by Simon Acland
“Does it fit with the facts? Does it match the contemporary chronicles, the reliable sources? Although that could hardly be accurately ascertained by a member of the Modern Languages faculty, could it?”
The History Don looked round the table for support. Cautiously the Chaplain intervened.
“Does it touch on religious matters too? I imagine it nails all the silly old heresies surrounding the grail and eternal life.”
“How do you know that you have translated the Latin and the Greek correctly? Before you go making a fool of yourself and circulating your findings you had better allow me to check the manuscript over.” The Classics Fellow’s offer was prompted less by charity than by academic greed.
“And of course I can help you to render the translation into elegant prose,” oozed the Professor of English.
Now it was the Master’s turn. Perhaps his preprandial dissatisfaction with his college colleagues, his frustration at the Best-Selling Author’s excuses, and the lure of the old port had encouraged greater alcoholic self-indulgence than was his wont. Or perhaps there was just something strange in the air that night. In any case, his fancy took off on an atypical flight.
“I have an idea. I think I have a solution to our problems. The manuscript, college property of course, could provide our friend here with his new plot. He will write it in his inimitable style, and share the royalties with the College. It will kickstart his career, help to get me my…I mean help us to overcome our little financial difficulties.”
The Taylor ’45 had clearly also assuaged the fellows’ awe of their Master, for now a hubbub rose round the table.
“We must check the facts and make sure it is historically correct and tallies with the sources.”
“It must be religiously sound. It should deal appropriately with the clash between Christianity and Islam.”
“The old French must be translated correctly.”
“Not to mention the Greek and the Latin.”
With a gesture that had once struck terror into Whitehall committees and brooked no disagreement, the Master demanded silence.
“You seem to forget who is Master here. I shall retain full editorial control. You may be permitted to contribute some ideas, and perhaps a bibliography. But nothing, nothing at all, must be allowed to interfere with the readability, the popularity of the book.” The Best-Selling Author nodded with grave surprise. “Our objective here is purely commercial. We need a bestseller.”
This time the Professor of English managed the last word.
“But we must have a good literary title at least. What about The Waste Land?”
CHAPTER ONE
THE ROOTS THAT CLUTCH
“Hugues de Verdon semme,
Et cil est mon histoire.
Ni conte ni roman est
Quoi qu’il soit bien etrange,
Mais est un vrai histoire.”
“Hugh de Verdon is my name,
and this is my story.
No tale or romance is this,
however strange it may seem;
it is a true story.”
I come of a family of knights which held land near Verdun under the Dukes of Lorraine. I was born in the year of the Lord 1077. Or so I was told. My birth is the only event in my story which I do not remember witnessing myself. So that much at least I have to take on trust, and pass on to you in that spirit.
Why should I trouble to chronicle this history? Well, for a start, I have too much time on my hands. And the important truths in this document should not die with me, however much some might so wish. Read this manuscript with care and discretion. So much of my suffering stems from my own illicit reading. I would not wish my fate on you.
I know you want me to move on quickly to tell of battlefields and adventure. But first I must set out some events from my early life so that you may understand what made me the man that I am. My male kin died when I was young. To protect me from the same fate, my mother placed me in the great monastery of Cluny.
When I look back all those years it seemed almost that I had two childhoods. The first was set inside the warm dark cocoon of my mother’s chamber. The loudest noise came from the crackling of her fire, the brightest light from its flames and their reflections dancing on the walls. I would listen with half an ear to my mother’s quiet, soothing voice, as she sat conversing over needlework with her maids, her moist eyes, dark with care and occasional reproach, following me round the room as I played.
But it was the light-filled world outside that held my attention. My ears pricked up whenever I heard horses clatter into the yard. Silent hope turned to secret thanks when my mother’s door burst open. There stood my father, filling the doorway, his deep-set eyes sparkling with vigorous good humour.
“What is my boy doing in this dark roomful of women? Does he not come of a family of knights who take their descent from the great Emperor Charlemagne?”
I flushed with excitement, and then twinged with guilt as I tried to ignore my mother’s sighs. I knew they were directed at me, for my ill-concealed glee, as much as at her husband, for the interruption and his attention on son not wife. As my father gathered me up, I tried not to flinch away from the bristling tickle of his beard. I filled with excitement as he rushed me outside through the great hall, threw me onto a horse and rode off to hunt. My two elder brothers complained bitterly that their young sibling would slow the party down and spoil their sport. My exuberance overcame my fear of the pummelling that they would mete out to me later, as I pulled triumphant faces and stuck out my tongue at them when my father’s back was turned.
I was anyway determined not to give grounds for their gripes. I was far too eager to impress and to earn my next outing. Any fear that I might have had of hurt and pain was washed away by excitement. I took many tumbles but by the time I was ten it was hard to shake me out of a saddle and I could skilfully handle a lance and a bow to kill boar and deer. This much my brothers tacitly acknowledged when their remonstrations ceased and I became a member of the party by right.
Sometimes my father and brothers went after more dangerous quarry. Called to avenge a theft, or to erase a slight, they donned their mail coats, strapped on their long swords and gripped their shields. Their brows encased in the shells of their helmets, grimly closed away behind their noseguards of steel, they set off after two-legged game, hard-faced and tense with a greater excitement. I begged to go too but was told that I was too young, that my time would come. My mother then gazed on me in unspoken reproach and when I squirmed with guilty discomfort, she turned to watch painfully until my father and my two elder brothers were out of sight.
A day arrived in late autumn, the mournful season, after the leaves but before the first bright fall of snow, when instead of hooves clattering into the yard there came the dolorous rumble of an ox cart. A servant panicked into the hall and shrilled for my mother.
“My lady, my lady, I beg you, come at once.”
Catching the urgent fear in that call, she threw her needlework aside with an uncharacteristic lack of heed. All the colour had washed from her face. She passed into the court, rushing forward and slowing, then rushing forward again, as her anxiety tore at her desire to maintain the appearance of dignity. I followed forgotten behind.
My childish unconcern froze to horror at the chilling wail that broke from my mother’s throat. Never had I heard such a sound. Never had I imagined that her calm composure could conceal such passion, such pain.
The cart was heaped with the broken bodies of the three familiar knights. The keening lamentation of mother and wife rose and fell as she clutched and clawed at her beloveds’ remains. The carcasses were already grotesquely stiff, rigidly rejecting her caresses. Limbs jutted out at odd angles like the legs of the stags and boar we used to bring home from the hunt. My mother’s howls were tossed back without sympathy by the cold walls of the courtyard. Slowly they subsided into low racking sobs.
Our family steward, hurt too, dishevelled and bloodied, stru
ggled to lower his portly frame from his horse. The jovial expression that he always showed me was now wiped over with pain and grief. The magic arm that used to pluck tasty sweetmeats for me from behind my left ear now dangled limp and useless.
“They caught us in an ambush. First we knew was a hail of arrows from the trees. That knocked many of us down.”
He paused in a grimace of pain and drew breath.
“Your sons were almost the first to fall. My lord charged forward. He always did. This time his luck deserted him. The spear went up under his mail and deep into his guts. After a rough fight we scattered them and chased them off. When I came back, I found him lying pierced on the field. We carried him back to the place where his – your – sons lay. We found one dead and already food for crows and ravens. The other was almost gone. My lord’s groans were awful to hear. As your second son gave up his spirit, so he too swooned away and we heard his death rattle.”
Hesitantly my mother’s maids tried to pull her away. At first she resisted angrily but then her shoulders sank in broken resignation and she allowed herself to be turned from the scene. Ignored, I stood still by the cart and gazed at those bodies which I remembered shortly before so full of life and vigour. Gripped by some macabre fascination, my hand trembled out to touch them. I felt the clamminess of death on their faces. I shuddered at my elder brother’s eye sockets, one pitted and pocked by the ravens and crows which had just begun their meal, the other red and empty where the vicious beaks had pecked their fill. Something irresistible pulled my hand and forced my fingers into the slimy cavity. The other well-known faces seemed to turn on me disapproving expressions of vacant agony and fear. I span and ran, full of pity and fright, but whether for them or for myself I could not tell. There were so many unanswered questions that I had wanted to ask of my father. One thing I did know then without doubt was that my life, previously running its course so cheerfully and so predictably, had ruptured, as a fracture in the rock under a river causes a waterfall, and was now pouring in an unexpected direction.
No more hunting and hopes of knightly adventure for me; from all that I was disinherited. My grief-broken mother intended at all costs to protect me from the fate of the husband and sons she had loved so well. Her youngest, dearest child was to be a monk, safely cloistered away from danger and death. She gave grateful thanks for our kinship with Hugh de Semur, the sixth abbot of the great monastery at Cluny. She wrote to beg him to take me in as one of a small number of boys who would train from an early age to become novices and then full members of the Benedictine order. For herself, she begged leave to enter Cluny’s sister convent at Marcigny.
The turn of the years 1087 and 1088 was the darkest winter I had seen. My mother wore sepulchral mourning. Ironically her hair, once jet black, began to grey and lighten as if in protest at her funereal clothes. The pools of her eyes took on infinite depths, darker and harder to fathom than the night sky, whose stars were mirrored in miniature by the pricks of light scattering through her tears. Her sorrow and her grief deadened her quiet to a conventual silence. Now the fire in the grate in her chamber seemed to smoulder and smoke rather than crackle and blaze as of old. The bursts of energy brought to my life by my father were gone. Through that winter I became wan and listless. All my zest had been stripped away.
“Dear son,” my mother would say, sighing lugubriously, “you must promise me to learn well what you are taught. You must lead a life dedicated to God and to your duty. Promise me. Don’t think of the life led by your father and your brothers as knights. If you follow that path you will destroy not just yourself but your poor mother as well. Your father and brothers died with blood on their hands. They received no absolution. They enjoyed no remission of their sins. We must save them from the eternal fires of hell. Without our constant prayers they will burn there forever.”
And at that solemn thought her hands met, and her eyes rolled upwards in supplication. My faith was secured by the callowness of youth, so I could only agree that my mother’s wishes were meet and fitting. I had been stirred by the stories of Our Lord Jesus Christ, his disciples and the old prophets told to me by my mother’s fire. I almost felt proud to be asked to subsume my own hopes and ambitions into a life of monastic abstinence. I had not been allowed to protect my kin with the strength of my arm; perhaps now I could save their immortal souls through the power of my prayers.
When it was time to journey to Cluny, at least spring had come. As nature came back to life and the green leaves began to bud from their branches, so my youthful high spirits tried to push forth again. But the change in season also made me sadder that my father’s lands would be left untended and barren instead of bursting with vitality.
As our retinue reached the abbey’s double-doored entrance, my emotions seethed in a maelstrom. The excitement of my first journey drained away and the unknown life lurking behind those high walls stirred fear into my curiosity. The dark monks scared me as they worked the surrounding orchards and fields, scratching at the soil like a flock of rooks, their white faces beaking out under their black cowls. The abbey awed me; it was in itself the largest town I had seen, ringed by a thick wall broken by occasional narrow windows, with the houses of the village scattered around outside. By the wall loomed the skeleton of a building greater than I had dreamed possible, clad in wooden scaffolding. The ribbed bones of huge arches made me think of the great fish which had swallowed up holy Jonah.
The entrance was guarded by a solid gatehouse. It squatted on the walls with menace. I realised that it hunched there as much to close the inhabitants in as to keep strangers out. Above the gates was carved the Cluniac coat of arms – two large keys crossed over a single heavenwards pointing sword. It pictured to me an uncompromising message: ‘Here forever you will be locked away from your childhood knightly ambition.’ Fear had now conquered my curiosity, hollowing my belly and spreading through it in a thick cold soup. Our steward hammered on the gate with his left arm – for his right still hung useless, and I knew that the magic which had once delighted me was vanished for ever – calling forth at the grille a pale face which asked our business. Presumably the answer was satisfactorily provided, for the heavy oak door swung wide and my mother and I were shown to a small room at one side of the entrance.
“Welcome, my lady,” said the monk in charge of the portal, “you are expected. Wait while I send for my Lord Abbot. Stay here – no woman may pass beyond the inner gate,” indicating a thick door bound stoutly with black iron. I took in little of his appearance save the rough black habit and the round shaven tonsure, which made me shudder and reach up to check the soft hair on the top of my own head.
That dark room by the gate was furnished only with two hard chairs and a wooden settle. Like penitents we waited in discomfort for a while. We did not speak; what little I had to say had been already said. My mother sat very straight, watching me standing, quivering with anticipation, too tense to sit but too overawed by the stark surroundings to run about. The walls had been washed white and their only ornament was a crucifix from which Christ looked down. Thinking Jesus’ expression tinged with pity, I whispered a brief inner prayer as my mother had taught me. A single shaft of sunlight shone through the narrow barred window, illuminating a funnel of dust down to a cross of shadow in a bright rectangle on the flagstone floor. As if the outside world were mocking my plight, denying my prayer, a cloud passed over the sun, closing out the beam of light and plunging the room into a gloom still deeper. Just at that moment the door swung open to reveal a tall, commanding figure. He bowed with respect to my mother, keeping his arms folded and his hands hidden deep in his habit’s wide sleeves, as if he did not want to risk contact with female flesh. She stood and returned his salute with a curtsey.
“Cousin Hugh…My Lord Abbot…”
The Abbot contemplated her in silence. I wondered if he too were thinking a prayer. How could he not feel sympathy for this lady whose grief was etched so plainly in new lines over her beautiful face? And th
en a warm smile lit the Abbot’s gaunt face.
“Yes, Lady Claire. Yes, you do have a look of your mother about you. I am now in my sixty-fifth year, so it is a long time ago, but I still remember her gentleness to me as a child in Semur at my father’s court.”
‘At least he remembers what it was to be a child,’ I thought. I gained some courage from this notion as I met his gaze as firmly as I could. I felt myself transfixed, pierced through, by the Abbot’s grey eyes. They carried out their examination from deep beneath unruly eyebrows. They were not unkind; indeed even in that moment of anxiety I could not mistake their humanity. Somehow, though, they seemed to read my innermost soul. Before I gave away all my secrets, I averted my face towards the floor in a gesture that I hoped showed respect, not subservience.
“Well, Hugh, we share our given name. Perhaps when we both die they will dry our bones and turn them into tools for making shoes too, eh? For that was the fate of the first Saint Hugh the shoemaker.”
I felt very small and awkward and could find no response to make. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief when the Abbot turned back to my mother.
“So you wish your Hugh to become a monk? To devote his life to the service of Our Lord, disinherited? To eschew a knight’s life and all worldly pleasures, just as my own mother desired for me? I wanted it as much as my mother. I was only fourteen when I renounced my title of Count and my rights to my father’s lands. Then I began my novitiate. My full vows came the following year. I was unusually young – I do not know that we would allow it again. Eight or ten years are normally required to learn the ways of the abbey, and to establish that a vocation to a life in the service of Our Lord is real. A false calling only leads to corruption and sin. The rule of Blessed Saint Benedict is too strict to follow without a true vocation. Our Holy Father the Pope was himself prior here. He has now entrusted us with the duty of stamping out improper practices in our Mother Church. So we have to maintain the highest standards. I am afraid that we have many enemies who view our power with suspicion and jealousy. To withstand their attacks we must place ourselves beyond reproach. Then achieve our task we will, to the greater glory of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom we owe so much.”
