The Hawk and the Dove

by Penelope Wilcock

  Brother Edward’s scalp crawled, and gooseflesh stood out all over his body at the sound. His mouth went dry, and his hands trembled as he bent in the gloom to peer at and feel the bundle at his feet. As his hand moved over it, again came that groan: hideous, wordless in anguish. Brother Edward, thoroughly shaken, hesitated a moment and then decided to go for help, and a light.

  Edging his way round whoever or whatever it was, he ran to the sacristy, where he found Father Matthew, as he had expected, laying out vestments with Brother Thomas. They looked up, startled, at Edward’s white, agitated face.

  ‘Brother, for God’s sake, come,’ he gasped. ‘Bring a light, make haste.’

  Father Matthew asked no questions, but snatched up a candle and followed him, and together they hurried back into the Lady chapel, while Brother Thomas followed a little uncertainly, sensing trouble and not sure if he was expected to help or mind his own business. As he crossed the sacristy, he saw that Brother Edward’s sandal had left behind a trail of marks, and the one on the threshold of the room reflected the light a little as a sticky substance will. Frowning, he bent down and held the light to look closer.

  ‘Mother of God, it’s blood!’ he murmured, and carrying the light in his hand followed his superiors out into the Lady chapel.

  There they found Abbot Peregrine, though his face was bruised and beaten almost beyond recognition. His body was tied and bound with his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands behind his back, the right side of his face laid open in a ragged gash that exposed his cheekbone and extended from his temple nearly to his jaw. Blood had flowed from his nose into his mouth and mingled with blood from a split lip. Two of his teeth were spat out on the floor in a sticky puddle of blood.

  Appalled, the brothers looked at each other.

  ‘Who can have done this?’ whispered Father Matthew, but Edward shook his head.

  ‘So many strangers, so many guests. Did you not hear anything in the sacristy?’

  ‘Nothing, Brother. We came in through the main body of the church, not through here, just ten minutes before you found us. We saw no one. Whoever it was must have fled, because—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ interrupted Brother Edward. ‘Brother Thomas, find me something to cut these ropes with, the knife in my belt will be too blunt to do it carefully.’

  Thomas ran off without a word, and Brother Edward gently felt Peregrine’s back and skull to be sure it was safe to move him. His hair was sticky with blood, and there was a swollen, spongy bruise, but his skull was intact. Thomas returned with a small knife, very sharp, filched from the kitchen, and Brother Edward took it from him and bent to cut the ropes that bound the abbot’s arms behind his back.

  ‘Lift the light a little, Matthew. I can’t see what I’m doing. Oh, but what’s this?!’

  Peregrine’s hands, tied behind him, were smashed and mangled, grotesquely broken, disfigured and bruised. Gingerly, Edward cut the cords that bound him. They moved the benches aside and carefully laid him straight, and Edward felt all over him for broken bones.

  ‘That’s his collar-bone broken. Two ribs here. No, three. Hold the light steady, Matthew, let me look at his leg. No, his left leg, that’s it. His shin-bone’s smashed, look at this. That’ll never set straight. His knee too. Brother, what kind of devilish beast can have done this to him? And why? Dear Lord, what savagery! Nothing else broken, though. Brother Thomas, run to the infirmary and ask Brother John for a stretcher. Quick as you can.’

  He sat back on his heels and looked down at the still, battered body.

  ‘Matthew, I kicked him,’ he said. ‘I came through in a hurry, and I stumbled over him. The moan of pain that came from him, I’ve never heard anything like it. He was lying here like this, and I kicked him. Still, thank God he’s alive, poor soul.’

  Brother Thomas came back bringing a stretcher and with him Brother John from the infirmary. As gently as they could, they eased him onto it.

  ‘Brother, have a care for his hands. They may be beyond repairing, but we’ll not injure them further. Cross his arms so, that’s right. Now then, gently.’

  They carried him to the infirmary, and he lay there as still as a corpse, his eyes swollen shut with bruising, his breath snoring in the oozing blood of his nose.

  Until dawn, Edward tended to the broken mess of his hands, fine, scholar’s hands, shattered now. He made wooden splints, and set the bones and bound them straight, but knew with a heavy heart that those hands would never serve again to do fine lettering. He had set the leg bone as well as he could, but it was smashed, not broken clean, and he doubted if it would ever bear a man’s weight again. He set and bandaged the ribs and the collar-bone, too, and then washed and bound the other wounds, salving the bruises with ointments, and laying green poultices on the places where the skin was split. The hideous wound on his face he repaired as best he could. As the sun rose on the following day Edward sank down on his knees and prayed, offering up the work he had done, beseeching the Great Physician to make it good, to bring healing where his own skill fell short.

  They thought Peregrine might die. By the mercy of God his skull and his back were not broken, but the men who had beaten him had left him for dead. However, he did not die, though for a long time he lay without motion or speech, unable to open his eyes. Brother Edward and Brother John took turns to keep constant watch over him, and Father Chad took up the responsibilities of abbot once again.

  That first day, they began by dripping water through his lips from a soaked cloth. Then after two days, as the bruises began to subside a little, they were able to feed him broth and honeyed wine; slowly, slowly dribbling it in through the split, swollen mouth. It was impossible to say if he was in his senses or not, for he made no response to them at all. All the same, they talked to him gently and reassuringly, explaining what was happening to him, words of comfort and love. He was able to swallow most of the soup and wine they fed him, which Brother Edward saw as a sign of hope, but he did not speak to them for three days. By this time the swelling had eased, and his face was recognisable as his, in spite of the bruises and the gash down the right side. Brother Edward was fearful he might have suffered some internal injury, for there was bruising on his belly and back, but though he saw some blood in his water the first day or two, he seemed to have sustained remarkably little damage. They did not attempt to lift him to relieve himself, and he had to be cleaned like a baby.

  They had just finished washing him on the Thursday morning, the third day they had been nursing him, when he spoke to them for the first time. He said, ‘Thank you.’

  Like the other brothers, Brother Edward had respected—but had no especial affection for—their austere, uncompromising abbot, despite his blood-relationship. But nursing that battered body and fighting for him in intercession, he had come to care passionately what became of him. Day and night, he and Brother John had taken turns to watch over the suffering man.

  A flood of relief and joy and love welled up in Edward as he raised his head and met Peregrine’s eyes, which were open at last. He saw the look in those eyes change from a bleak gaze of hopeless pain to wonder at his own face so full of love and relief. Compassion mingled with the relief as Edward saw that the man was astonished to find himself loved. He always remembered the amazement in Peregrine’s eyes as the abbot found the love he had never inspired, never won, now given him as a gift in the midst of his helplessness and pain.

  In the end, it was that love which pulled him through the horror of what had happened to him, and of his helplessness. His proud, independent soul writhed at the humiliation of being fed and cleaned like a baby and recoiled from the prospect of facing life with maimed hands and a useless leg. He spoke little, and complained not at all. ‘Thank you,’ were the words most often on his lips.

  Though he seemed calm and self-possessed, Edward, knowing him from childhood, guessed at the howling terror inside, and would sit and say the Office with him and talk to him about the comings and goings o
f the abbey. He sat quietly beside him at night, too, when Peregrine slept restlessly, sometimes starting awake with a sob of fear. Beyond that, Edward felt powerless to help him, did not know how to reach through his abbot’s reserve to the terror inside, and comfort him.

  As soon as he was able to eat, they propped him up to feed him, but he still couldn’t feed himself because his hands were splinted and bound.

  Brother Edward asked him if he knew why he had been so savagely attacked, and he said yes, he knew. The words came painfully.

  ‘Many years ago now, there was one Will Godricson, who worked on my father’s estate. You probably won’t remember him, Edward; you were with the Franciscans by then. He killed a man in a drunken brawl. My father handed him over to justice, and he was hanged. He was a violent man to the point of insanity, and they could scarcely hold him on the day he was taken away. They bound him, in the end, bound him with his hands behind his back, his feet together and his knees drawn up to his chin. His two young sons were standing there watching; poor, scared ragamuffins, exposed to it all. They were brought up in violence, and they pledged themselves to vengeance on my father for their father’s life. They never found a way to carry it out on him; you know him, well guarded and well armed, he always carried a dagger and knew how to use it. But it must have come to their ears eventually that a son of that household lived here, accessible to visitors and without defence. I suppose they came with the crowd and waited for their moment.

  ‘I had been into the sacristy in search of Father Matthew; but not finding him there, I came out through the Lady chapel, where they were waiting for me. They must have followed me into the church. They approached me, and I greeted them. They seemed vaguely familiar, though it was dusk, and they were but children when I saw them last. They had the look of their father. One of them carried a club, which seemed strange, but then visitors departing on a journey need some defence in the moors and wild places. They… they said….’ He stopped, his voice unsteady, bit his lip and continued, ‘I… they….’ But his voice died to a whisper, and he closed his eyes and shook his head.

  Edward laid a gentling hand on his arm, ‘No, no, lad, no need. Your body tells its own story.’ And beyond that, the tale was never told.

  The day came when he was mended as well as he ever would be, and ready to take up his responsibilities as abbot of the monastery again. The collar-bone and ribs had knitted nicely, but the leg was stiff and crooked for ever, and as Edward had predicted, the shin-bone was too damaged to take his weight, so that ever afterwards he used a crutch to get about. It had to be a crutch, and not a stick, because in spite of Brother Edward’s best efforts, Father Peregrine’s hands were misshapen and twisted. He had stretched them out to defend himself against the club, and to save himself as he was knocked to the ground, and in their cruel, insane vengeance, his attackers had stamped on them in their heavy labourers’ clogs: not once, but again and again and again.

  The brothers were unsure how to behave towards him when first he came among them again. It was as though their abbot had been taken away, and this was another man. Used to the imperious, aristocratic, decisive figure they had known, with his swift, purposeful stride and his hands gesturing impatience, they were appalled by the look of him. He had grown very thin, his face disfigured by the livid scar, his eyes shadowed with pain. His hands were good for almost nothing now, and although he did not try to conceal them, he no longer moved them as he talked, but kept them still. He went every day to the infirmary, at Brother Edward’s insistence, so that Edward might massage the broken hands with his healing aromatic oils, and help him exercise them. Yet though he could feed himself, albeit slowly and with difficulty, and write, though laboriously and untidily, he would never again work on fine manuscript illumination, or sit late at night writing essays, sermons and poems. He could not even cut up his food or fasten his own sandals, and the hands tended to cramp into claws if Brother Edward left off his care of them for any length of time.

  Peregrine’s progress about the place was slow, lame and awkward, painful to watch. There were those who wondered if a man so broken would be fit to continue as abbot of a monastery, but they bided their time and gave him his chance. They found him changed in other ways, too. The old arrogance and self-assurance had been knocked out of him, and he was humbly grateful for the help his brothers gave him to turn pages and cut food. The constant need for help in everyday things brought him closer to the brothers, and the quietly spoken ‘Thank you, brother’, with an appreciative smile, were what they had gained in exchange for the imposing figure they had lost. Uncle Edward said that few of the brothers guessed just what it cost Peregrine to come among them again, disfigured and clumsy and slow.

  Brother Thomas was one of those few. He had helped to carry Father Peregrine to the infirmary that Easter Monday night, and then wandered away to sit on his own in his cell, no longer needed in the infirmary, but with no stomach for company. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the limp body, beaten almost senseless, broken and bloodied. Every time he opened his eyes, he saw the tortured man hanging on the crucifix on the wall of his cell. He couldn’t decide which was worse. In the end he sat staring at the floor until the bell rang for Compline, when he rose automatically to his feet and went down to the chapel. He sat through the Office in a daze, and was glad of the shelter of the Great Silence as he walked numbly back to his cell afterwards.

  Late, late that night as he lay awake on his lumpy bed, unable to sleep, he could not expunge from his mind the sight of those hands: destroyed, hopelessly mangled, swollen, bleeding, lacerated. He felt sick at the memory. He stared into the darkness, thinking of the cool self-possession of the man, the resolute, intelligent face, the eyes with their almost fanatical intensity, the proud bearing of him; but above all he thought of those quick, impatient, clever hands—oh, smashed. The brutality chilled him.

  Even that memory failed to prepare Brother Thomas for the change in Father Peregrine when he came back into the community again; the painful toil of his progress about the abbey, the way his ironic superiority had been snuffed out as if it had never been. Most of all Brother Thomas looked in horror and pity at the silenced hands, scarred and twisted, which Father Peregrine did not attempt to hide, but which no longer spoke in gesture and impatience as he talked. They were still now, bearing their own mute testimony to his suffering.

  ‘How can he bear it?’ said Brother Thomas to Brother Francis, his friend in the novitiate, as they went in to the chapter house together, on the last day of April, the day Father Peregrine officially took up the duties of the abbacy again. ‘How can he bear it?’

  Brother Francis shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is for him as it would be for you or me, Tom. He probably thinks he can’t bear it, but what else can he do?’

  One of the first and worst hurdles for Father Peregrine coming back among the brethren again was presiding over the community chapter meeting, held in the morn ing every day in the chapter house after Mass, when a chapter of St Benedict’s Rule was read, and the abbot gave an address to the brothers, and the affairs of the community were discussed. Easter Day had fallen early, on the twenty-sixth of March that year, and it was on the thirtieth day of April that Abbot Peregrine took his place for the first time in the chapter house again, to preside over the meeting of the brethren.

  The reader that morning was Brother Giles, assistant to Brother Walafrid the herbalist, and he read in his broad Yorkshire accent chapter seventy-two of the Rule, the chapter set for that day.

  ‘Just as there is an evil zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal which separates from evil and leads to God and life everlasting,’ he began, confidently. ‘Let monks, therefore, exercise this zeal with the most fervent love. Let them, that is, give one another precedence. Let them bear…’ Brother Giles’ voice faltered, and he flushed with embarrass ment. ‘Let them bear with the greatest patience one another’s infirmities—’ he gulped, and hurried
on, ‘whether of body or character. Let them vie in paying obedience one to another. Let none follow what seems good for himself, but rather what is good for another. Let them practise fraternal charity with a pure love. Let them fear God. Let them… let… let… let them love their abbot with a sincere and humble affection.’ Brother Giles cleared his throat and finished hastily, ‘Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ. And may he bring us all alike to life everlasting.’ He sat down in confusion.

  Abbot Peregrine sat with head bowed, dreading their gaze on him. Then he lifted his face, with the stark, hungry bones, the savage scar and missing teeth and dark, hollow eyes. ‘The sacred text in this morning’s chapter is from St Paul’s letter to the Romans,’ he said, ‘“Give one another precedence”. That is to say, treat one another with the deepest respect….’ He himself hardly knew what he was saying, but he managed to speak to them calmly and lucidly for ten minutes and conduct the business of the meeting. The first hurdle was past.

  The next thing to face was his pastoral work with the brothers. Peregrine was worried about his novices. Although he trusted his novice master to guide and discipline them, he knew they needed the opportunity to talk things over with their abbot, too. They had had to make shift without it long enough.

  Brother Thomas was asked that morning after chapter to come to the abbot’s lodging for his routine conference, to review his progress and consider his vocation. It was the first conversation Brother Tom had had alone with his abbot since the night before he had made his novitiate vows two weeks before Easter, and he found it hard to conceal his shock at the change in Father Peregrine. Those dark, penetrating eyes had never looked at him like that before; not with remote amusement, nor yet probing and challenging, but with… Brother Thomas searched for a word, and could only come up with… ‘gentleness’. The abbot was still straight and authoritative in his bearing, still shrewd in his appraising look, still very much in charge: but the look of him was quite different.