The weathered grey stone of this chapel is married to the grey hillside like a blade to its handle; I, I have been priest of this chapel for thirty years; I grow as weathered and gray as the hillside and the chapel and the walls of grey cloud which surround it. The weeks pass in peace, until my flock visit me on Sundays for a brief, climactic hour and then leave again, remembering like their own flocks where their heft is on the hills, letting the walls remember their grey silence like a peaceful death.
In the weektime, unless a parishoner troubles me for my signature on a will or seeks the marital advice of this old bachelor, I attend to my small garden, and the next week's sermon, and my poetry. The garden is enough for my own needs and no more, but I rarely have to travel to town for vegetables; I have been good steward of the earth God has given me, I have lived by the sweat of my brow and taken enough for my own need. In like form I write the sermons: whatever my text, I preach against excess, against waste. Some of my flock live in heated houses, though they keep it from me, and have machines to sweep the floor; I cannot abide this softness. It will be the death of all of us.
I write the sermons in the old tongue, a language full of poetry, but my words have no cadence, no harmony. The poetry I write I write in my birth-tongue, English, the thin language. I myself was old when I learned the old tongue, the language of my flock, yet in a month I could greet, in a year I could converse, in five I could preach and counsel. Yet verse in the old tongue eludes me still, and I write it in the language I inherited from my parents along with original sin.
The bards who write in the old tongue, those who were born to it, they hold great feasts, and tell stories far into the night around the firelight, and compete to win a wooden throne. I write through the days dreaming of this throne, and it bites my dreams at night. The poets in London say, I have heard, that my poetry has some merit, but little I care for their palms before my feet. Like our Lord before us, it will be the death of all of us.
It was one Sunday morning when the winter was beginning to sharpen the air that she walked through the door and paused beside the font. The congregation had long since left for their dinners of mutton and the sacristan had left to play rugby, I believe; I did not ask too closely. I put away what small amount of silver we have, safe in the wall, and was turning to fold the cloth on the table when I saw her, clad all in black with a dark veiled hat. I turned and coughed and dusted down my cassock; she took a few steps forwards and sat in the pew three from the back, like a good Anglican.
My first thought was to wonder at this woman, a woman I had never seen before. Perhaps she was some literary London critic intent on asking me about the meaning in a recent sonnet; I had been caught that way before. As I approached, however, she smiled at me, and said, "Excuse me, Father," in the old tongue, and I knew she was not English-born.
She was, as I have said, black-clad, with a silver cross around her neck looped at the top for the chain; her clothes and skirts were loose-fitting, but-- I have no reason to hide my feelings here-- she was a shapely woman, attractive at least physically, and my heart quickened to look at her.
"Can I help you?" I asked her, still in the old tongue; where I could leave English behind I would do so. "I believe I have not met you before."
She smiled again, and said, "I have met you once before, I recall, but it was several years ago. I have travelled to meet you. I'm not from the village. My name is Gwen."
I was a little puzzled; there was no way she could have driven in a vehicle or ridden a bicycle or a horse without me hearing her approach. The church is a mile from anywhere, and there is gravel all around; when it is silent inside, you can hear anyone coming. She must, then, have made her journey on foot. Why would anyone come so far in that way?
I sat down beside her, and she turned to face me. Her hands remained in her lap, but something in her demeanour changed slightly, feminine, female, but somehow slightly less ladylike, yet still she seemed to me unmistakably gentle-born. One of her knees rested slightly on the edge of the pew; I felt my flesh stirring, grateful for my cassock.
"You are a bard, Mr Thomas?", she said.
