Bridle the Wind (6 page)

‘She is tired and sick. She has not the strength to set out on her journey today. But Father Antoine could take her as far as the inn at the village of Zugarra, over the hill, where she could stay a day or two – only, she has no money. And I cannot draw from the Abbey funds without Father Vespasian's permission. But – along with your clothes, my boy, which I have in safekeeping there is a money belt –'

‘Of course,' I said, remembering the eleven English gold guineas and the three silver crowns that I had carried with me for my journey. ‘Take one of the guineas; she may have it with my goodwill, poor thing.'

‘Tut, tut! A crown will be sufficient,' said Father Pierre. ‘But I will not handle your belongings in
your absence; come, and you yourself shall give me the money.'

He led me to the infirmary, which lay off the main cloister near the kitchen, at right angles to the chapel.

‘This was once the visitors' parlour,' he told me. ‘But when our numbers dwindled, and the old infirmary became too large for our needs, this building was thought more convenient.'

There was a surgery downstairs, with wooden closets for blankets and bedding, shelves of medicines, pots of unguents, and bundles of herbs. Upstairs were the sickrooms where ailing members of the Community could be nursed.

Father Pierre opened the closet where my clothes hung, carefully put up in a linen bag with sage and comfrey leaves to keep moths at bay. It gave me an odd feeling to handle my striped jacket with the steel buttons, and remember how I had first put it on in my English grandfather's ducal mansion at Asshe, in England. What a distance from there had I now travelled; distance on land and in the mind, both! The gold English guineas seemed like fairy gold as I took them from the money belt and counted them, wondering greatly at the honesty of the people who had picked me up and brought me here, that the money should still be in the purse.

‘Here, my father, this is for the poor woman; and should not I give you money, too, for the Abbey where I have been tended and sheltered for such a long period? Indeed I would not wish to be thought ungrateful or unmindful –'

‘No, no, my son,' he said hastily. ‘We require no payment from our patients, no indeed! And one crown will be plenty for the woman. Besides, are you not rendering payment to the Order in the form of service – tending the garden, helping Father Antoine? No, keep your store for when you set out on your travels again. Here it shall stay, safely guarded with your clothes, you see, in the third closet from the stair; I carry the keys on me always, and at night sleep with them under my pillow just here – '

He replaced my clothes in the linen bag, and the bag in the cupboard; it struck me, at first idly, then with some force, that he had taken considerable pains to impress on me just where my things were kept. Was there a purpose behind his words and actions?

‘You are an excellent boy,' he went on, quickly blessing me with the sign of the cross. ‘I was certain of it. One cannot tend a person in sickness without forming a strong notion of his character. Now you had best run along to your work with Father Mathieu. And – it were better not to speak of this generous act of yours to any person here. It is our secret – between you, me, and
le bon Dieu.
Just in case Father Vespasian, waking, is displeased to find her gone.'

‘Of course, father; I perfectly understand.'

He gave me a quick smile; if he were not a monk I would have said he winked.

‘Good boy! Run along with you, then; you can
go through this side-door, which will be a shortcut to the vegetable garden.'

The door opened into the monks' recreation ground, a stretch of rough turf, studded with sea pinks and nodding yellow poppies, which lay between the cloister and the walled garden.

There, on the stretch of flat land at the foot of the wall (here about thirty feet high) it was their custom to play
pelota a mano
, a very ancient game of the Basques. Most men now play this game with a
pala
, or wooden bat, with which they strike the ball against the wall, but the monks kept to the oldest form of the game, using nothing but the bare hand, for which reason their hands were all tough and callused and thick as oak roots.

The doorway through the wall from the surgery saved me a long walk round through cloister and living quarters and kitchen.

‘I keep a key outside, hidden behind this stone, in case Father Mathieu has occasion to come in this way after gathering herbs for my sick ones,' said Father Pierre, pulling aside a square stone to show me the hidden key. Then he returned through the door, locking it from the inside. I stood outside the door, on the flat pelota ground, thinking hard.

Father Pierre is showing me something, he is warning me, I thought. What can be his object? Is he suggesting that for me, too, it would be best to leave the Abbey before Father Vespasian wakes?

A terribly strong temptation shook me: to take the key from under the stone, unlock the door
in the wall, break open the closet, remove my clothes, and depart at once. It would be impossible to leave by the main gate, because of the porter; but I knew there were many gaps in the crumbling outer wall, which enclosed a large area and many buildings, half of them ruinous, on the top of the island. A strong active boy such as myself, could climb through the wall without much trouble, and over the grassy, rocky hillside beyond there were numerous goat and rabbit paths. The Abbey was not entirely surrounded by sheer cliff. While emptying barrowloads of stones from the garden, or returning with seaweed from the beach, I had noticed how it would, here and there, be possible to climb down, unobserved, onto the sands below.

Of course such an escape could only be achieved when the tide was full out. Crossing the causeway, except by night, would not be possible, for the whole length of it was visible from the Abbey gate.

How I longed to leave! I could see that the life led by the fathers in the Abbey was a noble one, devout, hardworking, every minute of every hour put to good use in prayer, work, and healing; yet something about the place both frightened and repelled me. It was because of Father Vespasian: he was so powerful, so unpredictable. And they were all bound in duty to obey him, no matter what he ordered.…

I wondered if he had always been as he was now.

Twice I looked back with longing at the door in the wall.

But I had given my promise to Father Antoine. And perhaps the event which would release me, as he had suggested, would not be long in coming. Perhaps quite soon now I would recapture the memory of what had happened to me among the sand dunes.

I pushed, again and again, at the closed door in my mind. But it would not open.

Not until another ten days had passed did the memory return.

2

I find a victim in the thicket. The
decision to leave for Spain. I am
punished for obduracy

It was a day of mild sun and trembling, vaporous sea-mist. Father Antoine and I had gone, as was now our twice-weekly custom, to gather seaweed in the larger of the two bays, and also collect such pieces of driftwood as Brother Guillaume could use for his kitchen fire. Larks and peewits were twittering in the marshes beyond the seashore. Once or twice I saw a pelican flap his stately way over the sand dunes.

‘Why does nobody try to cultivate the marshes, father?' I asked.

‘The Marsh of Cuxaq? It is too unhealthy, child; pestilence and the lung sickness, they say, lie in wait for those who spend any length of time there. The only persons who can find their way through the boggy wilderness are brigands; for others, it is best not to venture far from the edge.'

‘Brigands?'

‘What you in Spain call the
gente de reputacion
– thieves, bandits, assassins. They, the Mala Gente, of course, cross all borders.'

‘Ah!'

I myself had had a little dealing with the
gente
de reputation,
when, on my way to England, I was unjustly imprisoned in Oviedo. The leader of a group of
rateros,
or brigands, in Oviedo jail had believed (wrongly) that I had some knowledge of the whereabouts of General Moore's paychests for the English army – or maybe the treasure sent from Paris for the French army, chests of gold doubloons and crusadas; one treasure, it was said, had been lost in the mountains of Galicia, the other somewhere in the Pyrenees. I knew nothing of either treasure, hardly believed in their existence, and had told the chief so, roundly; but it was plain that he did not believe me. He knew that I had once met an Englishman calling himself George Smith, who claimed that he had seen where the English paychests had been left when Baird and Frazer retreated westward toward Coruna. This Englishman was now dead, and moreover he had told me nothing of his knowledge. I had spoken to him once, and he had sent me a letter about my own affairs. But I supposed that if the Spanish
rateros
had not yet found the money (if, indeed, it really existed) I would do well to keep out of their way, for they might yet believe that I would lead them to it.

However, all this had nothing to do with the present occasion, I thought, with the Marsh of Cuxaq or the French bandits. The French wars were over, the Emperor Napoleon, imprisoned in St Helena, had died almost a year ago, and King Ferdinand the Desired had been let out of jail,
where Napoleon had put him, and was once more on the throne of Spain.

Reaching this point in my thoughts, I asked Father Antoine if he could give me any news of Spain. Now that I knew who I was, I began to feel homesick for my native country. Spain, to me, would always be that.

‘Ah, Spain!' said Father Antoine, pausing to brush the sand flies from his bald tonsure before hoisting up, with my help, a gray-white log of driftwood into the cart. ‘Who ever knows what new frenzy will afflict that country, the land of bullfights and blood feuds? But I have heard that a rebellion, under Rafael Riego, is spreading and gathering power; King Ferdinand now pretends to proclaim himself king of the people, promising to restore all the liberal measures which, previously, he had annulled. They say that the Holy Alliance (that is, Austria, Russia, and Prussia) will not permit this; they are afraid of the Spanish revolutionaries; they will send Cossack troops into Spain to put down the uprising.'

This news startled and shocked me. My Spanish grandfather, I knew (though it was long since he had quit politics), felt a sympathy for the Liberals and for Colonel Riego, who had wished to bring back the Spanish liberal constitution of 1812; whereas the rule of King Ferdinand VII was already noted for its despotism, oppression of liberty, closing of universities, banning of books, and exile or persecution of any men who dared to speak against the regime.

But I thought that, while it was bad enough to have such a ruler, it would be even worse to have his rule enforced by armies from outside the kingdom. Spain, in the years when I was a small child, had been plundered and devastated, year after year, by the armies of Napoleon; was this now all to happen again, only this time with the armies of the Tsar Alexander?

I was beginning to say something about these matters, when a very strange thing happened to me. Suddenly all my thoughts, all my faculties, seemed brought within me to a numbing halt, as if a pencil of ice had touched my brain.

We were in the centre of the bay, we had just levered the length of timber into the cart, and I was standing with my hand on the cart tail and my face toward the sand dunes, when I became seized by an overmastering blind urge to pass through a narrow gully between two of the silvery hillocks and see what lay beyond.

The violence of this urge hardly left me breath for speech. I knew – I felt quite certain – that something was waiting for me on the other side of the dunes.

‘Father Antoine – I believe I can hear somebody calling me.'

‘Why, my boy!' he exclaimed. ‘What in the world is the matter? You have turned white as an altar cloth. Are you ill? Do you have pain?'

‘No, no – I am not ill – but I believe – I believe I am beginning to
remember.
There is something
that I have to do beyond those dunes; I must go, at once; it is terribly urgent – ‘

While I gasped out these words I had begun to run over the sand. Father Antoine, without more ado, dropped the asses' reins over their heads, to prevent them from straying, and followed me, tucking up his robe and moving swiftly on his sandaled feet.

‘I will help you, my child, with whatever it is.' He glanced about him, over the flat sand, and back to where the cart stood, and the donkeys with drooping heads. ‘I believe – yes, I am sure,' he panted, following me, ‘that this is exactly the track through which you came running when I first saw you.'

‘Yes. Yes, it is! I remember now. I had wished to find a private place in which to kneel and thank God for my deliverance – '

‘Very understandable, my dear boy!'

‘I came through the dunes – just here – and saw that clump of trees ahead. It was twilight then -but I am certain that is the place.
Listen!
'

We were nearly at the thicket. My ears had caught something – a choking sob, a faint, pitiful cry for help.

‘I heard nothing,' said Father Antoine. ‘But you are young. Your ears are sharper.'

‘Quick, quick!'

Thrusting, grappling, kicking the boughs out of my way, fighting the tangled undergrowth, I forced my way into the thicket, with Father Antoine close behind me. Now I recognised again
the sweet haunting fragrance of the yellow blossoms that hung overhead. I had smelled that scent before! And yet a part of my mind, cool, doubting, sceptical, said to me, ‘Come, now, Felix, it was the month of January when the
Euzkadi
was wrecked, and you were cast ashore. How could these blossoms have been in flower then?'

But I was certain that I remembered their fragrance.

Three or four more minutes of battling progress through the bushes, and we emerged, torn, bloodied, and panting, into a dappled, shadowed glade which also, now, I remembered. The ground here was fragrant with violets.