‘Father, I beg your pardon—’ Peregrine opened his eyes at the sound of Brother James’ apologetic voice. ‘I’m sorry, but another visitor has arrived and is asking to see you.’
‘Oh, no!’ he groaned. ‘Oh, Brother, no! Who is it?’
‘It’s a woman with a little baby—I forget the exact name she gave. A Melissa Langforth? Thornton? Something like—’
‘Melissa!’ Father Peregrine’s face lit with happiness and he snatched his hand out of Brother Michael’s and, stooping, fumbled on the floor for the crutch that lay beside him. ‘She’s my—she’s my—she’s a relative of mine,’ he said to Brother James as he limped out of the room with jerky haste to find her.
She was walking down the cobbled path to meet him, and she laughed at his eagerness and joy as he greeted her.
‘Welcome, daughter, oh welcome! We heard your joyful news, dear heart, but I never thought to see you so soon. So this is the littlest, a son. Bless him, look at that yawn! By the saints, what a great, cavernous mouth he has on him! And a roar like a lion, I’ll be bound. But come, dearest, let me find you a place in the guest house where you can rest and be comfortable. You must be mortally weary; you should not have travelled so soon. Would to God that all our visitors were as welcome as you!’
She stayed with them for a week, and she would sit in the gardens outside the infirmary, her baby on her knee, talking to Uncle Edward, and the old brothers who sat out in the sun with him, and to Peregrine when he could snatch the time. It was one of those brief spells of complete happiness that come once in a rare while, an unlooked for gift of God, when the forces of darkness, of sorrow and temptation seem miraculously held back, a breathing-space in the battle.
On the third day of her visit, Peregrine stole an afternoon to be with her, and they sat together in the deepening golden peace of the afternoon sun, Melissa suckling her child and telling all the news from home.
She lifted up the baby, drunken and replete, eyes drowsing shut, a dribble of white milk trickling from his slack mouth. Holding him up to her with his head nestled on her shoulder, she stroked his back as they talked. The baby gave a huge, satisfied belch, which made them all smile.
‘Father, would you like to hold him?’ she said.
Peregrine looked at her, and looked down at his hands, and then at Melissa again, and the wistfulness and sadness in his eyes went through her like a knife.
‘Of course you can hold him!’ she exclaimed. ‘Here, I’ll lay him on your lap, so; rest his head on your hand.’ Gently she straightened Peregrine’s fingers under the downy head. The baby looked up at him, and gurgled and smiled—the little, confiding noises of baby conversation, the endearing, dimpled, toothless smile of innocent happiness.
Peregrine gently stroked the delicate skin of the child’s forehead, smiling back at his grandson, his face radiant with vulnerable tenderness.
‘Thus was Jesus,’ he whispered, ‘and thus all the little ones whom Herod butchered. Oh, God protect you in this world, dear one. God keep you safe from harm.’
Melissa watched the tiny, pink hand grip round Peregrine’s scarred, twisted fingers, and sadness welled up in her for sorrow to come, for the inevitable harshness and pain.
‘You can’t ask that, Father, and you know it, of all people,’ she said gently. ‘But let him travel through life with his hand gripping Jesus’ scarred hand as tight as it now grips yours, and the storms will not vanquish him.’
The baby yawned hugely, and Peregrine looked up at Melissa, delighted. ‘Wearied by theology, God save him, at eight weeks old! Oh Melissa, you have brought me joy!’
She came and stood beside him, leaning against him, her arm resting around his neck, her fingertips stroking absently, tracing the scar on his face as she smiled down at her baby son.
‘It’s a wonderful, wonderful, sacred thing; this perfect little life, a new beginning born out of my body, out of Ranulf’s and my love. It must be hard, to live without family life. Did you never think you missed your way, maybe, being a monk?’
‘Missed my way? No, not me. Did I choose it, or did God choose me? I would make the same choice again tomorrow. Although… sometimes my skin is hungry for tenderness of touch as you touch me now. Yes, that I miss: but no one is guaranteed that loving tenderness, and look, I have found it in the cloister, where others starve for it among their own kin, at their own hearthside.’
A sudden grimace of distress crossed the baby’s face, and he opened his gums wide in a trembling cry of protest. Melissa stooped and lifted him, held him against her, patting and rocking him gently. He drew his knees up and cried again, then belched enormously, and relaxed, content.
‘He is not yet baptised, Father. I saved that for you. Will you baptise him for me this week?’
‘Need you ask? I am honoured! Benedict, you said you were naming him, did you not? What brought that on?’
‘Well I wanted him to be named after you, but Peregrine is such an outlandish, ridiculous name, and none of the brothers here ever call you Columba—your kitchen brother says you may coo over the baby, but you’re still no dove. So I didn’t know what to choose. But I’ve been reading the Rule of Life that St Benedict wrote, and all he says the abbot should be sounds just like you, so I thought Benedict would do, because his Rule has shaped your life.’
Peregrine said nothing for a moment. She could not read his expression. His eyes were very bright in his lean, intent face as he looked at her.
‘That is all right, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Yes. Oh yes. I was just a bit overcome by the compliment you’ve just paid me. There, Brother Basil is ringing the Vespers bell.’ He raised his voice. ‘Wake up, Edward!’
Brother Edward started awake from his peaceful doze.
‘Eh? What is it? Vespers already? Forgive me, Melissa, sleeping. My old age overwhelms what manners I ever had, these days.’
He yawned and stood slowly. The three of them walked together up the cobbled path, Melissa holding her baby close and peaceful against her: four generations. At the guest house they parted company, and Melissa went in to lay her drowsy baby in his bed.
Peregrine and Edward continued together to the chapel.
‘God has been so generous to me, Edward. The sin of my youth is covered by his forgiving love, and all that is left of it is his gift of a daughter, and grandchildren. His generosity is more than I can comprehend.’
They entered together the cool dimness of the chapel and went each to his own stall.
Motes of dust floated in the rays of sun that slanted through the narrow windows. The brothers’ voices lifted in the sixty-second psalm. Peregrine closed his eyes and allowed his soul to be lifted on the beauty of the chant. ‘Is this worship,’ he wondered, ‘or is it self-indulgence?’
He joined in the singing of the sixty-third psalm: ‘Quaniam melior est misericordia tua super vitas, labia mea laudabunt te …—For your loving-kindness is better than life itself: my lips shall speak your praise…’
He opened his eyes, and his gaze fell on the great wooden crucifix, and then his attention was caught by a movement. Brother James, the newest of the new generation of novices, was still struggling with endless rules and regulations, and was creeping in late, standing wretchedly with downcast eyes, in the place of shame set apart for late-comers. Little darts of disapproval were flying his way from Father Matthew, who had seen him, too. Ah, well, life goes on…
‘Quia fuisti adjutor meus. Et in velamento alarum tuarum exultabo…—Because you have been my helper, therefore in the shadow of your wings I rejoice…’
‘Bear up, Brother James, three months now and you’ll be professed, God willing, and then it will be me you have to deal with, and not Father Matthew. God grant I may not be over-indulgent with you, because you are undisciplined for all your heart’s in the right place…’
Father Matthew, perfecting his withering look at the unfortunate Brother James, flared his nostrils and inhaled more dust than he had bargain
ed for, which caused him to sneeze, violently. Peregrine lowered his head, glad that the cowl hid his face, burying his delighted grin in the pages of his breviary:
‘Gloria Patri et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto…’
Repentantly, Peregrine composed his face, and gave his attention to the prayers. Wise old Benedict had laid down in his Rule of Life that at the first Office of the day and in the evening at Vespers, the abbot should pray aloud the Lord’s Prayer, so that the day should begin and end with the remembrance that we are forgiven, and must in our turn forgive, and so all differences between the brethren be laid to rest.
Abbot Peregrine raised his head and led the prayer in his firm, clear voice:
‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…’
Then the Office was ended, and the brothers were dispersing quietly. Brother James came and knelt before Peregrine, humbly awaiting penance.
‘Say a Miserere, my son, and try to be in good time tomorrow,’ said Father Peregrine mildly.
With a light heart he set on his way to meet Melissa and Brother Edward at his house for supper, and smiled at the sight of Brother Tom, hastening ahead of him, anxious not to be late.
‘And that’s all,’ said Mother firmly, looking at the clock. ‘There are plenty of other stories, though, to keep us going in the New Year.’
She smiled and stretched and yawned, and uncurled reluctantly from her armchair.
‘Bed time, I think, my darling. Happy New Year.’
We took one candle to light our way upstairs, and blowing out the other one, left the dying fire, its embers faintly illuminating the night.
Shivering in the unheated bedroom, I decided it was too cold to wash and clean my teeth, so I slipped off my dressing-gown and crept quietly into my bed, careful not to disturb my sleeping sisters. It was warm and cosy under the blankets; Therese had left me the hot-water bottle there. I lay for a long time in the darkness, listening to my sisters’ regular, peaceful breathing, punctuated by the little sighs and murmurs of sleep: thinking, remembering, imagining… and then finally thinking drifted into dreaming, and I was asleep.
Those are some of the stories then, that Mother told me the year I turned fifteen, so many years ago now: stories of my long ago grandfather, Peregrine du Fayel, and his Uncle Edward, and his daughter Melissa, named for Melissa du Fayel, Peregrine’s mother. Down the ladder of seven hundred years they have climbed, preserved by grandmother and mother and daughter, told at the firesides of our family through all those generations. My mother, my wonderful, magical mother, weaver of dreams, with her dark, compelling eyes, her wild mane of hair, and the soft blue folds of her skirt: she made them come alive for me, and they fed my hungry soul, and they changed everything for me. They have been stored away in the garden of my imagination, walled away since I was a young girl, until I have opened the green door and taken you in to wander in the garden. And the stories were there waiting, surprisingly fresh to my memory after all…. Well, but Peregrine was unforgettable, wasn’t he? So now I have told some of them to you. I hope, I really hope, they fed your hunger too. I wish you had known my mother, for she would have told them better than I; but there it is. Like you, I make the best of what I can do.
Glossary of Terms
Breviary – monastic prayer book
Cellarer – monk responsible for oversight of all provisions; a key role in the community
Chapter – daily meeting governing practical matters, where a chapter of St Benedict’s Rule was read and expounded by the abbot
Choir – the part of the church where the community sits
Cloister – covered way giving access to main buildings of monastery
Dorter – dormitory
Eucharist – the holy communion meal, the Lord’s Supper
Hours – (as in a Book of Hours) the services of worship in the monastic day
Lay – not ordained
Liturgy – structured worship
Office – the set worship taking place at regular intervals through the day
Physic garden – the medicinal herb patch beside the infirmary
Porter – doorkeeper
Postulant – new member not yet made a novice
Precentor – worship facilitator
Prior – in an abbey, the deputy leader; in a priory, the leader
Reredorter – latrines situated convenient to sleeping quarters
Rule – the Benedictine Rule: document guiding daily life, written by St Benedict
Monastic Day
There may be slight variations from place to place and at different times from the Dark Ages through the Middle Ages and onward – e.g. Vespers may be after supper rather than before. This gives a rough outline. Slight liberties are taken in my novels to allow human interactions to play out.
Winter Schedule (from Michaelmas)
2:30am Preparation for the nocturns of matins – psalms etc.
3:00am Matins, with prayers for the royal family and for the dead
5:00am Reading in preparation for
6:00am Lauds at daybreak and Prime; wash and break fast (just bread and water, standing)
8.30am Terce, Morrow Mass, Chapter
12:00 noon Sext, Sung Mass, midday meal
2.00pm None
4:15pm Vespers, Supper, Collatio
6:15pm Compline The Grand Silence begins
Summer Schedule
1:30am Preparation for the nocturns of matins – psalms etc.
2:00am Matins
3:30am Lauds at daybreak, wash and break fast
6:00am Prime, Morrow Mass, Chapter
8:00am Terce, Sung Mass
11:30am Sext, midday meal
2:30pm None
5:30pm Vespers, Supper, Collatio
8:00pm Compline
The Grand Silence begins
Liturgical Calendar
I have included the main feasts and fasts in the cycle of the church’s year, plus one or two other dates that are mentioned (e.g. Michaelmas and Lady Day when rents were traditionally collected) in these stories.
Advent – begins four Sundays before Christmas
Christmas – December 25th
Holy Innocents – December 28th
Epiphany – January 6th
Baptism of our Lord concludes Christmastide, Sunday after January 6th
Candlemas – February 2 (Purification of Blessed Virgin Mary, Presentation of Christ in the temple)
Lent – Ash Wednesday to Holy Thursday – start date varies with phases of moon
Holy Week – last week of Lent and the Easter Triduum
Lady Day – March 25th
Easter Triduum (three days) of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday
Ascension – forty days after Easter
Whitsun (Pentecost) – fifty days after Easter
Trinity Sunday – Sunday after Pentecost
Corpus Christi – Thursday after Trinity
Sacred Heart of Jesus – Friday of the following week
Feast of John the Baptist – June 24th
Lammas (literally ‘loaf-mass’; grain harvest) – August 1st
Michaelmas – feast of St Michael and All Angels, September 29th
All Saints – November 1st
All Souls – November 2nd
Martinmas – November 11th
The Hawk and the Dove Page 16
