He never fully lost her, and that was the problem. In the abbey in the woods, she was always on his periphery, more real than the silent brothers who fluttered like small, dark birds. She stood behind him during the long days he knelt in the chapel begging God and King’s forgiveness; she lay with him on the straw mattress in his cell at night.

Pulling buckets from the well or chopping kindling in the yard, he spoke to her constantly, conversations of long friends and old marrieds. “I will be in with the water in a moment,” he might say, or, “I saw a brown squirrel carrying an acorn the size of his head; I think we will have a cold winter, no?” She never replied, only smiled her sad smile and looked to her needlework.

The silent, lonely men of the abbey in the woods, who spoke no French and were married to the Church, saw this and smiled knowingly, though they knew nothing, and shook their heads in misplaced pity. And life went on like this for many years, in the presence of the woman he never saw again.