Ellis Peters - The Sanctuary Sparrow

“Don’t go, don’t go!” His arms were clasped tightly about her as they pressed together into the darkest corner, and his lips were whispering agitatedly against her cheek. “Stay with me! You can, you can, I’ll show you a place… No one will know, no one will find us.”

The chapel was narrow, the altar wide, all but filling the space between its containing columns, and stood out somewhat from the niche that tapered behind it. There was a little cavern there, into which only creatures as small and thin as they could creep. Liliwin had marked it down as a place to which he might retreat if the hunters broke in, and he knew his own body could negotiate the passage, so for her it would be no barrier. And within there was darkness, privacy, invisibility.

“Here, slip in here! No one will see. When he’s satisfied, when he goes away, I’ll come to you. We can be together until Vespers.”

Rannilt went where he urged her; she would have done anything he asked, her hunger was as desperate as his. The empty basket was drawn through the narrow space after her. Her wild whisper breathed back from the darkness: “You will come? Soon?”

“I’ll come! Wait for me…”

Invisible and still, she made no murmur nor rustle. Liliwin turned, trembling, and went back past the parish altar, and out at the south porch into the east walk of the cloisters. Brother Jerome had had the grace to withdraw into the garth, to keep his jealous watch a little less blatantly, but his sharp eyes were still on the doorway, and the emergence of the solitary figure, head drooping and shoulders despondent, appeared to satisfy him. Liliwin did not have to feign dejection, he was already in tears of excitement, compounded of joy and grief together. He did not turn along the scriptorium to go back to Brother Anselm, but went straight past the bench in the porch, where the gifts of food and clothing lay on his folded brychans, and out into the court and the garden beyond. But not far, only into cover among the first bushes, where he could look back and see Brother Jerome give over his vigil, and depart briskly in the direction of the grange court. The girl was gone, from the west door of the church; the disturbing presence was removed, monastic order restored, and Brother Jerome’s authority had been properly respected.

Liliwin flew back to his pallet in the porch, rolled up food and clothing in his blankets, and looked round carefully to make sure there was now no one paying any attention to him, either within or without the church. When he was certain, he slipped in with his bundle under his arm, darted into the chapel, and slid as nimbly as an eel between altar and pillar into the dark haven behind. Rannilt’s hands reached out for him, her cheek was pressed against his, they shook together, almost invisible even to each other, and by that very mystery suddenly loosed from all the restraints of the outer world, able to speak without speech, delivered from shyness and shame, avowed lovers. This was something quite different even from sitting together in the porch, before Jerome’s serpent hissed into their Eden. There they had never got beyond clasping hands, and even those clasped hands hidden between them, as if a matter for modesty and shame. Here there was neither, only a vindicated candour that expanded in darkness, giving and receiving passionate, inexpert caresses.

There was room there to make a nest, with the blankets and the basket and Daniel’s outgrown clothes, and if the stone floor was thick with a generation or more of soft, fine dust, that only helped to cushion the couch they laid down for themselves. They sat huddled together with their backs against the stone wall, sharing their warmth, and the morsels Susanna had discarded, and holding fast to each other for reassurance, until they drifted into a dream-like illusion of safety where reassurance was unnecessary.

They talked, but in few and whispered words.

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

“Yes, you’re trembling.” He shifted and drew her into his arm, close against his breast, and with his free hand plucked up a corner of the blanket over her shoulder, binding her to him. She stretched up her arm within the rough wool, slipped her hand about his neck, and embraced him with lips and cheek and nestling forehead, drawing him down with her until they lay breast to breast, heaving as one to great, deep-drawn sighs.

There was some manner of lightning-stroke, as it seemed, that convulsed them both, and fused them into one without any coherent action on their part. They were equally innocent, equally knowing. Knowing by rote is one thing. What they experienced bore no resemblance to what they had thought they knew. Afterwards, shifting a little only to entwine more closely and warmly, they fell asleep in each other’s arms, to quicken an hour or more later to the same compulsion, and love again without ever fully awaking. Then they slept again, so deeply, in such an exhaustion of wonder and fulfilment, that even the chanting of Vespers in the choir did not disturb them.

“Shall I fetch in the linen for you?” Margery offered in the afternoon, making a conciliatory foray into Susanna’s domain, and finding that composed housekeeper busy with preparations for the evening’s supper.

“Thank you,” said Susanna, hardly looking up from her work, “but I’ll do that myself.” Not one step is she going to advance towards me, thought Margery, damped. Her linen, her stores, her kitchen! And at that Susanna did look up, even smiled; her usual, wry smile, but not unfriendly. “If you wish me well, do take charge of my grandmother. You are new to her, she’ll take more kindly to you, and be more biddable. I have had this some years, she and I wear out each other. We are too like. You come fresh. It would be a kindness.”

Margery was silenced and disarmed. “I will,” she said heartily, and went away to do her best with the old woman, who, true enough, undoubtedly curbed her malevolence with the newcomer.

Only later in the evening, viewing Daniel across the trestle table, mute, inattentive and smugly glowing with some private satisfaction, did she return to brooding on her lack of status here, and reflecting at whose girdle the keys were hung, and whose voice bound or loosed the maidservant who was still absent.

“I marvel,” said Brother Anselm, coming out from the refectory after supper, “where my pupil can have got to. He’s been so eager, since I showed him the written notes. An angel’s ear, true as a bird, and a voice the same. And he has not even been to the kitchen for his supper.”

“Nor come to have his arm dressed,” agreed Brother Cadfael, who had spent the whole afternoon busily planting, brewing and compounding in his herbarium. “Though Oswin did look at it earlier, and found it healing very well.”

“There was a maidservant here bringing him a basket of dainties from her mistress’s table,” said Jerome, one ear pricked in their direction. “No doubt he felt no appetite for our simple fare. I had occasion to admonish them. He may have taken some grief, and be moping solitary.”

It had not occurred to him, until then, that he had not seen the unwanted guest since the boy had come out of the church alone; now it seemed, moreover, that Brother Anselm, who had had more reason to expect to spend time with his pupil, had not seen hide or hair of him, either. The abbey enclave was extensive, but not so great that a man virtually a prisoner should disappear in it. If, that is, he was still within it?

Jerome said no word more to his fellows, but spent the final half-hour before Compline making a rapid search of every part of the enclave, and ended at the south porch. The pallet on the stone bench was bare and unpressed, the brychans unaccountably missing. He did not notice the small cloth bundle tucked under a corner of the straw. As far as he could see, there was no sign left of Liliwin’s presence.