A Whispered Name (43 page)

Anselm’s
eye fell on Sylvester’s empty seat and a rush of sympathy made him want to quit
the room and find the old fellow To tell him that Herbert’s silence on these.’
the most important experiences of his life, was not a species of rejection, not
a lack of trust, just the inevitable outcome of a moral and emotional battering
no man could recount without breaking down, perhaps permanently.

‘There
are two journeys of great importance that now took place.” resumed Anselm,
after clearing his throat and his mind for the task in hand. ‘Herbert’s, to
Larkwood as a man restored to himself, and that of John Lindsay — who owed his
life, yet again, to someone he’d met by chance. As for Herbert, he set out with
Doyle’s tags around his neck. He never removed them. No one can know what
happened during his passage save that, at its end, he came to define Larkwood’s
ambience. Now, while
we know
that John Lindsay followed a similar path
towards fulfilment,
Herbert
remained in the dark. He had no way of
knowing, because after leaving Étaples he had no contact with either the boy or
his adoptive mother, Lisette Papinau. And he worried that Joseph Flanagan’s
sacrifice had been wasted by a life of remorse. Thankfully he was wrong. There
was no healing message to deliver, because John Lindsay had been nurtured to
the harmony of light and dark by a woman who’d known both in equal measure,
Lisette Papinau. If you like, everything Herbert had hoped for had come to pass.

Anselm
paused, recognising a question in many of the faces fixed upon him.
Involuntarily he glanced again at Sylvester’s empty chair. ‘The problem, as you
are well aware, is that someone
did
come to Larkwood. Kate Seymour: a
relative or friend to someone who
is
tormented; a man to whom Herbert
never gave a glancing thought. And I have no idea who it might be:

Anselm
had finished. He sat down feeling weary, blood beating gently against his ears.
He was exhausted by what he’d had to say; by his own long journey through
scraps of paper to the wavering voice of Mr Shaw, through so much submission to
suffering, only to reach this moment of confusion. He let his gaze rest on the
guttering candle, unable to restrain the flood of names and imagined faces.

‘It’s
fairly obvious, isn’t it?’ came Bede’s voice.

Anselm
snapped into the present.

Bede’s
stern eyes were upon him. Swiftly Larkwood’s archivist scanned the Chapter Room
as if looking for support. No one made a sound. ‘The family thrown aside by
military justice was Joseph Flanagan’s. What about them? They’ve probably
hidden their loss for half a century.’

Anselm
felt like he’d been thumped from behind. He looked over to Bede and nodded,
remembering the vehemence of David Osborne. ‘You’re right.’

‘Did
the army write to his parents?’ continued Bede, again addressing Anselm. ‘They
might have done, but if so, the details would have been vague — something to
hide what had really happened. “We beg to report that your son died from
wounds. I remain, Sir, Madam, your obedient servant.” Some nonsense like that.
No precise location, maybe no date. If Joseph Flanagan’s name vanished from all
military records after nineteen seventeen, no member of the family would—’

‘Bede
is absolutely right,’ insisted Anselm, turning to the Prior. ‘There’s no
memorial save a tree among trees — the family would never know what had
happened to their son. They wouldn’t be able to find out. And that is precisely
what has happened.’.

The
community were of one mind: whatever Kate Seymour’s connection to the old man
might be.’ they shared a secrecy of purpose entirely consistent with
embarrassment or a sense of dishonour, however ill-founded. And that fact alone
made tracing them a delicate enterprise because their privacy could not be
compromised by a rudimentary public appeal.

‘Let’s
sleep on it.” said the Prior, finally ‘I’ve never yet solved a problem the day
it surfaced.’

With
another prayer he drew the meeting to a close and extinguished the candle
between his thumb and a finger. The community processed out of the Chapter
Room, through the dark cloister and into the church for Compline. There,
leaning on his stall like an exile.’ was Sylvester. Though he knew the words by
heart, the Gatekeeper leafed through the pages of his Psalter as if he’d never
seen it before.

Anselm slept badly trying
to think of schemes that would lead him to Joseph Flanagan’s family When he
woke for Lauds he was as lost as the night before. Throwing his habit over his
pyjamas, he glanced across his cell and froze. On the ground, inches away from
the narrow gap beneath the door, was a small square of white card. He picked it
up and read the embossed writing several times.

Dr Kate
Seymour.’ Ph.D, was a forensic anthropologist based at the University of
Galway. How she came to have an interest in Joseph Flanagan was the main
question but Anselm was distracted by another. Who had knelt outside his cell
during the night? He suspected Bede, who’d spoken wisely at the moment Anselm
had confessed to defeat.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Where the Lark Runs

1

Herbert and ten other
monks walked the eight miles from Sudbury Station along a country lane to the
Old Abbey Ruin and a seventeenth-century manor that had been donated for the
new foundation. The Benedictines had built the place in the thirteen hundreds
and it had thrived until forced closure during the Reformation, when the abbey
was quarried for local housing, and a manor built for Henry VIII’s trumpeter.
The property had passed through several hands until its ramshackle condition
prompted abandonment. Such was the information sent to Les Ramiers, along with
a citation from the earliest known manuscript reference to the site and its
occupants:
hic monachi pacati habitant ubi manat alauda:
monks dwell in
peace where the Lark runs.

Herbert
stood at the large broken gates, his feet sore. On his back was everything he
possessed. His brother monks were from Britain.’ France, Belgium and Germany
oddly enough the Christian countries at the heart of the conflagration that had
destroyed empires and changed the face of the modern world. No map could chart
the difference. There were too many dead. Our innocence has gone, as Duggie put
it. Herbert gazed at the ruin ahead: tall arches covered in creeper, a worn
night-stair leading to the open sky a tumbling manor with red and pink tiles in
disarray. Père Lucien at Les Ramiers had not seen this place; and he could not
possibly fathom the delicate configuration of things that might move a man’s
heart. But he’d been profoundly right about Herbert’s. I, too, can dwell here
in peace, he thought.

Quite
how it came to pass no one knew The monks began restoring the building,
sleeping in old army tents from different armies, and praying in the room of
least leaks. In place of a bell they hung a plank between two ropes and struck
it with a spade. Perhaps that strange sound had drawn the attention of
passers-by. who’d then spoken of what they’d seen. Whatever the explanation,
the monks gradually found themselves with other companions. People of faith and
no faith, of all denominations and no denomination, began to help the silent
monks in their work. Some came with a tent of their own and remained for
months. Artisans worked for nothing, learning the blunt sign language that
joined the community together. In the evenings, when tools were downed, all
other sounds seemed curiously loud after the racket of the day. Herbert waited
for that time with impatience. He liked to walk beside the stream, listening to
the land: the rush of water and the jubilant song of larks hiding in the
fields.

Despite
their years, Herbert’s parents joined the motley crowd. For a week at a time
they too, came to help. Ernest scratched his thick whiskers while deploring the
shoddy work done since his last inspection. Constance laid out long trestle
tables, covering them with fabulous needlepoint lace, family heirlooms from
Bruges and Alençon. Her sandwiches and cakes, once the talk of the 22nd
Lancers, became the fare of men without a nation—state. This couple from a
bygone age were adored by everyone. They even saluted Ernest on his rounds.

‘Herbert,’
said Constance, nervously on a day of parting. ‘There’s something I’ve wanted
to say for a
very
long time.’

She
twisted a cane umbrella between her gloved hands.

‘A long
time ago your father and I made a very wrong decision. And it affected you
deeply.’

Herbert
thought of Colonel Maude and the High-Ups of the regiment. Inside, he felt a
burst of remembered humiliation.

Like
someone stepping honourably under a train, Constance said, ‘When you refused to
go to Stonyhurst we sent you to the local school.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Please,
Herbert. You know
very well
what I’m referring to. We wouldn’t let you
change your mind, even though you were quite miserable. You see —’ she blushed,
tapping a shoe with the umbrella’s point — ‘we thought it would be
character-building to make you stand by a decision. I’m so very sorry for my
harshness. So is your father. We were frightfully silly back then:

If only
she knew, thought Herbert. If only she knew of the decisions I’ve made and had
to live with. Not even Stonyhurst could have prepared me for the pulling of a
trigger … for when he’d said ‘Guilty’ and ‘Death’, banking on someone else’s
mercy. Herbert never wished to be once again in the consuming presence of Colonel
Maude.’ but he did now: that his commanding officer might hear his mother
confess to a great wrong; that the Lancers might learn how innocent she was,
even after all these years.

When the restoration work
on the monastery was almost complete, someone came up with the outlandish idea
of erecting a statue of Our Lady right in the middle of a secluded lake behind
a shoulder of trees. So one evening Herbert and the Prior, an experienced monk
from Les Moineaux.’ went to take a long look at this hidden eye on to heaven.
After gazing at the reflections for a long time, the Prior nudged Herbert’s arm
and deftly signed, ‘Where are we?’ He meant:

‘What
are we going to call this school for sane living, run by the not so sane?’

Herbert
listened intently to the music in the trees. Then he was drawn elsewhere, to
another sound, first heard on a dark road out of Oostbeke when the dawn
silvered some nameless trees. He tried a few clumsy manoeuvres with his
fingers. Eventually he whispered.’ ‘Larkwood.’

2

One of the more talkative
helpers — a whisperer and nudger — was called Sylvester. He came to help with
the thatching of a barn and never left. He became a novice in 1925, the year of
Herbert’s solemn profession. With tousled blond hair and bright blue eyes, he
was, at twenty-two, a lively presence: a practical joker (using a plumb line as
a trip wire) who was always late for everything. He had to be dragged out of
bed in the morning and hauled away from the table after meals. Despite hours of
instruction he never mastered the sign language — even though it had been
devised to accommodate the slower medieval mind and had worked smoothly for
centuries without need of alteration. He took to whistling, pointing and
winking. During recreation, when the monks talked freely, he occasionally
pressed Herbert for stories of the war.

Sylvester
had wanted to join up but he was only eleven in 1914. He’d been frustrated,
because plenty of boys only a few years older than himself had enlisted. They
got a spread in the paper. Time and again there was an article about a
fifteen-year—old in the trenches, bravely fighting for King and Country. His
father, a skilled thatcher, would slam the paper shut every time he saw the
photo of some young hero — not because he thought it a disgrace, but because he
was ashamed. A back injury had rendered him unfit to serve in uniform. Despite
the growing casualty lists and the drawn blinds in the streets, he tried
several times to get past the army doctors, but they always turned him away. He
was eventually banned from the premises. So Sylvester, eager to please his
father, had joined the scouts. He’d even met Baden-Powell, the man who’d stood
firm during the siege of Mafeking. And Herbert, ten years his senior, and a
veteran, listened to Sylvester’s ardour for England with a deep melancholy. He
shared it, still.

However,
something in Sylvester’s questioning unsettled Herbert. Despite knowing many
war widows, and former soldiers — both injured and apparently ‘normal’ — the
young man didn’t seem to appreciate what it had been like in France and
Flanders. Which.’ perhaps, was not so surprising. In order to survive, most
soldiers had bottled up their experiences, or changed their way of talking, to
make it credible, to bring it properly dressed into decent society. It was the
same for Herbert. He said nothing to his brother monks, but he was still
haunted by the face of Quarters; he still had to steel himself to watch those
eyes vanish in a spurt of mud. And he still saw Elliot at Broodseinde with the
cigarette in his hand, just before he stubbed it on his boot. Herbert had been
right beside him. And, of course, there was Joseph Flanagan, his breath beating
against a canvas gas mask. None of these moments dimmed. They formed such an
intense presence of intimate memory that he could not speak of them. To do so
would be like talking while someone died in his hands. Certain tragedies
require silence as an epitaph — at least for the participants. And
consequently. it was with some alarm that Herbert sensed in Sylvester the birth
of a new romanticism, an excitement not dissimilar to that which preceded the
war.