He believed it was his mother who had arranged the apprenticeship with the bookbinder, though he did not know how she had accomplished this. She was unlettered, and the English village of Wharram near Warwick was a good distance from the Welsh border. He could not name the village where he had been born, and had only the dimmest memories of his parents. The bookbinder had done the finish work for the scriptorium of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad. It was a slow, demanding craft and John’s thick fingers had found no friend among the quires and glue and thread that marked the bookbinder’s trade. To make matters worse, he saw no use for books, and had stoutly refused to learn to read. Books were nothing more than dead markings on a page that confused a man’s spirit and made him discontent with the lot to which he had been assigned by Almighty God.
When the weather was fine he had played truant, which had displeased his master and brought beatings down upon him. When he had grown large enough to strike back he had been ejected from the bookbindery in disgust. Well and good. He hated the man. Instead, he returned to fletching arrows and archery the way his father had taught him in his early youth, before he had come to the shire.
It was from his father and grandfather that John the Fletcher had inherited his skill with the bow, not to mention his eagle eyes. Like them, he was master of both longbow and crossbow, this latter weapon introduced from Italy—lately made wicked by the addition of a steel bow, which added power and range, and by steel bolts with chiseled points for maximum penetration. Unlike its cousin the longbow, the crossbow could be carried loaded, it could be drawn and aimed with the archer lying prone, and it delivered its bolt silently, all of which made it an ideal weapon for hunters and assassins. A skilled marksman with a good eye and a steady hand could place a bolt through solid armor at three hundred and fifty paces. But the crossbow was slow. It had to be cranked back, rather than drawn back, and when speed was necessary an archer always preferred a longbow. British archers were unmatched in the whole of Europe; any one of them could fill the air with a steady river of arrows, the second arrow following so closely on the first that it was aimed and in the air before the former had struck its target. It was among such men that John the Fletcher was considered a master bowman. Once, with a longbow he had brought down a wild boar that had charged his party at full run twenty paces to his left.
So skilled was John Fletcher with either weapon that he had eventually been promoted to the rank of sergeant in the service of Ranulf, Sheriff of Warwickshire, perhaps the highest rank afforded a man who could not read. He had been an energetic man, had worked hard, had had hopes of living as well as any man born to a peasant’s modest station. That was before Alysse died in childbirth, leaving him with a broken heart and a pitiful, squalling baby girl whom he had kept alive with rough lullabies and a thin gruel of goat’s milk and boiled oats. (Thank God for the women of Wharram—especially Sarabeth—who had watched the baby when he had had to work.) After Alysse’s death he made no further attempt at progress, but simply accepted his station as the will of God.
Alysse had been dark and spirited and comely, the love of his life and now the angelic figure who haunted his dreams both waking and sleeping. Her high cheekbones and broad forehead had framed eyes that could have lighted the way home for mariners lost in the great sea.
Fletcher tried to think of the child as Alysse’s gift to him, someone for whom she had given her very life, but when he was tired or discouraged his perspective shifted and he saw the child as an intruder, a thief, who had taken its mother’s life in the very act of being born. Its first lusty squall had drowned out its mother’s dying sigh, so that when Sister Bertrice the midwife turned from the child to its mother she discovered that Alysse had quietly slipped away, like a messenger who leaves a package on the doorstep and moves along to another errand in a different place. To John it seemed as if the child had stolen its mother’s breath from her.
Sister Bertrice had handed him the squalling baby while it was still covered in its mother’s blood and what John thought was mucus from the birth canal. There was an urgency to her movements that made him panic. Why had she done this? The blood on his hands shocked and horrified him.
The panic was over in a moment. When Sister turned back, the look in her eye and the change in her manner told him that Alysse was gone.
His life itself was gone.
“I’m sorry,” Sister had said then. “God took her. I did all I could. It seems you can’t have both, John, but she got you a fine, strong child.”
“Boy,” he had said, not really asking. He had not looked, had been afraid to look, and had been distracted by the urgency of Sister’s movements.
“A girl,” Sister said. She cleaned her hands on a towel. “I’m sorry, John.”
Fletcher stood there numbly. Why would God take Alysse, and not me instead? Or the baby? What am I going to do with a baby? I don’t need a baby. Especially not a girl. Not without Alysse. Why take Alysse, and not the baby instead? With Alysse alive they could have tried again for another child, at another time.
Sister took the child gently, washed it and wrapped it in the blanket Alysse had folded and left ready on a chair near the bed. “Now take the child outside. Send for Sarabeth; she’ll know what to do. I got work to do here.” There was a pause in her talk as she handed the baby to Fletcher. “Hold its head like this,” she said.
John had tried to hold the baby’s tiny head, but it was awkward. The baby’s muscles did not work, and it was so small it seemed to get lost in his large hands, and then he was aware that it looked so fragile and its skin was wrinkled but so soft there against the rough calluses of his palms and fingers that he thought for a moment that it had none of him in it and all of Alysse, and he was overcome by the helplessness of it and he had felt helpless to care for it too and he wanted it gone. But then again, as fragile as it was, it had been strong enough to steal its mother’s breath from her. It had taken her life and his too. He held his breath for a moment, thinking of Alysse’s breath, now forever drowned out by the breathing of the baby. He felt the gorge rise in his throat. It would be so easy to drop the child. Or wrench its neck. Who would know? He could call it an accident.
As deep as it was, this reaction was also fleeting, a momentary pause in the normalcy, and it raised an equally fleeting revulsion within him. How could he have thought such? But the death of Alysse had not been normal; nothing would ever be normal. Not now. How was he to raise a child without Alysse?
“. . . Father Athanasius.” Sister was saying something.
“What? What was that you were saying?”
“I said to have one of the children bring Athanasius.” As she said this she bent over Alysse’s body and quietly closed the eyelids. She crossed the girl’s hands above her heart.
“Yes. Father Athanasius . . .” Fletcher said, and left the midwife to the sorry holy work of cleaning up after the birth and the death, preparing Alysse’s body to be moved to the monastery church to await the funeral mass and after that the spring thaw when the ground would open up to receive all that remained of his dreams and hopes and happiness.
Thus had begun a long nightmare of grief. Was this what the priest had called The Dark Night of the Soul, this asking questions for which there are no answers, this waiting to forget but never forgetting, this wound that would never heal, just as Alysse herself would never return to him no matter how—or how long—he waited; this loving the child because it was Alysse’s dying gift to him yet hating it too because of the terrible price it had exacted by its birth?
Already by nature a private