The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [78]
‘You may wonder’, he said, ‘why this woman is allowed to remain here this night. For the abbot’s rule is not to be ignored. No women in the Great Close.’ He looked at them severely. ‘But’, he went on, ‘Our Lord also enjoins us to show mercy. Did not he himself save the woman taken in adultery from being stoned? And so it is, on my authority given me by the abbot, that we allow this good woman to remain here this terrible night and seek shelter from the storm.’ Then he blessed them and retired.
When the next day the blizzard continued unabated – at times it almost knocked him off his feet when he opened the door – the poor woman grew very agitated about her children. But Furzey assured him that his sister and the other villagers would be taking care of them, so he forbade the woman to leave. And thus, with the brazier providing heat and Tom at work on his cart, she remained while, three times during the day, Brother Adam led them all in simple prayers.
How she longed to go back. She didn’t really want to be with Tom. Her eldest girl would see the younger children were safe, but they would all be frightened that something had happened to her. Above all, there was Luke.
What would he do? He’d have wondered where she was when she failed to appear in the evening. Would he try to investigate the cottage? What if the children saw him? All day she waited anxiously for the blizzard to abate.
There was nothing much to do. Now and then Brother Adam would appear and she found herself watching him with interest. The lay brothers, she could see, found him distant. Tom just remarked, with a shrug: ‘He’s a cold fish.’ But then Tom never thought much about people if they didn’t belong to the Forest.
The monk came from another world, certainly. Yet, as she thought of the way he had brought her in from the blizzard, she didn’t think he was cold. She said nothing, though. When he led them in prayer, in the half-light of the great barn, his soft voice carried such quiet conviction that she was impressed. She supposed he must be so much more intelligent than simple folk like her; yet perhaps, deep inside her, a small voice might have suggested: you, also, could read and write, and know what he knows too. If so, however, she could only answer with a sigh: in another life. Until then, the monk had something she did not. She did not say it to Tom, but she thought Brother Adam, in his way of course, was rather fine.
She was entirely caught off guard late in the afternoon, when the small door of the barn opened with a brief moan from the wind and closed fast again behind the monk who, advancing to within a few feet of the brazier, beckoned to her. She went to him obediently. There was nothing else she could do.
For a moment he stood there, looking at her curiously. He was stoutly built, like Tom, she realized, but a little taller. In the glow from the brazier behind them that warmed her back, his eyes looked strangely dark. Tom, working a few yards away by the lamplight, seemed separated from them, in another world.
‘I did not realize, when you spoke to me at the abbey gate …’ He remembered her then. ‘I have just been told that Luke, the runaway, is your brother.’ She noticed that he spoke quietly, so that Tom could not hear them.
A stab of fear went through her. She could not meet his eye. Her relationship was common knowledge, of course, but in the hands of this clever man it seemed more dangerous. She hung her head. ‘Yes, Brother. Poor Luke.’
‘Poor Luke? Perhaps.’ A pause. Then, very quietly: ‘Do you know where he is?’
Now she looked him straight in the eye. ‘If we knew that, Brother, you’d already know.