In the Wilderness (7 page)

Olav sat down again when the psalm began. Now and again he sank into a half-doze—woke up as his head dropped—then the veil of sleep wound about him again and his thoughts became entangled in it. Till he grew wide awake at the notes of
Salve Regina
and the sound of the procession descending from the choir. The people moved forward into the nave as the train of white and black monks advanced, singing:

“Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria!”

Olav strode quickly down toward the wharf; it was dusk outside now, bats flitted like flakes of soot in the darkness. He must be aboard the
Reindeer
before it was quite dark—the other evening the river watch had called to him from
their
boat. To his very marrow he felt the good this evening service had done him. It was the same as he had heard in Hamar, in Oslo, in Danish and Swedish ports—in good and evil days he had always attended evensong, wherever he found a convent of the preaching friars. He had also heard the singing of nuns one evening here in London—for the first time in his life. He had never chanced to enter the church of a women’s convent before, but Tomas Tabor had taken him one evening to a nunnery. Marvellously pure it had been to listen to—but nevertheless it did not stir the depths of him in the same way. The clear, sharp, women’s voices floated like long golden streaks of cloud on the horizon between earth and heaven. But they did not raise themselves above the world over which the veil of darkness was falling as did the song of praise from a choir of men on guard against the approach of night.

Tomas Tabor appeared at the gunwale as Olav came alongside. Now it was dark already, he complained, and Leif had not yet come—likely enough he would stay ashore again tonight, and tomorrow he would make the same excuse, that he could not get a boat in time. Olav swung himself over the gunwale.

“You must refuse him shore leave, Olav! He cannot be so steady as we thought him, Leif!”

“It seems so.” Olav shrugged his shoulders and gave a little snorting laugh. The men walked aft and crept in under the poop.

“I trow that serving-wench out at Southwark has clean bewitched him.”

They snuggled into their bags and ate a morsel of bread as they lay.

“ ’Twill end in the boy getting a knife between his shoulder-blades. That place is the haunt of the worst ruffians and ribalds.”

“Oh, Leif can take care of himself—”

“He is quick with the knife, he too. You must do so, Olav, you must forbid him to go ashore alone.”

“The lad is old enough; I cannot herd him.”

“God mend us, Master Olav—we ourselves were scarce so wise or heedful that it made any matter, at seventeen years—”

Olav swallowed the last mouthful of bread. After a while he answered:

“Nay, nay. If he cannot come back on board betimes, he must not have leave. And he should have had his fill of playing now, enough to last him a good while.”

Presently: “I think we shall have rain again,” said old Tomas.

“Ay—it sounds like it,” said Olav sleepily.

The shower drummed on the poop above them and splashed on the boards; the hiss of raindrops could be heard on the surface of the river. The men shuffled in under cover, as far as they could come, and fell asleep, while the summer shower passed over the town.

Torodd and Galfrid were tarrying in the west country, it seemed—perhaps they had not found it so easy to get their hands on the heritage of Dom John. Olav was as well pleased one way as the other—and the days went by, one like another.

O
NE EVENING
Olav had been sitting half-asleep in his corner of the church. When he heard the scraping of feet in the choir, he stood up and went forward into the nave.

Right opposite on the women’s side was a statue raised against one of the pillars, of the Virgin with the Child in her arms and the crescent moon under her feet. This evening a thick wax candle was burning before the image; just beneath it knelt a young
woman. The moment Olav looked at her, she turned her face his way.

And now his breath went from him and he lost all sense of himself and where he was—but this was Ingunn, she was kneeling there, not five paces from him.

Then he recalled the time and place and that she was dead, and he knew not what to believe. It felt as if the heart within him stood still and quivered; he knew not whether it was fear or joy that made him powerless, whether he was looking on one dead—

The narrow face with the straight nose and long, weak chin—the shadow of the eyelashes on the clear cheeks. The hollows of the temples were darkened by a wave of golden-brown hair; a transparent veil fell from the crown of the head in long folds over the weak and sloping shoulders.

Even as he drank in the first vision of her charm, Olav saw that perhaps this was not she—but that two persons could be so like one another! So slender and delicate from the waist down to the knees, such long, thin hands—she held a book before her, and her lips moved slightly—now she turned the leaf. She knelt on a cushion of red silk.

A sobering sense crept over him that it was not she after all. As when one wakes from a heavy sleep and recognizes one thing after another in the room where one is, realizing that the rest was a dream—so now he realized little by little.

His poor darling, she had not been able to read a book. Nor had she ever had such clothes. As he looked on the rich dress of the strange woman, a bitter compassion with Ingunn stirred within him—there was never anyone to give
her
such apparel. He remembered her as she had been all the years at Hestviken, in bad health and robbed of her youth and charm, poor and unkempt in the coarse, rustic folds of her homespun kirtle.
She
should have been like this one, kneeling on her silken cushion, rosy-cheeked, fresh and slim; her mantle spread far over the stone slabs, and it was of some rich, dark stuff; her kirtle was cut so low that her bosom and arms showed through the thin golden-yellow silk of her shift. Half-hidden in the folds at her throat gleamed a great rosary—some of its beads were of the color of red wine and sparkled as her bosom rose and fell. She was quite young. She looked as Ingunn had looked as she knelt in the church at Hamar, childlike and fair under her woman’s coif.

The strange woman must have felt his continual stare—now she looked up at him. Again Olav felt his heart give a start: she had the same great, dark eyes too, and the uncertain, hesitating, sidelong glance—just as Ingunn used to look up at those she met for the first time. She had never looked at
him
in this way—and a vague and obscure feeling stirred in the man’s mind that he had been cheated of something, because Ingunn had never looked upon
him
for the first time.

The young wife looked down at her book again; her cheeks had flushed, her eyelids quivered uneasily. Olav guessed that he annoyed her with his staring, so he tried to desist. But he could think of nothing but her presence—every moment he had to glance across at her. Once he met a stolen look from her, shy and inquisitive. Quickly she dropped her eyes again.

The procession came down from the choir, and the sprinkling of holy water recalled him wholly to his senses. But truly it was a strange thing that here in London he should chance to see a woman who was so like his dead wife. And young enough to be her daughter.

He remembered that he had not yet said his evening prayers, knelt down and said them, but without thinking of what he was whispering. Then he saw that she was coming this way—she swept past so close to him that her cloak brushed against his. When he rose to his feet, she was standing beside him, with her back turned. She had laid her hand on the shoulder of a man who was still kneeling. Behind her stood an old serving-woman in a hooded cloak, carrying her mistress’s cushion under her arm.

The man stood up; Olav guessed he must be the strange woman’s husband. Olav knew him well by sight, for he came to this church nearly every day. He was blind. He was young, and always very richly clad, and he would not have been ugly but for the great scar over his eyebrows and his dead eyes. The left one seemed quite gone—the eyelid clung to the empty socket—but the right eye bulged out, showing a strip under the lid, and this was grey and darkly veined as pebbles sometimes are. His face was pale and swollen like that of a prisoner—he looked as if he sat too long indoors; his small and shapely mouth was drawn down at the corners, tired and slack; his black, curly hair fell forward over his forehead in moist strands. He was of middle height and well-knit, but somewhat inclined to fatness.

Olav stood outside the church door and watched them: the blind man kept his hand on his wife’s shoulder as he walked, and after them came the serving-woman and a page. They went northward along the street.

That night Olav could not fall asleep. As he lay he felt the slight rocking of the vessel in the stream and heard the sound of the water underneath her—and through his mind the memories came floating—of Ingunn, when they were young. Sometimes they gathered speed, came faster, wove themselves into visions. He thought he had opened his arms to receive her—and started up, wide awake—felt that he was bathed in sweat, with a strange faintness in all his limbs.

It was too hot in his barrel; he crawled out and went forward on deck. It was dripping wet with dew; the sky was clear tonight above the everlasting light mists that floated over the river and the marshy banks. A few great stars shone moistly through the haze. The water gurgled as it ran among the piles of the wharf. A man was rowing somewhere out in the darkness.

Olav seated himself on the chest of arms in the bow. Bending forward over the gunwale, he gazed out into the night. The outline of the woods in the south showed black against the dark sky. A dog barked far away. Dreams and memories continued to course through him; it was their youth that rose from the dead and appeared to him. All the years since then, his outlawry, the time of disaster that came and shattered all his prospects, all the after-years when he had tried to bear his own burden and hers too as well as he could—they seemed to drift past him, out of sight, as he headed back against the stream.

At last he started up—he had fallen asleep on the chest, and now he was chilled all through. Now he would surely be able to sleep if he crept in again and lay down. Outside, the day was already dawning.

He grunted when Tomas Tabor came and waked him. Today Tomas could take Leif with him to mass; then he would stay aboard.

In the course of the afternoon Olav made ready to row ashore. It was warm now in the daytime; he could not bear his haqueton
under his kirtle, the one he had brought with him was so heavy, of thick canvas padded with wool. There could be no great danger in going undefended—as yet he had had no quarrel thrust upon him in the town—and it made him so bulky and awkward. Olav girded himself with a short, broad sword before putting on his kirtle, which was split over the left hip so that one could easily get at a concealed weapon. It was a rich kirtle, reaching to the feet, of black French cloth with green embroidery, light enough for warm weather. Ingunn had made it for him many years ago. At that time he had much more need of suitable working-clothes; not often had he had use for this handsome garment, but it was finely sewed and finished. Olav chose a brown, hoodless cloak bordered with marten’s fur and a black, narrow-brimmed felt hat with silver chains about the crown. He pressed it down, so that his greying silvery-golden hair waved out under the brim on every side. But—though he would not admit it to himself—when he took the pains, he still looked a fair and manly man, and few would have guessed that he was as old as seven and thirty winters.

He rowed straight in to the town and strolled through the streets and alleys. But as soon as the bells began to ring for vespers, he made straight for the church of the Dominicans. Just after him came the blind man and his wife and their two servants.

Olav had now forbidden Leif to leave the ship after nones; instead he sent him ashore with Tomas Tabor every other morning. In this way he himself could only attend mass every other day, but it would be too bad if the young man met with a mischance out there in Southwark. And it would bring trouble on them all if one of their ship’s company came to any harm ashore.

The blind man came to mass at the convent church every morning and on most days to complin as well. She was always there at vespers and sometimes with her husband at evensong.

Olav did not know who these folks might be or where they lived, nor did he ever think to find it out. It was only that a change had come about in his mind: all the thoughts that had been habitual with him for years, all the daily doings and cares and all that belonged to his life as a grown man had been flooded by a fountain that had sprung up in him. It was beyond his own control—in all these years, when he had thought of his youthful memories, he had not recalled them in this way. Now they were
not things of the past—he walked in the midst of them; it was as though everything was to happen now for the first time. Or it was as when one lies between sleep and waking, knowing that one’s dreams are dreams, but seeking to hold them fast, struggling not to be wholly awake. And every day he came hither to see this blind man’s wife, for at the sight of her these clear, dreamlike memories flowed more freely and abundantly; the image of the rich young wife became one with the sweet, frail shadow of the young Ingunn.

And she was no longer angry with him for looking at her—she vouchsafed him this, he had noticed. One evening he entered the church, walking fast, and bent the knee as he passed the high altar. The scabbard of the sword he wore under his kirtle struck the pavement hard, driving the hilt against his chin. He must have cut a ridiculous figure—and when he looked round at her, he saw that she was bursting with suppressed laughter. Olav turned red as fire with anger. But after a while, when he looked round again, he met her eyes, and then she smiled at him—and then he had to smile too, though he was both vexed and angry. After that he kept an eye on her; she followed her book diligently, but all the time little secret smiles played like gleams across her lovely face.