The Beautiful Thread

by Penelope Wilcock

  His small, sharp, astute eyes rested meditatively on the abbot’s face. “I am not easy to deceive,” he said, “and I do believe you have tried to mislead and hoodwink me. I mean – let me make myself quite clear – with regard to your one-time brother of this house, William de Bulmer. Foxes are hard to surprise but easy to smell when they’ve been around. I don’t know what game you are playing, Abbot John, but you can be sure of this: I will be watching. My reach is long. Word finds me. I have eyes in many places. And I do not like that man.”

  You and how many other people? thought John, but he lowered his eyes submissively, and did not speak.

  “Well?” The bishop wanted a response.

  Cautiously, John framed a reply. “I am sorry that your Lordship finds anything disappointing. I am sorry if something in my conduct is lacking, falls short of the mark. And I’m grateful and appreciative that you find so much to commend. All I can say of William de Bulmer is that our responsibility for him – our jurisdiction over him – ceased on the day he left us. Some of us were glad; he was not born to an easy life, and turbulence surely attends him. And yet, for all that, he loved and served us right well, in his way; he tried his best. He made mistakes in his life, as which of us do not? For the grief and trouble he caused, he was humbly sorry, and made the best reparation he could. Much like St Paul, Christ enlightened him, turned him around. The man you were seeking is already dead. His life is hid with Christ in God.”

  The bishop frowned. “William de Bulmer is dead? Well, why didn’t you say so before, man? Are you making this up? You told me you knew nothing of his whereabouts!”

  The abbot felt strongly tempted to roll with this misconstruction of what he had said, but felt it might lead to further trouble if he did. So he replied: “When a man leaves here, he is dead to us; and when a man is in Christ, he is a new creation.”

  The bishop contemplated him thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Be careful, Abbot John Hazell.” The quiet menace of his voice was not lost on the abbot. Friendship with William turned out to be a hazardous undertaking indeed. And potentially costly.

  But his Visitor picked up his gloves and made ready to be on his way. Not entirely easy in his mind, John watched him and his equerry ride out. He felt uncomfortably aware that, even with his best efforts, he could never guarantee to shelter either William or Madeleine from cruel and vindictive men bent on mischief; especially those whose arm came strengthened with the whole weight of the magisterium. It was not beyond possibility that he had jeopardized the peace and safety of every brother in his community; the men whose shepherd he was, the charge of their wellbeing placed in his trust. With a heavy heart he watched Brother Martin drop the great iron latch behind their departing inquisitor. This did not have the feel of a story entirely told.

  Even so, he had other matters awaiting him. He walked back across the court to his lodging, sat at his table, picked up his pen, dipped it in the ink, and did what he might to train his thoughts into preparing a homily for Hannah’s wedding.

  “Estote autem invicem benigni…5” he wrote. He straightened his back, warily, wishing it didn’t feel so sore it made him want to weep. He looked at the words he’d written and tried to think of something trenchant – or at the very least, coherent – to say about them. This would be his last chance to speak up for Hannah before the Bonvallet dynasty swallowed her up. Getting this right mattered.

  The latch to the cloister door rattled and lifted. John raised his head. It was his esquire. The abbot suppressed as best he could his frustration. Was it impossible for a man to find five uninterrupted minutes to work and think?

  “I thought you and Stephen were going to get the rest of the bracken in,” he said, trying hard to seem casually conversational.

  “Aye – I was.” Tom sounded as frayed as John felt. “I came back because I thought you might like to know, while you were with Bishop Eric this morning, Sir Geoffrey and Lady Agnes d’Ebassier arrived. Brother Dominic made them comfortable in the guesthouse, said you weren’t free right then. But they’re champing at the bit to come and greet you. They’re wondering if they might not have to wait for suppertime, but can dine with you at midday as well. Being the case, it occurred to me you might be grateful for some back-up. So I searched out a lad from the novitiate to go up with Stephen. Brother Placidus. Cutting bracken isn’t a complicated thing wanting expertise – I just like doing it. Oh, what? Not grateful?”

  The abbot took this in. “I’m sorry, Tom,” he said. “Of course I’m grateful. It’s just… The d’Ebassiers… Whatever next? Oh, Jesu, Maria, oh heaven give me strength. Oh, my God. Oh, my Lord Jesus.” He put down the quill and dropped his head into his hands.

  “Hey – Father – John! I wasn’t in earnest – about expecting you to be grateful, I mean; I was in earnest about the d’Ebassiers. It’s all right. Look – I’ll stall them. I’ll send Francis over there to cheer ’em up. He can convey effusive greetings and salutations and tell ’em, yes, you’ll be delighted to see them – at suppertime. How’s that? You don’t have to be at everyone’s beck and call. And, when I’ve been to the guesthouse, will I nip up to the hayloft and give William the all-clear? Yes? And set our prisoner free?”

  The abbot pulled himself together and looked his esquire in the eye, trying to summon a modicum of cheerfulness to meet his kindness. “Oh, glory – yes, please do,” he said. “But, Tom! Caution William that the d’Ebassiers are here. Bishop Eric was not pleased about our concealment of William, nor fooled, by a long way. Best he avoids encounter with anybody he even thinks might know him.”

  “Aye, Father; consider it done. Back to your cogitations, then.”

  By the time Tom returned, he found his abbot had recovered his equilibrium.

  “Tom,” he said, “I’m embarrassed to be asking this, because I’m sure you’ll already have told me and I’ve forgotten – have our cows calved well?”

  “Aye, they have,” said Tom, surprised that in the midst of all that had been going on, surrounded by guests and with final preparations for the wedding still requiring attention, John had time or inclination to think about the cows. “We had two bull calves and three heifers this spring – all fine, healthy animals.”

  “So, not counting the heifer calves, just the mothers, we have eight milk cows now?”

  “Nine. When William was living with us, he extorted one in lieu of rent from some poor soul who’d fallen on hard times. After the summer rain, the man was all ‘I’m so sorry, Father, I can’t even afford to buy fodder for my cows’; to which William’s reply was, ‘Oh, really? Well, you can give one of them to us, then, and I’ll write off a third of your debt.’ Farmer looked fairly sour. He could see William had the better half of the bargain. But he didn’t have much choice, so that’s why we have nine cows.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Tom waited, but the abbot said no more on the subject, and returned to the task of finishing off the homily for tomorrow, so his esquire got busy with his usual chores. As soon as John had roughed something out to his satisfaction, he left his atelier and went across to the checker, where he found Brother Cormac all the better for a few days’ rest in a quiet cell. On reflection, John thought he wouldn’t have minded changing places.

  “Can I have a look at our dairy yield records?” he asked the cellarer, and felt heartened to see Cormac could put his hand on them instantly and they were up to date and in immaculate order. He scanned the most recent page.

  “But this… it’s all in William’s writing!”

  Brother Cormac laughed. “Father John, you have no idea. He’s been through these accounts like a gale force wind. He’s been down here in the middle of the night with a candle, and here in the day when he knew the bishop was elsewhere. He’s had every brother in the house on full alert as his watchdogs. Yes, our dairy record was a mish-mash of jottings, whatever Brother Stephen or I, or Tom passing through, thought to note down. Not good enough for William. He’s been up at the farm asking questions, he cop
ied out all the particulars and added in the new bits he’d gleaned from Stephen, wrote the whole thing out afresh in proper columns, and told me not to waste our old sheet but use it for kindling. And that was just the dairy yields!”

  John said nothing to this, but looked carefully at the sums recorded. Eventually, “Seems to me we could manage with one less cow,” he said.

  * * *

  Surrounded by friends and family all jostling and straining to see, under a sky of brilliant blue adorned with scudding clouds of purest white, Hannah and Gervase exchanged their vows. Afterwards, as the cheerful, noisy throng of people poured into the church for Mass through the west door from the abbey court, William lingered outside. Though he’d promised to help serve food to the hordes of guests, he honestly wondered if this might be the moment to slip away. He detected and acknowledged the familiar bitter ache of exclusion, right down there deeper than his gut, than his bowel. In his core, the fountainhead of who he was. It hurt. John had once given him Eucharist in the privacy of the abbot’s house, and had gone out on a limb for him, dared to break every rule for him. Compassionate. Forgiving. But having been a brother of this house, having broken his vows to Christ and walked away to marry Madeleine, there was no way back. The abbot could not possibly, in such a public setting, hold out the host of Christ’s body for him to take. Though John had not formally excommunicated him, this far he could not go. And William knew it was his own doing, but it still felt like a deep, deep bruise.

  He wanted to see the summer light slanting through the coloured glass of the lofty windows, and smell the incense. He wanted to hear the beautiful music Father Gilbert had prepared and made them practise every evening for the last heaven knows how many days. He wanted to hear the abbot’s homily in this Mass. He wanted to be in the church, not just outside it; part of the holiness and the peace. Hungry, thirsty, tired; his soul. Without really consulting him, his feet trailed along with the ragtag of the crowd, and he found a shadowed place to stand in the side aisle, leaning his shoulder against the curving body of one of the great sandstone pillars. And so the Mass began.

  William listened to the familiar words of Christ’s teaching, that before approaching the altar of God a man must be reconciled, must make peace where relationships are broken. He wondered if that was really the Gospel reading set for the day, or if this was Abbot John tweaking the rubric in a last desperate attempt to make the Bonvallets be nice to their unwelcome addition. He watched the abbot walk down to the chancel step to speak to the people. There he stood, dignified in the embroidered chasuble, bearing the weight on a slowly mending back, vested in the solemnity of his position. Abbot of this monastery, but the same man as the one who had stooped, knelt, in his simple black tunic, to wash and salve the burns and scrapes on William’s body when he came here after the fire. The same man as had dissolved in convulsing agony of grief over the death of his mother, the angry pain of his sister. The same man who had come and found him in the hayloft and refused to budge until he heard the source of his misery. John. Healer. Friend.

  The abbot murmured his dedication of the words he would speak, signing himself with the cross. He looked out across the people, then at the couple who stood together at the front.

  “Hannah, Gervase, this Mass is celebrated in honour of your nuptials, and really these words are not for everyone else but for you.

  “Not long ago, a friend commented to me that the idea of love baffled him at times. There were days when he felt an upwelling of affection towards his wife – delight in her – and others when, frankly, he wished she’d leave him in peace and he found her profoundly irritating. Here and there he came across fellow human beings whom he esteemed and with whom he felt a sense of fellowship, harmony. But not many. Mostly he preferred to go his own way and let everyone else go theirs. And guilt stirred in his soul, because he loved little, loved few – sometimes stopped loving even the one he had vowed and pledged to love, to have and to hold. And yet, he took seriously the command of Christ – to love and go on loving, to make that the mark of his discipleship and the work of his life.

  “And my friend – humbly, neither cocksure nor evading the issue – put it to me that though he could not always find it within himself to love, he thought he could try to be kind. He said, in the course of his life he had been loved but rarely; and because of this, he valued with real gratitude those who had treated him with kindness. He said, sometimes he found it hard to tell whether someone actually loved him – cared for him with genuine friendship – and when they were merely being kind to him. So, knowing himself to be a shrewd judge of men, he concluded love and kindness must be so extremely similar that the division between them is porous – where one ends and the other begins cannot readily be detected. He said this gave him hope, since, though love felt so often remote and mysterious, he knew how to be kind. Because, he said, everyone knows what kindness is. It means giving the other person the benefit of the doubt; including them, not cold-shouldering them; offering a smile and a cheerful greeting; making them a hot drink when they’re tired and cold at the day’s end; overlooking their shortcomings and their harmless – but intensely annoying – little mannerisms. It means giving them another chance. My friend also mentioned that it means trying not to swear at them too often, and forbearing from actually hitting them, however much you want to. He doesn’t always find it easy to get on with his fellow man, or his wife – as you can tell.

  “I thought – Gervase, Hannah – you might find it useful to hear about that conversation I had with my friend. Though today I hope you feel you are head over heels in love and will never be anything else, well, these vows are for a lifetime. I sincerely hope that means a substantial number of years for both of you. And maybe even today, you may be tired, you may feel somewhat strained; this is a big occasion, and family events always carry many resonances. Not all of them are easy.

  “So I thought I’d put my companion’s musings before you – that even when he runs out of love, forgets what love is, finds love impossibly difficult, he knows what kindness is; love’s humble, less exalted, identical twin.

  “God bless you in your life together. May you be happy, may you know bliss, may you be fruitful and content. And may you always at least try to be kind to one another – remembering that one of the most everyday habits of kindness is the willingness to try to understand, to forgive and begin again.”

  The abbot turned back into the sanctuary, and the Mass moved on through its rhythms of reconciliation and sanctification. There came the sharing of the peace – out of fashion but steadfastly maintained in the traditions of this house. “Peace be with you… peace be with you…” Those who stood close to William shook his hand in the Pax Christi, but their gaze didn’t meet his. It was just a requirement, a formality. They didn’t know him. They moved around, they moved on, shuffling and murmuring and turning from one to the other. He folded his arms across his belly, his back curving into a protective hunch that shut out the world as he took up his stance again, leaning against the sturdy York stone pillar, still slightly surprised to have encountered himself in a sermon, the echo of an evening conversation with John in the course of his stay.

  Then, as the long thanksgiving and consecration prayers began, he became aware of a shifting in the people around him, making room for somebody coming to stand there, next to him. He turned his head, and to his astonishment saw Father Chad, who nodded at him in faintly embarrassed greeting, but did not speak, just stood beside him. They stood together, through the Benedictus, the epiclesis, the raising of the host, the singing of the beautiful, haunting, yearning Agnus Dei, the invitation of the people. As the great press of people moved forward to make their communion, William stood where he was; and Father Chad went on standing at his side.

  Eventually, as those at the back began to make their way forward, the men were left behind in a space alone. In the privacy this created, Father Chad turned to William and said quietly, “The body of Christ.” William looked at h
im. Then he understood. The teaching of Augustine that John, and Peregrine before him, brought again and again before the community had evidently sunk in. That the body of Christ, mystical, cosmic, immense, is in how we touch one another, how we are with each other, as well as in the broken bread, blessed wine. It was very clear to Father Chad that William could not possibly participate in the sacrament. But there is more than one way to express the body of Christ.

  From somewhere within and beneath him, arising from the earth under his feet, moving up through the whole of him, William felt a smile of purest peace and happiness; unexpected, startling. He whispered back the words he knew Chad meant to prompt – “I am.” And Chad beheld what he would never have believed without seeing the evidence for himself: the shining of Christ’s smile breaking through the fractured and shifting clouds of William’s eyes.

  The crowd formed around them again, returning. They stood there together through the final prayers, the benediction, watched the brothers process from the choir round into the south transept to the cloister door.

  They still stood there as the multitude began to chatter and shift and find its way out into the sunshine in search of food and festivity. Eventually, once more they were alone.

  “Thank you,” said William.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t understand – before,” said Chad. “About why you came here.”

  Silence fell between them, awkward and self-conscious, these men who essentially had nothing to say to each other and no time for each other, until now. Nothing but distrust on the one side and contempt on the other. Not fertile ground for friendship.