Ten

WE WENT our separate ways again into the town. No one said to the others what he would do. I went into the marketplace, which was loud with hens and geese and traveling tinkers shouting their wares. The snow was trodden and churned between the stalls and there were piss marks in it and feathers and scraps of kale and carrot. The sky was clear and pale with loose shreds of cloud in it like the clippings of sheep. A man on stilts passed through the crowd shouting that the town bathhouse had good hot water. There was a ragged man kneeling in the snow and juggling with three knives.

I saw the beggar who had come to our fire and spoken of lost children. An egg had fallen and smashed below the stall, where the snow was trodden. The yolk of the egg made a yellow smear on the snow and a rawboned dog saw it at the same time as the beggar did and both made for it and the beggar kicked the dog, which yelped and held back but did not run, hunger making him bold. The beggar cupped his hands and scooped up the egg in the snow and took it into his mouth and ate all together, the egg and the fragments of shell and the snow. He saw me watching him and smiled the same smile, with the wet of the snow and egg glistening on his innocent face. I remembered then that he had been ready with names, as if in that simplicity of his mind names were like a lesson learned, and I approached him and asked him the name of the woman’s father. He said it at once, smiling still: “His name is John Lambert, good master. The father of the one to be hanged is called John Lambert.”

I gave him a penny and he turned away with the coin clenched tight in his left hand. As he did so, very briefly, he raised his right hand and held it before his face in that same gesture of dazzlement. “She would tell where the others are, if she could be brought to speak,” he said. Then he went shambling away from me and I lost sight of him among the people.

She lives on the edge of the common … Someone had said that, the day before when we were talking among ourselves. Her father is a weaver … I thought he would more probably be abroad on this day of the market but there was a chance I might find him at home and I had no other idea of what to do. However, it was of no use to present myself to him either as priest or player. Then it occurred to me that I could pretend to be a clerk of the Justice. Quite by chance I had taken the black cloak of Avaritia to wear when we came out from the barn, that being the only thing left that offered any protection from the cold. And I was wearing the round black hat that I always wore abroad to cover my shorn head.

I made my way out of the marketplace and on to the road that led out of the town, going past that meeting of ways where we had been held back by the mounted men the evening before and seen the Justice ride by with his retinue. A path led up from here, skirting the common. Snow lay over the fields, unbroken. The crystals glinted on the slopes as I climbed upward. The skins of the beech trees that ran along the rises at the edge of the common had their silver darkened by this whiteness of snow and the sheep looked dirty against it.

I remember this walk well. It seemed for the moment that I was free and on the road again, without this incubus of the boy’s death. I mounted the slopes quickly and I felt the youth of my blood. I had tied scraps of canvas round my shoes and bound my legs with cloth below the knee, as had we all before setting out, and my feet had so far kept dry enough. I saw the tracks of a trotting fox leading away into the shrub.

I met a man carrying a bundle of dried gorse twigs on his back, kindling he had raked out from the heart of the bushes, where it keeps dry, and I asked him if he knew the house of John Lambert. I thought he looked at me strangely and wondered if he remembered my face from the play. But my cloak was voluminous, as was necessary for Avaritia, it would have covered two of my size, and it was of an antique cut. And the human regard is strange in any case. He pointed higher, to a stone-built cottage enclosed in a timber fence. It was a house with byre and living place side by side and the entrance in the middle. Smoke came thinly from a hole in the thatch. I went through into the yard and geese lowered their heads at me and set up a clamor. I called out and waited there, on the slate flags below the step. The snow had been swept clear and there was a skin of dried blood on the slate where a pig had been killed. After some moments of waiting I heard the wooden bolt drawn back and a tall, gaunt-faced man stood at the threshold looking at me without great friendliness.

“What is it?” he said. “What do you want with me?” His voice was strong, with some hoarseness in it, as from much use.

“I am sent by the Justice that is come to town,” I said. “He wishes to be satisfied of your daughter’s guilt. I am sent to inquire further into the matter and bring back a report.”

His eyes moved slowly over my person, the hat, the cloak, the scraps that bound my feet and legs. They were pale eyes, almost colorless, as if bleached, and they were set deep in his head. “From the King’s Justice,” he said. “Well then, come in.”

It was almost as cold within the house as without. A small fire of wood chips was burning in a brick hearth in the middle of the room and the smoke of it hung in the air. His loom stood close to the single window and his narrow pallet was set against one wall. There was a door beyond, which I supposed gave admittance to the room where the woman had slept.

The Weaver stood looking at me. There was a high-backed chair in the room but he did not ask me to sit. The frame of his body was big, but he was wasted, either from illness or underfeeding. He raised his hands and flexed the fingers, which were dark red with cold. They were thick, strong fingers—strong enough to choke the life from boy or man. He filled the room in some way, there was a sense in me of not having enough space. I clutched the cloak about me, not wanting him to see Brendan’s ragged doublet below it. “I am sent by my master,” I said, “to inquire into the facts of that morning when the Lord’s chaplain came here to your house and found the stolen money. There is a question as to why—”

“The Monk found no money here.” The words came unhurried, with that slight hoarseness in them. It was a voice that was used to talking. Without taking his eyes from me he gestured round the bare room. “Look round you, my young man that is sent by the Justice. Having stolen money and killed to steal it, would you hide it in your own place when there are fields and woods all round?”

“But the purse might have been well hidden even here,” I said. “Being suspicious, they came prepared to search.”

“They came prepared to find,” he said. “What is the name of your master, the Justice?”

I had not anticipated such a question, being unused to deceit. “Stanton,” I said—the first name that came to mind. “His name is William Stanton.” The pause had been too long but he gave no sign of noticing anything amiss. He continued to regard me in the same lingering manner, but with a strange dispassion now, as one might look at a drifting leaf or an odd-formed cloud in the sky. I was disconcerted by this and I blundered. “Where exactly was the money found?” I asked him.

He was silent for a moment, then he said, but quite calmly, “All this was deposed before the Lord’s Sheriff by that devil’s scum of a Benedictine. The Justice can see the writings if so he wishes. It is not necessary for a man to come here through the snow to ask me such a question. You seemed uncertain of your master’s name. Can you tell me the name of the Monk?”

I could not answer this, and looked at him without speaking.

“Simon Damian is his name and God will find him out,” he said. “You are not come from the Justice, brother, are you?”

“No,” I said, “it is true that I am not.”

“God reveals all lies to me because He is all truth and He dwells within me,” he said in the same tone. “The Children of the Spirit share in the nature of God. I knew from the first you were not what you said. If I had thought it true I would have not opened my lips.”

I began to speak but he cut me short. “I would say nothing to one that came from a justice,” he said. “The justices are like the priests, spawn of hell, ravening wolves that harry the sheep and feast on the blood of the poor. But the time will come, the people will turn. I say to the people, be of good heart, do as the wise husbandman who gathered the wheat into his barn but uprooted the tares and burned them.” He looked at me now and his pale eyes had a light in them. “We know these tares,” he said. “Let them take heed, let them beware, for the time of the harvest is coming.”

I was tempted to reveal to him that I was a man in Orders and therefore knew better than he where God makes His dwelling. But had I done so he would have put me out. All the same I was unwilling to allow such heresy to go unreproved. And by arguing against him it seemed to me that I would make more space for myself in that room. The Weaver had a strong presence and he was somehow taking all the air from me.

“It is not for us to judge who is for burning,” I said. “God is the judge and He dwells apart. Brother, you did not find me out because God dwells within you, but because I did not lie well enough. If I had been a better liar you would have believed me.” Thus I turned my falsehood to God’s service, asserting His entirely separate being. It did not occur to me until later that I might have done better to keep silent and repent my lies. “Man’s nature is corrupt,” I said, “and has been so since loss of Eden. He may be redeemed, but God is nowhere to be found within him. Our way to redemption is through Holy Church, there is no other way. Ex ecclesiam nulla salus.”

“You talk like that servant of Antichrist who came here and took away my girl and left me with the goats and geese to tend as well as my loom,” he said. “Have you come from him? Are you too one of the host of Antichrist? You are in borrowed robes and that is a sign of it.” He spat aside and made the sign of the Cross. “Whoever you are,” he said, “and whoever sent you, I say again there was no money found here. They hate me because I travel abroad, bearing witness and speaking against the rich and the priests. They know their days are numbered … They seek to bring me before the judges but they are afraid of rousing the people if they do it without good cause. A spark is all that is needed now. I am one of the forerunners. As tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be at the end of the world, and the wicked shall howl in Hell for ever.”

“But it is not you who have been taken,” I said. “It is she, your daughter, who is under sentence of death.”

“Me? How could they take me?”

For a moment I thought he was claiming God’s special protection. I was about to speak but he raised a hand to stay me—the gesture of the orator postponing interruption, arm bent at the elbow and held up at a slight angle with the palm facing outward. I resolved to remember it. “You know nothing of it,” he said. “You are a stranger here. Why do you come asking me questions?”

Then I told him I was a player, that we wanted to make the True Play of Thomas Wells, and we were trying to find out the true things that happened so as to show them to the people.

“You would show it in a play?” he said. “You would make a play of a true thing?”

“We can show it to be true by making a play of it,” I said.

It was clear from his face that he thought this a damnable proceeding, which I could well understand as I partly so regarded it myself. He paused for some moments with lowered head, looking somberly before him. “And you would show this devil’s pander of a monk, this Simon Damian, you would show him … One of you would play him before the people?”

“Certainly.”

“Players are a brood of Satan,” he said in a considering voice.

“We will make a true play of it,” I said, “as far as we can know the truth.”

“Well,” he said, “we set thieves to catch thieves. I will tell you. It was for me that they came. They came to find the money in my house, but I was not here.”

“Where were you?”

“I was at the house of friends in the hamlet of Thorpe, three hours’ walk from here. I stayed the night there. There were brethren of the Spirit come from far—they had come from Chester. We stayed together in the house, praying and bearing witness. There are many who can vouch for this. I told it to the Lord’s Sheriff but it availed my daughter nothing, the Monk denied that it was for me he had come.”

“So when he came there was only your daughter in the house?”

“Yes, only my daughter.”

“And he did not know this?”

“How could he know it? If he had known it he would not have come.”

“But that takes us in a circle,” I said, offended in my sense of logic.

“Listen, master-player or Devil’s messenger or whatever you are. They have wanted to take me for years past because I speak against the monks and friars and especially against the Benedictines, most slothful and debauched of all. This Simon Damian is a minister of Hell, he serves the Lord and helps him to live delicately on our labors and goods. We starve while they feast, we groan while they dance. But they will groan in their turn when the day—”

“What will be done with them?” I said.

“They will burn,” he said. He stared before him as if he saw the flames already there. “They will be put to the fire, with their hounds and horses and their whores that they feed and clothe from our labors. Also the Jews will be put to the fire, who crucified Christ and live by breeding money. Also the clothiers and merchants of cloth will be put to the fire, who fix the prices among them and deny to the weavers the fruits of their labor. Why would he come only for the girl, and she afflicted? How does that serve his turn?”

“Afflicted?”

“I have work to do,” he said bitterly, and he gestured toward the loom.

“When the Monk found the money, he still believed you were there somewhere in the house or nearby?”

“If he had not believed so, he would never have found it.” Again I felt my mind bruise against the rock of the Weaver’s logic. Everything came round in a circle back to him. He was privy to all schemes, the Monk’s for convicting him of murder, God’s for the punishment of the rich.

“By then it was too late,” he said. “Someone they had to take, the money once discovered.”

“Is your daughter also a Child of the Spirit?”

“She cannot bear witness,” he said. “She came sometimes with me to meetings of the Brethren.”

I turned to go. “What is her name?” I said.

“Her name is Jane.” His face had softened with the uttering of it. “It was also the name of my mother,” he said. “My wife and one son died in the plague and my older son died two years later in the famine of that year, when we all nearly died. More here died of want than of disease.” His voice quickened and the lids lifted from his eyes as he stared at me. “My curse on him that took her and left me alone,” he said. “May he die in blood. My curse on them that feast while we toil and pay us by the piece instead of letting us sell our own cloth and plunder the people of God. The Reckoning is coming, the time is near …”

At the door I glanced back. He had not moved. I met his eyes and I seemed to see the glint of tears in them. But his voice was the same, practiced, hoarse with much speaking. “She cannot bear witness,” he said. “But I know her. She would hesitate to kill a mouse, or a wasp that had stung her, let alone a human child.”