she thought she had found her large family.
'It would be a wicked waste, for just one couple and their children to live in a house like this,' Simon's ridiculously young-looking mother Anna had explained to Claire, while giving her the tour. 'And each, um, sub-family I suppose you could say, has their own space, we don't have to be in each other's pockets all the time if we don't want to.' All this while ascending a staircase that would have made a comfortable house on its own. There were portraits on the walls, and some of them looked like Simon.
'So how many of you are there?' Claire had asked. She'd only met Simon's parents and his great-grandfather as yet, though she had been promised brothers and sisters at supper. Anna had counted on her fingers, she had actually counted on her fingers. 'Twenty, give or take.'
'You're not sure?'
Anna had laughed at her astonishment, 'Oh, it varies a bit with the seasons. We home-school the children, you see, until they are eleven, and in term time we have some nieces and nephews staying who live away with their parents in the holidays.'
Now, on her way to visit the house for the second time, Claire still wasn't sure she'd met all twenty of them. Simon would keep saying things like: 'Oh that's Ezra, my cousin' or 'my aunt Martha' or 'Abby' or 'Luke' or 'Joshua' or… she despaired of ever getting to know them all. But they were certainly worth knowing. She had been impressed with how unashamedly intellectual they were, the wide array of professions they had chosen. It was so different from her own family home, where watching University Challenge on the telly was considered suspiciously highbrow. Here the children were precocious, growing up as they did amidst a bunch of incredibly knowledgeable adults. Maybe that was why Simon sounded so wise for his age. He was younger than she was, yes, but she often felt he had somehow managed to squeeze a lot more wisdom into his years than she had into hers.
'So you're in love with his beautiful mind, then?' Julia had asked, when she tried to explain this.
'Not just that,' Claire had said, 'But you know what I mean, don't you? It's a relief to meet a man who knows how to talk about other things than the footie and the property market. I've never met anyone who wasn't a colleague who could challenge me in my own field. There aren't that many people who know enough about medieval Christianity to try.'
'Okay, with me it's more the cricket and the stock exchange,' Julia had conceded, 'But I see what you mean. Good for you, Claire.'
She got off the motorway after she passed Oxford and continued her journey on the friendlier country roads. The place names of tiny villages peeled off at either side, and her historian's mind automatically set them in their proper place in time. All those names recalling ancient fords and woods and settlements. No thorpes or bys here, this was pure Anglo-Norman, Domesday country. Well not 'pure' obviously, she corrected herself, Anglo-Norman already being a mixed breed. Away to her left, the square tower of the cathedral marked the presence of a town that had sat in this valley for ten centuries at least. The cathedral whose bishop had once seen fit to build his splendid residence in the next village along. She was getting near now. From the next bend, she caught her first sight of the house, deceptively close. She knew it would be nearly twenty minutes yet on the winding lanes, but already she felt she was coming home.
3
They came to her house, her sons' messengers, and offered her a set of shears and a sword - one blade or another. Clothilde, queen-mother, guardian of kings to come, looked at the gifts with perfect understanding. Would she let her grandsons be tonsured and put away safe in a monastery? Or would they be killed, and not trouble her sons' conscience anymore? It was a choice between the mildness of the religion she brought to her husband's family and the cruelty that was theirs by right of inheritance. Clothilde understood, and wretchedly, fatally, she chose…
Dominic chewed on the end of his pencil and looked down in mild horror at what he had written. What did he think he was, a novelist? This was no way to start a sober history of a monastic order, though in truth, it was how the order had begun. Instead of this colourful story, he should be writing an introduction carefully outlining his aims. But those aims were no longer as clear-cut as he would like. Sometimes he wished he'd never started on this project, especially lately, now it came to actually writing the book. Uncharacteristically, instead of working on his tiny, shiny netbook, for this study of the Chapter of St Cloud he had bought a handsome bound notebook, which he had gradually filled with pencilled lines. And now this flight of fancy. Maybe he had written it because at least this harsh scrap of legend went uncontested. The two eldest sons of King Clodomer were killed. The youngest child, Clodoald, entered the church, and later established his own abbey, which was renamed St Cloud after his death in honour of the founder. It was from that abbey that the order known as the Chapter of St Cloud had grown. Dominic had thought it such a perfect subject when James dropped it in his lap. Right up his street, encompassing both the history and the historiography of a monastic order, and no one had done it before. Should he have been worried about that earlier? The Chapter of St Cloud still existed, and he had anticipated some resistance at the idea of a scholarly study. Information about it was hard to come by, he had found, sometimes even the written sources seemed cagey. People associated with the chapter were difficult to find and unforthcoming when tracked down. Its abbot was so completely unavailable that Dominic had started to doubt his existence. Or maybe he was just being paranoid. Maybe he should stop shilly-shallying and just write this straightforward monograph that any university press would be happy to publish at a small loss. With a clear, simple title, he had imagined it. St Cloud: a history, something like that. And sometimes he could almost convince himself that that was all there was to it.
He pulled Alfred Poole's book towards him. It wasn't actually very useful, belonging to the kind of history that reflected its own time more than its past, but it had the distinction of containing one of the very rare printed summaries of the development of the chapter. The spotty Victorian volume, printed in an age with a realistic attitude to the selling value of true crime, contained a lurid account of the author's murder in the back pages. A botched robbery had done for Alfred Poole before he could start on his projected history of the Chapter of St Cloud. It was as if the enterprise was cursed.
'Excuse me, is this place taken?'
'No, no. Please, sit down.'
A pretty dark-haired woman took the seat across from him. Noticing that his books had begun to take up more than their share of table, Dominic made room for her. They worked in silence for a while, the woman at her laptop with a neat stack of linguistics texts beside her, Dominic increasingly frustrated by the lack of information in his hoard. He noticed the woman was taking peeks every time he picked up a different title. 'I'm sorry,' she said eventually, 'I'm hopelessly curious, always looking what people are reading. What is your subject? That's an odd collection you have there.'
Dominic was happy to have an excuse to talk. 'I'm not making much headway,' he said, 'But it's the history of a religious order. It's a long history, hence the combination of Carolingians and twentieth-century Catholicism.'
'Oh. Is it interesting?' she asked, sounding mildly disappointed.
'I think so.' He was used to that reaction. Monks and nuns were inherently boring to the general public, even if the general public in this case - he'd taken a peek of his own - could be fascinated by The Construction of Noun-Phrases in the Indo-European Languages. But the woman was still looking at him expectantly, so he tried to explain a little more. 'I think even historians sometimes tend to forget that for a long time the religious wasn't part of everyday life, it was life. We think of the cloistered as missing out on something - this age abhors celibacy - but a monk in the twelfth century was fully part of life, and performing an important function. The concerns of a religious order were the concerns of its times.'
'I
