‘Their leader?’
‘It was fate, I suppose. God’s will. It’s often said that he works in ways that are difficult for men to understand. But I understand now. This was another test, perhaps the greatest of them all. He wanted to see whether or not I was worthy of his grace. And I failed.’
Beorn is frowning. ‘So in all that time your paths never crossed, but then suddenly this Wulfnoth appeared again, from nowhere, for no reason at all?’
‘It was no coincidence, Beorn. This was the divine hand at work; I know it was.’
*
It happened like this.
It was about a month after Michaelmas, not long before the feast of All Saints. The first frost had just been and everywhere the leaves were falling. I was travelling from Rypum, which for seven years had been my home, out to the surrounding villages and manors to spread the Lord’s word among the country folk, just like my master, ?thelbald, used to do all those years ago. And, like him, I had with me students of my own: three wide-eyed youths, the sons of nobles all, who knew little of the world beyond Rypum’s minster school. Hedda with the spotty face. Wiglaf the fat one, whose nose was forever bleeding. Plegmund the abbot’s nephew, so God-fearing and self-righteous that he would make the saints themselves spew.
That’s what I thought. Imagine that. Me, a priest, despising a child for his piety. A child. God help me, but I did. I resented all of them.
Why? Because after all the years I’d spent serving God’s glory, traipsing from village to village, across hill and fen, saying Mass and listening to countless hundreds unburden themselves as they made confession, I thought I deserved better than looking after a crowd of snotty children and wasting my days in a dank schoolroom teaching them the rudiments of Latin grammar.
I understand now how Master ?thelbald must have felt.
I resented them, but not as much as I resented myself. Because the truth is I could have had more, if only I’d tried harder. I could have had a church of my own, if only I hadn’t strayed from the path, hadn’t succumbed so readily to temptation and sin.
I’ve said it already, but I’ll say it again. The Church was not the place for me. What I hated most was all the rules we had to follow. These days we’re supposed to live like monks. That’s what the bishops want. It started years ago, long before the Normans came to these shores, but things have only been growing worse since. These foreigners the new king has been bringing across from France, arriving with their instructions that they say come from the pope himself in Rome. We should all take the tonsure, they tell us, and must dress sombrely at all times and eat as plainly as possible, and only by doing these things can we hope to reach salvation.
So many rules, and so many different penances to be undertaken should you break any of them. And I was always breaking them. It used to be that priests could marry and take whoever they chose to their beds; now they tell us that if we even so much as glance at a woman in a certain way we’re entering into sin. They say we must be purer than pure. So when they found me with a whore, I was made to wear a hair shirt for a whole month in penitence. The second time, it was two months. When it got out that men and women had been coming to me, offering coin if I’d divine their future from swirls of wine in the baptismal font, I was accused of daring to determine the mind of God. They didn’t care that those folk had given their silver willingly, or that I’d correctly seen that the blacksmith’s child would be a girl, and that the harvest would be poor because it was going to rain all summer. They said what I was doing was sacrilege, and imposed a fast upon me, and for nine months made me recite the Paternoster in church fifty times each day.