Fletcher quietly patted Elspeth’s shoulder, indicating in that non-verbal language fathers share with daughters that the priest had made a good and important point. He whispered the name, “Meurig ap Gwynedd,” but Elspeth shrank back slightly, allowing his hand to slip unheeded to her back.
To Fletcher this line of reasoning made sense, not because as a father he wished to be obeyed, but because as a sergeant in the service of the sheriff he had seen first hand the misery caused by masterless men who did not wish to be accountable for their actions. It was not a matter of who was right, but of who held the properly constituted authority—parents over children, baron over villein, king over baron, and Holy Mother Church over all.
“. . . Holy Mother Church over all,” Father continued, not knowing that his language had been anticipated by this quiet man in the back of his congregation. “It was disobedience that had caused the fall of Adam, and even now brings wars and famines, pestilence and plague, all visible signs of the evil and fallen state of man! Disobedience was the original and primal sin, the very thing for which God drove Adam from the garden!” By this time the priest was red-faced, nearly shouting out his sermon. What was the word he had heard? Diatribe. That was it. Diatribe.
Fletcher listened and thought about Elspeth and grew as red-faced as the priest, shamefully aware that he was the father of a disobedient daughter. Surely God would punish them both, the girl for her open rebellion against the law of God, and the father for his failure to teach his daughter this primary lesson of the Christian faith!
“Even this is indicated in the natural order, in the relation between animals and men,” the priest continued. “For the higher animals are those that can be trained in the service of king and country, while those animals that cannot take training are the very ones that prey upon man, that destroy our crops and eat our farm fowl.”
Fletcher thought about the wolves he had hunted and the damage they had done to the villagers’ livestock. He thought about the moles and rabbits and rodents that burrowed their ways into the villagers’ vegetable patches. He thought about the dragon. Surely the priest was right!
Elspeth usually listened to Thomas only sporadically, if at all. Thomas was a man of God, but he was hard to hear, just as the scriptures were hard to understand, and she wanted and believed she deserved clearer evidence from the maker of heaven and earth. A bird outside flew against the rose window with a nearly silent thud, and clouds now cast varied patterns of light and dark against the clerestory windows above her. The rivering light through the stained glass brought the biblical images to life; they captured her imagination and carried her away to the Holy Land. A willing conscript, she was. Perhaps she might even take the Cross and join the crusades if she could convince her father to teach her the skill of archery. She could dress as a boy! Maybe some nobleman on crusade would be willing to take along a high spirited lad with skill in archery and the ability to read.
“And so also,” the priest continued, “when the Holy Apostle Paul instructs wives to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, and slaves their masters, he bases that admonition on the primary structure of the created order itself. For to rebel against parents or masters is to sin not only against God, but also against nature. In the same way, he means for those same husbands and parents and masters to train up their wives and children and servants to the holy estate of obedience, and in doing so to raise them from the lower form to the higher, and thus to save their souls!”
Elspeth gazed at the ceiling, hoping for a breath of air, but the church was fully enclosed so that not even the movement of the ushers along the ambulatories provided relief. The women fanned themselves. A not-so-subtle change of pitch in Father’s voice caught her attention, and she suddenly sat up and tried to focus.
“‘Filii oboedite parentiyus vestrin in domino . . . Children obey your parents,’” Father said, “for in obeying your parents you learn the important lessons about obeying the civil authorities whom God has placed over you.” Then came more Latin.
Like a ship dragging anchor, this final crescendo of the sermon caught her attention and held fast. So far as she was concerned, it might as well have been the whole of the sermon, and despite her growing sense of independence she found herself filled with consternation and shame because she knew, as her father knew, that she had within her an unrepentant heart and an unbroken spirit. For days now she had thought about running, about leaving him alone in the world, and then she had thought about killing him. It was a tearing of whole cloth, to think like that. He had been sent away from his home as a boy; he had been bereft of his wife as a man. Could she be the one who took his final human contact from him?
But in the last months, since she had stolen the wolf pup, he had grown angrier, more preoccupied, and more unpredictable. Something within him had soured like milk, and she could hardly avoid thinking that in some way it was her fault.
“He who spares the rod . . . . Chastise and discipline the soul . . . . Thus he draws us to Himself . . . .” The words echoed in Fletcher’s head as the mass concluded. Such words were all the more painful because he had tried to train Elspeth into a life of obedience, but the girl had been headstrong, like a wild animal, following her baser nature. Now he had that idiot Levente and his wife to reinforce every bad trait in the girl. The harder he tried, the worse she got. Fletcher knew that despite his most serious efforts he had failed miserably in this foremost of a parent’s duties—failed the girl, failed God, failed Alysse.
The mass ended. He rose and brushed past the girl in a hurry to get out of the church. Elspeth, limping, had to struggle to keep up. She caught up with him outside in the narthex. They walked home slowly then, impeded by her limp.
Fletcher did not say anything to the girl, and instead tried to piece together the key points of Father Thomas’ rambling sermon. From this sermon, or more precisely, from what he understood of it, John Fletcher had in his own way resolved to do better by his daughter. He who spares the rod . . . . Chastise and discipline the soul… Thus he draws us to Himself . . . . Chastise and discipline the soul . . . . Thus he draws us to Himself . . . . He who spares the rod . . . .
❧
Several weeks passed. There were fewer problems with wolves in the shire and the talk in the village turned to other things. Fletcher found himself reluctantly thinking about the wolf pup, but not understanding what had happened, or why it had happened, and that had led to a period of deep brooding. The episode with the wolf pup had unnerved him. He had seen something within himself he did not know was there, as real as if he had lived through a waking nightmare. In his darkest moments it all came back. The images, the blood, the wrenching of the pup’s neck. All of this had happened only in his mind, but still it horrified him. In reliving the nightmare, he saw himself, too, clearly for once—angry and enraged and as wild as this animal he had almost killed with his bare hands. He did not like it that he had had to beat the girl, but he did not know what else to do to curb her rebellious, headstrong spirit. His treatment of his daughter—but how else could he treat her?—spoke to that same something within him he had not known was there, and he felt dirty and disgusted with himself, like the floor of the sheriff’s stable.
These things he kept within his heart, torn apart as it was. One entire afternoon he spent walking alone along the back roads and forest paths of the shire. As he walked he pondered who he could share this struggle with. The priest? He had committed no sin. Elspeth? It would not do to let her see him question himself. The sheriff? It would not do to let such a man think less of him. Aelric was excluded, too, because he did not trust the man’s discretion. He thought about the disturbances in his daughter’s spirit, which also seemed to be growing, and these disquieted him even more.
When the sheriff’s man Caedmon asked him to account for his time, he said merely that he had been keeping an eye on the king’s forest.
At