The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [76]
He pushed open the door of the grange. The half-dozen lay brothers looked startled to see him. Good. He had already learned to turn up suddenly, like a schoolmaster. He hardly paused to shake off the snow. ‘First,’ he said sternly, ‘I will inspect the food stores.’
The grange at St Leonards was a typical Cistercian affair. The dwelling house was a long, single-storey structure with an oak door in the middle. Here the lay brothers lived in spartan conditions, returning to the abbey domus for the main saints days and festivals, and being relieved from the centre from time to time. About thirty of the roughly seventy lay brothers were to be found out at the granges, usually.
‘So far, so good,’ Adam told them, as soon as he had checked for signs of pilfering or illicit drinking. ‘Now I will see the barn.’
It was strange, he reflected, that although, for years, he had seen the lay brothers every day, he had never really known them. The huge domus conversorum of the lay brothers might take up the whole western side of the cloister, but it was also completely separated even from the cloister wall by a narrow lane. One had to go right round the outside to reach the domus. In church the monks sang in the choir, the lay brothers in the nave. They ate apart.
Until now, he had never realized that he looked down upon them. It was true that he had found it necessary to treat them a little like children, to ensure discipline in the granges. Yet they were also men. Their commitment to the abbey was no less than his. They think less intensely than I do, he considered: each day I measure my life by what I have thought, about God, or my fellow men, or the world around the abbey. Yet their way is to feel these things and they remember the days by how they felt upon them. It may even be that, by thinking less, and feeling more, they remember more than I do.
If the dwelling house was modest, the rest of the farm buildings were not. There were cattle yards and cowsheds – even St Leonards often had a hundred oxen and seventy cows to take care of. There were sheepcotes and piggeries. But towering over everything was the huge barn. It was the size of a church, built of stone, with massive oak rafters. The wheat and oats they harvested were stored there in huge piles of sacks; so was all the farm equipment. On one side was a mountain of bracken, used for bedding. There was even a threshing floor. And at the moment, in the middle of its cavernous space, lit dimly by some lamps, stood Tom Furzey’s recently started cart.
Peering across the shadows, however, it was something else that caught Adam’s eye: a figure beside the peasant in the half-light. Unless he was mistaken, it was a woman.
Women were not allowed in the abbey. A great lady might visit, of course, but she was not supposed to stay the night even in the quarters reserved for royal guests. The womenfolk of the hired hands might visit them at the granges but, as the abbot had particularly stressed to him, ‘They’re not to hang about. And never, on any account, to stay the night.’
He went over to them at once, therefore.
She was sitting beside Furzey on the floor. As he approached, they both got up respectfully. The woman had a shawl of some kind over her head and as she was looking down modestly he could not see her face very well.
‘This is my wife,’ the peasant said. ‘She brought me some cakes.’
‘I see.’ He did not want to offend Furzey, but he thought it best to be firm. ‘I’m afraid she must leave before dusk, you know, and it’s already getting dark.’ The fellow looked sulky, but although she did not look up, it seemed to him that the woman did not mind. ‘Your husband’s cart will be magnificent,’ he said in a friendly tone, before turning back to the others.
He spent some time in conversation while he went round the barn, so he was