The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [99]
And obtainable. She knew it was so. Her instinct told her. Although her husband might choose to humiliate her it was in her power to attract, to have this man, so infinitely superior to poor Tom Furzey.
Suddenly she was overcome by desire. She, modest Mary on her farmstead, had the power – here, now – to turn this innocent into a man. It was a thrilling, heady sensation.
‘See.’ She lifted the bird’s wing so that he would lean forward to touch it. As he did so, she half turned, so that her breasts brushed lightly against his chest. She slowly rose and stepped past him. Her leg touched his arm. Then she moved to the door of the barn, which was ajar, and stood gazing out at the bright sunlight. Her heart was beating faster.
For a moment she thought of her husband. But only for a moment. Tom Furzey did not value her. She owed him nothing more. She closed him out of her mind.
She was conscious of the sunlight upon her, of the tingling in her breasts and of a fluttering sensation that seemed to be spreading like a blush down her whole body. She closed the door of the barn and turned round. ‘I don’t want the cat to get in.’ She smiled.
She moved quietly towards him. The barn was shadowy but here and there the slivers of bright sunlight came in through cracks in the wooden walls. And as she came towards him he slowly rose, so that in a moment they were standing face to face, she looking up, almost touching.
And Brother Adam, who loved the voice of God in the great panoply of the stars at night, knew only that his universe had been invaded by a warmer, larger brightness that had caused the stars to vanish.
She reached up her arm, curving it behind his neck.
The summer afternoon was quiet. Far away, on the Beaulieu grange, the reapers had resumed their work and the faint drone of the hedgerows had been joined by the rhythmic hiss of scythes upon the stalks of golden wheat. By the little farmstead all seemed quiet. Now and then a bird fluttered in the trees. On the grassy verges the forest ponies moved occasionally as they grazed upon their shades or drank from the tiny streams and rivulets that still flowed in the summer dryness. Across the wide open heath the sun, watched by the pale moon, bore down upon the purple glow of the heather and the bursting yellow flower of the spiky gorse. And to the south, in the Solent channel, the sea tide ran and its healing waters washed the New Forest shore.
The morning service. The unchanging forms. The eternal words.
Laudate Dominum … Et in terra pax …
Prayer. Pater Noster, qui es in coelis …
Sixty monks, thirty each side of the aisle, each in his place, which only death can change. White habits, tonsured heads, voices all raised together in the nasal chanting of the unchanging psalms. The Cistercians had a precise, clipped form of Gregorian chant, which he had always found particularly satisfying. Laudate Dominum: Praise the Lord. Voices rising in strength, in joy, from the very fact that these psalms and prayers were the same five hundred years ago, and today, and for ever. The joy and comfort of the certain marriage, the knowledge that your fellowship is with the one order that has no end.
There they all were: the sacristan who was responsible for the church, the tall precentor leading the chant, the cellarer who looked after the brewery and the sub-cellarer who controlled all the fish. Dear Brother Matthew, now novice master, Brother James the almoner, Grockleton, his claw hooked round the end of his stall – grey-haired, fair-haired, tall or short, thin or fat, busy with their chant, yet watchful, the sixty or so monks of Beaulieu Abbey, joined by about thirty lay brothers down in the nave, were at their morning service all together and Brother Adam, too, was in his proper place among them.
There were no candles on the choir stalls this morning. The sacristan saw no need. The summer sun was already falling softly through the windows on to the gleaming oak stalls and forming little pools of light on the tiled floor.
Brother Adam looked