The Maiden of All Our Desires by Peter Manseau

Author:Peter Manseau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

A YEAR AFTER HIS arrival at Gaerdegen, Francis received a message from the Cathedral City at last. His first contact with home since his ignominious journey north, the sight of the letter lifted his spirits with the possibility that his exile in the wilderness might be coming to an end.

Yet it was not what he had hoped. No formal letter from the bishop begging his pardon or humbly requesting his return. No pleading from the carvers’ guild to defy the episcopal directive and return as a respected craftsman rather than a scandalous priest. It was instead a sheaf of pages, with the briefest of messages from the bishop’s clerk appended.

“For reasons that will become obvious,” he wrote, “you must abandon any expectation you may have of returning to the Cathedral City. You would do well to serve Gaerdegen for whatever days you have remaining, thanking God that you have been spared our fate.”

To Francis’s astonishment, the remaining pages were addressed to him, and they were written in Helena’s unmistakable hand. It was far more than could ever be written on the birch-bark scrolls they had shared in their youth but he knew the shape of her letters at a glance.

My dear Francis,

Certain though I am that you have found peace so far from the daily turmoil we face, and reluctant though I am to introduce evil into the holy convent you now call home, I cannot allow the silence that has passed between us these long months to extend into the eternal quiet in which I fear we who you left behind are all soon to dwell. If by now you have heard even at such a great distance of the suffering visited upon the Cathedral City, I am sorry to add to the distress of such knowledge. If somehow thus far you have been spared, I am sorry to rend the veil of your comforting ignorance. In either circumstance, to be sorry in some measure is perhaps for me all that remains.

You may suspect that I greeted your abrupt departure with relief. Nothing could be further from the truth. I had hoped the sharp feelings between us would blunt in time, as you came to understand my reasoning and we together learned to live in proximity in ways that would bring shame neither to our family nor to the Church. Even in your absence I trusted God that this would be the case. But now it is too late.

Do you remember when we were young, and we passed idle hours among the great blocks of stone set to be lifted in place for the cathedral walls? When we learned to write from the architect’s draftsman in the building dust? What joy we felt in the nonsense we traced in that fine powdered rock! When I wrote “love,” you blushed at my boldness and added a “g” to disguise the word as “glove” before our teacher could see, but then I put my hand on yours as if one wore the other, and together we swept all our words away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.