Chapter Seven

Each orphan loved to find a different pattern at the bottom of their bowl each morning. Anne always thought the man wearing a big yellow hat flourishing a blue feather was a sign of a joyful day but hadn’t yet been able to work out from the edge which one it was so she could be sure of it. But, on this day, as she scraped away the last of the porridge from the blue feather, a porter nun came to her even while she ate, pretending to clear the table of empty wooden platters. She whispered, ‘The carpenter’s here.’

The first thing Maynard did when he walked into the day room was examine the stone floor. There were a lot of charcoal marks. He looked at the worried Claude and Pierre, then squatted down to study the smeary sums and diagrams.

Anne looked over his shoulder but saw nothing of meaning in the multitude of numbers.

Claude and Pierre stood by, watching seriously.

Maynard looked up at them, ‘Total run is 240 inches?’

‘Did you see?’ Claude showed the carpenter where they’d marked out the run on the floor parallel to the wall.

Maynard smiled. He stepped back to examine their marks. ‘And how many steps?’

‘Twenty-one?’

Maynard heard the question in Claude’s voice. ‘Not sure?’

Pierre and Claude looked at each other with doubt.

Maynard’s voice was gentle, but Anne could hear the warning in it. ‘If you cut the stringers too short it will be difficult to fix.’

‘Two hundred and forty inches is right,’ continued Claude, ‘But that’s if most of the steps are less than seven inches.’

Pierre added, ‘Unless we have a shorter step at top and bottom, perhaps?’

Maynard nodded. ‘Very good.’ The three orphans followed Maynard to his cart by the front door.

Anne couldn’t believe her eyes. Maynard’s cart was pulled by a gorgeous grey mare. ‘Oh! What’s her name?’ Anne rushed to introduce herself to the horse. She had the longest eyelashes Anne had ever seen.

Doudou cried out forcefully from the back field and everyone laughed.

Maynard stroked the mare’s face. ‘Her name is Silvia.’

Claude looked at Pierre, ‘Latin for forest.’

‘Or,’ said Anne, ‘spirit of wood?’

Maynard raised his eyebrow and nodded in approval.

General relief after the mathematical challenge. The boys told Anne they’d invited Sister Beatrix in to help them, but she just looked at their work and gave them the barest encouragement.

Anne adored Silvia. She blew down her nose at her, fussed and patted her and found some juicy grass stalks growing by the fence to feed her. ‘Will we put her in the same field as Doudou?’ She explained, ‘The donkey.’

Maynard thought not. ‘Animals are not like people. They’re more honest. We need to give them time to get to know each other in case they have an immediate reaction. Is there room for her elsewhere?’

Together they put Silvia into the field on the other side of the vegetable garden where she had access to fresh water and green grass with some sheep and chickens for company.

Maynard approved, saying that Silvia liked sheep. They’d kept them for many years before his mother had died. Anne looked up at him, sensing his sadness, but there was fuss from the other field. It was apparent Doudou and his goats knew what was going on and Anne had to run to the donkey with peace offerings.

Soon the human team was gathered around the cart again.

‘Are we building today?’ asked Anne.

‘Today I … , I beg your pardons, I mean ‘we’ … have enough dry wood to do the floor patch and we must move those bookshelves. For the staircase, it’s better to let the timber dry to the same moisture as the planks already in the room. I need to collect more wood from Armentières before we can complete the work.’

Maynard unlocked the back of his cart and began to untie the lashes around bundles of timber. The two boys unloaded the hardwood, carried them through the garden and into the calefactory.

The Mother came out of the public building with Sister Matildé on one side and Sister Beatrix on the other. The sunshine appeared to dazzle her, but she stood tall between her two pillars by the front entrance watching the unloading. ‘Good morning, Maynard.’

‘Good morning, Mother. Sisters.’

The three nuns bowed in response. The Mother asked, ‘What will occupy you this morning?’

‘We’ll begin with the planking upstairs, to patch and strengthen.’

‘And what of your helpers?’ The Mother smiled at Anne, Claude, and Pierre. ‘Are they of any use to you?’

‘They make my life much easier.’

In fact, Claude and Pierre had done carrying the planks inside even before Maynard finished talking. They stood blinking and looking at the Mother.

The Mother said, ‘The Assumption will be arranged after our lunch. You’ll return after you’ve eaten?’

‘Yes, Mother. These people need their strength.’

‘Fear not. We feed them well.’

As the nuns left, everyone agreed they still had porridge strength enough to move the shelves from against the wall. The three children just managed on one side of the heavy wooden unit while Maynard took most of the weight on the other. They pushed it off the wall where the anticipated staircase was to be built, and round to face the other shelves to keep them free of dust.

While the boys prepared to go upstairs, Anne swept the area from where the shelves had stood. There was a lot of sand and dirt resulting from firefighting with the contents of chamber pots. In amongst the mess, she found three little booklets, pamphlets, that had fallen behind the case. They were printed in Dutch. Her first impulse was to raise them up to show the others. Then she noticed a picture on one of the covers and she took a closer look. As she examined the grubby papers and recognised the shapes her stomach sank. There was something strange, even dangerous, about these publications.

‘Forgiveness by Faith Alone’ had a bold woodcut cover featuring the crucifixion. ‘The Abomination and the Antichrist’ seemed to depict the Pope as a Devil while ‘Where Monks came from’ had a dramatic black and white image showing monks tumbling out of the Devil’s anus.

A feeling of shock rose in Anne as she gazed on these pictures. She couldn’t imagine what was meant by monks falling from the Devil’s arse. Armaud was a good man, for all he was not a religious monk. She thought of the other monks she’d seen walking in the town. Ones that came to their market stall to chat to Armaud. Ones that came to the public parlour with the Abbott or Father Vincent, their normal priest monk. Ones that came to public mass in the Chapelle. She never saw any of them as evil. She was horrified by the notion that adults had printed these pictures to be shared. And what was forgiveness by faith alone? Surely you had to give penance and say Hail Marys and do good works to be forgiven? Anne realised that if someone had gone to the trouble of hiding them there had to be a reason. She put them in her pocket to examine later. It felt like she had three boiling hot appleflappen next to her skirts. Surely everyone could tell? What on earth should she do with them?

Maynard shared the planking out between Claude and Pierre. He bent to pick up his tool case. ‘Anne, you will guide us upstairs once more?’

The strange little troop marched outside into the sunshine, upstairs to the nuns’ cells corridor and finally to the hole in the floor. He put down his tool bag and looked round at his youthful band. ‘Ready for work?’

He smiled at Anne as he handed her a measuring rod. ‘You may as well have something to do.’

They set to work. Lines were ruled to distinguish the parts that needed to be cut. Holes were drilled in a line, enough to enlarge to get a tiny blade in place before sawing out the bad planks. He taught all three how to use the drill and saw. As each piece of scorched wood was removed, they stacked it neatly to the side. He explained it would not be a good idea to throw them down to the calefactory below because they could bounce and damage the walls or bookshelves. He tried to demonstrate that a clean job would be a good job, explaining his father’s rule now applied to all of them.

Maynard’s travel case held a myriad of marvels. He pulled out the pieces that appeared to make a small sort of chair. He explained it to be a sawhorse. He asked Claude and Pierre to measure the required pieces of oak planking.

The bells for Terce took the young people away to the church for prayers. Maynard said he did not mind their departure, but Anne did. Claude and Pierre moved automatically but a need for refusal grew in Anne. She stopped. Claude looked back at her. ‘What are you doing?’

Anne opened her mouth, ready with a bold retort, but held back. She knew full well there would be consequences if she did not attend prayers. Having only recently visited the dark hole she thought better and joined her brother after all.

When they returned from church, Maynard had already put up his sawhorse and begun cutting the replacement planks to size. He ascertained the under-beams were strong enough to take the weight of the new wood and the staircase, and he had shaved off the burn marks and planed the smoke stain as well. The youngsters assisted in placing the planks while Maynard hammered the nails. All three orphans took turns in trying the hammer. Anne wondered about the picture of Jesus in her pocket. How did the Romans feel when they hammered home the nails through the bones of His hands and feet?

Maynard asked the boys about the marks on the beams around them. Could they see marks from a saw? An axe? A different shape blade? What of those square holes? Could it have meant the beam had been used before and was repurposed? ‘When was this built?’ He slapped his hand on a beam high above the orphans’ heads.

Anne said, ‘Mother says the land was gifted in the year nine hundred and fifty.’

Pierre asked, ‘Did they build Saint Benedictines first? Maybe one thousand?’

‘Well then, give or take a few decades, let us say this wood could be six hundred years old. Would it be local timber, do you think? Or from far?’

Anne guessed, ‘Local?’

Maynard agreed. ‘Probably. We don’t often see trees this size any more, do we?’

Claude said, ‘Imagine what’s happened in this room over the last five hundred years!’

‘Not much.’ Pierre muttered, ‘They’re nuns.’ And the two boys sniggered together.

Maynard continued his lesson, ‘When we take the axe to the wood, we follow the grain. Have you heard the notion of rubbing a person up the wrong way? The same with trees. Always follow the grain.’

They swept the new planking, removed the larger pieces of detritus and the little troop marched downstairs once more.

Anne watched Maynard take his measuring rod out along the staircase run that Claude had marked on the floor. He looked up at Claude. ‘You write?’

Claude took the lead and marked the paper with the numbers that Maynard called out; ‘ … five and three eights, six and seven eighths … ‘

Then it was time for prayers at Sext. Maynard went home for lunch, taking Silvia back to her familiar territory but he assured them he would return.

After lunch, they measured, stacked wood for the stairs and cleaned down the area to Maynard’s specifications. There wouldn’t be any lumps and bumps when building in wood.

On the eighth hour Eloise put her head in the doorway to find them. ‘Hurry! Sister Absolem is already irritated. The cherubs are in place. For the moment ... ’ They shut the door to the calefactory and walked out to the garden.

The sun was covered by a haze of smokey clouds. It was getting cold.

Maynard would enter the front door by himself.

Jeanette was already in the staging area behind the grille, dressed in her raiments of gold. She lifted her head to greet the small troop arriving behind her. Although she smiled to see them, Anne noticed Jeanette’s eyes went to the public area. Was she waiting for him?

Maynard slowed as he entered the room and seemed surprised as he looked at the heavenly tableau.

Anne wondered why he’d be so taken aback when he’d seen it all before.

Sister Gertrude was trying to remember how everyone was positioned. She was moving and pushing with Sister Absolem who was picking up errant cherubs and handing them to the older children for control.

Jeanette could not help but look every now and then under her lashes at Maynard.

Marie Therese buckled Anne into her wings and pushed her about, muttering. ‘May as well enact the whole thing.’

Sister Gertrude signalled Anne could stay where she was at this time.

Marie Therese was reluctant to leave the stage, ‘Why we need expensive carvings like some fancy cathedral?’ Anne suspected she was looking for any excuse to stop the whole thing but, as she could not find any, she swept out of the room with a muttered, ‘God have mercy on us all.’ Anne fancied everyone present sighed with relief after she had gone.

Maynard sat in the parlour and sketched. He drew up a small stool in the middle of the room and balanced the board on his knee as he studied the scene before him then bent to his work. The charcoal scratched across the paper. Anne watched as he drew in shapes. He concentrated on drawing the children swiftly, sending the small ones away with Sister Absolem after he briefly outlined them.

Anne asked, ‘Where did you get the paper?’

Maynard said, ‘The monks make it.’

‘What about the charcoal? Where do you get that?’

Maynard sighed, even as his arm darted here and there over the paper. ‘I made it.’

Anne wondered how these slim sticks were different from the burnt patches on the planks from the fire and Maynard, noting her in-breath to ask more, said, ‘Please be quiet.’

Suddenly, Marie Therese returned, and everyone tensed again. Of course, she was allowed on the public side of the grille as a tertiary nun. Anne knew she would have taken vows but not life-long vows of enclosure as she was probably too old when she volunteered. Marie Therese approached Maynard quietly. Standing behind him she was silently watching every mark grow on the page.

When Maynard grew aware he had someone behind him he gradually stopped work and raised his head. ‘Do you like what you see?’

Marie Therese shrugged. ‘I do not know why this sculpture is necessary.’

‘I beg your pardon, but I find it really difficult to work with someone looking over my shoulder.’ Maynard smiled at the bent nun as best he could while twisting on the little stool, ‘Could you please excuse me?’

Marie Therese was in a difficult situation. Anne suppressed her enjoyment, knowing to relish another’s discomfort was a sin. She was even more pleased when the senior nun appeared to decide no great harm could come to her charges if she left them unsupervised and she went back to work with her animals.

Anne knew it was only a matter of time before Marie Therese would return and what would she bring with her?