All of this transpired in only that moment it took to walk past the open doorway of the church. He continued through the foregate, released the horse to one of the sheriff’s grooms, and headed home. The path took him past The Pint and Ploughman, where he stopped for a drink to clear his head.
“Ale.” That was all he said to Sarabeth. She brought a flagon in silence. He failed to notice the way she fussed with a stray lock of her hair in the thin light of the doorway, or the bustling physicality of her body as she reached across his right shoulder to set the flagon before him on the table. There were so many troubles that required his attention, not least among them the emerging difficulty with his daughter, who was approaching womanhood with a petulance unbecoming a peasant girl in the year of the Lord 1253.
If nothing else, the goings on in the king’s forest told him the girl was hiding something from him. He could abide a strong-willed child, but not a liar. Then there was her obstinate refusal even to talk about the marriage he had arranged for her with that boy in Aberystwyth. There was the dragon the had appeared in the hut. Beneath it all, tugging strongly at the corners of his mind, was that troubling business with the wolf pup, with its flickering rapid-fire images revealing a deeply disturbing connection with Alysse, just as everything he did or said was connected in one way or another with Alysse.
When he looked up finally from the flagon of ale, Sarabeth was seated opposite him at the table, watching him intently. She was a large, rawboned woman whose ruddy complexion and long braid of thick red-gold hair reflected her Scottish ancestry. For all the energy she usually exuded, Sarabeth was also capable of that deep inner quiet of a woman accustomed to waiting. The world had not rewarded her wait, so that even though she was now past her prime, Sarabeth had known neither the pleasures of marriage nor the joys of motherhood. What maternal instincts she possessed she lavished on the patrons who frequented her brother Willem’s pub for ale, man and woman alike, but among these she paid special attention to those who were without the care of a wife at home, such as John the Fletcher who in his loneliness had occasionally sought out her help or advice about what to do with his daughter, Elspeth.
“So, John,” she said, eyeing him with more than her usual circumspection. “What’s troubling you tonight? You’ve got that look on your face again.”
He did not move, but simply looked at her. She always made such a fuss when he was there.
“Don’t you know I worry about you so?” Sarabeth was saying. Her voice rippled from her, deep throated and smooth like aged brandy, set off against the hubbub and clatter of the pub by the rolling lilt of her native Scotland.
“I was thinking about a funeral mass a lot of years ago,” he said.
“Alysse,” she clucked. “You’ll not move along from that now will you?”
He sat silent as she talked.
“Aye,” she said. “I remember it well enough myself. Quite vividly as it happens. You alone on the mourners’ bench. Willem and I sat in the transept. I held the baby, remember? I remember pulling my blanket up around her against the winter chill. Sister Bertrice sat there beside us, remember?”
Fletcher drained the flagon. Sarabeth was back in a moment with a pitcher.
“Could I tell you something, Sarabeth, just between the two of us?” he said. “I remember watching you there. I even thought at the time that except for your face, it could have been Alysse sitting there, holding the child before its baptism.” For a moment the scene flashed across Fletcher’s troubled imagination. The baby dressed in a white baptismal robe. The candles gone, the church festooned with banners. The chant, while serious, would have been full of hope.
Somebody at the back of the pub called for Sarabeth’s attention. When she returned, she sat down beside him. “The funeral. What time did it begin?”
“I remember the bells tolling Sext.” Sarabeth’s question thrust him headlong and heart-long back into the nightmare. In his mind’s eye he saw a faceless acolyte whose solemn ministrations with the incense brazier had filled the air with the thick sweet smell of a church in mourning. Then came the coffin, a simple lead-lined wooden box that had been made by one of the monks in the monastery woodshop. He remembered wanting to crawl inside it, to join Alysse in the sweet oblivion of the box, but could not because he had to care for her baby. Behind the pallbearers filed the monks of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad. Then the other acolytes, the sacred scriptures, and last of all Father Athanasius. Athanasius carried an incense brazier on a silver chain, singing the words of the liturgy in high-pitched Latin, swinging the brazier systematically in the direction of the various sectors and rows of the worshippers, blessing them with the heavy smells and sounds of the Christian burial rite.
“Father Athanasius officiated, remember?” he went on.
“Who can forget Athanasius, God rest him?” said Sarabeth. Athanasius had been the priest at St Cuthbert’s for as long as anyone could remember, since the turn of the century even, until the inevitable infirmities of old age had forced him from his pulpit. Fletcher looked around the hut at Willem’s patrons. There was hardly a man or woman there whom Athanasius had not baptized. He had buried most of their parents, and some of their husbands and wives, and sadly one or two of their children. It had been Athanasius who had officiated at his marriage to Alysse, and Athanasius who had baptized their child.
But on the day of Alysse’s funeral, Fletcher thought, it had also been Athanasius, acting the role of pallbearer to his hopes and dreams, who had announced Alysse’s death and in this sacrament prepared her soul for paradise, even as later on in the spring it had been Athanasius who had consigned her body to the earth.
“Yes,” said Fletcher. “Who can forget Athanasius?”
“Don’t remember his sermon, though” said Sarabeth. “That much was forgettable.” She laughed a little, awkwardly.
“They were all forgettable,” John replied. “He preached in Latin. Remember?”
“Aye. Not like Father Thomas.” The new priest occasionally lapsed into English.
“Want to know what he said?” asked Fletcher, suddenly needing not to be alone.
“Don’t tell me your talents extend to Latin, now.”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll fetch another phitcher of ale.” He was unaware that he had slurred the word “pitcher,” but was alert to the blurring of the images in his mind’s eye. The flames of Willem’s candles, only moments before bright and crackling in the evening light, were now softening into an unreliable glow. In Fletcher’s mind’s eye, Willem’s candles illuminated the movements of the monks in the church, and in their unsteady flickering light the shapes of their habits blended into huge ghostly shadows cast up against the walls of the chancel.
Sarabeth poured another drink. “Now,” she said. “Tell me how you know Latin.”
“Never said I knew Ladin,” said Fletcher. “Said I knew what Fatherr said in his sermon.”
“Alright, then, John,” said Sarabeth. “Tell me that, then. But first tell me how you know.”
He drank from the flagon, setting it down hard on the table. “One the monks transslted, doan remember which one.”
“Brother Constantine?” she said. “He sat next to you.”
“Righ, Constantine. It was Constantine translated Athnasius’ serm’n for me. When th’ other monks filed into the chancel,