A Vision of Light Read online

  “Why, more Latin, and other languages—that’s called grammar—and speaking well and arguing—that’s dialectics—and mathematics, theology—things like that.”

  “And what is mathematics?”

  “Why, it’s—it’s—well, it’s very complicated, too, and too hard to explain.” It must be complicated, I thought, if even David, who is so good at school, can’t understand it.

  “Oh, David, you are so very clever, you’ll surely have a place. You belong at a great cathedral, the greatest in the world.”

  “Well, sister, I’ll study hard and take what I can get. But I am fortunate in one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I have the abbot for a patron. He called me in and explained it to me. If I have talent and work hard, he’ll help me find a place. He does that with the boys he sponsors.”

  “Well, then, who’s to say you might not come back a prince?” I said to him as I unlatched our front door.

  That summer David set to work with a will, but to me he called the farm work his “penance.” This is how I knew that although he acted the same as before, he was waiting for fall with all his heart.

  It was just before St. John’s Eve, when we light bonfires and roll fiery wheels downhill, that mother told me she had found a husband for me. We were weeding the garden together as we spoke.

  “Your father is willing; the match is good,” she said, picking a caterpillar off the beans and squashing it.

  “Good? What kind of good?” I was very anxious, for I feared marriage greatly.

  “A wealthy older man, a merchant of furs and a widower, has been making inquiries about you. He saw you on court day at St. Matthew’s and was driven wild with desire by your beauty, or so says my cousin.” Now she was pulling errant sprouts among the turnips.

  “Does he live at St. Matthew’s? Then, at least, I can visit you.” I had finished the carrots and had begun the onions. Sweat was running down my nose, and I wiped it off with the back of my hand, leaving a smudge on my nose.

  “That’s the hard part. He lives much farther, in Northampton. He’ll make a generous settlement on you. You’ll never lack for anything: fine food, fine clothes, fine friends. It is rare that a girl like you, even a beauty, gets a chance like this.”

  “I’d rather live here, in the country, with the people I know.” My heart was sinking for fear of living in solitude among strangers.

  “You should think of the comforts your children will have, and thank God that He has sent you such good fortune at such a needful time in your life.” Mother Anne’s face was set like iron.

  “But, but—”

  “Don’t ‘but.’ If a rich man had seen me when I was in my full beauty, I’d not have said, ‘But.’ I’d have been living in town, enjoying every luxury, with nothing but praises on my lips. Praises to God, and to my dear parents, who had arranged such comfort for me. Gratitude! That’s what children lack today! It’s gratitude! The new generation is graceless and ungrateful, I say!”

  “Oh, mother, I’m grateful. Truly, I’m grateful. I’ll always thank you. Yes, I will, I promise.”

  And so word was sent to the merchant, who seemed so wealthy to us, and negotiations begun to arrange for the marriage he evidently desired so passionately.

  It was hard to talk to David about it. That evening I spoke to him when he had returned from his “penance” and was staring into the fire.

  “You’ve heard father and mother? I’m to be married.”

  “I’ve heard,” he said morosely.

  “He’s very grand, they say.”

  “Not grand enough,” said David.

  “Will you miss me, David, when I’m a married woman, and you’re a teacher?”

  “That’s a stupid question, Margaret.” David stared glumly at the glowing coals.

  “I’ll be sad, David, but maybe we can visit.”

  “That’s stupid, too, Margaret. We’re parting forever, this time. And if we see each other ever again, we won’t be the same. Not the same at all.”

  “Will I be too rich for you, David? Is that it?”

  “Oh, Margaret, there’s nothing too good for you! I’m not jealous. That’s not it. It’s just that I’ll be different. I’m different now. I’m more different all the time. I can’t talk to mother or father. I can’t talk to my old friends. Maybe someday I won’t be able to talk to you either.” He set his chin on his fist and brooded silently.

  “But, David, even if you’re higher, can’t we love each other anyway?” I asked softly.

  “It’s—it’s just hard to explain.” He looked confused and troubled. “You see, it’s hard to feel the same when you can’t talk to someone.”

  I thought of something.

  “Tell me, David, do you see angels anymore, up there at the abbey?”

  “I don’t see so many—no, that’s not true. I don’t see any at all, these days.”

  When David left, it was as if he’d died. I felt I’d never see him again.

  But losing David was only the first sorrow. Sorrows always come together, I think. First there’s one, then another little one or two, and then a whole crowd. If you could think of a way to keep the first one from jamming the door open, then the rest wouldn’t be able to force their way into the house. At least, that’s how I see it. But I didn’t know that then. I was young, and thought things always turned out for the best.

  Not long after, my suitor came, mounted on a white mule and accompanied by servants bearing gifts. He made quite a stir as he rode through the village. Although he was old—already thirty—he had retained a curiously youthful look. His fashionable, tight scarlet hose made his well-muscled legs show to advantage while riding, and his elegant red-and-silver liripipe was wrapped about his head to show off his carefully curled hair and his even, classical profile. Little flawed his looks: a hint of a line on the forehead, perhaps, and a muscular, squarish jaw that made his pale blue eyes seem a bit too small in contrast. But what everyone was dazzled by was his clothes: he dressed as a walking advertisement of his trade. There was fur on his hat, fur in his sleeves, and fur at his neck. Over all an embroidered, fur-lined gown was drawn up by a belt, tooled with silver, that held his long knife at his waist. His fingers glistened with gold, and on his feet were beautiful morocco leather slippers, with fur at the top and long, pointed toes that dangled with elegant disdain from the stirrups as he rode. But as I stood before the house staring, the distaff fell from my hand, and my breath suddenly stuck in my throat. It was the ice-hearted merchant I had seen at the abbot’s court!

  BROTHER GREGORY HELD UP his fingers and wiggled them until the joints cracked. Then he squirmed until his back felt unkinked, and sighed. It was obviously too late to get out. He couldn’t decide whether to blame his stomach, which had started the whole thing, or his Curiosity, which had led him on when he should have said, “Enough!” Or perhaps it was his Honor that kept him from rejecting a bad bargain in time to save himself from recording this compendium of trivia. Yes, definitely, it was his Honor, he decided. Honor wasted on the kind of people who didn’t even understand what honor was. Women, for example. They don’t have any themselves, so they don’t appreciate it in others. The kind of sly, self-serving women who aren’t even ashamed that they are the cause of the Fall of Man. Eve tempted Adam and started it all with an apple, and this awful woman used a bakeshop meat pie, but it was all the same. And now he was wallowing in the nasty lives of the sort of women he wouldn’t even speak to on the road, unless he needed a drink of water or directions to the next village. Saint John Chrysostom was right when he called women open cesspools, and that was even one of the nicer things he said. I should have heeded him, growled Brother Gregory to himself, I did it all to myself.

  The worst part was that these preposterous creatures explained everything backward. It was exactly—well, almost exactly—as if he had made a contract to take down the memoirs of someone’s favorite horse.

  “And now, Bayard,” you
’d say, “how will you begin?”

  “With my feed bin,” he’d say. And then the catalogue of miserable little events would begin. And would any well-meaning correction have the slightest effect? Certainly not! You have to be a thinking creature to be capable of perceiving higher things. Feed bins, tittle-tattle, and birthings. How low he’d sunk. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been warned by all the Authorities, he thought. On the other hand, perhaps God was trying to teach him a lesson. What lesson? Humility? He’d certainly had a bellyful of that lately: God ought to be tired of that one. Maybe the story had a moral. In that case he would be disregarding God’s will in not hearing how it came out. But was that his Curiosity tempting him again? I’ll do a penance, and then send her a message and tell her it’s over, he decided.

  But then he couldn’t help thinking about how well his meditations were going, now that that recurring nightmare, the one about the fowl on the spit that kept floating just beyond his grasp, had gone away. Why, it was only yesterday evening that he had come very, very close to a truly ecstatic moment, while contemplating the Crown of Thorns. Perhaps he shouldn’t cut her off too abruptly. It might make her hysterical, and that would be unwise. For a moment he had a vision of hysterical women, hundreds of them, their faces all red and distorted, and their open mouths screaming. He shuddered. Then he inspected Margaret’s face. It didn’t look hysterical—yet. Perhaps it could all be managed. With a brusque motion he piled the pages together and bade Margaret farewell.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BROTHER GREGORY SAT FUMING BY HIMSELF in a corner of Master Kendall’s great hall. A new shipment of goods from Asia had arrived that morning, and the household was in an uproar: journeymen and accountants hurried through on mysterious errands, there was hubbub in the kitchen and the stables, and even the voice of Master Kendall himself could be heard through the open door of his business office, requesting that a certain length of silk be held for the wife of the lord mayor to inspect. Margaret was nowhere to be seen.

  “She’s probably forgotten—or given up—without bothering to let me know. That’s the way this sort of people are.” Brother Gregory felt very sour. He had come without breakfast, which doesn’t bother most people, since dinner is at eleven in the morning. But it made him grouchy all morning long. He felt even grouchier when he overheard voices floating out of the kitchen: “Mistress does find some funny ones, doesn’t she? Remember that fellow in the black gown who went around blessing everything?”

  “How about those heathen foreigners with the little black boy who followed them about? Master found those.”

  “They’re two of a kind. But this one is the grumpiest they’ve found yet—that’s what I think.”

  “Then you don’t remember that fellow with the yellow face from Venice.”

  “Italians don’t count—they’re all crazy.”

  “Not as crazy as Germans, that’s what I say.”

  “That does it,” said Brother Gregory to himself. “I’m leaving, and she’ll just have to come and find me and beg. My Curiosity is cured.” He got up and took several angry strides to the front door, only to come close to losing his nose when the door was flung open to admit Margaret, who was followed by a footman with an empty basket.

  “Why, Brother Gregory! Not going already?” Margaret took in at a glance the annoyance that was rising from Brother Gregory in the kind of waves that you see over a grain field in the heat. She was in a feeding mood. These overwhelmed her at times. They were a product of all the cooking and feeding she had been raised to do on the farm. She had been out feeding the poor, having caught and fed her daughters and all the apprentices earlier. Now she fixed Brother Gregory with a sharp eye. He clearly needed feeding.

  “You haven’t had breakfast, have you? You’re much too tall to go without breakfast. You’ll become weak and ill.” (She told short people they were growing, when this mood came upon her.) “Now, you just turn around and sit over here, while I see if Cook has a little something.”

  It is impossible to deny a woman in a feeding mood. It is as if they look right through you, to that small, weak part that has been there since you were a baby and that doesn’t know how to defy authority. Brother Gregory was completely docile as she sat him down while bread, cheese, and a mug of ale were brought. She stood over him while he ate, and when it was clear that his mood was rapidly becoming mellower, she said, “There! Isn’t that what you needed? Now, if everybody in the world ate breakfast, there would be no more wars.”

  Brother Gregory’s natural contentiousness had returned, and with his mouth still half full, he responded, “That is an entirely illogical statement. The Duke of Lancaster, who is a great warrior, eats breakfast every day. But I know of a holy abbot who goes without eating for days at a time, and he doesn’t even kill flies.”

  “You can’t prove anything with just two examples.”

  “You just tried to prove an outrageous non sequitur with only one example—me,” said Brother Gregory primly.

  “Oh, Latin, that’s what you’ve run to hide behind.”

  “I’m not hiding anywhere, I’m right here in the open, reminding you that your book isn’t being written,” said Brother Gregory, chewing up the last of the bread.

  “Oh, gracious, there’s hardly any time left!” exclaimed Margaret, and so they set to work almost immediately.

  MY SUITOR’S NAME AND praises were on everyone’s lips. Lewis Small, how grand, how elegant! How lucky Margaret is, too lucky, really, it’s entirely unfair, they all said. It didn’t matter how many times I said, “I don’t want him! He frightens me!” It was just “Lucky Margaret, she’s a selfish girl who doesn’t appreciate what anyone does for her. She’s always been that way, now that we think about it.” They say that only fools struggle against fate. But I don’t think it’s foolish at all. After all, you don’t know how things will come out afterward until they have, so why settle for them ahead of time? But there was no one to turn to, no one at all. So I went to Father Ambrose and wept. After all, your confessor has to listen to you, even if he doesn’t want to. Surely, I said, wiping my eyes, God doesn’t think people have to get married even when they don’t want to? But to my surprise the priest’s face grew hard when I told him that Master Small’s face frightened me. I had to conquer fear, he lectured me, to do the will of my parents, which was the will of God.

  “But—but couldn’t I be a nun, then, instead of marrying?” I ventured timidly.

  Sir Ambrose stood up in a towering rage and shouted down where I knelt, “You? A bride of Christ? You have no vocation that I have ever seen—Mistress Light Foot, the Dancer, Mistress Gay Voice, the Singer, Mistress Stay-up-at-Night-to-Steal-Kisses! Do not blaspheme the Holy Sisters! Ask Christ to steady you and make you grateful for marriage to so fine a man as Lewis Small!”

  “Fine a man?” I looked up at him.

  “Why, fine indeed! Finer by far than your own family. And although not noble in birth, noble in thought, noble in deed, and noble in his love for Mother Church. He has already made an offering sufficient to repair the roof. And on the day the wedding vows are made, he pledges a window for the nave. Would you deny a holy place the beauty of a stained-glass window for your own selfish desires? Repent, repent now, and be forgiven, and marry in all modesty and humility, as becomes a maiden!”

  How I hated that penance! Why does God do these things to us? It was then that it came to me that the reason must be that God is a man, or rather, that men and God think alike. Now, if God were a woman, things would be entirely different, it seemed to me. Certainly She wouldn’t make a girl get married when she didn’t want to. She’d let the women do the choosing, and the men would have to wait to be chosen, and obey in all modesty and humility. It would be very, very different in this world, if women could make their own choices. But that isn’t the way things are, so marry we did, before the church door, with Sir Ambrose all conceited at the thought of his new window.

  Since mother was a brewster, the bride-a
le was even greater than when the hayward’s only daughter at St. Matthew’s married. But the food and drink were not even half consumed when my new husband summoned his men and, leading me to a gaily bedecked mule, assisted me to mount with a showy gesture.

  “Ah!” exclaimed the women, who thought Master Small looked exactly like the hero of a romantic ballad as he lifted me into the saddle. But Richard Dale, who had now lost all hope of the dowry he once coveted, watched without a word, his face pale as a ghost’s. I almost felt sorry for my former suitor. As the mule train began to make its way from the churchyard I turned back for a last look, and saw the men coaxing Richard Dale to take a drink, and then another. I felt sure that by the time the remnants of the party made their way to our house, he would be falling-down drunk.

  A long trip gives a person a chance to think. I should have been all anticipation, dreaming about my new home and the grand estate to which I had risen, all because a wealthy stranger’s glance had chanced to light on me. Instead I kept wondering, Why me? It’s true I had a good dowry for a village girl, but wasn’t that nothing to a man who could buy a window? So it couldn’t be that he was in debt. They said that he was mad with love, captured by my beauty. But when he spoke of my burning glance, I really couldn’t recall any. He didn’t look very lovesick to me. Maybe men of the world conceal it better? And why travel so far to find a bride when the towns, they say, are full of beautiful women, all dressed in crimson and gold? Oh, it was all a mystery to me. Besides, there was something about him that made my skin crawl. I felt more and more depressed. Ahead of me, on the narrow, dusty track, rode my bridegroom and his friends, passing the time by singing songs about the fickleness of women. Behind me rode his armed retainers in silence. Now I know how a bale of goods feels when it’s being transported, I thought.

  A flight of blackbirds rose suddenly from the barley field beside us. Why couldn’t Margaret fly away like that? I imagined, for a moment, running away. But it couldn’t be done. It’s impossible for a woman not to be married. You’ll end in a ditch—everyone knows that. So it all had to be. I tried to tell myself it wouldn’t be so bad. Everyone says you get used to it, and besides, there’s babies, and they make it all right. That’s what they say, at least. A pretty baby, that wouldn’t be so bad. Then I wouldn’t really have to think about him anymore.