A clear answer this time. Not silence.
Refusal.
Aldwin opened his eyes. He looked down at the page beneath his hands for a long moment.
“It will not,” he said.
He said it to the manuscript. Not to any of us. Then he lifted his hands.
The light returned to the page beneath them slowly, brightening back to what it had been before, as though the psalter had been holding its position politely while he made his attempt and had now resumed its conversation with the woman it had crossed eight hundred years to find.
Harper stepped closer to him. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“You told me,” Aldwin said.
“I’m still sorry.”
He nodded once, but didn’t look at her. He was still looking at the manuscript, and I understood he was not going to accept what had just been answered. There were other manuscripts in England. Other monasteries. He had been quietly sending out inquiries for weeks. I had pretended not to notice.
Father William, who had been silent the entire time, spoke.
“Some doors are closed by the One who opens them, my son.” His voice was a gentle rasp. “The grief is yours to carry. Not to undo.”
“I have heard that homily before,” Aldwin said.
“I expect you have.”
“I did not find it persuasive.”
“No,” Father William agreed. “Few do, the first time.”
Aldwin made a sound that was almost a laugh. He stepped back from the lectern.
The psalter brightened. It was no longer for him. It had never been for him. The gold moved beneath the vellum with the steady deliberate light I had come to associate with the manuscript’s attention, and the attention was for Harper.
My father shifted behind me. He was watching her too.
“Lady Harper,” he said.
She looked at the manuscript, her hands folded loosely at her waist, the way she had held them when I first walked in. She did not lift them or place them against the page. The color drained from her face as she took one step backward.
“Not yet. I want to see Runnymede.”
The psalter dimmed. Not the way it had dimmed beneath Aldwin’s hands. Not refusal. The light eased back from what it had been, settled into a steady warm glow, and then was gone.
My father moved past me. “Three days,” he said. “We must prepare.”
Then he turned and left the chapel, and Aldwin, after a long careful look at the manuscript, followed him.
Father William lingered. “I will be in the sacristy,” he said.
The chapel emptied around us. She turned to me.
“He’ll try again,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Aldwin. He’ll find another psalter. There’s a monastery on Sheppey with a manuscript collection that…” She stopped. “He’ll go.”
