The Keeper of Ashworth Abbey

12 min read · Gothic romance · Free, complete, 18+

The monk who copied the Ashworth psalter had shaking hands, and by her third week at the abbey Vivienne Marlowe could tell which pages he had written on cold mornings.

The downstrokes gave him away. On a good day his letters stood in line like a choir; on a bad one every stroke wavered at the foot, a reed in moving water. She had the lamp angled low against the January dark and a loupe screwed into one eye.

Vivienne was thirty-six and had catalogued eleven private libraries, most of them for heirs who wanted to know what they could sell. She was the cataloguer people sent for when somebody else had left a job half done. She had never left one half done herself. Ashworth Abbey, a Cistercian house on the moor above Helmsley, roofed and glazed and added to by four hundred years of owners, held some four thousand books in ten bays and a north alcove behind an iron grille, and nobody had made a list of them since the Dissolution. Mr Ashworth called that policy. The contract paid on completion.

Three cataloguers had come before her. Mrs Garside, the housekeeper, had told her so on the first night, ladling soup. “All three got as far as the north bay,” she said, with some relish, “and all three went home.”

The north bay was the one with the grille, and Mr Ashworth kept the key.

That afternoon she was so far down in the 1520s that she did not hear Damien Ashworth come in. She never did.

“He was worse in Lent,” he said. “They kept the fires low.”

She took out the loupe. “You talk about him as if you’d shared a cell.”

“I’ve been reading him a long time.”

He stood at her shoulder in the cold of the east library, close enough for her to smell woodsmoke on his coat and old paper on his hands. He was tall and dark and entirely without hurry, and in three weeks she had not once seen him shiver. Her own breath hung in the lamplight. His never did. She had put that down to the fire he kept at the far end of the room, and then she had stopped putting it down to anything.

“He signed this one,” Damien said, and leaned past her to turn the leaf. His sleeve brushed her wrist. In the lower margin of the last folio, smaller than the text and browner, one line ran across the vellum.

Gervasius scripsit. Domine, firma manus meas donec libri custodiantur.

“Gervase wrote this,” he read. “Lord, steady my hands while I keep the books.”

“That isn’t what it says.”

He went still. She had noticed that about him. Other people fidgeted when they were caught out; Damien Ashworth simply stopped, like a clock with a finger laid on its pendulum.

“Donec with the subjunctive,” she said. “Until. Lord, steady my hands until the books are kept.” She tilted the lamp. “And look at it. Everything else on this page shakes a little. This line shakes as if he wrote it in a burning house.”

“Perhaps he did.”

“Then he knew exactly what he was asking for. It’s good Latin.”

“It was,” Damien said, and went back to his fire without telling her how he knew.

---

The North Bay

Snow closed the road on 2 February and stayed. The abbey shrank to the rooms that had fires in them: the kitchen, the library and the bedroom she had been given in the west range, whose window looked down on the broken cloister and the line of the old precinct wall running away white across the fields to the gatehouse.

She worked through it. Bay eight, bay nine. Damien brought her tea she had not asked for and set it at her left hand, and stood reading over her shoulder until she forgot to mind. Some evenings he talked about bindings and inks and the habits of dead scribes, and he never said I think. He said it was.

“You know every book in here,” she said one night, with bay ten done and the clock gone eleven.

“I know where they’ve all been.”

“Then give me the key, and I’ll write down where the last ones are.”

He looked past her at the grille, and the fire made two small lights in his eyes. “Leave the north bay.”

“I don’t leave bays.”

“I’ll pay the full fee tomorrow. You can go when the road opens and tell the trade you finished Ashworth. Nobody will ever know otherwise.”

It was a strange offer and an insulting one, and he made it gently, which was worse.

“I’d know,” she said.

The next morning Mrs Garside put a key on the kitchen table beside her toast. It was iron and as long as her hand.

“Thirty year I’ve kept house here,” Mrs Garside said, “and he’s not put on one grey hair. I’d like to see one of you get to the end.”

Behind the grille there were no books, or none that a catalogue would expect. There were sixty-one quarto volumes in plain brown calf, their spines blank, and when Vivienne opened the first, the hand on the page was the hand from the psalter margin, the same long g, the same habit of crossing a double t with one stroke, without the shake.

1538. They burned the books in the garth today. I went in and out of the fire until the prior held me back. My hands did not shake. They have not shaken since.

She did what professionals do when they are frightened, which is check. The ink in the first volume was iron gall, gone to rust and eating through the paper in the heavier strokes. The middle volumes were a blacker gall she would have dated to the Restoration. The last was written with a fountain pen, and its last entry was dated the Tuesday before. The hand moved with its times, took up an italic, later a copperplate slope, and under every fashion it stayed one hand, as a face stays a face under changes of hair. Nobody could forge that. Nobody would think to.

She knew, in the part of her that had spent fifteen years in auction-house basements, what stood on these shelves. One hand, one house, four hundred and eighty-eight years. It would put her name in every footnote for the rest of her life. She photographed the first page before she could argue herself out of it, then sat a long minute with the phone face down on her knee.

Then she read.

1665. Went past the gatehouse for the doctor at Helmsley, the carter’s boy being took with the sickness. By the beck my hair was white and my hands were an old man’s hands. Crawled back on them. Young again inside the wall. I am not to leave them.

1889. A woman called Hester came today to mend the library windows.

1902. Hester asked again to see the sea. I walked her as far as the gatehouse and watched her go on alone.

1923. Hester died this morning in the east bedroom, seventy-four years old, holding my hand. It is the hand it was the day she came.

After that the pages were dated and empty: a date at the head of each week and nothing under it, thirty-one years of them. When the writing came back, it came back short.

1954. The cataloguer reached the north bay. Paid her. Sent her to the station.

1988. The same.

2011. The same. I am a coward and I am still here.

---

Brother Gervase

“You’ve met him, then.”

He was in the opening of the bay with no candle, as if he had never needed one in this house.

“He signs every volume,” she said. Her voice came out level, which surprised her. “Gervasius, on the flyleaf. Sixty-one times.”

“Sixty-two. The one I’m writing is on my desk.” He came in and sat on the step-stool opposite her, so close their knees almost touched, and looked at the journal in her lap the way other men look at an old photograph of themselves. “I was twenty-nine. I’d had the shake since I was a boy. The novice-master called it a judgement and the prior called it a waste of good vellum, and the abbot made me armarius anyway, because nobody else could read Greek. When the King’s men came, I prayed for steady hands to carry the books out. I got them.”

“And the rest of it.”

“And the rest of it.” He spread his right hand on his knee. It lay there as still as something carved. “There have been eleven Ashworths in this house. I have been nine of them.”

“You’ve always known what donec means.”

“I was the best Latinist in the house.” He did not look away from her. “The armarius kept a register. A book that wasn’t on his list wasn’t kept, Miss Marlowe, it was only lying about. Mine burned in the garth with everything else. So every generation or so I send for someone to write me a new one, and every time, when she reaches this bay, I find I’m afraid.”

“Of dying.”

“Of not knowing which. Perhaps the clock starts again where it stopped, and I’m twenty-nine with a bad hand. Perhaps the rest comes due at once.” He nodded at the page she had open, the beck and the white hair. “I’ve had a taste of the rest.”

She closed the journal. Her own hands, she noticed, were not steady at all. She reached across and took his right one, turned it palm up in the cold and pressed her thumb into the root of it, where the shake would live if it lived anywhere. Nothing. A pulse, slow and faintly cool.

“You should go when the road opens,” he said.

“Is that what you want?”

“No.”

She had been alone in rooms with employers before and knew to the inch how much of a moment was the employer and how much was the room. This was neither. “I’d like to kiss you,” she said. “You pay my wages and the road’s shut, so you’ll have to take my word that I’m choosing it. You can say no.”

“I’ve been saying no since fifteen thirty-eight.”

“Then stop.”

He did. His mouth was cool at first and then not, and he kissed the way he read, slowly, all the way to the foot of the line. His steady hand came up under her hair and held the back of her neck like something he had been told never to drop. It was her hands that shook. She laid them flat on his chest to hide it and felt his heart under them, keeping time with the abbey clock, and then, for one beat, not.

When she drew back, he did not let go.

“Stay,” he said against her temple. “Leave the bay as it is. I’ll be here every morning of your life, exactly like this.”

Nobody had ever offered her anything she wanted more, and she had the book on her knee that told her how it ended. A woman in the east bedroom at seventy-four. A man at the gatehouse who could not take one more step. Thirty-one years of dates with nothing under them.

“No,” she said. “I’ve read Hester.”

He let her go then.

“And I won’t finish it behind your back,” she said. “If the clock starts, it starts because you said so. It’s your life. It has to be your hand on it.”

---

The Last Entry

The thaw came a week later. A car from Helmsley was booked for ten.

She finished bay ten the night before and wrote the register up fair: three thousand nine hundred and six items, every one with its shelf and its condition, and under the heading North Bay a white space. In fifteen years she had never sent in a catalogue with a gap in it. The fee was on completion, and the trade was small enough that by spring every dealer from York to Bloomsbury would know Vivienne Marlowe had walked out of a library with a bay to go. She left the register on the reading desk with the iron key on top and carried her own bag down to the hall.

Mrs Garside looked at the bag, then at the ceiling, and said nothing, which from Mrs Garside was a speech.

At five to ten Damien came down the stairs with the sixty-second journal under one arm and her pen in his hand.

“Write it,” he said.

“It might kill you.”

“It might.”

“Then why?”

“Because I stood at that gatehouse once and watched a woman walk on without me.” He held out the pen. His hand did not move at all. “I’m not doing it twice. Vivienne. Finish my catalogue.”

She took the pen. “If it goes the other way,” she said, “I’m not leaving you on the floor.”

“I know. That’s why it’s you.”

They went up together. She sat at the reading desk with the north bay open behind her and entered the journals one by one, sixty-two lines in her small square hand, while he stood at the window and did not watch. Before the last line she took out her phone, found the photograph of the first page and deleted it. It would have made her. It would also have put him in a glass case, and he had been kept long enough.

The last line she wrote slowly.

Item. The journals of Gervase, armarius of this house, sixty-two volumes in one hand, 1538 to this present day. Kept.

She blotted it.

Nothing happened. The clock went on. Down in the lane the car from Helmsley still sat outside the gatehouse with its engine running, patient, under the last of the snow.

Then Damien breathed out, and his breath stood white in the cold library between them.

He looked at it as though somebody had spoken in a language he used to know. Then he lifted his right hand, and she watched the tremor arrive in it: small and quick, a reed in moving water, the same shake she had spent five weeks learning in the downstrokes of his psalter. It ran into his fingers and stayed.

He sat down on the window seat rather suddenly.

“Damien.”

“I’m cold,” he said, like a man reporting news from abroad. He was laughing, or close to it. “Vivienne, I’m cold.”

She knelt and took the shaking hand in both of hers. It was warm, and it went on shaking, and his hair was as dark as it had been at breakfast. She held on a long time anyway, in case. The years did not come. Only the one he was in, which was enough to be going on with.

He walked her down to the gatehouse with his coat buttoned wrong. At the line of the old wall, where the snow had been trodden flat to the car, he stopped, and the hand in hers went tight.

“If it’s the other way—”

“Then I’ll be holding an old man’s hand,” she said. “I’ll still be holding it.”

He stepped through. The snow came down on his hair and melted, as it melted on hers.

The driver leaned across and opened the passenger door. “Station, love?”

Vivienne looked at the man beside her, who had kept a library for four hundred and eighty-eight years and had never once seen the sea.

“Whitby,” she said.

In the morning, in a room above the harbour with the window open on grey water, he was a day older, and he woke her to show her.