The Wish House and Other Stories (67 page)

The sub-cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with red-lac for a background to the Virgin’s hardly yet fired halo. She was shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched landscape in the middle distance.

‘You’ve made her all Jewess,’ said the sub-cantor, studying the olive-flushed cheek and the eyes charged with foreknowledge.

‘What else was Our Lady?’ John slipped out the pins. ‘Listen, Clement. If I do not come back, this goes into my Great Luke, whoever finishes it.’ He slid the drawing between its guard-papers.

‘Then you’re for Burgos again – as I heard?’

‘In two days. The new cathedral yonder – but they’re slower than the Wrath of God, those masons – is good for the soul.’

‘Thy
soul?’ The sub-cantor seemed doubtful.

‘Even mine, by your permission. And down south – on the edge of
the Conquered Countries – Granada way – there’s some Moorish diaper-work that’s wholesome. It allays vain thought and draws it toward the picture – as you felt, just now, in my Annunciation.’

‘She-it was very beautiful. No wonder you go. But you’ll not forget your absolution, John?’

‘Surely.’ This was a precaution John no more omitted on the eve of his travels than he did the recutting of the tonsure which he had provided himself with in his youth, somewhere near Ghent. The mark gave him privilege of clergy at a pinch, and a certain consideration on the road always.

‘You’ll not forget, either, what we need in the scriptorium. There’s no more true ultramarine in this world now. They mix it with that German blue. And as for vermilion—‘

‘I’ll do my best always.’

‘And Brother Thomas’ (this was the infirmarían in charge of the monastery hospital) ‘he needs—‘

‘He’ll do his own asking. I’ll go over his side now, and get me re-tonsured.’

John went down the stairs to the lane that divides the hospital and cookhouse from the back-cloisters. While he was being barbered, Brother Thomas (St Illod’s meek but deadly persistent infirmarían), gave him a list of drugs that he was to bring back from Spain by hook, crook, or lawful purchase. Here they were surprised by the lame, dark Abbot Stephen, in his fur-lined night-boots. Not that Stephen de Sautré was any spy; but as a young man he had shared an unlucky Crusade, which had ended, after a battle at Mansura, in two years’ captivity among the Saracens at Cairo where men learn to walk softly. A fair huntsman and hawker, a reasonable disciplinarian, but a man of science above all, and a Doctor of Medicine under one Ranulphus, Canon of St Paul’s, his heart was more in the monastery’s hospital work than its religious. He checked their list interestedly, adding items of his own. After the infirmarían had withdrawn, he gave John generous absolution, to cover lapses by the way; for he did not hold with chance-bought indulgences.

‘And what seek you
this
journey?’ he demanded, sitting on the bench beside the mortar and scales in the little warm cell for stored drugs.

‘Devils, mostly,’ said John, grinning.

‘In Spain? Are not Abana and Pharpar—?’

John, to whom men were but matter for drawings, and well-born to boot (since he was a de Sanford on his mother’s side), looked the abbot full in the face and – ‘Did
you
find it so?’ said he.

‘No. They were in Cairo too. But what’s your special need of ’em?’

‘For my Great Luke. He’s the master-hand of all Four when it comes to devils.’

‘No wonder. He was a physician. You’re not.’

‘Heaven forbid! But I’m weary of our Church-pattern devils. They’re only apes and goats and poultry conjoined. Good enough for plain red-and-black Hells and Judgment Days – but not for me.’

‘What makes you so choice in them?’

‘Because it stands to reason and art that there are all musters of devils in Hell’s dealings. Those Seven, for example, that were haled out of the Magdalene. They’d be she-devils – no kin at all to the beaked and horned and bearded devils-general.’

The abbot laughed.

‘And see again! The devil that came out of the dumb man. What use is snout or bill to
him
? He’d be faceless as a leper. Above all – God send I live to do it! – the devils that entered the Gadarene swine. They’d be – they’d be – I know not yet what they’d be, but they’d be surpassing devils. I’d have ’em diverse as the Saints themselves. But now, they’re all one pattern, for wall, window, or picture-work.’

‘Go on, John. You’re deeper in this mystery than I.’

‘Heaven forbid! But I say there’s respect due to devils, damned tho’ they be.’

‘Dangerous doctrine.’

‘My meaning is that if the shape of anything be worth man’s thought to picture to man, it’s worth his best thought.’

‘That’s safer. But I’m glad I’ve given you absolution.’

‘There’s less risk for a craftsman who deals with the outside shapes of things – for Mother Church’s glory.’

‘Maybe so, but, John’ – the Abbot’s hand almost touched John’s sleeve – ‘tell me, now, is – is she Moorish or – or Hebrew?’

‘She’s mine,’ John returned.

‘Is that enough?’

‘I have found it so.’

‘Well – ah well! It’s out of my jurisdiction, but – how do they look at it down yonder?’

‘Oh, they drive nothing to a head in Spain – neither Church nor King, bless them! There’s too many Moors and Jews to kill them all, and if they chased ’em away there’d be no trade nor farming. Trust me, in the Conquered Countries, from Seville to Granada, we live lovingly enough together – Spaniard, Moor, and Jew. Ye see,
we
ask no questions.’

‘Yes – yes,’ Stephen sighed. ‘And always there’s the hope she may be converted.’

‘Oh yes, there’s always hope.’

The abbot went on into the hospital. It was an easy age before Rome tightened the screw as to clerical connections. If the lady were not too forward, or the son too much of his father’s beneficiary in ecclesiastical preferments and levies, a good deal was overlooked. But, as the Abbot had reason to recall, unions between Christian and Infidel led to sorrow. None the less, when John with mule, mails, and man, clattered off down the lane for Southampton and the sea, Stephen envied him.

He was back, twenty months later, in good hard case, and loaded down with fairings. A lump of richest lazuli, a bar of orange-hearted vermilion, and a small packet of dried beetles which make most glorious scarlet, for the sub-cantor. Besides that, a few cubes of milky marble, with yet a pink flush in them, which could be slaked and ground down to incomparable background-stuff. There were quite half the drugs that the abbot and Thomas had demanded, and there was a long deep-red cornelian necklace for the abbot’s lady-Anne of Norton. She received it graciously, and asked where John had come by it.

‘Near Granada,’ he said.

‘You left all well there?’ Anne asked. (Maybe the abbot had told her something of John’s confession.)

‘I left all in the hands of God.’

‘Ah me! How long since?’

‘Four months less eleven days.’

‘Were you – with her?’

‘In my arms. Childbed.’

‘And?’

‘The boy too. There is nothing now.’

Anne of Norton caught her breath.

‘I think you’ll be glad of that,’ she said after a while.

‘Give me time, and maybe I’ll compass it. But not now.’

‘You have your handiwork and your art, and – John – remember there’s no jealousy in the grave.’

‘Ye-es! I have my art and Heaven knows I’m jealous of none.’

‘Thank God for that at least,’ said Anne of Norton, the always ailing woman who followed the abbot with her sunk eyes. ‘And be sure I shall treasure this’ – she touched the beads – ‘as long as I shall live.’

‘I brought – trusted – it to you for that,’ he replied, and took leave. When she told the abbot how she had come by it, he said nothing, but as he and Thomas were storing the drugs that John handed over in the cell which backs on to the hospital kitchen-chimney, he observed, of a cake of dried poppy-juice: ‘This has power to cut off all pain from a man’s body.’

‘I have seen it,’ said John.

‘But for pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug; and that is a man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motion of his own mind.’

‘That is coming to me, too,’ was the answer.

John spent the next fair May day out in the woods with the monastery swineherd and all the porkers; and returned loaded with flowers and sprays of spring, to his own carefully kept place in the north bay of the scriptorium. There, with his travelling sketch-books under his left elbow, he sunk himself past all recollections in his Great Luke.

Brother Martin, senior copyist (who spoke about once a fortnight), ventured to ask, later, how the work was going.

‘All here!’ John tapped his forehead with his pencil. ‘It has been only waiting these months to – ah God! – be born. Are ye free of your plain-copying, Martin?’

Brother Martin nodded. It was his pride that John of Burgos turned to him, in spite of his seventy years, for really good page-work.

Then see!’ John laid out a new vellum – thin but flawless. ‘There’s no better than this sheet from here to Paris. Yes! Smell it if you choose. Wherefore – give me the compasses and I’ll set it out for you – if ye make one letter lighter or darker than its next, I’ll stick ye like a Pig-’

‘Never, John!’ The old man beamed happily.

‘But I will! Now, follow! Here and here, as I prick, and in script of just this height to the hair’s breadth, ye’ll scribe the thirty-first and thirty-second verses of Eighth Luke.’

‘Yes, the Gadarene Swine!
“And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the abyss. And there was a herd of many swine’”
— Brother Martin naturally knew all the Gospels by heart.

‘Just so! Down to
“and he suffered them”.
Take your time to it. My Magdalene has to come off my heart first.’

Brother Martin achieved the work so perfectly that John stole some soft sweetmeats from the abbot’s kitchen for his reward. The old man ate them; then repented; then confessed and insisted
on penance. At which, the abbot, knowing there was but one way to reach the real sinner, set him a book called
De Virtutibus Herbarum
to fair-copy. St Mod’s had borrowed it from the gloomy Cistercians, who do not hold with pretty things, and the crabbed text kept Martin busy just when John wanted him for some rather specially spaced letterings.

‘See now,’ said the sub-cantor improvingly. ‘You should not do such things, John. Here’s Brother Martin on penance for your sake—‘

‘No – for my Great Luke. But I’ve paid the abbot’s cook. I’ve drawn him till his own scullions cannot keep straight-faced. He’ll not tell again.’

‘Unkindly done! And you’re out of favour with the abbot too. He’s made no sign to you since you came back – never asked you to high table.’

‘I’ve been busy. Having eyes in his head, Stephen knew it. Clement, there’s no librarian from Durham to Torre fit to clean up after you.’

The sub-cantor stood on guard; he knew where John’s compliments generally ended.

‘But outside the scriptorium—‘

‘Where I never go.’ The sub-cantor had been excused even digging in the garden, lest it should mar his wonderful bookbinding hands.

‘In all things outside the scriptorium you are the master-fool of Christendie. Take it from me, Clement. I’ve met many.’

‘I take everything from you,’ Clement smiled benignly. ‘You use me worse than a singing-boy.’

They could hear one of that suffering breed in the cloister below, squalling as the cantor pulled his hair.

‘God love you! So I do! But have you ever thought how I lie and steal daily on my travels – yes, and for aught you know, murder – to fetch you colours and earths?’

‘True,’ said just and conscience-stricken Clement. ‘I have often thought that were I in the world – which God forbid! – I might be a strong thief in some matters.’

Even Brother Martin, bent above his loathed
De Virtutibus
, laughed.

But about mid-summer, Thomas the Infirmarian conveyed to John the abbot’s invitation to supper in his house that night, with the request that he would bring with him anything that he had done for his Great Luke.

‘What’s toward?’ said John, who had been wholly shut up in his work.

‘Only one of his “wisdom” dinners. You’ve sat at a few since you were a man.’

‘True: and mostly good. How would Stephen have us—?’

‘Gown and hood over all. There will be a doctor from Salerno – one Roger, an Italian. Wise and famous with the knife on the body. He’s been in the infirmary some ten days, helping me – even me!’

“Never heard the name. But our Stephen’s
physicus
before
sacerdos
, always.’

‘And his lady has a sickness of some time. Roger came hither in chief because of her.’

‘Did he? Now I think of it, I have not seen the Lady Anne for a while.’

‘Ye’ve seen nothing for a long while. She has been housed near a month – they have to carry her abroad now.’

‘So bad as that, then?’

‘Roger of Salerno will not yet say what he thinks. But—‘

‘God pity Stephen!…Who else at table, besides thee?’

‘An Oxford friar. Roger is his name also. A learned and famous philosopher. And he holds his liquor too, valiantly.’

‘Three doctors – counting Stephen. I’ve always found that means two atheists.’

Thomas looked uneasily down his nose. ‘That’s a wicked proverb,’ he stammered. ‘You should not use it.’

‘Hoh! Never come you the monk over me, Thomas! You’ve been infirmarían at St Illod’s eleven years – and a lay-brother still. Why have you never taken orders, all this while?’

‘I – I am not worthy.’

‘Ten times worthier than that new fat swine – Henry Who’s-his-name – that takes the Infirmary Masses. He bullocks in with the viaticum, under your nose, when a sick man’s only faint from being bled. So the man dies – of pure fear. Ye know it! I’ve watched your face at such times. Take orders, Didymus. You’ll have a little more medicine and a little less mass with your sick then; and they’ll live longer.’