Читать книгу The Chapter of St Cloud - Marcus Attwater - Страница 5

They came to her house, her sons' messengers, and offered her a set of shears and a sword - one blade or another. Clothilde, queen-mother, guardian of kings to come, looked at the gifts with perfect understanding. Would she let her grandsons be tonsured and put away safe in a monastery? Or would they be killed, and not trouble her sons' conscience anymore? It was a choice between the mildness of the religion she brought to her husband's family and the cruelty that was theirs by right of inheritance. Clothilde understood, and wretchedly, fatally, she chose…

Dominic chewed on the end of his pencil and looked down in mild horror at what he had written. What did he think he was, a novelist? This was no way to start a sober history of a monastic order, though in truth, it was how the order had begun. Instead of this colourful story, he should be writing an introduction carefully outlining his aims. But those aims were no longer as clear-cut as he would like. Sometimes he wished he'd never started on this project, especially lately, now it came to actually writing the book. Uncharacteristically, instead of working on his tiny, shiny netbook, for this study of the Chapter of St Cloud he had bought a handsome bound notebook, which he had gradually filled with pencilled lines. And now this flight of fancy. Maybe he had written it because at least this harsh scrap of legend went uncontested. The two eldest sons of King Clodomer were killed. The youngest child, Clodoald, entered the church, and later established his own abbey, which was renamed St Cloud after his death in honour of the founder. It was from that abbey that the order known as the Chapter of St Cloud had grown. Dominic had thought it such a perfect subject when James dropped it in his lap. Right up his street, encompassing both the history and the historiography of a monastic order, and no one had done it before. Should he have been worried about that earlier? The Chapter of St Cloud still existed, and he had anticipated some resistance at the idea of a scholarly study. Information about it was hard to come by, he had found, sometimes even the written sources seemed cagey. People associated with the chapter were difficult to find and unforthcoming when tracked down. Its abbot was so completely unavailable that Dominic had started to doubt his existence. Or maybe he was just being paranoid. Maybe he should stop shilly-shallying and just write this straightforward monograph that any university press would be happy to publish at a small loss. With a clear, simple title, he had imagined it. St Cloud: a history, something like that. And sometimes he could almost convince himself that that was all there was to it.

He pulled Alfred Poole's book towards him. It wasn't actually very useful, belonging to the kind of history that reflected its own time more than its past, but it had the distinction of containing one of the very rare printed summaries of the development of the chapter. The spotty Victorian volume, printed in an age with a realistic attitude to the selling value of true crime, contained a lurid account of the author's murder in the back pages. A botched robbery had done for Alfred Poole before he could start on his projected history of the Chapter of St Cloud. It was as if the enterprise was cursed.

'Excuse me, is this place taken?'

'No, no. Please, sit down.'

A pretty dark-haired woman took the seat across from him. Noticing that his books had begun to take up more than their share of table, Dominic made room for her. They worked in silence for a while, the woman at her laptop with a neat stack of linguistics texts beside her, Dominic increasingly frustrated by the lack of information in his hoard. He noticed the woman was taking peeks every time he picked up a different title. 'I'm sorry,' she said eventually, 'I'm hopelessly curious, always looking what people are reading. What is your subject? That's an odd collection you have there.'

Dominic was happy to have an excuse to talk. 'I'm not making much headway,' he said, 'But it's the history of a religious order. It's a long history, hence the combination of Carolingians and twentieth-century Catholicism.'

'Oh. Is it interesting?' she asked, sounding mildly disappointed.

'I think so.' He was used to that reaction. Monks and nuns were inherently boring to the general public, even if the general public in this case - he'd taken a peek of his own - could be fascinated by The Construction of Noun-Phrases in the Indo-European Languages. But the woman was still looking at him expectantly, so he tried to explain a little more. 'I think even historians sometimes tend to forget that for a long time the religious wasn't part of everyday life, it was life. We think of the cloistered as missing out on something - this age abhors celibacy - but a monk in the twelfth century was fully part of life, and performing an important function. The concerns of a religious order were the concerns of its times.'

'I see.' She appeared amused by his insistence, and perfectly content to continue talking. He hoped she could be engaging on the subject of Indo-European noun-phrases. 'But what makes this particular order your fascination of choice?'

'Partly, I'm afraid, that it has been the least studied of them. The mendicants, the white monks, the military orders especially, they've all been researched to death. The Chapter of St Cloud is obscure, but it's been obscure for a very long time. And it seems to have kept its character remarkably well, through the centuries. There's always the same focus in its religious thought, which is odd, given the number of reforms and renaissances it's gone through. And it has a history of strong, charismatic abbots. That is, as far as I can tell.' Was he explaining too much?

'Why? You seem uncertain.'

'It's very hard to find primary sources. There are some charters, chronicles written after the fact, a seventeenth century copy of the Rule. But there is little original material, and modern scholarship is very insistent on primary sources. Something that didn't bother him yet.' He patted Alfred Poole. 'He made all kinds of connections that seemed eminently reasonable to him, and now I'm having to go over it all again to see if his assumptions were warranted.'

She smiled. 'Don't you love those self-confident Victorians? Mind you, we wouldn't have been anywhere without them. We owe the whole historical-linguistic edifice to their willingness to make assumptions.'

Here we go, Dominic thought, noun-phrases. They turned out to be unexpectedly entertaining.

On his way home he bought an evening paper at a newsstand. The lead article was about yesterday's murder. A young man, the barman of a local pub, had been shot in his home. No motive, no suspects. Not very cheering, but at least it put Dominic's own worries in perspective. Murder was still rare enough in this town to make headlines. He had moved here only a few months ago, but Dominic knew the young man's - the boy's, really - place of work, knew he must have seen him around. And now he was dead. An Inspector Collins was quoted as saying the police were keeping an open mind as to the motive and identity of the perpetrator, which presumably meant he hadn't a clue.

Dominic's steps had automatically brought him into the Close, and he tucked his newspaper under his arm and went through the church's small south entrance. There was no choir practice today, but he still liked to go home by the cathedral, even through it, on most days. It was nearly closing time, and the tourists had left. He loved a big church when it was quiet, even though he knew that in the days when it was built it wasn't meant to be. Now he moved silently through the south aisle until he reached the westernmost bay. There he leant companionably against a massive compound pier and looked upwards to drink in the cathedral's towering gothic beauty. It never ceased to amaze him, the proportionate perfection of the arches, the clear lines of the vaults, the little builders' quirks he was only beginning to notice. The cathedral had been one of the reasons he chose to come here. He would never have taken a job at a university in a town that didn't have a proper gothic building at its heart. He had grown up in a cathedral town, and he was determined he would eventually die in one.

He crossed the nave and went out on the north side, through the devil's door. The door that would have been kept permanently closed in former days now sported a practical wheelchair ramp, and Dominic felt no compunction about slipping out where the devil once slipped in.