Candle in the Attic Window(20)
Richard clutched at the fabric of his coat and took a moment to regain his composure. He had been years away from home, but never before had he felt so much a foreigner on the continent. His inquisitiveness, his skill in losing himself in brass rubbings and sketches of gears, often made him forget that months had passed since he had last heard a word of English.
Richard did not recall that he had knocked, so he twitched as the doors started to creak open. Although he felt foolish after his panic, he was relieved to see someone inhabited the grey place.
Warm light spilled from the crack. “Yes? What do you want?”
“If you please,” Richard said in his proficient boarding school German, “I’ve just been robbed. If you wouldn’t mind –”
The voice, which had a peculiar accent, interrupted: “You are out of breath. Are the thieves still near?”
“Uh, no –” Again, he felt a fool, as if he were still walking about with his hands stuck in the air. “I thought there was a large animal after me.”
The light spilled out onto the porch. “Inside! Inside now!” A hand grabbed Richard’s arm and tugged him between the doors. It happened so fast that he might have left his boots on the porch.
As he entered the vestibule, Richard felt a peculiar sensation around his legs. It was as if a fur shawl were rubbing between his ankles, slipping through the door crack and past him. But there was nothing to see after the man slammed shut the heavy doors and dropped down the bar.
“Pardon me, young man,” his abrupt host said, “but the highwaymen here are a vicious class and it’s best if they don’t spy you looking for help.”
Richard was about to mention that the man had reacted, not to news of robbers, but news of the stalking animal. However, the warmth of the inside and the chance for hospitality made him stay quiet. His natural curiosity, which thrived when his life was not in immediate danger of ending, was coming alive again.
The man was grey with age, but had the posture of a saint’s statue on a French cathedral. It was an easy comparison to make, for not only had Richard sketched the Chartres and Bourges Cathedrals, but his host wore the habiliments of a monk. His robes were a simple brown, with a heavy topcoat that draped down to his wrists. A black skullcap clung to his silver hair.
“I am Abbot Fletcher,” he said, with a bend at the waist. “You will be safe here for the night, and we can offer you modest food and drink. Please come this way.”
Richard followed the abbot into a chapel. He was wondering at the abbot’s unusual accent, which was familiar but drowned under the heavy gravy of German. “So, this is a monastery?”
“Yes. When the nearby town of Kelheim converted to Luther’s heresy, they built this place as their church. Eventually, the righteous returned and burnt down the steeple in anger. That was two hundred and fifty years past. Our brotherhood has resided here since.”
Richard decided it was inappropriate to mention that he was a follower of the Anglican faith and had no love for the Pope. But he had nothing against the Pope’s followers, as he had learned from the kindness he had met so far in his journey across Bavaria. Highwaymen excepted.
Abbot Fletcher led him along the ambulatory into a room that might have once been a sacristy. Now it was decorated as a small banquet room. A fire struggled in a brick hearth, and an oil lamp added light from a table with Italian-style carvings on the legs. The rug spread across the floor had Moorish swirls, which Richard thought queer for a monastery.
The most striking furnishing in the room was an enormous tapestry covering the wall farthest from the door. While the abbot poured from a flagon of wine into tin goblets, Richard walked up to the hanging. On the thick wool was a distinctive stone bridge arching over a wide river toward a map of a city. Prominent in the middle span of the bridge was a statue of a child with his eyes covered, as if he were afraid to look on the unfinished cathedral at the end of the bridge.
“Regensburg,” Richard remarked.
“Indeed. Have you come that way?”
“I’m heading there now.” He gave a short explanation of his travels: He was hoping to reach Prague before winter so he could study the collections of Emperor Rudolf II. Richard was an admirer of mechanical devices and contraptions, and the sixteenth-century emperor was famous for his clockwork museum.
Richard placed his fingers on the grey weave of the tapestry that made the bridge. The abbot’s face turned stony and Richard pulled his hand back.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m eager to cross this bridge. It’s one of the finest in Europe, I hear. So firmly built, they say the Devil himself could not break it, although he once tried.”
The abbot turned back to the table. “The Devil is said to spend too much time in Regensburg. Too much time.”
Suddenly, Abbot Fletcher spoke in clear English with a slight Scottish burr. “You must excuse me, but your accent tells me that what I am now speaking is your first language.”
Richard felt a warmth swell that the tiny fire could never have made. To hear his own language, after so many months deep in Bavaria, was almost enough to bring tears. “I had wondered at the name ‘Fletcher’,” he said.
The abbot did not seem as moved to hear his mother tongue. He started to slice a hard rye and serve it onto pewter plates. “Do you see the church with the courtyard in the middle of the tapestry?” he asked. Richard had noted it, since its halo of gold thread dared the eye to look anywhere else. “That is – was – the Benedictine Abbey of St. James. Now this –” He gestured with disdain at the roof over him. “– is the Abbey.”