, I’m staggered he found the strength or motivation—I think under those conditions my thoughts would have been occupied with myself. Anyway, apparently that’s what he did, but the other thief took issue with him and defended Jesus against the unjust raillery. ‘The good thief’, we’ve come to call that second man. We don’t know what he’d appropriated that wasn’t his to handle, whether it was only trifling things or amounted to a great deal; we only know he’d taken something he shouldn’t have, and now he was paying the price. The good thief. It’s very pleasing to me that we hold those two words together—there’s always more to a man than the things he’s done wrong. I like it, ‘The good thief’.
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