18. Then Doxology
THEN: DOXOLOGY
The priest could not forgive himself for my boxing. He had quarters in the back of the church, eschewing the finer rooms Father Kenneth had occupied in the lord’s keep, claiming he wanted to be amongst the town should anyone call for a priest.
Tibolt visited me several times in the night.
He told me there was nowhere for him to light a fire to keep me warm.
He told me he worried about putting a blanket over the box and suffocating me.
He told me he could not let me out for at the back of the church two of Torm’s guards stood watch, that they were watching him lean over the box that very moment.
“They know I have not the heart for this,” he lamented. “I will think of something, my girl. I will think of something to avoid this happening again.”
I lay in the chill of my own piss and tried to concentrate on his voice and not the bite of the winter night or the smell of myself.
In the morning, I was lifted from the box by the two guards and sent outside. My father was waiting in the street outside.
“Have you repented for your sin?”
I nodded, chastened and beleaguered.
“Good girl,” he said and placed his hand on the top of my head.
I leaned into his touch, and he put his arm around me.
I could not understand myself. I had been furious at him the day before, but now I burrowed into his side, desperate for affection.
But once I was back in our house, once my mother had provided me a warm, damp cloth to wash off with, once I was clothed in a clean shift and dress, once I had been given bread and cheese to fill my empty belly, I was flush with embarrassment and then rage.
I relived an entire church witnessing my shame.
I relived the iciness of the wooden box that had given me a splinter in one leg.
I relived the abandonment. That day I realized I was just like my father.
We were both angry people, just angry for different reasons.
And I vowed I would never let the saint or his men break me.
Shortly after this, Brother Tibolt asked my father if he could tutor me in Rodwin’s doxology, suggesting we study the reasoning, rites, and scriptures of the saint so as to educate me as to why I must behave.
He vowed to use only The Book of Rodwin in his teachings.
He must have been penitent, apologetic for his lukewarm preaching, and somehow he convinced my father this could prevent further boxing.
All it did was create further incidents of the practice.
For once I was in his office, surrounded by more books than my young eyes had ever seen, the priest said, “I do not know what to do with you, Roberta. You seem a fine girl to me. Perhaps in our study, we can understand what makes you question the saint so. They tell me you know how to read.”
He gave me books to study. And the books gave me ideas.
Twice a week, I sat in his office. I was, of course, handed a battered copy of The Book of Rodwin.
I read it in silence in a chair next to the priest as he wrote his sermons.
I had already memorized the long, tedious text about how the female body was a temptation and that women used things like song, dance, and drink to entice men from the righteous path.
But I read it anyway and when I was done, Brother Tibolt said, “Well, perhaps you should read my namesake’s essays.
And, I am supposed to ask, are you being a good girl at home? ”
I said that I was.
The teachings of the Lesser Saint Tibolt were dull but gracious, about putting the needs of others before one’s own, addressing how it was not a woman’s fault that she was born a woman and she could be rescued from hellfire with the instruction of a kind father or husband.
Four seasons passed like this, with me reading in his office twice a week, a strange respite from the upheaval of the house attached to the mill where my father’s ire reigned.
When I was done with the lesser saint’s texts and several more dull doxologies on how to be a good woman, Brother Tibolt said, “I think any of my texts would be beneficial to your spiritual education, my girl.”
But that sweet, scatterbrained man—who should have been a university master in Eccleston, not a priest of Perpatane—forgot his love of books had often eclipsed his love of his saint. And I got my hands on a book that changed my young life.
The priest was an avid reader, having been abandoned as a boy and given as an orphan to a large Perpatanian monastery.
He had been allocated to the library and had spent his life keeping and cataloguing the written works of his faith.
And he had collected his own library. Amongst those tomes were books not related to our religion.
That was where I got into trouble. That was where I found The Life of Una.