“You said Mathieu wanted to talk about it. Was the meeting his idea, or yours?”
“The topic was his idea. The timing was mine. We needed to resolve the issue before the community met again in Chapter.”
“So it wasn’t yet decided if there’d be another recording?”
“He’d decided, but I hadn’t. We’d discussed it in Chapter, but the outcome was—” The abbot searched for the right word. “Inconclusive.”
“There was no consensus?”
Dom Philippe took a few paces and slipped his hands into his sleeves. It made him look contemplative, though his face was anything but thoughtful. It was bleak. An autumn face, after all the leaves had fallen.
“I can ask others, you know,” said the Chief.
“I suspect you already have.” The abbot took a deep breath then exhaled with a puff in the early morning chill. “As with most things in the monastery, some were for it, some against.”
“You make it sound as though this was just one more issue to be resolved. But it was more than that, wasn’t it?” said Gamache. His words pressed but his tone was gentle. He didn’t want the abbot to put up his defenses. At least, not any higher than they already were. Here was a guarded man. But what was he guarding?
Gamache was determined to find out.
“The recording was changing the abbey,” the Chief pressed further, “wasn’t it?”
The abbot stopped then, and cast his eyes over the wall, to the forest beyond and a single, magnificent tree in full autumn color. It shone in the sunlight, made all the brighter for the dark evergreens surrounding it. A living stained-glass window. More magnificent, surely, than anything found in a great cathedral.
The abbot marveled at it. And he marveled at something else.
How he’d actually forgotten what Saint-Gilbert had been like just a few years ago. Before the recording. Everything now seemed measured by that. Before and after.
Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups had been poor, and getting poorer. Before the recording. The roof leaked and pots and pans were put out by hurrying monks every time it rained. The woodstoves barely gave off enough heat. They had to put extra blankets on their cots in winter and wear their robes to bed. Sometimes, on the bitterest of nights, they’d stay up. In the dining hall. Gathered around the woodstove. Feeding it logs. Drinking tea. Toasting bread.
Warmed by the stove, and by each other. Their bodies.
And sometimes, waiting for the sun to rise, they’d pray. Their voices a low rumble of plainchant. Not because some bell had tolled and told them they had to. Not because they were afraid, of the cold, or the night.
They’d prayed because it gave them pleasure. For the fun of it.
Mathieu was always beside him. And as they sang Dom Philippe would notice the slight movement of Mathieu’s hand. Privately conducting. As though the notes and words were part of him. Fused.
Dom Philippe had wanted to hold that hand. To be a part of it. To feel what Mathieu felt. But, of course, he never took Mathieu’s hand. And never would now.
That was before the recording.
Now, all that was gone. Killed. Not by a stone to Mathieu’s head. It had, in fact, been killed before that.
By that damned recording.
The abbot chose his words, even the ones he kept to himself, carefully. It was a damned recording. And he wished with all his heart it had never happened.
This large, quiet, quite frightening man from the police had asked if he was ever wrong. He’d answered glibly that he was always wrong.
What he should have said was that he was wrong many times, but one mistake overshadowed all the rest. His error had been so spectacular, so stunning it had become a permanent wrong. In indelible ink. Like the plan of the abbey. His error had soaked into the very fabric of the monastery. It now defined the abbey and had become perpetual.
What had appeared so right, so good, on so many levels, had turned into a travesty. The Gilbertines had survived the Reformation, survived the Inquisition. Survived almost four hundred years in the wilderness of Québec. But they’d finally been found. And felled.
And the weapon had been the very thing they’d wanted to protect. The Gregorian chants themselves.
Dom Philippe would die before he’d make that mistake again.