The Breath of Peace (5 page)

William shrugged. ‘I want to brush down the horse, and they all need fresh water. Not much else. There's always something needs doing, isn't there, but nothing for you to bother with unless you want to. I should think you've enough to be getting on with in here. And it's still cold out. Wind's sharp.'

She stood looking down at him and, despite the dour set to his face this morning, thought it safe to risk an affectionate ruffling of his hair.

‘Well, take those boots off before you go out again,' she chided kindly. ‘It'll take those hours to dry, not to mention you'll get chilblains going out in wet boots in this cold and sticking your feet right close to the blaze like that – yes, you
will
. You can take that look off your face! Set your boots in yon chimney corner there; I'll stuff a cloth in them so they dry in shape. Give your feet a good rub down and put two pairs of thick stockings on; wear your clogs.'

William hated wooden clogs with a passion, but not as much as he hated being told what to do. And he had very little appetite for feeling foolish while somebody else lectured him with what was perfectly obvious, that he should have had the sense to do for himself.

‘Madeleine, leave me alone,' he answered quietly.

She frowned, baffled. There seemed to be no shifting of the black mood that had settled on him. ‘Well, I will,' she said, ‘but don't you be such a numskull then. Take care of your boots and take care of your feet. We've no money for more of one and God's broken the mould for the other. Think!'

William clenched his jaw hard shut to prevent himself replying. He set down the mug of tea half-finished and bent forward to untie his boots, which he removed and set exactly where Madeleine had said, to forestall further comment. He undid the strips of cloth that fastened his stockings in place, for they were wet too, and peeled them off, laying them on the hearthstone to dry. His feet still felt cold, and he wanted to toast them by the fire for a few minutes, but his wife was still watching and he knew she was perfectly right about the chilblains. So he contented himself with briefly rubbing his toes in his hands, and then picked up the sock ties and reluctantly left the hearth to climb the stairs in search of dry stockings to put on. It was a mercy they would indeed be dry too, he reflected. At St Alcuin's monastery in this weather, the only dry clothes would be what men were wearing. There, damp seeped right into the stones, and the cold was bone-freezing. Here in the cottage the fire warmed everything through. The chimney rose up through the middle of the house, and the other two rooms downstairs had the edge taken off the chill even with the doors shut. But they lived almost entirely in this main room through the winter, and the rising warmth also reached their bedroom, linked by the open staircase, as well as the warmth of the chimney by the head of their bed.

Obediently he further chafed his cold feet with the edge of the blanket, to restore circulation, and found two pairs of thick woollen socks to put on one over the other. He tied them in place, and rummaged in the chest for his hood to keep the cold out of his ears. ‘You're not fat enough,' Madeleine commented sometimes. ‘It's your own fault you're always so cold. You don't eat enough. You're forever wandering off and not finishing your food.'

It had been William's habit through three decades of monastic life to find refuge in order and control. He had wrapped the predictable, unvarying routine of liturgy and work and silence around him like a blanket. To say it had brought him peace would be inaccurate, but it had offered respite and a means of stemming chaos. When, on an unexpected impulse of yearning that had grown out of watching Abbot John's face and observing the life at St Alcuin's, he had been moved to un-shutter his heart and invite in the living Christ, everything had changed. He had imagined improvement. He had imagined at last a capacity to love, gentleness in him strengthened, and the streak of ruthless cruelty that ran through him, like a glittering black seam in a rock, chiselled out. He had been unprepared for a return to vulnerability, bringing emotions that connected in turn to memories he would prefer to forget forever. Certainly he, who had regarded women as creatures of no use to him, and therefore of less interest than the cattle on the priory grange, had never expected to fall in love. They say love is an affair of the heart. William felt, in letting its longings lead him forth from the safe cleft in the rock where he had sheltered to the uncertain ground of domestic life, that it had opened up his heart and his gut and probably his liver and kidneys for good measure. The turbulence and difficulty of the everyday, in its present form, hooked onto the memories of household norms in the period of his life before he had entered religion, and brought to the surface memory after buried memory to torment his waking mind and harass his dreams. Incidents he had locked down in irons and refused the light of day had come straggling into conscious recollection and muddled together with his interactions with Madeleine, opening him up painfully and pitilessly to despair and self-loathing he had thought was settled and done with. As he sat pulling on his stockings, one pair over another, and folding them and lacing them carefully round his feet and legs, his soul seemed to be in danger of disembowelment. Something savage and desperate battened down in him in self-defence.

He padded soft-foot down the stairs in his socks. His wife, seated on a stool close by the window mending a difficult tear in his loose-woven russet hemp smock that he loved, lifted her head from her task to watch him push his feet into the wooden overshoes. Whether socks and pattens would suffice against the mud and wet grass she felt unsure. She thought of his best boots upstairs, but decided he had better save those for going to Mass and for when they had any kind of business abroad that required respectable appearance – which happened not often, it was true, but occasionally. So she said nothing, just observed the grim, dogged set to his face, and realized that he neither spoke to her nor looked at her – not because other things were on his mind but because right now he could bear no more of her company: which felt unjust.

William latched the door quietly and carefully behind him. Hating the inflexibility of clogs, and their tendency to turn the ankle so that walking in them was an occupation of itself requiring vigilance, he longed for the barefoot days of summer. He trudged along the path round the house to the woodshed, then stopped and swore under his breath. He'd forgotten the basket. Retracing his steps, he found it set out on the doorstep. Evidently Madeleine had noticed he'd forgotten it as well.

The woodshed, with its dusty quiet fragrance, offering shelter from the wind, was a sanctuary William appreciated. He took off the loathed pattens, and fetched the whet-stone and the hand-axe. Patiently he ground the blade until it was sharp enough to satisfy him, then he took three logs from the pile and sat on the ground with a log held in his hand in the space between his knees, and began steadily to reduce it to fine kindling sticks.

The rhythmic, methodical work felt soothing, but there was not enough in it to keep his mind busy, and before long the old memories that had all somehow got out of their dungeon began to creep up into consciousness with their sour reek of humiliation and soul-destroying shame. One by one he pushed them away, persisting with the rhythmic, gentle chop and split as the sharpened axe bit through the unresisting wood.

A boyhood memory surfaced of one day among many leaving him knocked to the floor while the blurred drunken voice of his father roared in rage for him to get to his feet and take it like a man, and he had been lost between fear of the consequences of obeying or of disobeying. That particular day he had tried to get up and been kicked off balance before he was properly on his feet, falling against the corner of the table. Even the furniture of the house had something against him, and the spiteful point of the corner hurt the soft part of his body agonizingly. Collapsing again in a sea of pain, the immoderate cackle of mocking laughter had cascaded round his senses like bright leaves of molten hate, as he tried and failed to find some vestige of self-respect and dignity to hold on to.

William did not pause in his present task. He placed each stick freed from the old log on the pile of wood dealt with, and went on to the next. Something in his belly squirmed and bucked in protest against the unbearable memories, but he held himself calm by sheer determined self-discipline, persevering doggedly with the job in hand.

He had almost finished the last of the three logs when Madeleine appeared in the doorway. He looked up at her, in time to catch the mystified expression on her face dissolve into laughter. ‘What on earth are you doing it like that for?'

‘Doing what like what?' He sounded none too pleased to see her.

‘Sitting on the floor to split wood.'

‘I'm comfortable like this. I've got the job done – what more do you want, and what business is it of yours anyway?'

‘Oh! I beg your pardon! None at all! You can split wood standing on your head for all I care. Only most people would want to be bending over the task to let the force of their weight help with the chopping.'

‘Fine. But not me. Is that what you came out to tell me – that I'm splitting the wood wrong as well as everything else – or did you have something further that you wanted of me?'

William did not raise his voice when he was angry. He spoke softly always, but when she annoyed him his tone assumed a dangerous quality that sounded menacing and implacably hostile. It disturbed her, and put her on the defensive.

‘Have it your own way. What do I know? And I came out to see if you'd got the kindling ready because I want to heat up the bread oven and I need small sticks for that – and we have none left indoors.'

Without replying, he gathered up the stack of split wood and dropped it into the basket, then stood up and handed it to her.

‘Thank you,' she said, and her tone had become distinctly chilly. He had irritated her now. ‘Can you do some more, then, so we have enough for later? This will all get used up firing the oven.'

‘Yes,' he said curtly, with a small nod. She sighed. This wasn't necessary. It shouldn't be like this. Why was he so impossible?

‘William –'

‘Just leave me alone!' he snapped. ‘For mercy's sake, leave me in peace!'

She stood a moment longer with the basket, then wheeled about and marched back down the path, offended and hurt.

Left alone in the woodshed, William took three more logs from the pile. He thought Madeleine would probably be right about bending over the wood to chop it, which made him the more determined to do it his own way. He resumed the rhythm of cutting and splitting, but it no longer felt soothing. Like guts spilling out of an animal taken down by predators, memories tumbled unchecked out of their storehouse, merciless, maddening. He concentrated on cutting the sticks fine, as narrow and slender as he could. It made a focus. But the last log had a knot in it and wouldn't split at all. He got into an absurd and mindless battle with it, determined to get the better of it and reduce it to sticks as small as splinters. With an almighty whack he drove the axe a little way into it, and there it stuck. Getting up onto his knees, he picked up the axe with the log fixed tight on the end of it, and smacked the whole thing twice without result on the ground. The third time the axe handle broke. Almost out of his mind with rage and misery, William gathered up the pile of sticks he had completed and, without stopping to put his clogs back on his feet, walked back to the house in his socks. Struggling with the door latch, he dropped the sticks in the puddle of water on the worn stone step. As he bent with iron patience to gather them again, Madeleine, having heard the latch rattle, opened the door from inside.

‘William, what in the world –' She took in the sight of her husband in wet stockinged feet, his face set pale and hard, and she stepped back to let him pass into the house.

‘William, whatever ails you today? Look, won't you just –'

‘
What
? Won't I just
what
?'

His eyes, the colour of flint and every bit as soft and yielding, glared at her, formidably cold. The quiet, biting control of his voice bewildered her.

‘Oh, nothing! Walk through the mire in your socks, why don't you? Just drop the wood in the basket and go! But your boots are sodden and so are your socks – what will you wear to go and retrieve your clogs?'

In William's path to the fireplace, Madeleine had left a stool standing. His hands full of sticks, he kicked it to move it out of his way. As it toppled and fell, Madeleine's cry of sorrow as she saw what was coming preceded by an instant the crash of breaking crockery as the seat of the stool hit the breadbowl on the hearthstone, the beautiful bowl John had given them and Brother Thaddeus had made.

‘You
stupid
blasted clumsy idiot!' Madeleine yelled at her husband, who stood frozen, the sticks still held in his hands, unable to bear or believe what he had done.

Beside herself with anger and grief, she pulled the linen cap off her head and threw it to the ground in a gesture of despair as he walked with absolute quietness and control to the fireside, dropped the sticks into the basket, and knelt on one knee by the hearthstone to lift the dough from the broken bowl.

‘Leave it!' Madeleine screamed at him. ‘Leave it alone! Don't touch it! God alone knows what more damage you'll manage to do. You seem to bring the kiss of death to everything. Just leave it be!'

Very slowly, his face white, William stood up and turned to face her. He looked at her, his gaze appraising and cold, his voice still quiet and perfectly controlled.

‘“Witch” doesn't meet the case – I'd have said “bitch” would be better!'

As Madeleine stepped up close to him, he would under normal circumstances have admired the magnificence of her hair tumbling out of its fastenings, and the flash of fire in her eyes. This day he didn't care what she looked like; he was just furious at himself and at her and at everything.