The Breath of Peace Read Free Page A

says, “Ooh, that’s cheap, must be damp, I’ll have it all.” It takes you by surprise. That’s why it pays to be cautious. It’s not the things you know are going to happen that ruin a man, it’s the things that catch him out.’
    â€˜What?’ she snapped. ‘You mean, like spending the entire fortune of an abbey on a ship not safe in harbour and watching it go to the bottom of the sea?’ It was an unkind dig, raking up his past mistakes, and she felt a pang of guilt even as she said it and watched him turn his face away, stung by the taunt.
    â€˜Aye,’ he replied quietly, after a moment’s silence: ‘exactly like that. Well, let’s not do it again. I haven’t been lucky with risks.’
    Not even the risk of leaving a lifetime spent in monastic life to get married , he thought bitterly as he followed his wife into the house on this February night. Oh, the love between them was sweet at times, and no amount of spats between them came anywhere near denting the basic reality that he adored her: but it had been a very long time since his everyday life had brought him so many scoldings, and led him so inexorably into one kind of trouble after another.
    He thought if he let her go first up to bed, he could slip out quietly to the henhouse and close it for the night. Even if (as was most likely) the fox had been at dusk and taken a bird, that would not become apparent until morning, and he could pretend he just hadn’t noticed the evening before. ‘They were already roosting,’ he could say. ‘I couldn’t tell how many were in.’
    That would bring wrath on his head too, because her immediate rejoinder would be: ‘If you couldn’t tell how many were in, you might have left some shut out. You must count them! You must count them in every time!’
    He slipped past her at the door as she bent to unfasten her pattens (the wooden clogs that kept the all-pervasive winter wet out of her boots) and went in ahead of her to attend to the fire. He found it almost dead. He had been longer out looking for her in the lane than he expected. Only a few tiny embers remained. He tore a fragment of lint from the small supply of it they had close by the hearth, drew the embers together, laid the scrap of charred linen over them and built above that a careful pyramid of dry sticks, balancing on top of everything a stiff dribble of candle wax they had saved. He bent low and blew patiently on the embers until the smoking scrap of fabric caught light. And then he prayed. He stayed on his knees, apparently watching the beginnings of the fire, but in reality he prayed. ‘Please,’ his heart whispered: ‘Just this once. Please let the wretched thing take.’ And it did. The sticks were dry enough, the lint scrap large enough, the embers just hot enough, and the remnant of wax proved adequate as it melted to give the necessary extra boost. As the kindling wood took light he added the next size up of split wood, carefully positioning the pieces. He had his fire. ‘Thank you,’ he said in the silence of his soul, ‘for sparing me that.’
    He got up from his knees to fetch the pot still half-full of stew from last night’s supper, and set it low on the hook to warm through. His wife had hung her cloak on the nail and taken through to the pantry the bag of provisions she had walked into the town to buy, this having been market day.
    â€˜Well, at least I see you cleaned the hens’ feeding bucket out this time when you shut them in,’ she said as she came to the fireside. The adrenalin rush of the fear she had felt in the lane, and its following sea of anger, had ebbed away now. Madeleine, left feeling flat and slightly guilty in its wake, thought she’d better look for something positive to say. She glanced at her husband, but he did not reply. He stirred the stew with more attention than it deserved and kept his