The Hour Before Dawn

by Penelope Wilcock

For the first time an impish grin suddenly lit Madeleine’s face. “Squeamish, eh? Stay out here then! Come, Adam; come, Oswald; let’s get this done.”

  Abbot John let Father Oswald take his arm and, leading him, followed Madeleine into the infirmary. Though the day was warm, for this occasion Sister Bede had kept her infirmary charges in their rooms. Priests were not to be troubled by the uninvited presence of her sisters. She stood ready in an inner room, where the fire had been burning since morning. Madeleine and Sister Bede had prepared the room together while John went in search of what they needed. A bed stood near the window, through which a strong shaft of sunlight shone. Two uncompromising Franciscan pillows topped by a third, a soft goose-down pillow, had been set ready. “We can’t let him lie flat on his back without a complete tongue,” Madeleine remarked. At the foot of the bed, a table had been spread with a clean fair linen cloth. On it they had laid out a small bowl and four large bowls covered with cloths, a tidy pile of lint scraps, fine silk and needles for suturing, two short, slender knives, a low stack of neatly folded linen towels, a stoppered flask and a beaker both of forest glass, the beaker empty, the flask half-full of something red. The rays of sun from the window sparkled on the glass and lit ruby glints in the contents of the flask. Warming on the hearth stood a pitcher of wine, its aromatic fumes permeating the air of the room along with the pleasant fragrance of wood smoke. Sister Bede held in her hands a second stoppered flask two-thirds full of dark liquid.

  “You have used the exact measures I said?” asked Madeleine. “He is thin; we must not give too much.”

  “Exactly as you instructed, Sister,” the infirmarian replied.

  “God reward you. Now the challenge will be for him to swallow it. It does not have to go down too fast, thankfully. Father Oswald, we need this drink to go down without choking you, so I will not administer it, you must do it yourself. Don’t fret if you dribble some, it doesn’t matter. We shall know when you have had what you need, for you will start to drowse.”

  She took the pitcher of wine from the fireside and poured some into the glass on the table to just over half-full. “Now, Sister Bede, add from your flask until the glass is comfortably full,” she instructed. “There, that’s enough.”

  She set the pitcher back by the fireside and took the glass to Oswald. “Wash your hands, Father John,” she said, careful to use his name in religion in the presence of Sister Bede, who valued respect. The infirmarian set her flask on the table and uncovered one of the four large bowls, into each of which had been poured boiling water now cooled to be comfortably hot. The small bowl held wine for cleaning Oswald’s eye sockets. John smelled the pungent fragrance of lavender and conifer oils in the steam as he washed his hands thoroughly, using the nail brush set beside the bowl. Sister Bede took from him the towel he had used when he had dried his hands.

  Meanwhile Oswald, under Madeleine’s watchful eye, was making a success of swallowing the dwale. He used a peculiar tossing of his head to get the liquid down; because there were no solids incorporated into it, the technique was simple and effective.

  “Well done,” said Madeleine quietly as he continued to drink. “That’s right,” she murmured softly. “Good lad… well done, my brother…” And as she continued to speak to him softly, the three of them watched his head nod and his body start to sway. Madeleine had her hand around his as his grasp relaxed and let go of the glass. “Now!” she said without raising her voice. Sister Bede took his legs at the knees, and Madeleine took him under the shoulders. They lifted him across the small room and onto the bed. John watched, holding his hands, now completely clean, clear of everything.

  As Sister Bede positioned Oswald on the bed, Madeleine hastily but thoroughly scrubbed her hands in the aromatic water of the second large bowl. “Pick up the lint pieces, Adam,” she said, forgetting Sister Bede’s sense of etiquette. “Sister, bring the bowl of wine.”

  One by one she took the scraps from John, and he watched as she cleaned the sockets meticulously, first one and then the other, ensuring that all was thoroughly cleansed and not the smallest speck of a foreign body left inside. Everything she did was swift but unhurried, every movement deft and neat. Observing her, John saw she had forgotten herself, forgotten the horrors of recent memory—everything except the task in hand. As she worked, she dropped each used scrap of lint on the floor at her feet. When the pile in John’s hands was down to three scraps remaining, she stepped quickly back to the table, washed her hands again in the third large bowl, and dried them on the third towel, dropping that too on the floor.

  She took up the first of the two needles threaded with the silk, and John watched her clever fingers in admiration as she made the neatest job of suturing Oswald’s left eye. “Pick up one of the blades for me, Adam, from the table,” she said when she was done. He brought her the very sharp scalpel set there, and she cut the thread, dropping the blade into one of the bowls in which she had washed her hands. Then she scrubbed and dried them a third time, took up the second silk, and sutured the right eye. John was ready with the second blade as she completed the stitching. She cut the thread, dropped the blade in the bowl with its fellow, washed her hands in the water she had last used, and dried her hands on one of the two remaining towels in the stack.

  She came back to Oswald’s side. “We just wipe off with wine now for good measure,” she said. “You do one. I’ll do the other.” She took one of the two scraps John still held, dipped it in the bowl of wine in Sister Bede’s hands, and wiped the left eye carefully from centre to tail. John did the same with the right eye.

  “Now we wake him up. Give me that last scrap of lint.”

  Madeleine took the stoppered flask of red liquid from the table. “This is vinegar and water—God reward you, Sister; you can put that bowl of wine down now and pick up the discarded cloths from the floor.”

  Splashing the vinegar and water on Oswald’s temples, Madeleine spoke his name several times. He closed his mouth, which had fallen open as he slept, and began to murmur incoherently. “Oswald! Speak to me!” said Madeleine sharply in a voice of command not to be ignored, and Oswald obediently responded with some blurred and incomprehensible reply.

  She looked satisfied. “That’s all I need. Well, that went without a hitch! He can stay in here until he is fit to stand and walk. By Vespers he should be able to return to the guest house. Abbot John was an infirmarian, Sister Bede; this man will be safe in his care. Can I leave the two of you now to clean up in here and bring him out into the fresh air as soon as he is ready?”

  She washed her hands one last time and dried them on the last remaining towel, leaving it on the table for John to do the same if he wished, then went out into the sunshine. “We are done; all is well,” she said to William who watched her approach, his expression intent in expectation of her report. “They are tidying up and tending to him. Would you care to walk up the hill a little? I need to feel the breeze on my face. It’s hot in there.”

  William did not reply but got up from the low wall on which he had been sitting and went with her up the grassy track that led toward their burial ground. Madeleine glanced at him as they walked together. “What has been happening—exactly, I mean? I heard what my brother said last night,” she asked as they strolled up the path. The scent of chamomile was sharp on the warm air.

  “Happening?”

  “To you, that you tried to take your life—and to Oswald? I have not put together a full picture.”

  William sighed. “To tell you the truth, I am almost weary of the tale.” He plucked a stem from a tall weed that grew by the path and toyed with it, pulling the leaves off one by one, rolling them between his fingers. “Well, then, our community—and I as its prior—we were not loved; we were not gentle; we were not charitable. We made enemies, and they burned our house. Oswald—oh, but you can see what happened. He escaped the fire, but he was seen by those who had a grudge against us. They thought they’d teach him a lesson since they hadn’t succeeded in burni
ng him to death.”

  Madeleine stole a glance at his face, hearing the savage bitterness that came into his voice as he contemplated what had been done to Oswald. Set and pale, not even noticing her face turn toward him, ripping the remaining little leaves from the plant stem, he continued, “First they put out his eyes, after a violent scuffle; he has told me all this as we’ve travelled, but his speech is so poor it has taken a while to understand. That—the eyes—did in his inclination to resist anything else they had in mind. He thinks they did not want him to recognize them. Next they used him much as you were used and gelded him as well just to make their point. He thought he was beyond caring by then and imagined with one last kick they would leave him alone with his agony, but no. One of them had the bright idea he might try to tell the tale. To ensure he did not, they thought they’d leave him with no means to do so. That was Oswald, then. What’s left of him you can see for yourself. He seems to me to have come through with surprising fortitude and resilience. I wouldn’t have guessed he had it in him.

  “And me? I was afraid for my life and was welcome nowhere. I tried house after house, and they would not let me in. When I finally came to St Alcuin’s, I was hated there as thoroughly as anywhere. They knew me from former days. I had used their abbot ill. I guess you remember him. He was a crippled man. I was not kind to him. The community had no mind to give me refuge. Your brother, God bless him, did what he could to plead for me, but they remained, all but a few, indifferent. It was my only hope, you understand, or I would not have gone there. I did not expect they would have forgotten how I’d used their Father Columba. So nowhere was safe. I thought I’d better finish it before I fell into rougher hands and found myself tortured and beaten and maimed. But Brother Thomas—though he loathed me with every fibre of his being and never hesitated to let me know it—found me swinging and cut me down, and here I am. They let me stay. That’s it.”

  They walked on in silence.

  “Did you… did you really deserve—either of you—anything of this?”

  William stopped and looked at her frankly. “Aye, we did.” Then he carried on walking. “We surely did. But it was not the fire nor the hatred nor the fear that made me sorry for it—but that Thomas saved my life without stopping to think, for all he hated me, and that John did what he could to shelter me from every well-earned punishment, and that Michael sat up all night to pull me through when I had pneumonia and would have come out of the safety of those walls with me if they had still turned me away. I saw in them something that puzzled me. Something beyond what I have encountered anywhere else. It is a connection with Christ. So I…”

  “Yes?” Intrigued, Madeleine, looking sideways at him, saw his shyness, the faint colour that rose in his cheeks. “What?” she said.

  “I opened my heart to Christ,” William mumbled. “I invited him in.”

  “You are shy about this? Is it not what every brother does?”

  William laughed. “No, it’s not. And yes, I am. It feels very private. Despite what you see, Madeleine, I am not entirely hard boiled. Somewhere at the core something still is alive, which must imply some kind of sensitivity—some vital nerve still sensible to love and fear and pain. But I protect it as best I can.”

  “You mean you still have a soul?”

  Again he stopped in his tracks, and she was surprised to see as he looked at her that the question had found and touched that nerve. “I hope so,” he whispered.

  “I hope so too,” she answered, offering him a way out of the space of vulnerability he found himself in, “or else you would be just like a woman—for the theologians among you monks say, do they not, that women have no souls?”

  William’s eyes met the challenge of her gaze, no irony in them now. “They do say so,” he admitted, “but I don’t know why. For you know and I know it is not true. Maybe they would not say it if they had met you.”

  Further surprised by this unexpected gentleness, Madeleine turned back to their path and walked on. She felt puzzled. Even with every receptor in her being questing to test the presence of this monk walking at her side, she could not find what had seemed so obnoxious to her in him last night. Detachment was what she felt now—he wanted nothing from her. But she found also an obscure conviction that she could entirely trust him. In these intuitions she could not remember an instance where she had been wrong. No further conversation passed between them as they climbed to the brow of the hill, after which the path dipped before the land began to rise again beyond the wall of the burial ground.

  “We should go back in a minute. I must check on Father Oswald and see that all is well.” As they reached the burial ground, Madeleine turned back toward the monastery buildings at the foot of the hill. “Oh, look—there’s my brother. Oswald is not with him. I think they will have put him to bed. I guess Adam wanted to visit Mother’s grave again while he’s here.”

  John crossed from the infirmary to the foot of the track they had climbed. He had seen them and waved back as Madeleine waved down to him. She watched his easy stride as he started to walk up the grassy path.

  William sat down to wait for him on the grass in the sunshine, resting his back against the stones of the burial ground wall. Madeleine sat down beside him, not too near.

  “Do you really want to be a Poor Clare nun?” he asked her suddenly. Madeleine did not need to turn the question over in her mind very long.

  “No,” she said honestly, “but I really want to be safe.”

  He took this in thoughtfully and did not immediately reply. He felt her observing every detail of him—his hands, one folded peacefully on the other, his forearms resting on top of his drawn-up knees, then her gaze travelling on from the long bony fingers, noting their shape and structure, to his feet, dusty in well-worn sandals, and the rough, faded black of his tunic. “Didn’t they give you a new habit when you joined?” she asked.

  He glanced sideways at her. “Not much gets past you, does it? I asked if I could keep this one. You will have known Abbot Columba, I think? This was his.”

  “You mean Father Peregrine?”

  “Yes, him. It was his.”

  “I thought you didn’t like him. You said you used him ill.”

  “That’s why I wanted to keep it. At first the thought of putting it on scared me. Now what I feel is that I am wearing his forgiveness. Look, Madeleine, why don’t you come and live with us?”

  Startled, she looked at his face, wondering if she had heard right and, if she had, if he really meant it. “What? How could I? I’m a woman,” she said, “and you live in a monastery.”

  He turned his head, and the cool gaze of his pale eyes met hers.

  “Aye, but we have much more land than that. There is a cottage in the close wanting a tenant. I think we would not go hungry without its rent. You’d like it. The garden is bursting with herbs already, and there’s space for a henhouse.”

  Madeleine felt such a gripping of hope around her heart in that moment, she could hardly breathe. She was afraid to reach out for this possibility in case it should be snatched away.

  “Is there room for goats?” she asked tentatively, playing for time.

  William laughed, and she watched the crinkling of the skin at the corner of his eyes. “No,” he said, “but I think we could find you a place to tether a goat on our land. You would not be vulnerable there as you are here. Motherwell is a small place, and the people do not travel. They will be ignorant and unaware of your connections. I’ll wager John might as well have gone to the moon when he left for St Alcuin’s—am I right?”

  “That was the problem,” said Madeleine softly. “He was just gone. That was all they knew. But won’t it be the same anywhere? Your village is not big either. Won’t they think I am a witch and a heretic by St Alcuin’s too?”

  “No. They will think you are the abbot’s sister, and you will have the sense to come every day to Mass and to Vespers, so they will know you are devout.”

  William saw the struggle in her
face. He saw that she wanted this, but something stood in the way. “What? Tell me,” he said.

  Madeleine felt again the unlikely sense that she could trust him, whoever he was and whatever he had done.

  “It was important to Mother that we did not impose on Adam. He is protective and kind by nature. She said we must let him go and never breathe a word of what it cost us. If I stay here, I will not become a burden to him.” This was not an admission easily made. She and Katelin had kept their understanding entirely to themselves.

  “If you stay miserable, you will destroy him!” replied William. He shot her a sly, sideways glance. “Besides, the brothers at St Alcuin’s are good and gentle to a man. It gets under my skin at times. I could do with a sparring partner.”

  When John came up over the crest of the hill to where they sat, he saw his sister was laughing. He took in the sight hungrily, with great relief and joy in his face. William smiled and bent down to pick a flower of grass, which he twirled and picked to pieces in his fingers as Madeleine said, “This brother of yours has just committed a terrible indiscretion.” It told her something about William and John’s expectations of him that, despite her lighthearted and teasing tone, John immediately looked somewhat alarmed.

  “What’s he done?” he inquired gingerly.

  “He has—without his abbot’s permission, mind, Father John—invited me to leave this place and come live in a little cottage in St Alcuin’s close.”

  John’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Slowly, considering this, he came to sit with them on the grass. “Is that what you want?” he asked her.

  “A little cottage with herbs and a place for hens, he said. With no rent. And I can browse a goat at the abbey. He said I will be safe because I am your sister, and I can come to chapel so people will not say I am a witch.”

  John said nothing. He bent his head, absently fingering the speedwell flowers in the grass, but gently, so as not to hurt the delicate petals.

  “Adam? Would I be in the way?” Her voice sounded uncertain.