Ellis Peters - The Sanctuary Sparrow

“Please, sir, I am sent by my lady with alms for the young man who is here in sanctuary. If you would kindly teach me where I may find him.”

She had not spoken his name because it was a private thing, to be kept jealously apart. Jerome, however he might regret that any lady should be so misguided as to send alms to the offender, was somewhat disarmed by the approach. A maid on an errand was not to be blamed for her mistress’s errors.

“You will find him there, in the cloister, with Brother Anselm.” He indicated the direction grudgingly, disapproving of Brother Anselm’s complacent usage with an accused man, but not censuring Rannilt, until he noted the brightening of her face and the lightness of her foot as she sprang to follow where he pointed. Not merely an errand-girl, far too blithe! “Take heed, child, what message you have to him must be done decorously. He is on probation of a most grave charge. You may have half an hour with him, you may and you should exhort him to consider on his soul. Do your errand and go!”

She looked back at him with great eyes, and was very still for one instant in her flight. She faltered some words of submission, while her eyes flamed unreadably, with a most disquieting brilliance. She made a further deep reverence, to the very ground, but sprang from it like an angel soaring, and flew to the cloister whither he had pointed her.

It seemed vast to her, four-sided in stony corridors about an open garden, where spring flowers burst out in gold and white and purple on a grassy ground. She flitted the length of one walk between terror and delight, turned along the second in awe of the alcove cells furnished with slanted tables and benches, empty but for one absorbed scholar copying wonders, who never lifted his head as she passed by. At the end of this walk, echoing from such another cell, she heard music. She had never before heard an organ played, it was a magical sound to her, until she heard a sweet, lofty voice soar happily with it, and knew it for Liliwin’s.

He was bending over the instrument, and did not hear her come. Neither did Brother Anselm, equally absorbed in fitting together the fragments of the rebec’s back. She stood timidly in the opening of the carrel, and only when the song ended did she venture speech. At this vital moment she did not know what her welcome would be. What proof had she that he had thought of her, since that hour they had spent together, as she had thought ceaselessly of him? It might well be that she was fooling herself, as Susanna had said.

“If you please…” began Rannilt humbly and hesitantly.

Then they both looked up. The old man viewed her with mildly curious eyes, unastonished and benign. The young one stared, gaped and blazed, in incredulous joy, set aside his strange instrument of music blindly on the bench beside him, and came to his feet slowly, warily, all his movements soft almost to stealth, as though any sudden start might cause her to quiver and dissolve into light, vanishing like morning mist.

“Rannilt… It was you?”

If this was indeed foolery, then she was not the only fool. She looked rather at Brother Anselm, whose devoted fingers were held poised, not to divert by the least degree the touch he had suspended on his delicate operations.

“If you please, I should like to speak with Liliwin. I have brought him some gifts.”

“By all means,” said Brother Anselm amiably. “You hear, boy? You have a visitor. There, go along and be glad of her. I shall not need you now for some hours. I’ll hear your lesson later.”

They moved towards each other in a dream, wordless, took hands and stole away.

“I swear to you, Rannilt, I never struck him, I never stole from him, I never did him wrong.” He had said it at least a dozen times, here in the shadowy porch where his brychans were folded up, and his thin pallet spread, and the poor tools of his craft hidden away in a corner of the stone bench as though some shame attached to them. And there had never been any need to say it even once, as she a dozen times had answered him.

“I know, I know! I never believed for a moment. How could you doubt it? I know you are good. They will find it out, they will have to own it.”

They trembled together and kept fast hold of hands in a desperate clasp, and the touch set their unpractised bodies quivering in an excitement neither of them understood.

“Oh, Rannilt, if you knew! That was the worst of all, that you might shrink from me and believe me so vile… They believe it, all of them. Only you…”

“No,” she said stoutly, “I’m not so sure. The brother who comes to physic Dame Juliana, the one who brought back your things… And that kind brother who is teaching you… Oh, no, you are not abandoned. You must not think it!”

“No!” he owned thankfully. “Now I do believe, I do trust, if you are with me…” He was lost in wonder that anyone in that hostile household should send her to him. “She was good, your lady! I’m so beholden to her…”

Not for the gifts of food, orts to her, delicacies to him. No, but for this nearness that clouded his senses in a fevered warmth and delight and disquiet he had never before experienced, and which could only be love, the love he had sung by rote for years, while his body and mind were quite without understanding.

Brother Jerome, true to what he felt to be his duty, had marked the passing of time, and loomed behind them, approaching inexorably along the walk from the great court. His sandals silent on the flagstones, he observed as he came the shoulders pressed close, the two heads, the flaxen and the black, inclined together with temples almost touching. Certainly it was time to part them, this was no place for such embraces.

“It will all be well in the end,” said Rannilt, whispering. “You’ll see! Mistress Susanna—she says as they say, and yet she let me come. I think she doesn’t really believe… She said I might stay away all day long…”

“Oh, Rannilt… Oh, Rannilt, I do so love you…”

“Maiden,” said Brother Jerome, harshly censorious behind them, “you have had time enough to discharge your mistress’s errand. There can be no further stay. You must take your basket and depart.”

A shadow no bigger than Liliwin’s, there behind them black against the slanting sun of mid-afternoon, and yet he cast such a darkness over them as they could hardly bear. They had only just linked hands, barely realised the possibilities that lie within such slender bodies, and they must be torn apart. The monk had authority, he spoke for the abbey, and there was no denying him. Liliwin had been granted shelter, how could he then resist the restrictions laid upon him?

They rose, tremulous. Her hand in his clung convulsively, and her touch ran through him like a stiffening fire, drawn by a great, upward wind that was his own desperation and anger.

“She is going,” said Liliwin. “Only give us, for pity’s sake, some moments in the church together for prayer.”

Brother Jerome found that becoming, even disarming, and stood back from them as Liliwin drew her with him, the basket in his free hand, in through the porch to the dark interior of the church. Silence and dimness closed on them. Brother Jerome had respected their privacy and remained without, though he would not go far until he saw one of them emerge alone.

And it might be the last time he would ever see her! He could not bear it that she should go so soon, perhaps to be lost for ever, when she had leave to be absent all day long. He closed his hand possessively on her arm, drawing her deep into the shadowy, stony recesses of the transept chapel beyond the parish altar. She should not go like this! They were not followed, there was no one else here within at this moment, and Liliwin was well acquainted now with every corner and cranny of this church, having prowled it restlessly and fearfully on his first night here alone, when his ears were still pricked for sounds of pursuit, and he was afraid to sleep on his pallet in the porch.