Remember Me

by Penelope Wilcock

  As William listened to John, the practical words of ordinary domesticity steadied him.

  “I do hear you,” he said in reply. “I have no doubt in my mind that adjusting to this will take everything I have. For sure we shall have our misunderstandings and find ourselves glaring at each other and hating each other and thinking we must have been mad to take each other on. I can see that coming and I’m not looking forward to it, but… Yes, to be candid with you, I’m terrified, but… I feel embarrassed saying this, it’s not really my way of talking, but she is my destiny, John. She has my heart. There has been so much in my life… you know most of it, but not all. So much that I’ve been ashamed of or afraid of. It’s damaged me, all of it—I thought, beyond repair. But when I am with her, something in me wakes up; it’s as though I remember the man—and even the boy—I was meant to be.”

  Looking at him, thoughtfully, considering, John believed him. There was no more to be said.

  “Well, then—are you composed? Shall we go? In answer to your question about chapel, I should strongly advise you to stick to Holy Redeemer for a year; after that you can come to us if you want, for Vespers, but only for Mass if you do not receive the sacrament—because I cannot dispense you from your vows, and that puts me in an impossible position pastorally if you marry. At Holy Redeemer, my counsel to you is simply not to discuss your history with the priest. He does not know you. Then what you choose to do at Mass will be between you and God. And I shall not forget your offer about accounts, and on our previous record I imagine I’ll be glad to take you up on it. And—yes, you are forgiven. In fact—” he hesitated, unsure if he ought to say this, but decided he’d stepped so far beyond how he, as William’s abbot, should have handled this that it no longer made much difference. “I’ll be proud to have you as a brother-in-law. So, shall we go and find you some secular garb while they’re saying Sext and eating lunch?”

  The bell was ringing for the midday office as they walked across to the almonry rooms in the gatehouse. William knew exactly what was there because he had examined, valued, and catalogued it all. He found himself some sober, decent clothes—“Keep your shoes,” said John—and a cap to cover his tonsured head.

  He stripped himself of Peregrine’s habit, folded it up, looked at it for a moment, and then kissed it. “Goodbye, my beloved enemy,” he said. “I didn’t stay long enough to wear out your shelter and your embrace—maybe I never could have.” He gave the habit into John’s hands. “Such curious legacies,” he said. “Columba left me love, and Ellen Cottingham left me freedom.”

  “Don’t forget,” said John quietly, “that Christ has left you his peace as well, not as the world gives; he makes his own gifts, and he said with that gift there is no need to be afraid. Oh, I’m sorry—I’m starting to talk in homilies the whole of the time. Look, obviously you won’t be needing his habit, but do you want to keep Peregrine’s belt? As a keepsake.”

  He pulled it free of the bundle William had handed him, held it out, and William accepted it with delight.

  “Now then… here’s your money. Be on your way. Don’t delude yourself for a minute you will be forgotten. We shan’t speak of you—you know the custom—but how could anybody not remember you? Oh—you can have your horse back, too. You brought her; she’s yours.”

  It was a valuable gift, worth a year’s salary for a working man, and William was grateful indeed, especially to have his own palfrey—for they knew each other’s ways, and the familiarity was comforting. The two men went together to the stables. William saddled up his palfrey and swung up easily into the saddle.

  “Are you in one piece?” John asked, squinting up at him, his eyes against the light.

  “A bit shaky, but this is the right course,” William replied.

  John nodded. “I shall be praying for you. I shall keep you both in my prayers.” He watched as the palfrey responded to her master’s touch, and they began to move off under the gatehouse arch. “Oh—William!”

  William reined the horse in and looked back, eyebrows raised in inquiry. He had mastered himself and managed to restore a veneer of complete composure. His vulnerable soul had been furled back out of sight. John stood looking up at him, the folded habit held in his arms. “Have you anywhere to stay but this house of Madeleine’s?”

  William shook his head.

  “Then you should be wed. I will obtain permission from the priest of Holy Redeemer to come to the lych-gate there and consecrate your marriage this coming Saturday two hours after noon, if you wish it. I am empowered to write the license; you can do this quietly and without waiting for banns to be read. If we do the thing thus discreetly, I think no one will be asking questions. You will be a married couple, that’s all. You have been known as a man in orders in the religious houses, true enough—but as a layman, I doubt you will be recognized.”

  “You would do that? You would consecrate our marriage yourself ? Oh, God bless you! God reward you!” The smile that lit up William’s face shone with such sudden radiance that John was quite taken aback. “Till Saturday then; we shall be there!”

  John felt glad to his core that he’d found the grace to make the journey it took to release such a dazzle of joy. He held open the gate for his friend to ride out and fastened it behind him. As he turned to go back to his house, listening to the hooves of William’s palfrey striking the stones of the road beyond the gate, the sound carrying in the clear, cold winter air, he reflected soberly on how burdened William must have been for most of the time, that he had never even guessed he had the capacity for such a shining radiance of joy.

  And so it was that William rode out of St Alcuin’s in peace, comforted—his heart light, eager to find Madeleine, and to see the place that would be their home. And his happiness was John’s gift to him. Without that willingness to understand and forgive, he knew he would have been stumbling away free, but wretched and broken.

  Within the walls of the abbey, John walked back slowly to his lodging. Once inside, he went into the inner chamber and sat down on his bed, still with the habit that had been Peregrine’s and William’s held tight in his arms. He needed to be alone for a little while.

  He sat quietly, his eyes fixed steadily on the crucifix hanging from its nail in the wall of his chamber, opening his heart to Christ in stunned confession of what he had done. He knew that as the abbot of a religious community, he had transgressed in condoning this marriage—and worse, in offering to consecrate it. He knew his tradition demanded that he dismiss William coldly, reminding him that his solemn profession was irrevocable, that his vows were binding unto death. He knew that in showing him the pathway forward—to marry Madeleine without seeking permission or dispensation, and in so doing create a suspension of the active state of his vow—he had himself committed a grave offence. He should make a clean breast of any sin he committed either to his brethren in chapter or to his confessor—his prior, Father Chad. John ran through the scenario of kneeling to inform the community that he had just blessed William on his way to marry Madeleine, and in addition offered to consecrate the marriage, and rejected it as a possibility. He could not even contemplate telling Father Chad. He wondered if he might make his confession to Father Theodore.

  He sat thinking about the influence we have, each one of us upon the other. He faced the reality that the piece of casuistry he was presently engaged on was entirely consistent with William’s character and not at all with his own. But nor had William left his mark without being changed himself. The honest repentance, the tears of sorrow, the agony of love that had worked their way into his heart, he had found in this place; the months he had stayed under its shelter had transformed him.

  John accepted that somewhere the rule book had got thrown out of the window, but he believed in spite of that they had managed to hang onto the Rule. And he couldn’t make proper sense of that, but he felt sure it was true.

  He bent his head to rest his cheek on Peregrine’s habit, still clasped to his breast. “What would you
have done?” he whispered, “what would you have done?”

  Thinking about it, he acknowledged that Peregrine would probably not have budged an inch to condone what William was doing. He would certainly have made no plans to be consecrating his marriage. Even so, the conviction persisted that he had done the right thing in forgiving him, in being willing to bless their new beginning.

  He kissed the habit he held in his arms and laid it down on his bed. Resolutely he went out of his lodge into the cloister and up the stairs to the novitiate, where he found Theodore going through some difficult Latin with Brother Robert.

  “Father, I need to speak with you,” he said abruptly. While he waited as Theo quietly arranged to see Robert later, John thought he’d better try very hard after this to get his life back on track. Using his position as abbot to disturb an obedientiary’s fulfillment of his vocation was not an exemplary way to be spending the afternoon. Darting a worried look at him, Brother Robert hurried away.

  “Who’s in trouble?” asked Theo with a smile once they were alone, “you or me?”

  He listened carefully as John poured out to him all that had happened; he confessed how, though he had acted with integrity until today, he had wobbled at the last and sent William away with the kiss of peace, advice to get married quietly, and a promise to be the celebrant of that marriage, under license discreetly obtained. He felt guilty, and less certain of the rightness of his course, as he told the tale.

  “Is that all?” asked Theo gently when he had finished. “Yes,” said John, “that’s all. I need your counsel, brother.”

  Theo thought quietly for several minutes. “Well,” he said then, “I do see what you mean. You have bent the rules into some very interesting shapes, my father. But then again, God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. Salvation tangles with the human, gets its hands dirty. Condemnation never does. And I guess that’s the difference.”

  He did not need to look at the letter again. He had remembered precisely the directions Madeleine had sent him to find their house. It lay just over ten miles south of St Alcuin’s, on the outskirts of the village. Low Street, then Bakehouse Lane, then a left turn by the great oak tree where the road divided, then about a quarter of a mile after that, a low stone wall and a wooden barred gate. The trees intertwined their fingers over the lane. Mud laced hard by frost lay underfoot. Scarlet berries brightened the dark of evergreens and flamed among the yellow of a few last pointed leaves. The dead broken stalks of nettles and cow parsley poked from the long, dying grass at the edges of the way. On the grey stone of walls, lichens and mosses shone in vivid patches of colour. Clear of cloud, on this noon all the world was alight with the bright cold of winter. There would be a hard frost again tonight.

  William found the place, dismounted, opened the gate, and led his horse in after him—being careful to latch the gate again; he didn’t know what arrangements Madeleine had for her goat here.

  He stood gazing in astonished delight at his new home. “A cottage,” Thomas Haydon had said, which could have meant anything. William feasted his eyes on this low, comfortable house with a porch to the wide front door, weathered oak under a great stone lintel. A rose that had been trained to grow on the wall now hung loose in long sprays where the care of it had been neglected, only a leaf or two and three lingering blossoms left on it this late in the year. He had not known what to expect but had not anticipated something of such good size. At the front of the house where he stood, the stone-flagged yard adrift with leaves was bounded by a wall. Through the archway in the section of wall opposite him he saw a garden—clearly itself walled, so presumably for vegetables even though at present it looked on a glance to be no more than a haven for weeds.

  “Oh! Oh! You have your palfrey! And we have a stable!” An excited Madeleine appeared around the side of the house, where another way through led to the ground at the back. He had sent word to her that he would come today, and she had been listening for the sound of a cart or a horse or even the simple sound of the gate latch as a man came in on foot, every hour of the morning. “Come! Come and see!”

  He led his horse through like a man in a dream, to where she had prepared the stable with bedding on the floor, a pail of water, and a net of hay. “I’ve had the goat in here at night. I didn’t know we’d have the palfrey.”

  “John said I could bring her. She’d come with me from St. Dunstan’s.”

  They fastened her in the stable. “There’s a paddock where she can go,” said Madeleine, “and we have an orchard, and a pond—we shall be able to have ducks as well as geese, and a pig right away because the orchard is walled and has a pig house at the back. Oh—there is a fruit store by the vegetable garden, all fitted with racks and some apples already laid away. And the wood store is stocked—the wood is well seasoned too! Come and see!”

  William followed her in silence, taking in everything she showed him. “Isn’t it wonderful? Don’t you love it?” She looked for his approval as he stood under the boughs of an apple tree still bearing the last remains of unpicked fruit. She could not read his face. “You—you do like it, don’t you?”

  He nodded without speaking and hastily wiped a tear from his eye with the heel of his hand.

  “I can’t believe this kindness from someone we hardly knew.” His voice shook as he answered her. “This is a palace. It’s so much more than I imagined. I’ve been afraid for what we would do to provide for ourselves, but you’re right—there’s room for a pig and geese and ducks and vegetables and all we could need.” He smiled at her, trying to get a grip on his tangled emotions. “Where have your hens gone?”

  “Over there, look—tucked into the bottom corner of the orchard. There was a henhouse already.”

  She looked at him, her eyes dancing with joy, and she wrapped her arms about him. “And now there is you, to make it heaven.”

  And then he bent his face to hers, folded her in his embrace, his mouth joining to hers as he gave himself to the sweetness of their kiss.

  “We are home,” he said softly, when he could bear to let that kiss come to an end. “It came true.”

  He cradled her in his arms, drinking in everything about this moment, every nerve awake to the feeling of her body against his, hardly able to take in that this was their home; they could stay. It was given.

  “Come and see inside the house! Come and see!” She looked up at him, sparkling with happiness.

  “Just a minute,” he said, unwilling to let her go, and though he felt her taut with impatience to show him everything, he kissed her again. Then he was ready to look at their house.

  The front door opened into a generous room, one wall taken up with the inglenook and bread oven, but there were other rooms besides: the kitchen, of course, and a scullery with a stone sink. From the scullery a door led into a cobbled yard with a well in which Madeleine had found gaps built into the stones to house her butter. Another door opened from the scullery into a pantry with stone shelves and only one small window, built on the north side of the house to keep fresh food cool. A brace of grouse hung there. “Our neighbour brought them,” said Madeleine happily, “for a welcome gift.” Besides this, the house had three further rooms downstairs, so far bare and empty. “For accounts and deeds and records.” “For drying herbs and preparing medicines—a real apothecary.” “For a little oratory—one where I’m actually allowed to kiss my lady.”

  The stairs led to an upper floor with four fair-sized rooms. “If we need more money, we could have a lodger—maybe two!” said Madeleine.

  “We could,” William agreed, but she heard reluctance in his voice. “For a while—only a while—can we be private here? Can it be just you and me for a little while?”

  “For sure. Anyway, we have an income as well as a house. I have eight pounds a year, and if I marry, there is ten pounds a year for my spouse, remember. If I never marry, that second amount is to be held in trust and goes to the abbey on my d
eath.”

  William had remembered. No detail of that will had escaped him, and he had fully grasped the information and its implications on first hearing.

  It was a modest income, but with no rent to pay and the possibility of their own meat and eggs and milk, and with a horse already given, they would have to be frugal, but not anxious. The house had still a few sticks of furniture—a bedstead and a large chest with a domed lid in one room upstairs, a table and two stools, three pails, and some kitchen paraphernalia downstairs. “And it was so good of Adam to let me bring all that I had in the cottage, even though it wasn’t mine to begin with!” Who? wondered William momentarily; he could not get used to Madeleine referring to John always by his baptismal name.