A Vision of Light (6 page)

But the hardest thing was not the weather. At night I’d lie awake in the loft, listening to the heavy breathing beside me and the sound the oxen made as they shifted in the straw below and wonder, What’s to become of me? Everything was changing and moving in ways I did not understand. Sometimes I was frightened for no reason.

Then, one icy day, Mother Anne set down her spinning suddenly and got up from the fire. Alone, she walked out beyond the village to the frosty summit of the low hill beyond it, where she stood for a long time, silently, the wind whipping her shabby cloak around her. I followed her from curiosity, and when I approached, she did not curse as usual and send me away, but stood instead, unseeing and unmoving. As I looked at her, I realized that she was weeping silently. The tears seemed to turn to frost on her face, as she wept on and on, without speaking.

“Mother Anne, Mother Anne, what is wrong?” I caught up with her and questioned her.

“You don’t care, so why ask?”

“I do care. Do not weep so, you’ll be sick.”

“Who cares if I am sick?”

“Why, everyone cares—we all care.”

“No one cares. I’m old, and it doesn’t matter.”

“But you’re no older than you were,” I protested.

“The last of my teeth has fallen out this winter. All my beauty is gone, and I’m old forever until I die.” I looked at her, not understanding.

“You don’t understand, do you?” She turned on me fiercely. “You’ve always thought of me as old Mother Anne, the Ugly One. But I was beautiful once. I had pearly teeth and skin as fine and smooth as the petals of a flower, just as you have now. And I had hair like spun gold, too, such as none has ever seen. ‘A river of gold,’ they called it.” The icy wind cut me to the bone. “Now my teeth are all, all gone. ‘One for each child,’ they say. One and many more than that! But I have given them for dead ones. Where is the fairness in that? To give up beauty and love for dead things? Had I ten children living, I would be honored, honored, I say!” The tears had ceased, but her frozen, ice-blue stare looked even more inhuman without them.

“Oh, someday you’ll understand. Your mother was the lucky one! She died in the glory of her beauty. Her shining hair wrapped her like a great cloak within her shroud. Even dead her face was more lovely than the carving of the Blessed Madonna. ‘Oh, look at her, the beauty, the poor, lovely creature! A saint, a poor saint, who left behind two poor, wee little motherless mites.’ Two hard-hearted, shrewd little mites, I say, for poor ugly Anne to raise and make the best of. And when they do well, who gets the credit? The dead saint, of course! That’s who! Why should it be otherwise? Tell me, tell me, what will you do when you are old and ugly, and no one wants you, not even your children?”

“But Rob and Will—”

She turned, interrupting me in a bitter voice, “Rob and Will? They’re the Devil’s own, and someday he’ll come and fetch them. And I, I’ll be always alone until I die.”

I had never suspected that, simple as she was, she could think this way, that she had seen so many secret thoughts so clearly and yet gone on. I was seized by a sudden sympathy, so deep I could not imagine where it came from.

“Just come down from this cold place, Mother Anne, and I’ll try to be a good daughter to you. A real daughter.” She nodded blindly and, consumed by her own thoughts, let herself be led down and home again.

Everything was still when we returned, for father and the boys were out taking counsel with the older men of the village about the first day of planting. The ground was too hard, and it must be postponed. I put Mother Anne to bed, and wrapped her heavily, for she had begun to shake, and the death wish was in her eyes. When father and my brothers burst in to inspect the contents of the kettle, I tried to distract them, so they would leave Mother Anne to herself. But it was a useless effort, for father saw her in bed at midday, her lips blue and the covers heaped around her, and sauntered over.

“So, old sow, in bed at midday? Wielding a broomstick must have worn you out early!” The men laughed, even her sons. The death wish in her eye was replaced by rage: she glared at him ferociously.

“Ha! When you grow weaker, I grow stronger,” he mocked her. “We’ll see who rules, now!” He strutted in front of the bed.

She sat bolt upright in bed.

“You old he-goat!” she shouted. “You’re no stronger than a parson’s fart! I’ll show you how I wield a broomstick!”—and she jumped out of bed.

Father leapt nimbly away, cocking his finger in a sarcastic manner. “One more swing, Mother Lazarus, and I won’t tell you the news.”

“News? News? What news is that?” she asked anxiously.

“The kind of news old women like to hear. Priest’s news,” mocked father.

“Tell me now, or your head will need mending,” said mother, reaching menacingly for her griddle.

Rob and Will were laughing at father now; things were back the old way.

“Well, Sir Ambrose says we need pay no more tuition.”

“Holy Mother, they’ve thrown him out.” Mother’s face fell, and she sat down.

“Thrown him elsewhere, is more like it,” teased father cruelly.

“Oh, God, not in jail! What could he have done?” she wept.

“Nah, mother, it’s not that,” said brother Rob. Will poked him and chuckled.

“You tell, you tell now, or I’ll march straight to Sir Ambrose,” mother cried.

“Put your feathers back on, woman. It’s another one of those ‘honors’ of Sir Ambrose.” Father looked at her in a superior manner. “It seems there is this place of higher learning. Higher, higher learning.
Highest
higher, higher learning. So high that simpering priest has to roll his eyes heavenward to speak of it. Each year the abbot sends two boys, and pays their fees, but some years, no boy is holy enough, or high enough”—and here he held his nose, as if smelling rancid meat—“to go. This year there’s only one. It’s David, of course. Little Master Goodbody himself.”

“Has Sir Ambrose seen David?” I interrupted eagerly. “Is he well, is he happy there?”

“He’s seen him, and he’s fine. He grows apace! The monks eat better than we do, the bloodsuckers.”

“This place he’s to go, is it
very
splendid?” I asked. Mother was silent, thinking.

“From how Sir Ambrose tells it, it’s only short of heaven itself. It’s at Oxford town, and it’s called the university, and a man who studies there, he says, has an unlimited future. David might be something great someday. A great scholar, or a prince of the Church. Or, at least, so says that cozening priest.”

A prince! Nothing, nothing, was too fine for a boy like David! Mother looked paralyzed. Then she suddenly spoke.

“If any part of this is true, old man, then we are made. For princes look after their own.” Father nodded assent.

“But—but the trip. It’s long and dangerous. How will he go? Where will he stay?” The thought that she might lose such a treasure, after such a great imagined gain, was terrifying.

“All is arranged. We do nothing. In October the university sends the ‘fetchers,’ all well armed, to take the boys back from all parts of England. The abbot pays for the trip. Then they live in a house with a master to look after them. The abbot pays for that too. They read large books and learn large things. The abbot pays for all. It’s simple. Then when he’s done, he comes back a prince.”

“Well, then, hold my hand, for we are people of good fortune.” For a whole fortnight after that father and mother were reconciled.

“I
ALWAYS WANTED TO
study at Oxford myself,” remarked Brother Gregory placidly, placing the last period.

“Have you seen it, then?” asked Margaret.

“Yes, I have traveled there, and once bought a very fine book, but fate denied me the chance to study there.”

“You own books?”

“Only one for myself just now. The book I bought then was a gift I’d been sent to buy for someone. But the university’s a wonderful place. Even in the alehouses there is high disputation.” Brother Gregory had begun to feel that he might owe Margaret slightly more serious consideration. After all, not every woman—even one who talks too much—has a brother who is an authentic scholar. Well, he’d doubtless have to trek through many a weary page before he found out where the brother was now.

“My husband owns books,” said Margaret.

“Oh?” replied Brother Gregory politely, counting through the pages he had written and numbering them carefully. “Who’d have thought it of this money-sucking tradesman?” he thought to himself.

“He owns nineteen. They are locked in this big chest.” She tapped the closed, ironbound lid of the chest near where Brother Gregory was sitting. “Some are Latin, some are French. There is one in German, all about God, and even one in Arabic.”

Oho! Here was something out of the ordinary! Brother Gregory looked up and raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, Arabic,” said Margaret calmly, conscious of the sensation she had made. “My husband has traveled all over the world and says that a great merchant must know many languages.”

“And what about you?” asked Brother Gregory. He thought he could detect a hint of the north in her accent still, even after years in the south. Margaret’s face fell.

“I don’t know anything but English.” Then she brightened a little. “But my husband has got a Frenchwoman to teach me and the girls. He says everyone must know French, for it is the language of the court. He says he imagines I will speak French very nicely one of these days.”

“I know a man with forty books,” Brother Gregory remarked calmly.

“I am sure my husband will have forty books, when he has the time for them,” sniffed Margaret.

Brother Gregory got up to leave. Margaret took the pages that had been completed and did something very odd to the big chest. First she fiddled with a bit of carved decoration, then pushed at a corner, and then pulled out an entire drawer from the bottom of the chest, where its edges had been disguised beneath a line of carving.

“Look at this, isn’t this a fine place? There’s a secret drawer here that my husband showed me, that only he knows about. The whole house is full of things like that, and I don’t know half of them. But this is empty, and he said I might use it. It’s just the right place for my book, until it’s done, don’t you think?”

Brother Gregory nodded gravely and waited at the door.

“Oh, your fee for this week. I have it here. I didn’t forget. Clerics need to eat, too, I know.”

Brother Gregory looked studiously uninterested in her chatter.

“But you will come back? Day after tomorrow?”

“Next week would be better.”

Perhaps I’m paying him too much, thought Margaret. If he gets too comfortable, he won’t come back. He’s made it clear enough he doesn’t like writing for a woman. Still, it’s not right to be stingy when a job’s properly done, she sighed to herself. Master Kendall would be ashamed of me if he knew I’d been cheap. She fished in the little purse she wore on her belt, next to her bunch of keys, and picked out the coins for Brother Gregory. With a silent salutation he disappeared.

W
HEN
B
ROTHER
G
REGORY WAS
shown in the following week, he noted with a certain vague annoyance that Margaret had made herself comfortable on the window seat, exactly as if she had always expected him to return. Her sewing basket was beside her, and she was hemming something large and white, that spread in wide folds across her lap. Her maid had evidently just finished telling her something that was funny, and she continued to look amused even after the girl disappeared carrying a pile of folded, finished linen. In the hall beyond the open door he could hear Master Kendall’s apprentices shouting to each other. Margaret began to talk even before Brother Gregory had finished opening his inkhorn, and her tone of complacency irritated him.

I
THINK
I
LEFT
off where things had changed with me and Mother Anne. It wasn’t long after that that I was married. Spring came, and I turned fourteen, but that isn’t why it happened, even if I was a grown-up woman. It really all happened because of the miller, though I couldn’t see it that way in the beginning. You know how that is, don’t you? You pull a thread you hardly even notice, but the knitting comes undone. It’s only later you notice the little thing has brought all the great things with it—but of course, you couldn’t know it at the time. It was that way with the miller. He was a liar and a cheat, and no one ever came home from the mill with honest measure. But one bright day that spring he outdid himself, and father and my stepbrother Will came home from a day at the mill at St. Matthew’s shouting with rage. Father was so mad he threw his hat on the ground in front of our doorstep and swore furiously.

“Devil take that miller! I swear he’s given short weight again, that spawn of hell!”

But the miller held the abbot’s monopoly, so what was to be done? Nothing at all, we all thought. He was just a thieving pest, like rats or the little birds. At least the birds sing melodies for our pleasure, but all the miller ever sang was testimony in court. For when some man raised his fist in protest, the miller swore he had attacked him, and then he must pay a fine. Court day at St. Matthew’s was held regularly, and the abbot made as much again in fines from the miller as he did in fees. Now that I am older, I think they colluded in this, for the abbot knew how to make money from everything he touched.