He beamed and turned back, going quickly after the other monks towards the chapel, from where the bell continued to toll.

Twelve

walked between the monastery buildings towards the cloister at the far end. No one was here save a scraggy little black and white cat which streaked away into the shadows on my approach. I looked with pleasure at the beauty of the pattern made by the line of arches and at the stones of the floor. There was no sound. The singing of the monks at their office was contained somewhere deep within the walls. At the end of the cloister, I stepped off the path and onto closely cut grass. I had found myself in the garden, though one without any flowerbeds or trees. I stopped. I was surrounded by cloisters on three sides, on the fourth by another building. There was moonlight enough to see by.

I wondered what kind of men came here to stay not for a few days’ retreat or refreshment, but for life. Unusual men, it might seem. Yet the Guest Master was robust and energetic, a man you might meet anywhere.

I wondered how I would find the Librarian and the Abbot. And as I did so, I began to cross the grass. It was as I reached the centre of the large rectangular garden that I noticed the pool. It too was rectangular, with wide stone surrounds and set level with the ground. I wondered if there were fish living a cool mysterious life in its depths.

It was as I drew close to it and looked down that I felt the small hand holding mine. I thought my heart would stop. But this time the hand did not clutch mine and there was no sense that I was being pulled forward. It was, as on that first evening, merely a child’s hand in mine.

I looked down into the still, dark water on which the moonlight rested and as I looked I saw. What I saw was so clear and so strange and so real that I could not doubt it then, as I have never doubted it since.

I saw the face of a child in the water. It was upturned to look directly at me. There was no distortion from the water, it was not the moonlight playing tricks with the shadows. Everything was so still that there was not the slightest ripple to disturb the surface. It was not easy to guess at his age but he was perhaps three or four. He had a solemn and very beautiful face and the curls of his hair framed it. His eyes were wide open. It was not a dead face, this was a living, breathing child, though I saw no limbs or body, only the face. I looked into his eyes and he looked back into mine, and as we looked the grip of the small hand tightened. I could hardly breathe. The child’s eyes had a particular expression. They were beseeching me, urging me. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still there.

Now the small hand was tightening in mine and I felt the dreadful pull I had experienced before to throw myself forward into the water. I could not look at the child’s face, because I knew that I would be unable to refuse what he wanted. His expression was one of such longing and need that I could never hold out against him. I closed my eyes, but then the pull of the hand became so strong that I was terrified of losing my balance. I felt both afraid and unwell, my heart pounding and my limbs weak so that, as I turned away from the pool, using every last ounce of determination, I stumbled and fell forward. As I did so, I reached my left hand across and tried to prise the grasp of the small fingers away, but there was nothing to take hold of, though the sensation of being held by them did not lessen.

‘Leave me alone,’ I said. ‘Please go. Please go.’ I heard myself speak but my voice sounded odd, a harsh whispered cry as I struggled to control my breathing.

The hand still tugged mine, urging me to stand up, urging me to do what it wanted me to do, go where it wanted me to go.

‘Let me go!’ I shouted, and my shout echoed out into the silent cloisters.

I heard an exclamation and a hurried movement towards me across the grass and Frère Jean-Marc was kneeling beside me, taking me by the shoulders and lifting me easily into a sitting position, tutting in a gentle voice and telling me to be calm.

After a moment, my breathing slowed and I stopped shaking. A slight breeze came from the mountain, cool on my face, smelling of the pine trees.

‘Tell me,’ the monk said, his face full of concern, ‘tell me what is troubling to you. Tell me – what is it that is making you afraid?’

Thirteen

here could have been no place more calming to the senses or enriching to the spirit than the great library at the monastery of Saint Mathieu. Sitting there the next day in that quiet and beautiful space, I counted myself one of the most fortunate men on earth, and nothing that had happened to me seemed to be more than the brush of a gnat against my skin.

The library was housed in a three-storey building separate from the rest, with a spiral stone staircase leading from the cloisters firstly into a simple reading room set with pale wooden desks, then up to the one holding, so the Librarian told me, all the sacred books and manuscripts, many of them in multiple copies.

But it was the topmost room, with its tall, narrow windows letting in lances of clear light and with a gallery all the way round, which took my breath away. If I could compare it to any other library I knew, it would be to the Bodleian’s Duke Humfrey, that awe-inspiring space, but the monastery library was more spacious and without any claustrophobic feel.

At first, I had simply stood and gazed round me at the magnificence of the shelving, the solemnity of the huge collection, the order and symmetry of the great room. If the books had all been empty boxes it would still have been mightily impressive. There were slender stone pillars and recessed reading desks in the arched spaces between them.

The floor was of polished honey-coloured wood and there was a central row of tables. At the far end, behind a carved wooden screen, was the office of the Librarian. Along the opposite end were tall cupboards which contained, I was told, the most precious manuscripts in the collection.

The cupboards were not locked. When I noted this, the Librarian simply smiled. ‘Mais pourquoi?’

Indeed. Where else in the world would so many rare and precious items be entirely safe from theft? The only reason they were kept out of sight was to protect them from damage.

THE LIBRARIAN HAD brought me book after wonderful book, simply for my delight – illuminated manuscripts, rare psalters, Bibles with magnificent bindings. He was an old man, rather bent, and he moved, as I had noticed all the monks moved, at a slow and measured pace, as if rush and hurry were not only wasteful of energy but unspiritual. Everything was accomplished but no one hurried. His English was almost flawless – he told me that he had spent five years studying at St John’s College, Cambridge – and his interest and learning were wide, his pleasure in the library clear to see. He had a special dispensation to speak to me, but he did not waste a word any more than he wasted a movement.

I had slept well and dreamlessly after a late visit from the Infirmarian, who had given me what he described as ‘un peu de somnifère gentil’ – a dark green liquid in a medicine glass. He had checked me over and seemed satisfied that I was not physically ill. Frère Jean-Marc had brought my breakfast and explained that the Abbot had been spoken to and would like to see me at two o’clock but that he felt a visit to the library would be the best medicine. He was right.

‘And now,’ the Librarian, Dom Martin, had said, coming towards the reading desk at which I was sitting in one of the alcoves.

From there, I could look into the body of the library, and the sunshine making a few lozenges of brightness on the wooden floor. The place smelled as all such places do, of paper and leather, polish and age and wisdom – a powerful intoxicant to anyone whose life is bound up, as mine had long been, with books.