You step under the arcade and the light changes at once, the late sun caught and softened by stone. The flags beneath your shoes are dipped in the middle of each slab, worn down by long use into shallow basins that hold the cool of the day. Your footsteps make a small, even sound that carries to the far corner and comes back a half-beat later, thinned. To your left, the arches open onto a square of grass, and in the centre of the grass stands a single yew, very dark, very still. You walk at the pace the cloister asks of you, which is slower than the pace you came in with.
The arches are pointed and not quite uniform. Some are wider than others by a hand's breadth, and the masons who set them have left their marks in the spandrels, faint chisel-lines and the occasional initial cut shallow into the limestone. The stone is the colour of oat straw where the sun touches it and the colour of river-mud where it does not. You run your eye along the line of capitals as you pass, and find, in turn, a curl of stylised oak leaf, a beast with its tail in its mouth, a face whose features have worn back into the block until only the brow and the suggestion of a nose remain. None of these were made in a hurry. The light passes across them without lingering.
Beyond the arches the yew holds its shadow close. Its trunk is fluted, twisted in slow ropes around itself, the bark a reddish brown that takes the afternoon and gives back something quieter. A blackbird is somewhere in the lower branches, turning leaves over for whatever it finds beneath them. You can hear the small dry sound of this, the brief shuffle and pause, shuffle and pause. From the grass comes the smell of cut stems, mown perhaps a day ago, and beneath that the colder smell of stone that has not been warm for centuries. A wood pigeon calls from the roof above the chapter house and another answers from further off, in the town, and then both fall quiet, and the cloister returns to the small sound of your shoes on the slabs.
You pass a bench set into a recess in the inner wall. The wood is dark with age and polished to a low shine along its front edge, where knees and hands have rested against it season after season. You let your fingers trail over it as you go by. The grain runs long and even, and there is a place near the end where someone, perhaps repeatedly, has pressed a thumb until the wood there has taken a slight hollow. The iron brackets that hold the bench to the wall are pitted and have been painted black so many times that the paint itself has become a kind of skin. Above the bench, set into the masonry, a worn inscription in Latin gives a name and two dates and asks for prayers, and the letters are nearly gone in the lower half where rainwater has reached them across the years.
A monk crosses the far side of the cloister, robe the soft grey of a winter sky, head down, hands hidden in his sleeves. He does not look up. His steps are even and unhurried and they make less sound than yours, as if he has learned which slabs are quietest and walks only on those. He passes through a doorway in the corner and the doorway swallows him without sound. You go on. The smell of woodsmoke has drifted in from somewhere outside the precinct, faint and clean, mixing with the green of the grass and the cold of the stone. Somewhere behind a wall a tap is running, and then it stops, and then there is only the slow movement of air through the arches.
The bell above the chapter house begins to ring. It is not the full peal, only one bell, slow, the strokes wide apart. Each note arrives, opens, and is held by the cloister until the next comes. You count without meaning to. Between strokes the silence is not empty, it is thickened by what has just been in it. After perhaps eight strokes the bell stops, and the last note travels off across the roofs and out beyond the precinct walls and is gone into the town. You stand for a moment under one of the arches. The sound has left a kind of warmth in the air, a slight pressure, and then that too thins, and the air is only air again, cool, with woodsmoke at its edge. You begin walking once more. The flags continue their small basins underfoot, each one cupping a shadow that the low sun cannot quite reach.
The light is going by quarter-hours now. Along the inner wall it climbs in a slow band, pulling itself up the stone from the floor towards the corbels. Where it touches the limestone the surface comes briefly alive with grain, with the small pocks left by water and frost, with the dust of swallows' nests tucked under the eaves. A patch of lichen near the second buttress has gone the colour of marigolds in the slant. Two arches further on, the light catches a spider's line stretched between a column and the leading of the window above, and the line glitters and then does not, depending on how you turn your head. You watch the strip of sun climb a course of stone, pause at a joint, and continue. The grass in the centre has darkened by a shade. The yew has not moved, but the shadow it throws has lengthened across the south walk and is now reaching the foot of the wall beneath the cloister windows.
You come to the corner. Here the slabs are newer, replaced perhaps a hundred years ago, and they ring slightly differently underfoot, a flatter, drier note. A door stands ajar in the inner wall, dark oak banded with iron, the hinges long and ornamented at their ends. Through the gap you can see the corner of a room with a tiled floor and the leg of a wooden table, nothing more. You do not stop. The smell coming from the room is of beeswax and old paper, settled into the wood of the door itself, present even when the door is closed, drawn out now by the warmth the day has left in the oak. You pass on. The arches along this side are blocked at their lower halves with low walls, and on these walls cushions of moss have grown, soft greens and rust-greens, holding the damp of the morning still, untouched by the late sun that cannot quite reach them.
In the far walk, the windows of the cathedral itself open above you, tall and narrow, and the glass in them is old, full of slow ripples and small bubbles. The light coming through is broken into faint colours that lie on the flags in long, mild lozenges of rose and green. You walk through them and they move briefly across your hands and the cloth of your sleeves and are left behind. The sound of your steps has changed again here, deeper, where the vault rises higher. A draught moves through from some open door further inside the building, carrying the smell of cold candle-stone, of polished brass, of the wax cloths kept folded in a cupboard somewhere out of sight. The draught passes and the air settles. Outside, beyond the precinct wall, a single voice calls something in the street and is answered, and the words are too far off to be words.
The yew has gone fully into shadow now. The grass beneath it has turned the deep colour grass takes when the sun has left it but the sky is still light. Above the cloister roof the sky is a pale, even blue, with one high streak of cloud the colour of the inside of a shell. A swift cuts across it, very high, and is gone before you can be sure. The flags ahead of you are dimming. You walk the last of the south walk slowly, your hand brushing now and then against the cool of the column-shafts, and the columns are warm at their southern faces still and cold at their northern, and you can feel both as you pass. Somewhere in the stone above, a small bird settles for the night and is quiet. The light along the inner wall has climbed to the corbels and stopped, narrowing into a thin gold line that thins further. The yew is one shape. The cloister is another. The air is cooler against your face than it was when you came in, and softer, and going on softening, and the day is taking itself away by degrees so small that only the stones are keeping count