he was there.
“Don’t you know I worry about you so?” Sarabeth was saying. Her voice rippled from her, deep throated and smooth like aged brandy, set off against the hubbub and clatter of the pub by the rolling lilt of her native Scotland.
“I was thinking about a funeral mass a lot of years ago,” he said.
“Alysse,” she clucked. “You’ll not move along from that now will you?”
He sat silent as she talked.
“Aye,” she said. “I remember it well enough myself. Quite vividly as it happens. You alone on the mourners’ bench. Willem and I sat in the transept. I held the baby, remember? I remember pulling my blanket up around her against the winter chill. Sister Bertrice sat there beside us, remember?”
Fletcher drained the flagon. Sarabeth was back in a moment with a pitcher.
“Could I tell you something, Sarabeth, just between the two of us?” he said. “I remember watching you there. I even thought at the time that except for your face, it could have been Alysse sitting there, holding the child before its baptism.” For a moment the scene flashed across Fletcher’s troubled imagination. The baby dressed in a white baptismal robe. The candles gone, the church festooned with banners. The chant, while serious, would have been full of hope.
Somebody at the back of the pub called for Sarabeth’s attention. When she returned, she sat down beside him. “The funeral. What time did it begin?”
“I remember the bells tolling Sext.” Sarabeth’s question thrust him headlong and heart-long back into the nightmare. In his mind’s eye he saw a faceless acolyte whose solemn ministrations with the incense brazier had filled the air with the thick sweet smell of a church in mourning. Then came the coffin, a simple lead-lined wooden box that had been made by one of the monks in the monastery woodshop. He remembered wanting to crawl inside it, to join Alysse in the sweet oblivion of the box, but could not because he had to care for her baby. Behind the pallbearers filed the monks of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad. Then the other acolytes, the sacred scriptures, and last of all Father Athanasius. Athanasius carried an incense brazier on a silver chain, singing the words of the liturgy in high-pitched Latin, swinging the brazier systematically in the direction of the various sectors and rows of the worshippers, blessing them with the heavy smells and sounds of the Christian burial rite.
“Father Athanasius officiated, remember?” he went on.
“Who can forget Athanasius, God rest him?” said Sarabeth. Athanasius had been the priest at St Cuthbert’s for as long as anyone could remember, since the turn of the century even, until the inevitable infirmities of old age had forced him from his pulpit. Fletcher looked around the hut at Willem’s patrons. There was hardly a man or woman there whom Athanasius had not baptized. He had buried most of their parents, and some of their husbands and wives, and sadly one or two of their children. It had been Athanasius who had officiated at his marriage to Alysse, and Athanasius who had baptized their child.
But on the day of Alysse’s funeral, Fletcher thought, it had also been Athanasius, acting the role of pallbearer to his hopes and dreams, who had announced Alysse’s death and in this sacrament prepared her soul for paradise, even as later on in the spring it had been Athanasius who had consigned her body to the earth.
“Yes,” said Fletcher. “Who can forget Athanasius?”
“Don’t remember his sermon, though” said Sarabeth. “That much was forgettable.” She laughed a little, awkwardly.
“They were all forgettable,” John replied. “He preached in Latin. Remember?”
“Aye. Not like Father Thomas.” The new priest occasionally lapsed into English.
“Want to know what he said?” asked Fletcher, suddenly needing not to be alone.
“Don’t tell me your talents extend to Latin, now.”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll fetch another phitcher of ale.” He was unaware that he had slurred the word “pitcher,” but was alert to the blurring of the images in his mind’s eye. The flames of Willem’s candles, only moments before bright and crackling in the evening light, were now softening into an unreliable glow. In Fletcher’s mind’s eye, Willem’s candles illuminated the movements of the monks in the church, and in their unsteady flickering light the shapes of their habits blended into huge ghostly shadows cast up against the walls of the chancel.
Sarabeth poured another drink. “Now,” she said. “Tell me how you know Latin.”
“Never said I knew Ladin,” said Fletcher. “Said I knew what Fatherr said in his sermon.”
“Alright, then, John,” said Sarabeth. “Tell me that, then. But first tell me how you know.”
He drank from the flagon, setting it down hard on the table. “One the monks transslted, doan remember which one.”
“Brother Constantine?” she said. “He sat next to you.”
“Righ, Constantine. It was Constantine translated Athnasius’ serm’n for me. When th’ other monks filed into the chancel, Constantine slipped in beside me on my pew. Whispeered everything right in my ear.”
Fletcher was recalling the way the funeral entourage had processed down the north ambulatory, behind the final pew, and then up the center aisle. The pallbearers had set the coffin on a bier that had been placed at the point where the transept intercepted the nave. They then continued on to seats in the chancel, each one in turn bowing to the crucifix that hung above the high altar. As they mounted the short stairs to the chancel, unexpectedly Brother Constantine had broken ranks and had taken a place beside Fletcher on the mourner’s bench. He was a small man, and his movements within the church had hardly been noticed by the other mourners.
All of this recollection Fletcher had kept in a tight bundle inside him, as if by clinging to the details he could keep them from fading in his mind. But tonight, what time and an aging memory could not accomplish was quietly being turned into a finished work by the powerful numbing effect of the ale.
“Probly this monk—Constantine—had hell to pay in Shapter.”
“Now that you say it I remember the prior’s frown!” said Sarabeth. Prior Robert had more than frowned; he had indicated his displeasure with a heroic scowl. He had been a much younger man then, and freshly installed in his office had been distracted from his duty to offer pastoral care by an unusually large preoccupation with his new authority.
“He give a look that wuld’v had the devil doing penance,” Fletcher said, “but Constantine only smiled and nodded and settled in quiet.”
“Tell me about the sermon,” said Sarabeth. She poured him out another flagon of ale.
He concentrated hard on what she had said. “Lemme think a minit,” he said. He reviewed the entire stock of his memories, running through them the way he might inventory a shelf of crossbows, but raggedly because of the ale. He remembered being thankful for the presence of another warm body beside his own. On every prior occasion he cared to remember, the space beside him at mass had been filled by Alysse herself, now reduced to a body in a coffin not more than a foot or so before him. He remembered almost reaching out to touch it, but shrinking back when Constantine whispered something in his ear too quietly to make out.
Then
