Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

His hands appeared to be wrapped in rags except for his fingertips. As for the students almost all wore gloves. My hands were freezing but I too wore leather gloves and had since I'd left Norwich. I felt sad that Godwin did not have such fine gloves.

He had his students laughing riotously at some witticism when I found a place beneath the arches of the cloister, and against a stone pillar, and then he demanded of them that they remember some very crucial quotation from St. Augustine, which any number called out eagerly, and after that, it seemed he was going to launch on a new subject, but our eyes connected, and he stopped in mid-sentence.

I couldn't tell if anyone knew why he'd stopped. But I knew. Some silent communication passed between us and I dared to nod my head.

Then, with a few preoccupied words, he dismissed the entire class.

He would have been surrounded forever by those asking him questions, except that he told them with careful patience and gentleness that he had important business now, and besides that he was frozen, and then he came to me, took me by the hand, and drew me after him, through the long low-ceilinged cloister, past many an archway, and past many interior doors, until we reached his own cell.

The room, thank Heaven, was spacious and warm. It was no more luxurious than the cell of Junpero Serra at the Carmel Mission of the early twenty-first century, but it was cluttered with wonderful things.

Coals heaped generously in a brazier gave off the delicious heat, and quickly he lighted several thick candles, placing them on his desk, and on his lectern, both of which stood very near his narrow bed, and then he gestured for me to have a seat on one of several benches to the right side of the room.

I could see that he often lectured here, or had done so before the demand for his words had reached such heights.

A crucifix hung on the wall, and I thought I spied several small votive pictures, but in the shadows, I couldn't make out what they were. There was a very hard thin cushion there before the crucifix and what was obviously a picture of the Madonna, and I surmised that that was where he knelt when he prayed.

"Oh, but forgive me," he said to me in the most generous and affable manner. "Come, warm yourself by the fire. You're white from the cold and your head is damp."

Quickly, he removed my dappled hood and mantle, and then he removed his own. These he hung on pegs on the wall, where I knew that the heat of the brazier would soon make them dry. He then produced a small towel and wiped my head and face with it, and then his own.

Only then did he unwrap his hands and stretch his fingers over the coals. I realized for the first time that his white cassock and scapular were thin and patched. His was a lean frame, and the simplicity of his short cut ring of hair made his face all the more vital and striking.

"How do you know me?" I asked.

"Because Fluria wrote to me and told me that I would know you when I saw you. The letter preceded you by only two days. One of the Jewish scholars teaching Hebrew here brought it to me. And I've been worried ever since, not by what she wrote, but by what she failed to write. And then there is another matter, and she's told me to open my heart entirely to you."

He said this with ready trust and again I had a sense of his graceful demeanor and his generosity when he brought one of the short benches up to the brazier and sat down.

There was a firmness and a simplicity to his smallest gestures, as if the time for him was long past when any artifice needed to affect anything that he did.

He reached into one of his voluminous and hidden pockets, beneath his white scapular, and drew out the letter, a folded sheet of stiff parchment, and put it in my hand.

The letter was in Hebrew, but as Malchiah had promised I was able to read it plainly:

My life is in the hands of this man, Br. Toby. Welcome him and tell him all, and he will tell you all, as there is nothing he does not know about my past and present circumstances, and no more than this do I dare to put down here.

Fluria had signed herself with only the first letter of her first name.

I realized no one would know her hand better than Godwin.

"I've known something was wrong for some time," he said, his brows knitting in distress. "You know everything. I know that you do. So let me tell you before I attack you with questions, that my daughter Rosa was seriously ill for some days, insisting that her sister Lea was in great pain.

"It was during the most beautiful days of Christmas when the pageants and the plays before the cathedral are more lovely than any time of the year.

"I thought perhaps, our Christian ways being new to her, she was simply frightened. But she insisted that her misery was on account of Lea.

"These two, you know, are twins, and so it is that Rosa can feel those things that are happening to Lea, and only two weeks ago, she told me that Lea was no longer in this world.

"I've tried to comfort her, to tell her this can't be so. I've assured her that Fluria and Meir would have written to me if anything had befallen Lea, but Rosa can't be persuaded that Lea is alive." "Your daughter is right," I said sadly. "That's the heart of the entire dilemma. Lea died of the iliac passion. Nothing could be done to prevent it. You know what this is, as well as I do, a disease of the stomach and the insides that causes great pain. Surely people almost always die of it. And so Lea, in the arms of her mother, has died."

He dropped his face in his hands. For a moment I thought he'd break into sobs. And I felt just a tinge of fear. But he murmured over and over the name of Fluria, and in Latin, he begged the Lord to console her for the loss of her child.

Finally he sat back and looked at me. He whispered, "And so this beautiful one whom she kept has been taken from her. And my daughter remains here, ruddy and strong, with me. Oh, this is bitter, bitter." The tears stood in his eyes.

I could see agony in his face. His genial manner had completely collapsed in this misery. And his expression had a childlike sincerity as he slowly shook his head.

"I am so deeply sorry," I whispered as he looked at me. But he didn't answer.

We kept a long silence for Lea. He had a faraway look in his eyes for a while. And once or twice he warmed his hands, but then he simply let them fall on his knees.

Then gradually I saw the same warmth and openness in him as before.

He whispered: "You know this child was my daughter, of course, I've told you as much already in my own words."

"I do," I said. "But it's the child's very natural death which is bringing ruin to Fluria and to Meir now."

"How can this be?" he asked. He seemed innocent when he asked me, as if his learning had given him an innocence. Perhaps "humility" would have been a better word.