"Have it out with this God of yours," she said out loud.
"For I surely cannot have you, my sweet Tom, until you do," she whispered in her heart.
There were things he recalled with clarity – blinding, jagged-edged clarity –Agnes' blood, red-black in the snow; the half-moon print of her jagged nails embedded in his own hand; the slight and final tremor – not seen, felt only – as he pressed his warmth against her, in vain; the smell of life and death curiously mingled in the earth he packed over her body; the cries of his children; the metallic taste of the tears he swallowed.
There were other things he could never quite catch hold of. They teased him throughout his days of tramping the inhospitable roads, but when he lay down at night, determined to imbibe them to dull the pain, they slipped away.
He could not remember any longer the sound of Agnes' heart beating beneath his cheek as years of sleepy evening shadows had embraced them. He could not claim her woman's scent or feel her fingers tracing his lips when she yearned for his kiss. He could not taste the liquid welcome her body had long offered. He could not find the face of his newborn son.
Sleep was his blessing and his curse in those days. It laid hold of him powerfully soon after his aching body was stretched out in solitary exhaustion night after night, so that he had not long to pursue his fruitless quest. But it also resisted severing its bonds when the morning sky should have succeeded in breaking its hold. And so it locked him, instead, in an eternal weariness.
And he both welcomed its release and feared its sapping power.
He, who had helped lay out the aged body of his father and had later borne his share of the weight of his mother's simply-boxed earthly remains to finally lie beside that good man, could speak their beloved names and then wipe away warm tears from his cheeks with time-resigned fingers.
But he could not weep for his wife; he could not sob for his son.
It had not been possible since he got up from his knees before a naked grave and stumbled back down the path to own to his children that he had lost both their mother and their brother.
Sometimes he could scarcely breathe, and then he feared Martha and Alfred might be truly orphaned.
He could confess that was the dread that drove him, in part, to Ellen's tender care.
He could not confess what drove him away from her full embrace.
Sometimes a black shadow framed his vision, creating a limited tunnel, and then he feared he might be going blind and becoming a burden.
He could confess that specter bound him, in some measure, to Ellen's healing hands.
He could not confess what bound his heart from final commitment.
Sometimes he could not consume the food before him or control the tools of his trade or be certain his speech was even coherent. The simplest of acts required immense concentration to carry out with any sort of dignity or purpose.
He could confess his gratitude for Ellen's calm acceptance of his limitations.
He could not confess what prevented him from binding his soul to hers.
He could not confess.
He could not cry.
He could not curse.
And so his losses multiplied. He sensed that it was happening, but he was helpless to prevent it.
Rising each morning, he would steal out of whatever shelter they had claimed for the night and take himself as far away as possible from human contact. It was the only time of day he could allow the mask to slip.
And just for a moment, he would acknowledge that his soul was dying, drowning in grief. His fingers would close around the simply carved emblem of faith he had slipped from its resting spot between Agnes' breasts and placed against his own. His lips would dutifully whisper the familiar words of orthodox piety before slipping into anguished protest.
"I cannot do this any longer. Help me. Save me. Oh, God, Agnes … I did not mean to leave our son. Forgive, forgive, for pity's sake, forgive …"
And then would come the primal moan.
And to still its rush out of his soul and past his lips, to cage it again before it could burst forth and betray his helplessness, to master it before it consumed his life, he would gather the hem of his rough sleeve in his fingers and force the weave past his lips.
And he would choke back the sound, choke back the tears, choke back the all-consuming anguish and pay a fearful price to become a man again.
Ellen always knew when he left his bed, but she held her peace. She, who had been acquainted with such grief herself, understood something of its timeline.
He would come to her completely one day. He would accept more than her sweet kisses and soft finger strokes against his cheek.
She believed this to be true because she could not bear to think otherwise.
And she could wait for his heart to release Agnes. After all, she had been waiting for him for years, without even knowing his face.
Now, at least, she could drink in the sight of him as they trudged the roads. She could rejoice in the occasional gentle smile, delight in the velvet softness of his voice, breathe in the tantalizing tang of his sweat when the sun warmed their path.
She could dream dreams embodied.
What she could not overcome, she was finally confessing to herself, however, was the other thing that bound him. It was a thing she could not give a name to. Its identity eluded her and she had begun to fear that if she could not comprehend the monster that haunted his dreams and clawed its way through his waking hours, she would be condemned to love a shell of a man for the rest of her life.
And so, today she followed him, waiting for some sign, watching silently for some clue as he climbed the slight rise beyond the makeshift lean-to where their children still slept.
Even one such as she who had been outside the Church for years could recognize Tom's intent as he slipped to his knees beside the oak stump at river's edge. She suspected, as she watched him fumble at his cloak's neck binding, that his fingers searched for the symbol that God Almighty had sacrificed His Son. His prayer in a tongue now foreign to Britain's shores had some meaning for one such as she, educated in its intricacies, but she wondered if Tom, the son of a stonemason, understood precisely how he was addressing the deity.
Even as she pondered his devotion, though, she realized something had altered. No longer upright on his knees, Tom had swayed and fallen against the stump, the fingers of one hand still clutching the crucifix; the others curled into a fist that hammered at the rough-barked surface.
At first she thought he wept, his face pressed against the same unforgiving wood. But there were no tears. He was beyond them. He had crossed into territory where she had never ventured, not even in the worst of times after she lost Jack's father.
His body trembled as he raised his head and searched the early morning sky.
"Help … Forgive … Agnes, my love, forgive … Oh, God, Oh, God, not another day …"
Now, she thought, now he would release his anguish in scalding tears, like the ones staining her own cheeks as she watched him suffer.
She turned quietly to move away, lest he sense her presence and be shamed to have her as witness to his unmanly grief.
Two steps she took before the terrible moan halted her progress. And when she turned back, it was to see him collapsed to the ground, head bent almost to the leaf-strewn dirt.
She ran then, unable to let him bear it alone, and sank beside Tom, reaching for his face, pulling him toward her comfort.
But he would not come. He would not yield. He would not accept the healing warmth of her body.
"No, no," he whispered raggedly, his cross-enfolding fingers pressed against his lips.
"I can't … You have to go."
"Nowhere. I'm going nowhere. Let it go, my love. Let me help you," she begged as her fingers traced the anguished planes of his face. "I know what it's like. You must let it wash away."
He struggled to his feet and backed away from her, his jaw clenched, his fists crossed over his chest as though to ward her off.
"You don't know. Only God knows and I can't … I can't make it right with Him. I can't forget what I did. My son. I left my son to die. Do you see the kind of man I am, Ellen? My wife is gone. My son is dead. I can't take care of you or our children. I am no man. God help me, I am no man any more."
A thousand lifetimes passed while they watched each other in misery.
It was Ellen who finally broke the spell.
"Then have it out with this God of yours," she whispered and made herself walk away lest he read the rest of her thoughts.
Three weeks later they came to Kingsbridge Priory.
When they spoke, it was of inconsequential things. They had survived the attack at Shiring Castle and taken to the road again. If the children had any faith left that there was a future for them in some settled place, they owed it to Tom's grim determination that they suffer as little as possible for as long as possible.
But he could not alter the fact that they were vagabonds in search of some place to call home.
He did not come near her, except for that one brief moment at the castle when elation that they were still alive overcame both of them and they embraced with joy.
But since then, when they camped for the night, he spread his blanket on the farthest side from her. And Ellen did not force the issue.
She, who knew how to heal and mend from the bounty of the forest and fields, had exhausted her storehouse of comfort remedies slipped secretly into his food. And she had determined that another opportunity for rejection would benefit neither of them.
Sometimes she thought of the cave.
She could return.
But there was Jack – and Jack's future. And, more every day - curse him - there was the man who would not have her.
He no longer left them in the early morning hours. She had no idea where he begged his God for forgiveness. But she knew she was watching him die daily. She could see it in his eyes.
"We'd like to repair your church," Tom told the Kingsbridge prior that morning, forcing a breath of hope into his voice.
But once again, the answer was no. Once again, God had refused the offer of a sinner to serve him.
The stonemason accepted it as his due. He only ached for those who depended on him.
Unexpected. Totally unexpected.
Martha's cry should never have been heard in the safety and security of the priory, but recognizing it, Tom raced toward his daughter.
And came face to face with the brigand who had attacked her in the forest, the one who had set in motion the chain of events that had robbed a richly dreaming master builder of true wealth beyond belief.
Tom seized a cudgel, raised it high and ran forward to avenge his daughter, energized by the emotion he had been forcing down inside his very soul for so long.
Silent Jack intervened.
"Get away from me," Tom screamed at the boy, throwing him off, time after time, as he tried to reach the thief decked out in rough church clothes. "That man nearly killed my daughter."
"No! I saw him that night," Jack insisted quietly as he exerted all his strength to hold back this man he, too, loved.
"What night? What are you talking about?" Tom demanded.
"The night that your woman died," Jack claimed, finding it impossible to meet Tom's tormented gaze. "He took it," he added miserably, dreading to imagine what seething cauldron of emotion he might be uncovering, but knowing Tom deserved the truth.
"He took what?" Tom breathed.
And then, despite the impossibility that it could be so, he heard his son cry.
Alive. His son was alive.
Tom bent trembling knees before the most implausible of rescuers and extended his arms. His eyes closed in a moment of silent supplication, but the only words he uttered aloud were a whispered plea: "Please, I won't hurt him. I promise."
It should have been the happiest moment of his life, but as his babe cried within the shelter of his arms, his worst doubts and fears seemed to be confirmed.
"I'm no good to you, am I? I'm no good to anyone," he told the child he had left for dead and had then pleaded to die for ever since.
Then the tears came.
"He's better off here than he is with me, but I don't want to leave. I left him once before. I can't do that again," he told Ellen when he had surrendered the baby to the one best able to care for him.
"You've little choice," she said, kneeling beside him near the fire. He had not yielded to her completely yet, but she knew he was very close. She had watched hours earlier in anguish while his body shook with the force of cries suppressed these long hopeless months. She yearned to believe that with that dam he had so zealously guarded broken, he would be able to open himself to more. For he could now rest from the haunting fear that grief released would grant that grief a permanent upper hand.
"I know that. You think I don't know that? I can't support my family. I can't save my son. Why can't God give me work just this once?" demanded the man whose greatest passion was to honor Him.
And then He did.
For all a reborn Tom knew.
Later, when the truth came out – the terrible truth that Jack, the boy in search of a father, had seized the chance to be a literal answer to the prayer of a father in search of a boy – there was another hell to pay. Another unnecessary loss. Another man-made heartache.
But in the interim there was a peaceful space opened long enough for a rough-handed angel, as Prior Phillip described him, to enter in and, having finally dealt with his own spiritual crisis, to help the good prior through another.
There was forgiveness long-since freely offered and finally claimed.
There was purpose fulfilled as a master builder sent by God stepped in to clean up the devil's mess.
In the interim, in a place dominated in thought and fact by what Tom always envisioned as God's light-filled anteroom – a point halfway to heaven - there was love.