see.' She appeared amused by his insistence, and perfectly content to continue talking. He hoped she could be engaging on the subject of Indo-European noun-phrases. 'But what makes this particular order your fascination of choice?'
'Partly, I'm afraid, that it has been the least studied of them. The mendicants, the white monks, the military orders especially, they've all been researched to death. The Chapter of St Cloud is obscure, but it's been obscure for a very long time. And it seems to have kept its character remarkably well, through the centuries. There's always the same focus in its religious thought, which is odd, given the number of reforms and renaissances it's gone through. And it has a history of strong, charismatic abbots. That is, as far as I can tell.' Was he explaining too much?
'Why? You seem uncertain.'
'It's very hard to find primary sources. There are some charters, chronicles written after the fact, a seventeenth century copy of the Rule. But there is little original material, and modern scholarship is very insistent on primary sources. Something that didn't bother him yet.' He patted Alfred Poole. 'He made all kinds of connections that seemed eminently reasonable to him, and now I'm having to go over it all again to see if his assumptions were warranted.'
She smiled. 'Don't you love those self-confident Victorians? Mind you, we wouldn't have been anywhere without them. We owe the whole historical-linguistic edifice to their willingness to make assumptions.'
Here we go, Dominic thought, noun-phrases. They turned out to be unexpectedly entertaining.
On his way home he bought an evening paper at a newsstand. The lead article was about yesterday's murder. A young man, the barman of a local pub, had been shot in his home. No motive, no suspects. Not very cheering, but at least it put Dominic's own worries in perspective. Murder was still rare enough in this town to make headlines. He had moved here only a few months ago, but Dominic knew the young man's - the boy's, really - place of work, knew he must have seen him around. And now he was dead. An Inspector Collins was quoted as saying the police were keeping an open mind as to the motive and identity of the perpetrator, which presumably meant he hadn't a clue.
Dominic's steps had automatically brought him into the Close, and he tucked his newspaper under his arm and went through the church's small south entrance. There was no choir practice today, but he still liked to go home by the cathedral, even through it, on most days. It was nearly closing time, and the tourists had left. He loved a big church when it was quiet, even though he knew that in the days when it was built it wasn't meant to be. Now he moved silently through the south aisle until he reached the westernmost bay. There he leant companionably against a massive compound pier and looked upwards to drink in the cathedral's towering gothic beauty. It never ceased to amaze him, the proportionate perfection of the arches, the clear lines of the vaults, the little builders' quirks he was only beginning to notice. The cathedral had been one of the reasons he chose to come here. He would never have taken a job at a university in a town that didn't have a proper gothic building at its heart. He had grown up in a cathedral town, and he was determined he would eventually die in one.
He crossed the nave and went out on the north side, through the devil's door. The door that would have been kept permanently closed in former days now sported a practical wheelchair ramp, and Dominic felt no compunction about slipping out where the devil once slipped in.
4
He remembers the building of the abbey. He remembers the great blocks of limestone that went into raising the walls, the churning watermill and the terrible draught in the refectory when the wind blew from the east. He remembers the chants and the prayers in the night; the simple life of the monks, away from the world, before greed and doubt and ambition returned. He remembers the scholars of the emperor's court, many years later, when the scriptorium was never empty, and how the name of the abbey spread far and wide. He remembers the return to the Rule, and the first daughters and their priors, bright and zealous. Weren't those days the best? With houses all over France and England, with scholars at Paris and a voice in the curia. Oh, the books and the good works he remembers, and the great number of monks and nuns who sheltered under the abbey's wings. He had been proud of his flock. He had shrugged at the rise of the new preaching orders, he had felt rooted in that ancient house on the Seine. Safe, he had believed they were, safe for years, even when they grew smaller, just a few abbeys, a priory here and there. Those years all run together now. They must have been happy. There must have been peace, for he remembers the violence that ended it. He remembers the king's soldiers who took away the plate and the reliquaries. He remembers the abandoned cloisters, the years of hiding, of furtive meetings and unspoken words. Years of fear and silent prayer, right until the creeping words exploded into blustering debate, every man shouting for his own god. He remembers the stones of the kingless rabble that smashed a church's windows into painful shards, and the pamphleteers' dripping poison. But they had come out of that ordeal strengthened, renewed. They had learned to be quiet, had learned patience and wisdom. No worldly ambition marred the abbey's new face. No blocks of stone marked its place now, nothing that could be pulled down. It lived in his mind, and in the souls of his followers. And the years that succeeded were strange, but they have brought him here, to this place and time, where he can survey history and maybe make sense of it, all the way from that first course of masonry until now. But there is so much he remembers, there is too much. The abbey is there, the abbey is eternal, but he knows there were thoughts before he knew even that.
He recalls, but dimly, his proud, long-haired brothers, his stern-faced grandmother, who loved him. His memory of that time is confused and its colours are crude. He is not sure what really happened, what he was told later, what is true or false. He knows they were his older brothers, and they died where he was spared. It's not so strange that he doesn't remember them well. He was only a child. And after all, it was nearly fifteen-hundred years ago.
5
When he got home Dominic put on a recording of Allegri's Miserere. They had just started rehearsing it with the choir, and he liked to get a feel for the music as it was performed by others. A large production together with St Oda's Singers, it would be his first big project since he joined the Cathedral Choir. Now he hummed along bits as he started getting supper together. Asperges me hysopo…
He had been living in the flat for five months, having taken over at the history department during a lecturer's pregnancy leave. From the new term onward he would be teaching his own courses full-time. It had been a good move. Things had been all right in Canterbury, but while he was there he would always feel like half of a couple that no longer existed. It was the place of his life with Blake. They had broken up nearly two years ago now - two years! - but only since he moved had Dominic felt all right with that, here in his own place. Now, when he took stock, he could be content. Dominic Walsingham, 36, lecturer in the history and historiography of the middle ages, reasonably accomplished tenor voice, unreasonable fondness for gothic architecture, nice brown eyes. Not bad, really.
It was James Sutherland who had supported his candidacy for the post, he suspected. James had been his thesis supervisor when he was still at university, he owed him a lot. It must have been the conference last year that put him in mind of Dominic again. The Third International Conference of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages at Kalamazoo, Michigan. He'd laughed when he saw that incongruous place name tagged on. But he had never been to the States before, and he had been invited to present a paper, so he went. The conference was held on a large everything-provided campus, which seemed to exist without any relation to the outside world. There were medievalists from all over the world, with the largest contingent from the home university. There was a lot of top quality work coming from there, Dominic knew, and yet it always struck him as a little unlikely, that someone, a lot of someones, in the American Midwest had chosen to study the history of another continent. Where he grew up, the next medieval church was five minutes' walk away, ten minutes on a bus brought you to a full-scale castle. How did you get interested in the European Middle Ages
