The Wanderer and the Way 25
The Gift of the Cross
This is Chapter 25 of The Wanderer and the Way, now available for purchase.
They walked to Bordeaux where they were provided horses and a proper escort and were told that it was fruitless for them to seek King Charles in Aachen since he was campaigning in the East against the Avars. Instead, they were escorted to Tours where Alcuin had lately, at his request, been made abbot of Marmoutier, but who remained the councilor in whom Charles reposed the greatest confidence.
Marmoutier Abbey was an ancient foundation, going back four hundred years to its foundation by Saint Martin of Tours. It was built into the face of a cliff overlooking the Loire, where it included many monastic cells, which were nothing but caves in the cliff face. The abbey itself showed that it had been through periods of prosperity and periods of calamity, with some stout stone buildings standing proudly, others piles of rubble, and still others mare hastily made of wood, all in a jumble which left the visitor in need of guidance to find their way from any one part to another. The abbey was, however, clearly enjoying a time of prosperity, for there were gangs of men clearing away old rubble while others were mixing mortar and sorting stones by size and color for reuse in the new construction.
Theodemir thanked the men who had been their escorts from Bordeaux. They had seen them to their destination with courtesy and dispatch, each of them falling in love with Agnes, after the habit of men, and each saluting her wistfully as they parted from her. Agnes herself seemed unperturbed at having added so many to the legion of her suitors, but then, what difference did a few flies more or less make to a dead horse?
“I haven’t seen anything like it since York,” she said.
“York is like to this?” he asked.
“Well, not in the details,” she replied. “But all these new things built on top of old things that seem to have been built on top of things older still. York is like that.”
“You will have something to talk of with our host,” he said. “I understand the Alcuin spent many years in York and established a school and a library there.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I have visited them both. Eardwulf is very proud of them, though he is vexed that Alcuin should have left Northumbria to serve Charles.”
“It occurs to me,” he said, “that Alcuin is about the receive an embassy from two kings: myself for Alphonso and you for Eardwulf.”
She laughed at this. “I’m not Eardwulf’s ambassador,” she said. “I can’t imagine Eardwulf ever asking Charles for help. I think he would tell Alphonso to be careful what he asked for.”
“I remember that Alphonso said to me that he would gladly bend the knee to Charles if he could win his help against the Moors.”
“Eardwulf would not bend the knee to anyone,” she said. “Unless perhaps it was Mother Wynflaed.”
There was a catch in her voice as she said this. He turned and looked at her.
“He bent the knee to you once, did he not?” he said.
“That was a long time ago,” she replied. “We should go and ring the bell, though I’m not sure which of these buildings is the gatehouse.”
They were spared from having to solve this particular riddle because a young monk who had temporary charge of the gate that afternoon saw them and came running out to greet them. It was almost an amusement for Theodemir to see the questioning of his vocation that came over the young man’s face as he first set eyes on Agnes.
Theodemir introduced himself and his companion and presented his credentials, which the young monk scanned without any notion of their significance other than that they indicated a person of some importance who should be shown the appropriate form of hospitality. He led them into the warren that was the abbey and escorted them to a receiving room made of stone with richly embroidered hangings on the wall and cushions on the chairs. He was clearly in a flutter over what to do next, and Theodemir surmised that having evidently been raised in a noble family before receiving his monastic calling, he was more used to being waited on than waiting on others. Eschewing such intimacies as the washing of feet, which surely would have unmanned him entirely if he had attempted to serve Agnes in that way, the young man scurried off and returned with cakes and wine and then, recalling his unaccustomedly low place in the hierarchy of his new place of residence, hurried off again to find his master, the gatekeeper.
When they were alone together and exchanging smiles at the young man’s confusion and infatuation, Agnes suddenly cocked her head and said, “You have no gift to present to Alcuin. All the gifts the king sent were in the pack train. The Moors have them now.”
“Unfortunately, that is so,” he replied. “We must trust in Alcuin’s courtesy that he will not feel this a slight.”
“No,” she said. “You should present him with a gift.” And then she reached under her collar and pulled out the gold chain with the jeweled cross that had been presented to her by Alphonso the Chaste. “Give him this,” she said. “It is a gift from the hand of Alphonso himself, and nothing could be more appropriate for an abbot.”
“But I can’t take that,” he said. “He gave it to you.”
“You told me what purpose he had in giving it to me,” she said. “It was to escape Eric and Witteric. That purpose is accomplished, thanks to you. I never deserved it, and I have no more need of it. But you need a gift for the man you are visiting so that he may hear Alphonso’s message with an open heart, and here it is to meet your need.”
She pressed it into his hands. The warmth of her was still in the gold. He looked at her with wondering eyes and at last seemed to understand what was in her heart.
“I’m astonished that you have had it with you all this time,” he said.
“I had meant to bury it in the garden by the gatehouse, as you suggested,” she said. “But something said to me that I should keep wearing it. You are not the only one who sometimes thinks they have heard the voice of God in a vision.”
“You have mocked me for my vision from the beginning,” he said.
“I have mocked myself in my own heart. I have accused myself of secret vanity and of luxury. I kept it hidden because I was ashamed to admit that I had it. Yet here is the cross, where and when it is needed.”
He took it gratefully and bowed to her.
“Perhaps,” she said, “This is what your vision meant. Not that you were to dedicate yourself to me but that I was to assist you in your mission. And here I am when I am needed to do this small thing for you.”
“You have done far more than this for me,” he replied without blushing. “Both for me and for my mission. I am only sorry that I was so clumsy in how I made you come with me. The danger I put you in.”
“You saved me from a danger just as grave and far more certain,” she replied.
He thought he saw tears starting in the corners of her eyes and felt the same lacrimous tickle in his own face. But then they were interrupted, for the gatekeeper appeared, fetched from whatever occupation had taken him from his usual post and seeming none too pleased that his apprentice had not handled the matter himself. He looked over Theodemir’s credentials, frowned, and said he would convey Theodemir’s request for an audience to the abbot. He also dispatched his nervous young apprentice on another errand before leaving Agnes and Theodemir alone again. They smiled at each other and then, knowing that to speak would only be to invite tears that should have no place in the eyes or upon the cheeks of the king’s ambassador. They remained in companionable silence for what seemed like a quarter of an hour at least before the sound of giggles and girlish laughter came from outside the door, and two young women entered, pretty, plump, and dressed in extraordinary finery.
There was no one to make introductions, but Theodemir and Agnes understood by the finery of the dresses that these were young women of high rank and made the appropriate obeisance to them.
“You must be the lady Agnes,” the elder of the two said. She was of about Agnes’s age, though a little taller and considerably plumper. “I am Luitgard and this is Theodrada. Brother Winegarde asked if we would be willing to entertain you, so of course we said yes and we decided to come and fetch you ourselves. Do you like dogs? Our bitch Bertrude has just had a litter and they are so adorable. Will you come and see?”
“We are visiting Uncle Alcuin because daddy is off fighting the Avars,” Theodrada added, by way of explaining their presence. “But it's rather dull because it's mostly monks and novices here, and there are no other girls to talk to. Do say you will come.”
Agnes looked at Theodemir. It was not that there was any question that she should go with them, for the meaning of “daddy is off fighting the Avars” combined with calling the great scholar “uncle Alcuin” said that these were the daughters of Charles himself, whose invitation certainly could not be refused. Agnes’s look, rather, seemed to acknowledge the frivolous nature of the two young women who, though of an age with her, had known none of the trials she had known. And yet, there was nothing unkindly in the meaning of her look, nor any condescension, but only a sort of fond amusement, as if she were a beloved aunt set upon by adoring nieces the moment she rode into an estate to visit.
Agnes took his hand and squeezed it and said, “You will do well.”
“Thank you, lady,” he said.
The three young women left, and he was alone in the receiving room, and he found that this simplest and most inconsequential of partings ripped his heart into pieces and had him almost in tears, for he was, he realized, a man torn in two, and half of him had left to return to her proper place among the women, and in doing so had taken all his courage and his confidence with her. As he sat and waited, he felt himself just as out of place and unprepared for his office as the young novice who had chanced to be assigned to watch the gate at the hour of their arrival.
He had been warned by Alphonso’s clerk that, as the ambassador of a distant and unacknowledged king, he was apt to be kept waiting, both as a means to impress upon him that he was in the inferior position of a supplicant and also because the business of court was all-consuming, and ambassadors who arrived without notice should expect to cool their heels while the court found the time, and the appropriate ministers, to hear their delegation. And so it proved, as he sat hour following hour until he had to go wandering out into the warren of the abbey to find someone to direct him to a place where he could relieve himself. And having done so, he had returned to the receiving room, after some embarrassment in trying to find his way back to it, and had waited another hour still. But at that point, the gatekeeper returned with the news that the Abbot had a few minutes to receive him now.
The gatekeeper led him again through the warren, which did not seem to be at all the same warren as the one he had navigated in search of bodily relief, and ushered him into a vast library, with books and scrolls housed upon shelf after shelf, and through this into a richly furnished room dominated by a huge table which was spread with parchments, ink pots, and beeswax candles, which lent to the air a faint odor of smoke and honey. Behind the desk stood a man who seemed less like a son of the Saxon nobility, which he supposedly was, and more like a statue of a Roman senator transformed into flesh.
“Father Alcuin,” he said, bowing low.
“Deacon,” the patrician scholar replied. “I am not a priest.”
“Deacon. My apologies,” Theodemir stammered. Already he was wrong-footed.
“Don’t apologize. Just get it right next time,” Alcuin said. “It is the first business of an ambassador to know the correct form for addressing the men to whom they present their petitions. It creates a good impression.”
Theodemir swallowed the apology he had been about to make for his first apology and instead hurried on in the hope of making a better impression with his next action. He hurriedly pulled out the cross which Agnes had given him and held it out.
“A gift of King Alphonso the Chaste, King of Asturias,” he said.
Alcuin took it and inspected it. “An interesting piece,” he said. “Somewhat crude in the workmanship, but interesting in the design. You may convey my thanks to King Alphonso. Do you have credentials to present to me?”
These, as Theodemir now remembered, should have been presented before the gift, for they established the authority of the giver to act on behalf of his principal. But though Theodemir heard the scolding of the king’s clerk in his head, he received no scolding from Alcuin. Instead, the great scholar inspected his commission, read through it briefly, and then threw it down on his table. He raised his eyes to Theodemir then and asked, “What is the relationship of the divine nature of the Son with that of the Father?”
“The Son was begotten of the Father before all ages, Deacon,” Theodemir replied, aware that he was repeating his lessons like a small schoolboy stammering before a grim schoolmaster.
“You have read the letter of Beatus of Liébana, your countryman, concerning the theory of adoption?” Alcuin asked.
“I have, Deacon,” Theodermir replied.
“Good,” said the scholar. “We will discuss it tomorrow. I have some time between Sext and None. Brother Winegarde, has a room been prepared for our guest?”
“Yes, Father Abbot,” the gatekeeper replied. Alcuin, Theodemir realized, had been entitled to the title of Father because of his office as Abbot, even if he was not a priest. His correction had been a kind of test to see how easily discomforted Theodemir would be. Whether he had passed that test was more than he could have guessed. He resolved, in any case, to address the great scholar as Father Abbot in the future, and hope that this would do something to redeem his want of protocol.
“And the girl you spoke of?” Alcuin asked.
“Housed with the young ladies,” Brother Winegarde replied.
“Well, let us hope they do not quarrel,” the Abbot said as if this was the behavior he thought native to young women. “As for you, young man,” he continued, “you may join us in the refectory for the evening meal and in the church for vespers and compline if you so desire.”
And with that, Alcuin turned his attention to another of the parchments that covered his table, and Brother Wiengarde indicated that Theodemir should follow him out of the Abbot’s presence.
Aware that he would be judged harshly if he did not accept any of Alcuin’s invitations to eat or to pray, he attended the refectory, where all ate in silence while a junior monk read to them from the scriptures, and joined his voice to theirs in the chapel for the singing of the Divine Office, grateful that in his courtship of Agnes he had learned much of it by heart. Afterwards, in the cell prepared for him, he spent the whole of the candle he was given in rereading the letter of Beatus of Liébana, which had remained among his possessions, as he had used it as a wrapper to protect his ambassadorial commission from damage in the journey.
Comments welcome. If you spot a mistake, please let me know by replying to this email or by sending an email to author@gmbaker.net. Thanks!