All of this recollection Fletcher had kept in a tight bundle inside him, as if by clinging to the details he could keep them from fading in his mind. But tonight, what time and an aging memory could not accomplish was quietly being turned into a finished work by the powerful numbing effect of the ale.
“Probly this monk—Constantine—had hell to pay in Shapter.”
“Now that you say it I remember the prior’s frown!” said Sarabeth. Prior Robert had more than frowned; he had indicated his displeasure with a heroic scowl. He had been a much younger man then, and freshly installed in his office had been distracted from his duty to offer pastoral care by an unusually large preoccupation with his new authority.
“He give a look that wuld’v had the devil doing penance,” Fletcher said, “but Constantine only smiled and nodded and settled in quiet.”
“Tell me about the sermon,” said Sarabeth. She poured him out another flagon of ale.
He concentrated hard on what she had said. “Lemme think a minit,” he said. He reviewed the entire stock of his memories, running through them the way he might inventory a shelf of crossbows, but raggedly because of the ale. He remembered being thankful for the presence of another warm body beside his own. On every prior occasion he cared to remember, the space beside him at mass had been filled by Alysse herself, now reduced to a body in a coffin not more than a foot or so before him. He remembered almost reaching out to touch it, but shrinking back when Constantine whispered something in his ear too quietly to make out.
Then he started to cry, unashamedly because this was Sarabeth who would not think ill of him no matter what he did, and because the opinions of the other patrons did not matter to him.
Athanasius’ funeral sermon had been reduced to a short homily, no doubt because Alysse, while well known and loved in the village and town, had not been a woman of consequence. A short homily was adequate for the wife of a peasant; the husband would not understand the Latin in any case. Athanasius had not reckoned on Constantine translating, but that little mattered.
“Athanasius said that we ought not to grief as those who got no hope.” The tears were coming freely now. Fletcher did not care that Willem and the other patrons were watching him, maybe listening to what he said. “He said that Chrishians who die baptized and shriv’n are raised incorrubtible in the fin’l resurrecshun.” Fletcher thought about Alysse’s body, encased in its lead-lined coffin, already in that process of decay that is the end of all living things. Surely the hope of a bodily resurrection in paradise did much to allay the grief of those who are left behind. Even as his memory grew fluid and imprecise, still he was clear enough to know that Father Athanasius’ words had been intended to ease the old priest’s own doubting heart, his boney fingers raised in oratory, his own thick cough reminding the parishioners that the decay of the grave sometimes swallows us even while we live.
Then Sarabeth was saying something to him, but he couldn’t make out what it was. He tried to stop the flow of images and confusions and tears to concentrate on what she was saying, but he couldn’t do that now either. Sarabeth had slipped around on his side of the table and was cradling his head against her shoulder. “It was wrong, Sarabeth,” he said. “Shoulda been me, died.”
“But God has his reasons, John,” said Sarabeth, stroking his black hair with her hand. He thought that was what she said. Maybe something else. “Shhh, now, God has his reasons.”
It wasn’t God’s faull, he thought. It was the faull that girl, that child. The girl did this to Alysse. “Lea me ‘lone for a few minutes, will you Sar’beth? I wanna thing thiss through.”
Sarabeth disentangled herself from him and gently laid his head down across the table, and there, with the softly swirling sounds and bittersweet smells of The Pint and Ploughman, John the Fletcher dreamed the never-ending dream of Alysse.
He dreamed of the old priest stepping down from the high pulpit. He dreamed of Brother Constantine whispering that he would remember John and the baby in his prayers at Vespers, and then of Sarabeth bringing him the child. He dreamed of Alysse’s coffin being taken to a crypt in the apse to await interment after the spring thaw. He dreamed of the other deaths that winter, other bodies consigned to temporary crypts in the apse, and of their burial in the sacred monastery grounds after a special funerary mass when the thaw made it possible to open up the ground.
Then he woke up, startled, clear only that he was in little condition to move. Willem and Sarabeth were locking up. He stood and warily made his way across the floor toward the door of Willem’s pub.
“Better let us come along,” said Willem. “We’ll get you home, and in bed too.”
Willem slipped Fletcher’s right arm over his shoulder and Sarabeth came along the other side. With his free hand, Willem picked up a torch to light the path. It was dark already, and would be darker still when they made the return trip back to their hut.
As they made their way along the path, Fletcher tried to engage them in conversation.
“Iss a sinn?” he asked.
“Is what a sin?” asked Willem.
“What idiot priest said,” said Fletcher, taking some clarity from the cool breeze that ruffled his hair and kicked up the branches of the trees. “Iss a sinn to grief?” What Fletcher did not bury, could not bury, was his sense of confusion and loss over this woman whose life had made his own complete. The priest’s words, intended in their own way to comfort and encourage, had left him confused about the very grief they were designed to allay. And so he wondered if it was sinful that he still grieved. If it was, then it was a sin of which he would not repent; he had no choice but to live with this guilt.
“If not a sin, then a shame,” said Sarabeth, as she shifted her weight to get a better grip. She slipped her arm closer around his waist.
Willem was more philosophical. “If you want an answer to a question like that, you should ask the idiot priest.”
But Fletcher knew there were many questions he would not ask the idiot priest. Where was Alysse now? Did she miss their baby? Did she miss him? Where is the justice of a God who would take a mother and leave the child? What was the sense of that?
❧
When Elspeth got home, the hut was empty and in disarray, as though her father had left in a hurry. The gate was unlatched, and the goose was in the lean-to tearing open one of the sacks of grain that had been stored there for grinding into flour. Inside the hut there was a half-eaten loaf of bread on the table, and her father’s bed had been slept in but not made. At an earlier time in her life she would have found this worrisome, but lately, as the sheriff had come to rely more heavily on her father’s skills as a watcher and hunter, he had been called to service on increasingly short notice, and had had to stay sometimes late into the night. He left word when he could, but that was the exception rather than the rule. He could leave no note because he could neither read nor write.
What Elspeth did at such moments varied with her mood and her level of hunger and whatever she read in the subtle clues her father might have left behind. Usually she simply waited until her father got home to prepare their supper. Sometimes she nibbled on whatever fruits or vegetables were at hand to curb her appetite, but sometimes, when the appetite began to gnaw with a sixteen-year-old’s peculiar voraciousness, she simply went ahead and cooked, keeping her father’s portion hot on the fire until whatever hour he got home. It was an imperfect system, but in the absence of written communication it kept them both fed.
Elspeth