The Miracle at St. Bruno's

by Philippa Carr

  She did not consider the idea that we should go through the door now. But she talked of Bruno and there was something in her manner when she spoke of him that made me sure that he was almost as important to her as he was to me.

  “There’ll be a miracle,” she said to me. “You’ll see. This is what it was for. This is why he was sent. He was put in the crib so that he could be here at this time. You’ll see.”

  She voiced the thoughts of us all. We were all waiting for a miracle; and it would come from the Holy Child.

  The atmosphere was tense with expectancy.

  And then the climax came. But it was not the miracle we were expecting.

  Kate came to my room. It was past midnight. She looked beautiful in a blue robe with her long tawny hair about her shoulders.

  “Wake up,” she said. But I had not been asleep. I don’t know whether it was some premonition which kept me awake on that night. It was almost as though I was aware that this was going to be the end of an era.

  She said: “Keziah’s not in her room.”

  I sat up in bed. “She’s with one of the men.”

  “Yes, she’s with a man. She’s at the Abbey, I dareswear.”

  “That man. He’s sent for her again!”

  “She went willingly enough. It’s…horrible.”

  “Keziah was always like that.”

  “Yes, I know. A man only had to beckon and she was after him. I wonder your father allows her in the house.”

  “I don’t think he knows.”

  “His head is in the clouds. One day he will lose it if he is not careful.”

  “Kate, don’t dare say such things!”

  “I must say what I feel. Everything has changed so much. Do you remember when we went to see Queen Anne? How different it seemed then. Now everything has changed.”

  “No, it was changing then. It has always been changing, but it seems now that tragedy is coming near…nearer to us.”

  Kate sitting on the edge of my bed clasping her knees looked thoughtful. She did not want this kind of excitement. She wanted balls and gaiety, the pleasure of wearing fine clothes and jewels and men desiring her.

  “It’s time your father thought of a match for me,” she said. “And all he thinks of is what is happening at the Abbey.”

  “We all think of it.”

  “It’s so long since we’ve seen Bruno,” said Kate. “I wonder….”

  I had never seen her so concerned for anyone before. She said: “Let’s talk of pleasant things. Let’s forget Weaver and his men and the Abbey.”

  “We could not forget it for long,” I said, “because it is so much a part of our lives and what is happening there is happening to us.”

  But Kate wanted to talk of pleasant things. Her marriage, for instance. The Duke or Earl who would take her to Court. He would be rich and doting; but she was halfhearted and as she talked of the splendors to come I knew she was thinking of Bruno.

  Was it premonition?

  It was five of the clock when Keziah came in. Kate had seen her staggering across the courtyard and brought her to my room. She was without shoes or stockings and her feet were bleeding; her gown was torn and I saw a great bruise across her shoulder. She seemed as though she were intoxicated but I could smell no drink on her breath.

  I cried out: “What has happened?”

  “She seems to be demented,” said Kate. “Something’s certainly happened to her.”

  Keziah looked at me and held out a hand. I took it. She was trembling.

  I said: “Keziah, what is it? What happened? You’ve been hurt.”

  She said: “Mistress Damask. I’m a sinner. The gates of hell are yawning for me.”

  I said, “Pull yourself together, Keziah. What happened? How did you get into this state?”

  “She’s come from the Abbey,” said Kate. “You’ve come from the Abbey, Keziah. Don’t try to deny it.”

  Keziah shook her head. “No. Not the Abbey,” she said. “I’ve sinned….I’ve sinned something awful. I’ve told what should be locked away in here.” She beat her breast with such violence that I thought she would injure herself.

  I said: “For God’s sake, Keziah, what have you done?”

  “I’ve told them. I’ve told him and now ’tis for the whole world to know what was a sacred secret. What’ll they do now, Mistress Damask? What’ll they do now they know?”

  “You’d better tell us what they know,” said Kate. “And you’d better be quick about it.”

  Keziah rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and then burst into bitter sobbing.

  I felt I had strayed into a nightmare. I knew that something portentous had happened. I had never seen careless, sensuous Keziah in such a state before. Had she been an innocent young girl I should have thought that she had been raped by the monsters who had invaded the Abbey, but Keziah was no innocent girl, she was one who would find rape an enjoyable experience.

  But this was real sorrow—abandoned sorrow. Keziah was in torment.

  I said gently: “Tell us, Kezzie. It’ll help. Start at the beginning and tell us all.”

  She turned to me and I put my arms about her. She winced with pain. Her big rather flaccid body trembled.

  “I’ve told,” she babbled. “I’ve told what ought never to be told. I’ve done something terrible. I wonder Satan himself don’t come down for me.”

  “Begin at the beginning,” commanded Kate. “Tell us everything. You’re just babbling nonsense.”

  “Yes, it’ll help you to talk, Kezzie,” I said. “I doubt it’s as bad as you think.”

  “It’s terrible, Mistress Damask, I’m doomed. The gates of hell be yawning….”

  “Don’t start that again,” Kate said impatiently. “Now what happened? That man sent for you and you went willingly. In fact you could scarcely wait to get there. We know that.”

  “Oh, it were before that, Mistress Kate. It were long before that. It was when I found the gate in the wall. That’s when it all began.”

  The gate in the wall! Kate and I exchanged glances.

  “It were covered by the ivy and none would guess there was a gate there, but I found it…and I went through. I walked into sacred ground. I should have known I was damned from then.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” said Kate sharply. “There shouldn’t have been a gate and then you wouldn’t have found it. You couldn’t be blamed for opening and walking through. That was natural.”

  “But it didn’t stop there, Mistress. I saw him there…and he’d thrown off his monk’s robe and he didn’t seem the same without it—a man, nothing more. He was tending the herbs and plucking some and he was a fine man, that much was clear. I watched him and then I called to him and when he saw me he was that startled. He bade me begone quickly. He said after he thought I was some vision sent by the devil to tempt him, which in a way I was. The devil tempted us both.”

  “Go on,” said Kate excitedly, and a glimmer of understanding came to me, for I had a hazy notion as to where all this was leading.

  I could picture it so clearly. Brother Ambrose working there and Keziah tempting him with that blatant sensuality which was inherent and would prove her ruin.

  “I watched him working and I told him it was a pity all that fine manhood going to waste and all he could say was ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ But I was wicked and I knew it was only a matter of waiting. I went away but I came back and I could see that he was expecting me and I couldn’t think of any other man but him and I knew how it was with him. So we lay in the long grass and we did what was only natural for most men but him being a monk made it all the more exciting like for me. For him too, I reckon. And I went back and he wouldn’t come that time because he was busy in his cell itching in his hair shirt or kneeling before the cross asking for purification or something like that. So he used to tell me, but I didn’t listen. I always knew he’d come back and that he wanted to be there as much as I did. And so it was. But then I was with child. I know it had h
appened to others before me but this was different. This was with child by a monk.”

  “It’s not the first time that’s happened to you, I’ll swear,” said Kate, her eyes gleaming with excitement.

  “That was the first time—though it’s happened since, and I’ve rid myself of my burdens with my old Granny’s help. If it hadn’t been the first time I might have acted different. But there I was with child…by a monk…I was frightened. So I said nothing…nothing to him, nothing to nobody, and then it was six months and beginning to show so I went to my old Granny in the woods. She was a wise woman. She’d know what to do. ‘You’ve left it too late, Kez!’ she said. ‘You should have come three months since. It would be dangerous now. You’ll have to have the child.’ So I told her all and that it was a monk’s seed that had made my baby and she laughed then, she laughed so long and loud that she made me feel better. ‘Go back to the house,’ she said, ‘and wear your biggest petticoats. Tell them that your aunt in Black Heath is ill and calling for you. You’re going to her for a spell.’ So I did as she said and I set out with a few things in my saddlebags and I was to travel with a party that my Granny was arranging. But I stayed with Granny and she kept me in her cottage so that no one knew because she had this idea of what we should do when the child was born. She sent for Ambrose and he came to her cottage—though he were living enclosed and that were breaking his vows—and the child was to be born about Christmastime. He didn’t want to do it but my Granny had wonderful powers. He thought she was the Devil in petticoats for he believed by now that he sold his soul to the Devil. She tempted him. ‘It’s your own child,’ she said. ‘The seed of your loins. You’ll want to see it sometimes, watch over it.’ When the boy child was born—it being Christmas, this plan came to my Granny. She sat by the fire rocking herself and talking to the cat. The child was to go into the crib, so they’d think it was a Holy Child. My Granny said they’d bring him up in the Abbey and perhaps he’d be Abbot one day. They made an educated gentleman of him which would be different from his being a serving wench’s bastard. So we planned it and on that Christmas Eve I carried my baby through the secret door and Ambrose took him and laid him in the crib….”

  Kate and I were astounded. We could not believe this. Bruno—the Holy Child, whose coming had been a miracle which had changed St. Bruno’s from a struggling to a prosperous Abbey, the son of a monk and a serving girl! Yet although we cried out against this fantastic story we believed that it was true.

  “You wicked creature,” cried Kate. “All this time you have been deceiving us…and the world.”

  I thought she was going to strike Keziah. She was so angry; and I knew that she could not bear to think of the change in Bruno’s status. She had jeered at the Holy Child but she had wanted him to be set apart from the rest of us.

  Keziah began to sob. “But I’m not deceiving now,” she said. “And this is the most wicked thing of all. Now the whole world knows.”

  “Keziah,” I cried, “you have told that…man!”

  She rocked herself to and fro in her misery. “Mistress, I could not help it. He sent for me to go to the inn—the Abbey Inn. I was taken to a room there and he ordered me to strip and lie down on the bed. So I did and waited for him because I thought….”

  “We know what you thought, you harlot,” cried Kate.

  “But it wasn’t,” said Keziah. “He came and he bent over me and he fondled me rough like and said, ‘You’re not a young harlot anymore, Keziah, but there’s a lot of the harlot still left in you, eh?’ And I laughed and I thought it was a sort of love play and then he took a rope and tied me by the ankles to the bedposts. I struggled a bit but not so much.”

  “You thought it was going to be some new kind of what do you call it…love play?” said Kate.

  “I thought that, Mistress…right till I saw the whip. Then I screamed and he hit me across the face and said, ‘None of that noise, you slut.’

  “I asked him what he wanted of me more than he’d had and more than he could take as he wished for I had nothing more to give. ‘Oh, but you have, Keziah,’ he said. ‘You’ve got something I want and you’re going to give it too if I have to kill you to get it.’ I was frightened, Mistress, too frightened to cry for he looked like a fiend there bending over me, gloating as a man might when he looks on a naked woman but a gloating I hadn’t seen before. Then he said, ‘You’ve had something to do with the monks. You’re not going to tell me a woman like you hasn’t done a little frolicking behind the gray walls. You’d have had your fill of grooms and stablemen and gardeners and any travelers that came this way. You’d want a little change, wouldn’t you?’ Then with my sin heavy on me I began to tremble and he saw it and that made him laugh the more. ‘You’re going to tell me, Keziah?’ he said. ‘You’re going to tell me all about this tumbling on the altar and in the holy chapels.’ I cried out, ‘It weren’t there. It weren’t there. We weren’t as sinful as that.’ And he said, ‘Where were you sinful then, Keziah?’ I shut my mouth tight and I wouldn’t speak. Then he brought the whip down across me, Mistress. I screamed and he said, ‘Scream all you like, Keziah. They’re used to screams in this place and they daren’t complain. That was a taste, a starter.’ I could feel the blood warm on my thighs. He bent over me then and caressed me, in his rough way. He took my ear between his teeth and bit it. He said: ‘Keziah, if you don’t talk I’ll make your body so that no man will ever want to lie with you again. I’ll make your face so scarred men will shudder when they look at you. You’ll want them just the same but they’ll not want you. You won’t find it so easy to give that I’m-willing-and-ready-sir look you gave me in the lane when we first met.’ And I was trembling and I said to myself: I must not tell. I must not tell. And I said nothing and he bent over me and he said, ‘Just once more to remind you how you enjoy it, eh?’ And then he was on me in that fierce sort of way that was almost more pain than pleasure. Oh, Mistress, what have I done?”

  “You never told that beast!” cried Kate.

  She nodded. “He had the whip. He was saying all the things he would do to me and so I cried out, ‘I’ll tell you….I’ll tell you everything….’ And I told him about Ambrose and how I tempted him and how my Granny persuaded him to put the child in the crib and make him holy….And he just stared at me and I’ve never seen such a change in a man. He laughed so much I thought he was going mad. Then he untied the ropes. He said, ‘You’ll soon heal, Keziah. You’ll be better than ever. You’re a good girl, and this has been a good night’s work.’

  “So I put on my clothes and couldn’t find my shoes….I stumbled out of the inn and home and now it’s out. The secret’s out.”

  How right she was.

  The secret was out.

  How quickly, how suddenly I was becoming aware of the violent passions of men. Those few days will always stand out in my mind as the most horrifying I have ever known. I have perhaps since known greater horror, certainly greater suffering, but in those days I was shocked forever out of my childhood. It seemed to me that since the day I had stood with my father at the river’s edge and seen the King pass by with the great Cardinal I had moved slowly but certainly toward this climax. Death and destruction were growing up all around me, like weeds in an ill-kept garden; but during those days I saw a man murdered and that is something that must make an impression on the mind for evermore. I had heard the bells toll for Queen Anne and for Sir Thomas More and the memory made me serious; but this was different.

  All next morning we waited for the news to break. We knew it could not be long. But both Kate and I had been too shaken by it to speak of it to anyone. We hardly mentioned it to each other and when we did spoke in hushed tones.

  Did Bruno know? I wondered. I couldn’t bear to think of his knowing. I knew that it meant so much to him to be the Holy Child.

  I had to see Bruno. I was amazed by the strength of my feelings. I didn’t care what danger I faced. I wanted to tell him that it made no difference to me that he was the
son of Keziah and a monk. In fact I felt a certain relief—although I realized what disaster this would bring to the Abbey. But I must see him; so I went out alone and I ran to the secret door, I pulled aside the ivy and entered the Abbey grounds. My heart was beating so rapidly that I felt as though I were choking. I dared not pause to think what would happen to me if I were caught there. I went to the spot where we used to meet Bruno and I hid under the clump of bushes where Kate and I used to hide, hoping, rather absurdly, that he would come. It was thus that I witnessed this terrifying scene.

  I must have waited there almost half an hour, and at the end of that time he did come, but he was not alone. The monk Ambrose was with him.

  I remembered him because I had seen him when Keziah had set me on the wall and I had been so bewildered by Keziah’s badinage with the monk.

  It was obvious as soon as I saw Bruno that he knew. There was a strange lost look in his face. Ambrose was talking to him. They must have come here because it was an uncultivated spot in the grounds and rarely used by anyone from the Abbey.

  “You cannot understand,” Ambrose was saying; and his voice came to me clearly. “I wanted to watch over you. I wanted to play my part in bringing you up. It was wrong. It was wicked. It was a form of blasphemy…but I did it because I could not bear to be parted from you.”

  There was anguish in his voice which wrung my heart. I could well understand the terrible remorse and tribulation he had suffered, this man who should never have become a monk. I could picture his torturing himself in the solitude of his cell. The sinner whose actions had shut him out of paradise. Thus must Adam have felt when he had eaten of the forbidden fruit.

  I was deeply moved by Brother Ambrose. I think because I remembered that my father had wanted a family; he had left the Abbey because of that, which was clearly what Ambrose should have done. Instead he had tried to have the best of both worlds—his monk’s cell and his son. I understood very well and I wanted Bruno to tell him that he did.

  But Bruno was silent.

  “I have suffered for my sin a million times,” went on Brother Ambrose. “But I have had great joy in watching you. Did you not sense that extra care that I gave you? Did you not feel as I did that you were my very own boy? I was jealous of your fondness for Clement, for the hours you spent with Valerian. I wanted to be the one who taught you your Greek and Latin; I wanted to cook you tidbits in my oven. And all I could do was teach you about the herbs and their healing properties and their cruel ones too. But I grudged everyone else the time they spent with you. They loved you in their way…but I was your father. I would like to hear you call me by that name…once.”