The Hour Before Dawn

by Penelope Wilcock

  “Can you do this?” he asked her, his voice anxious and upset. “Dearest sister, this seems no time to be taking such a step. If you have no vocation, can you bear this life? Dear one, it is not easy.”

  A coldness settled over her, as though the flash of authentic response from a moment ago had hardened off. She stared at him woodenly.

  “I have a vocation to find a safe refuge,” she said, the words coming stubborn, bitter. “And it would seem I have a vocation to survive. The life of this house may look simple and strict to you, but compared with the rumours and the whispering, the innuendo and the ostracism and the fear we have put up with for years, it does not seem so very hard to me. It is not thought to be easy to live in a monastery. But I tell you, compared with being flung to the ground with my clothes torn off and held down by my hair while five leering village peasants take it in turn to hold my legs apart and force themselves upon me, I think I may find it easy enough. Look at you! You don’t want to hear this, do you? You don’t even want to think about it! No. Neither did I, but I had to be there: I had no choice in the matter. I could not choose to run away, or I would have done so. And now? At least in this house, if they receive me, they will cut off my hair. No one will ever hold me down by my hair again. If it happens to me again, the veil will come off, and I shall be able to fight free. Do you know how much that means? I had not thought I had a vocation to be a Poor Clare, ’tis true enough, but I know I am no witch, nor yet a heretic or blasphemer. And at least here no one will spit on me because I can read the missal and scribe the Pater Noster.”

  She let the words punish him like the knotted tails of a lash, regarding him with uncanny, calm hostility. “Don’t weep, brother; it’s too late for that!”

  He did not raise his eyes to her. He rested his bent head against the railings of the grille and suffered the guilt and horror of it all to tear at him. Blood ran down his soul.

  She watched him for a while; then it was as though a shutter came down inside her. She moved one hand in a small fretful gesture of impatience. Of what use were his tears?

  “God bless you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “God forgive you. God give you good day.”

  She rose to her feet, lowering her eyelids as she had seen the sisters do, so that she cut him off from her sight, and left the room.

  John, upright only because he still clung to the grille, stood there with his back to William, weeping as though his heart would break. It did break.

  William still said nothing. He held his peace and waited. His watchful soul, like a bird of prey on a crag, surveyed this bleak storm havoc without a sound. Against the harsh austerity of that stone room with its dividing grille, swept clean of dust and free of any comfort or ornament, the sound of his friend’s weeping was the only reality, and nothing relieved it at all. At some point the extern sister opened the door into their side of the room. Her face, already full of concern as she beheld the abbot, took on an expression of definite alarm as she found herself the focus of William’s pale and disconcerting eyes. “Not yet,” he said to her very softly, and she looked entirely content to withdraw. He turned back and continued his vigil, sitting motionless, his hands resting in his lap, watching John’s body racked and convulsed as the iron claw of grief harrowed over and over his soul.

  But the human spirit is tough. Even its storms of anguish cannot continue forever. The agonies we do not believe we could ever survive, we do. The time came when the anguish of sobbing shaking John’s body from the roots of his viscera finally abated. After a while his hands relaxed their grip, and he let go the grille, turning to stumble across the room to the stool they had set out for him. Collapsing heavily onto it, he bent double, sinking his face into his hands. “Oh God…” he groaned, “Oh God… Oh God… Oh God… how shall I live with what I have done? Whatever am I to do?”

  And still William waited; still he did not speak.

  Then at last, rubbing his tears from his face with the back of his trembling hand, John sat more upright and glanced across at William. In another moment he found his handkerchief, blew his nose, and wiped the tears that still dripped from his chin, still trickled from his eyes and would not stop.

  He groaned, shaking his head in sorrow. He had entertained no expectations of this visit, knowing only that he must come; he had certainly never imagined it would be as awful as this. Hunched on the stool, lost and broken, his head bent, he held the handkerchief loosely between both hands on his knee. The tears still trickled and dripped.

  Then, “Listen,” said William. “Listen to me; are you listening? Listen!”

  John lifted his head. Bleakly he nodded.

  “You did not do this—” He dismissed John’s nod of the head and semiarticulate protest with a peremptory gesture. “No, don’t interrupt me! Don’t argue with me! You did not do this. Each of us bears responsibility for the life we have been given. It was no more your fault that this happened than it was Madeleine’s fault because she had not provided herself with a husband to guard their home. It was not her fault, and it was not yours. It was the fault of the men who did it; and one day they will be brought to meet God’s justice or—even better—his mercy.

  “When I came to St Alcuin’s, I was hated because of what I did to Columba—and reasonably so. Nobody thought it was his fault for putting himself in a vulnerable position as a crippled man. Nobody thought it was Father Chad’s fault for failing to defend him. They thought it was my fault because I did it. And they were right.

  “This is your sorrow, but it is not your fault. It is the way of the world. People lend themselves to working great evil sometimes. That’s how it is. We are made to be able to carry the pain of that—and to recover. But we are not made to bear the guilt. If we try to do that, it crushes us. You were not there when men raped your sister and killed your mother. But Christ was there, and he did not intervene. We can only assume he was there in her vulnerability, in their rejected chance to have mercy; and he is here now in the agony of your sorrow. But, John, I am neither a kind man nor a good man, only a practical man, and I am telling you—and you may trust this—it was not your fault!”

  As he stopped speaking, his eyes with their pale fire fixed John’s. “Do you hear me?” he said.

  In spite of everything, surprising both of them, something about the furious intensity with which he was regarded unexpectedly made John smile. “I hear you,” he said.

  “Good! Then hear this as well. Your sister will be safe here. And these are not silly women. They will understand about outrage and pain, as well as vocation. They will not profess her unless she makes her peace with life. Right now she is so full of pain herself that she has nothing left over to enable her to touch your pain gently. Suffering isolates people. But here she is in a place where the channels of healing will be kept open for mercy and grace to flow into her. The sisters will make a ring of intercession all around her, as so will we in our turn, in our house. In time it will reach her, seep through to her. Sooner or later—probably later—it will soak through to the core of her where she has been terribly hurt. Something will touch her. Someone will get through. A change will come, and she will find her way back to living. When that happens, these things can be sorted out between you, and the bond of love can be grown back into place—not as it was before, but in a new way, because you will both be different having passed through this. But there is nothing you can do to rush that healing or take away the pain of the journey she must make to get there. It is between her and God. It would be presumptuous to think otherwise.

  “Your mother also is safe. She is healed. The sorrow and fear of this world cannot touch her now. She is safe, John, and happy and free. Do you hear me? Safe!

  “The many good times are also safe: the laughter, the caress of the breeze, the joy of the sunshine, the crooning of hens amongst the herbs, watching the garden grow and the spring come, the warmth of the fireside, the beauty of stars on a frosty night, shared jokes and shared meals—nobody can take them aw
ay from the lives that had them. They were God’s good gifts, and they belong to those lives forever. They are safe now.

  “What is not safe at this moment is your soul. If you are wise—are you listening, my brother?—instead of torturing yourself over what you could not help and did not foresee, you will allow the grief in you to be a simple open wound that Christ may touch and, in good time, heal. This thing happened. It has broken you to pieces. If you can find the humility to allow it, grace will also heal you: you will be stronger in the end for this, one day. This grieving is the filth and mess that turns out to be the bed of sticky clay that, if we plunge our hands into it and bring them out full, we can craft into a grail of hope. It is so. I promise you.”

  John nodded, half-listening, somewhat holding together. “All right,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll do my best.” He shook his head distractedly, trying to dislodge the bewilderment of overwhelming emotion. “Well, I guess we’d better go.”

  He got up wearily. For a moment he remained standing as though he could not remember how to put one foot in front of the other. Then suddenly his face crumpled, and he began to weep again, holding his head in his hands, sobbing helplessly where he stood in the middle of that bare room with its two wooden stools. The latch of the door behind them clicked again. Once more an extern sister looked in, murmured her apology, and hastily withdrew.

  This time William stepped briskly across the room and opened the door. He glanced along the corridor where the nun was walking away and said, not raising his voice, “Sister.” Monastic life is attuned to quietness. He knew there would be no need to call out. She turned back.

  Treading toward him, her kindly face full of concern, she said, “I did not mean to intrude. God strengthen you, brother, in your time of loss. Oh, may God give you peace.”

  William looked at her. “It’s not my loss, but thank you. I think we need to speak to your Reverend Mother, and also your novice mistress, please.”

  “If you will wait one moment, I’ll go in search,” she said. As the nun disappeared along the passage, William returned to the parlour. He assessed his abbot’s condition and frowned.

  “My father, you are almost hysterical,” he said. “It’s time to get a grip on yourself. Stop. Give yourself a break. The time of tears will be long. Look at you. Your head feels light, and your belly aches with sobbing. Hush now. Let it alone. The sorrow will wait for you.”

  William communicated with the world in many voices, but when he spoke in the persona of an Augustinian prior, the ruling authority of his house, he never doubted for an instant that he would be obeyed. And this was the role he found his way back to now. He placed his own dry, clean handkerchief in his abbot’s hands, flicking away the sodden one onto the floor, took hold of John’s upper arms from behind, and firmly steered him back to a seated position on the stool provided. “Enough now!” he said. John felt the well of grief seal off. He felt like a small boy who has been rebuked by his teacher. He also felt himself in the presence of a love like a rock that would never fail him.

  “D’you want your handkerchief back?” he asked some minutes later, his voice unsteady despite his best efforts, but his face finally dried of tears. William glanced at it. “I do not.”

  The door on the convent side of the grille opened, and two nuns came forward to the bars. John stood up to greet them, pushing the now damp handkerchief hastily into his pocket. As John and William stepped forward, William appraised the women carefully.

  “God grant you peace in your sorrow, my poor brother,” said the older of the two women. Short and stout, with a face physically soft and gentle but with eyes that expressed keen intelligence and immovable authority, she came to the grille. It was her intention to take John’s hands through the bars in a gesture of sympathy and comfort, but as soon as she read that might not have been what he sought, she forestalled the movement. When she stepped back to the stools on the convent side of the parlour, so did the novice mistress, a tall, angular nun with vivid blue eyes and a firm mouth in a face already etched deep with the lines of her smile. They seated themselves with dignity and composure, the brown skirts of their habits falling in folds that hid the stools beneath them completely. John also stepped back and sat down again.

  “I am Mother Mary Beatrix,” the first nun said, “and this is Mother Mary Brigid, our novice mistress. We are all praying for you every day through this harrowing time of terrible distress.”

  “Thank you,” said John simply. “Thank you.”

  Seeing that his superior had no apparent intention of adding to this, while the two nuns waited politely to hear what the men wished to say, William spoke. “I am Father William de Bulmer,” he introduced himself. “I am not an obedientiary at St Alcuin’s, having joined the community but recently. I have no authority, so I was free to be Father John’s travelling companion. This event has hit him hard, as you see for yourselves; for which reason only, I must be his mouthpiece now and ask you the things we need to know.”

  Reverend Mother inclined her head. She understood.

  “Firstly, of your kindness, may I inquire what has become of the body of my lord abbot’s mother? By my reckoning, even supposing your messenger came the day that you took his sister in—yesterday—this is still the fourth day Katelin Hazell has been dead. It is warm weather. Have you buried her body already, or is that still to be done?”

  William was aware of John’s movement of horror and distress but did not turn his head to look at him.

  “We laid her in the earth early this morning.” Mother Mary Beatrix let her calm voice steady this situation as it had had to steady so many others. “It would not have been a blessing or a comfort to you to see her.”

  “I understand,” said William quickly, sensing John’s trembling and thinking it best not to linger where imagination might dwell on the implications of what had been said. “Where is she buried, please? Might my lord abbot pay his respects at her place of burial?”

  Mother Mary Beatrix nodded. “Certainly. Usually only our sisters are laid to rest in the burial ground here; but Madeleine has been so consumed with the dread that wicked men might violate Katelin’s grave, we made an exception. I’m so sorry, Father John. I can see for myself how hard this is for you.”

  John felt for his handkerchief again, his hand shaking.

  “We can take you directly to the burial ground, and you may visit whenever you wish. Priests of the church are allowed inside our enclosure, as you know.”

  “Thank you,” said William. “You have our heartfelt gratitude for stepping in as you have, and bringing some healing and sanity to a time of deep turmoil and pain. May I ask you next about Madeleine Hazell?”

  “What can we tell you?” responded Mother Mary Beatrix pleasantly. Her eyes rested on William with careful appraisal, and she felt more puzzled than she usually did. She thought there was something odd about this man. His assurance and authority did not sit comfortably with his assertion that he held no office at St Alcuin’s. She thought that could not always have been the case. William de Bulmer… she felt sure she had heard that name somewhere before.

  “She was attacked on this last Saturday evening?” William asked, and Mother Mary Beatrix nodded in affirmation. “Yes.”

  “She hid the next day in the woods and came to you when dusk fell?”

  “That’s right,” confirmed Mother Mary Beatrix.

  “You sent word to us the very next morning, for which we most heartily thank you, and we came down to you the day following, being this day.”

  Mother Mary Beatrix nodded. “Mm-hm.”

  “Good sisters, please do not take my questions amiss. Madeleine Hazell had not previously come to you with intention to explore a vocation as a Franciscan?”

  “No. We knew her. She and Katelin had sometimes been with us for Mass. They were here only two weeks ago, at Easter, just after they had been to visit at St Alcuin’s, I gather. Katelin was very proud of her son. She wanted to tell me how he had been elect
ed abbot, but she said that she feared it would mean she and Madeleine should not overburden him; she did not want to be in the way at a time of year when he would have his hands so very full. So they came back home and observed the vigil at the cross with us.”

  “Oh, by all heaven, they would never have been in the way! They never… Oh God, help me, they are both so dear to me!”

  “My dear Abbot John, I didn’t mean—”

  “That’s all right,” said William quickly. “We understand. Father, your love—for your mother and your sister both—has ever been apparent, and you made them most welcome, so I heard. It was a sensible decision to come home. No superior has time on his hands in Holy Week—or on hers.”

  Mother Mary Beatrix rewarded his acknowledgment that women superiors also existed with a small, wry smile.

  “So Madeleine Hazell had no thoughts of a vocation as recently as Easter?” William persisted. “Then why is she dressed as a postulant today? I should judge her state of mind to be wholly inappropriate for making any such commitment.”

  Mother Mary Beatrix nodded. You don’t miss much, do you! she thought.

  “We thought the same,” she said transparently. “The day Madeleine made her way to us, we heard her story; we washed her and comforted her, for she was very distressed. We put her to bed, and Mother Mistress here sat with her through the night, for she was frightened and kept starting awake. The next morning we sent someone to look for her goats, as she was desperately concerned about them, and they could not be found. No doubt they have found new homes in the village, and what’s to tell between one goat and another if they are not your own? So we left it. That day we sent word up to you at St Alcuin’s. Madeleine pleaded with me to allow her into this community. She said she had been called a heretic and a witch, and she was afraid that if she remained here just as herself, Madeleine Hazell, somehow they would come for her and drag her out and do their worst to her again. No assurance from me would convince her otherwise. I think the experience had temporarily sent her to the edge of her sanity. Mother Mistress and I talked it over. We fully realize that as she comes to herself again—though what she is in the future can hardly be the same as she has been in the past—she may wish to reconsider this decision. On the other hand, it is quite likely that once she has been so savagely persecuted for a heretic and a witch, this may in truth be the only safe place for her. Frankly, if she wants to stay alive, she may have to find a vocation. When one looks at it realistically, what she said to us is probably exactly true. This is the eye of her storm; this is her only refuge. Fathers, can you understand this?”