Quest of Hope(42)

Under orders from the abbot, Prior Paulus had demanded the villages buy their bread from the monks and from the monks alone. He had unwisely closed the communal ovens that had served the villages so very well for generations. Now, each morning, bread was carted to the villages with their day’s allotment. Paulus argued that this control would provide needed revenues to the abbey and “protect our good people from the risks of the ‘corn witch,’ the cheats of the millers, and the poisons of ergot.”

While Heinrich enjoyed his good fortune, his brother Axel soon enjoyed his own. Baldric, now a village elder, was eager to make room for cash-paying tenants in his hovel. He was paid well as the overseer of the manor’s hunting, fencing, timbering, and assarting, but was eager for more silver. While the hovel was yet his own, he was determined to squeeze every penny he could from within its walls. Since blood kin paid no rents, it would serve Baldric well to make room for those who would. So, after a brief visit with a hired carpenter from Limburg and with the reluctant approval of the prior, Baldric arranged for young Axel to join the craftsman’s household as his apprentice. Axel, for his part, was happy to leave the labors of the fields to Heinrich.

It was Herwin, good and faithful Herwin, who still remained to shelter Effi and Heinrich from their uncle. But he would no longer stand guard alone, for to his great joy he had married the Slav, Varina. Considering the immediate increase in rents, Baldric was a willing creditor and loaned the happy man what pennies were required to pay the merchet. And so, into the household of Baldric moved Herwin’s new wife, her baby son, Wulf, and her twelve-fingered, twelve-toed, giant of a brother, Telek. The marriage proved fruitful, for in another year Varina bore Herwin a child of his own, a daughter, baptized Irma.

Meanwhile Emma, the Butterfly Frau, had aged with grace. She did her best to offer patient kindness to the village women who seemed ever disposed to disparage and deride her. Perhaps it was her very grace that earned her scorn and such contempt. Or, perhaps it was the unfortunate appearance of poor Ingelbert. Many, it seemed, remained convinced the woman was somehow connected to the witch of Münster’s forest. After all, she had come from another land with the freak child, she lived apart in her cottage by the stream, and she seemed to be of mysterious means. But more than all of these, rumors now abounded that she was visited each All Souls’ Eve by fearful shadows in the night.

For Lukas these years had proven difficult. His herbarium was grand, airy, and large, and his gardens had been fruitful in each season. Yet his heart was heavy and his mind oft troubled. It was his joy to serve his fellow man, like in the healing of little Alwin—the orphaned Gunnar oblate with fever, or even Pious—the pompous novice at Weyer. Many of his brothers in the abbey, to whom he brought infusions and balms, tinctures and ointments, thrilled at his duties, for he was skilled in the gifts of Creation and tender of spirit. But despite his competence, the man was often angry with his masters and sometimes doubtful of his faith. The man saw more than most and dared heed the call to brighter light.





On February the tenth in the Year of Grace 1186, Abbot Malchus yielded his body to plague and his spirit to the Almighty. It was fitting that he should die on the first day of Lent; his tenure had been characterized by self-denial and all within his shadow had been denied things temporal. Nevertheless, he had served his chapter vigorously and was mourned by most. The abbey’s priest blessed his soul and his remains were laid to rest in the monks’ graveyard to await the Resurrection.

The abbey had grown and prospered in Malchus’s final years. He had built a small scriptorium, complete with its own separate cloister, and he had been quite pleased with its construction. He had added storehouses and granaries to the perimeter walls; a herbarium, chapter house, and stable were built, as well as a dormitory for the men-at-arms that were occasionally quartered as guests. His only failure was that of not wresting the abbey from control of the archbishop.

After Malchus’s death, Pope Urban III, near death himself and railing against Emperor Barbarossa, sent his legate to Mainz recommending a friend, Stephen of Ghent, as a candidate for Villmar’s growing abbey. Stephen had a worthy pedigree, himself once a lord in Flanders. He had earned a fortune shipping textiles down the Skelt River and just four years prior had been feasting in the huge hall of Count Phillip’s castle.

Stephen had set aside his earthly treasures and took the vows of St. Benedict in order to serve as a brother in the vast French complex of Cluny. It seemed an odd decision at first, at least to his fellows. Many lords left their fortunes in old age to join a monastery, but it was clear they were simply guarding their souls as they faced death. Stephen, however, was not an old lord. He had just seen his thirty-third year, and some wondered what crime he was evading. “Christ,” he claimed, “gave His life at precisely this same age,” and Stephen chose to follow in kind.