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either, remarkably.
    â€œNay, not Brother Ambrose. The other one. Lean, wiry fellow with a swift step; hard, sallow face, and silver hair. Him.”
    Brother Martin grasped whom she had in mind.
    â€œHe should be over at the checker this afternoon, good mother. You should feel free to speak to him there.”
    Mother Cottingham stood up as straight as she could, the better to look Brother Martin uncompromisingly in the eye. “I don’t want to speak to him at the checker,” she said. “I want to speak to him alone, and I want him to call at my cottage. Will tha ask him for me?”
    Brother Martin could think of no reason why not. Mother Cottingham, who must have seen eighty years a while back and stopped counting, presented no danger of either temptation or scandal. She had lived there from time immemorial. Her husband, knowing his days numbered, had secured her a dwelling in the safety of the abbey ground during the early days of Abbot Gregory’s time. Father Peregrine, who disliked the selling of corrodies and thought the abbey was best inhabited by the monks (and nobody else), had left the cottages empty when their residents died. Father Chad had filled them again, to raise funds urgently needed, after Peregrine had become too ill to contemplate any realistic prospect of resuming office. But whether the cottages in the row stood filled or empty, Mother Cottingham stayed put in her house, the fifth in the row, next door neighbour to Peartree Cottage. She was not thought to be poor, for she gave generously to the abbey coffers and did not depend on the community for her daily necessities; it was only the house and the proximity to the brothers that her husband had wanted to provide, for they’d had no family beside each other, and he would not think of her all alone in the world after his death. The brothers knew nothing of her earlier history; there remained not one of them now who remembered Ellen Cottingham as a laughing young woman, the beauty of the village and the apple of her husband’s eye. There was no one left who recalled the griefs she had lived through: bearing four sons, three of them dying one after another as babes and her firstborn taken with lockjaw at nineteen years old—a swift and hideous death. She had gone almost mad with grief for her lads, and her man who loved her so had grieved over her grieving. It had taken a long time, but somewhere in midlife she had finally made her peace with God, and she became very devout. St. Alcuin’s grew to be a home from home for her. Simon Cottingham knew she would be all right without him if he could leave her a little nest under the eaves of the abbey church, and he had gone to his rest in peace when it had been finally arranged. Whatever else he had to bequeath her was long forgotten; her affairs were managed by a lawyer in York, but she seemed to have enough to get by.
    â€œYes, I can ask him.” Brother Martin smiled at her. “Urgently, do you mean? What shall I say it’s about?”
    â€œNay, nothing that cannot wait until tomorrow,” the old crone replied. “I wanted to make a little gift to the abbey is all.”
    Brother Martin laughed. “That should fetch him quick and make him happy—and there’s not much does; he isn’t the most cheerful soul on any day of the week. Yes, I’ll tell him for you, Mother, never fret.”
    â€œThank ’ee kindly, tha’s a good lad.” And Mother Cottingham made her slow, creaking passage back to her cottage. She saw no sign of her neighbour as she hobbled slowly by, for Madeleine had gone out to take her goat to new pasture and then had a visit to make to a newly delivered mother in the village.
    Brother Martin proved faithful in his errand, and William, being not behind with any matters needing his attention, had time that same afternoon to visit Mother Cottingham in her home.
    He walked briskly along the close without even