The Hour Before Dawn

by Penelope Wilcock

  John saw in that moment—as he watched Abbot Robert looking closely at William’s submissive innocence, trying to work out if he had just been breathtakingly insulted or not—why so many people hated William so much.

  And then Abbot Robert started violently as Oswald added his own plea to the mix.

  “Glory, what kind of a circus are we?” said John to William as twenty minutes later they made their way from the stables into the guest house, where they had been offered supper before they bedded down for the night. Father Robert had invited John to sup in the abbot’s lodging, but John took exception to this pointed exclusion of his brothers and sweetly explained that his skills as an infirmarian might be called upon to help Oswald manage his food. Father Robert seemed content not to push this by asking how Oswald had been managing until now without John’s help, graciously bowing his farewell to them as he withdrew.

  The guest master showed them their chambers, where they stowed their baggage. John, as their abbot, had been given a room of his own; William and Oswald were given a room to share.

  “Father Oswald, of your courtesy,” said John gently, “will you mind sleeping alone and allowing William to room in with me?” He saw the relief on William’s face as he said this, adding, “He is assisting our cellarer at home, and we have a number of things outstanding to discuss that are tedious to anyone else and may intrude on your rest as we talk. Will that arrangement please you?”

  Oswald had been a monk for twenty-four years, and his prior had been William de Bulmer. He knew better than to say it didn’t suit him, whatever his private thoughts might have been, and accepted the arrangement with good grace, though somewhere deep inside he knew he would be frightened when they left him alone.

  “Right!” said John briskly as he and William dumped their bags on their beds. “I’m going down to the infirmary to beg a clean habit and a razor. I’ll ask the guest master what their bathing arrangements are, and we’ll get you clean and presentable before we sit down to eat. I shan’t be long.”

  William guided Oswald into his chamber. “Just a minute—don’t sit down yet,” he said. He went to his own room and fetched the cloak he had deposited there, spreading it on the clean pale wool of Oswald’s blankets to save them from the dried blood and food and the filth of the street that mired Oswald’s garments from neck to hem. “You can sit down now—just one step directly behind you,” he said. Oswald, looking ill at ease, sat on the bed. William sat beside him.

  “Your tongue, your eyes—is that all?” he asked him crisply, and Oswald shook his head. The grim cruelty of what human beings will stoop to moved like a shadow through William’s face. He said soberly, “Abbot John has been St Alcuin’s infirmarian these many years. He will see to what must be done to make the best of this. You could not be in a safer pair of hands.”

  Oswald nodded. He spoke, but William could not understand him. He said it again. “Thank you?” said William, and Oswald nodded. “For?” Oswald nodded. “Say the rest again.” Oswald said it twice. “Coming back for you?” Oswald nodded.

  Because his brother could not see, William did nothing to disguise the bleakness of this situation from showing in his face. But he said, “You are most welcome. I am only sorry that I did not come sooner; I had some struggles of my own.”

  As they waited together, William covered the silence that lay between them with quiet talk of St Alcuin’s Abbey, describing to Oswald the contours of the land and the extent of the buildings, telling him about its traditions of music and style of pottery, the size of the farm and the focus of its husbandry, the location in relation to the villages and towns nearby. As the anodyne flow of his words continued, he watched Oswald begin to relax, his mind led out of the fear of violence and hatred and danger into the consideration of the simple realities of everyday life—buildings and communities, routines and the comfortable patterns of tradition.

  Then John stood in the doorway, an old habit from the infirmary in his arms. “We can take you to wash, Father Oswald, and I will shave your head and beard. Come to that, William, you look much like a vagrant yourself—a little soap and water would do you no harm.”

  John and Oswald rejoined William in time for supper. “It is as you thought,” John said quietly to William, “they were not satisfied with what they did to his face. Whatever the countenance of pity looks like, it is not human.”

  William shrugged. “Some and some,” he said and added, “Yes, he told me.”

  The guest master brought them bread and cheese, apples and ale, with a pat of freshly made butter still beaded with moisture in an earthenware dish.

  Oswald looked like a monk again, his beard shaved and his hair trimmed and tonsured, dressed in St. Olave’s clean habit.

  John had also begged a large cloth from the infirmarian. He said gently to Father Oswald as he took his place at the table, “Father, will you let me provide you with a napkin to keep your habit clean? My guess is, supper has become something of an adventure to you now.” Oswald laughed, from which sight William silently looked away, and John spread the cloth carefully, tying the ends of it at the back of Oswald’s neck. When he had done, he rested his hands in reassurance on Oswald’s shoulders and said, “I am here beside you if you find yourself in need of any help.”

  Oswald replied. John and William looked at each other blankly. “Say that again,” said William, and Oswald did. “Oh, right! You can manage!” John’s face cleared. “Yes, I expect you can. Here’s bread, brother, and cheese and butter. I’ll put some here on your plate; butter on the edge. There’s ale too. Would you like some milk to dip your bread? I’ll ask our guest master. There are apples, but those will not work for you I think?”

  Oswald shook his head, saying “no apples,” which the shake of his head and the p in apples helped them recognize. He nodded his head then, affirming milk, and stroking his left finger with his right hand in the sign for milk from the Monasteriales Indicia, the sign language of the monastic hours of silence. John requested some from the guest master who was happy to oblige.

  Oswald next spoke to John again, but however often he repeated it, neither man could understand. He reached out his hand, groping for John, whose hand found his. “You—” Oswald managed to make himself understood at last, and he traced the word kind in unsteady letters with his forefinger on the tabletop.

  “You notice he doesn’t extend the same compliment to me,” said William drily, pulling them back from the territory of emotion into the verges of which they were straying.

  As they ate together, the magnitude of what had been done to Oswald made itself obvious. William watched him, remembering his fastidious manners. The son of a merchant with aspirations to upward mobility in society, Oswald had been schooled in courtly graces until the end of his teens, when his father had lost three spice ships and most of his money, the large mansion in which they lived had to be sold, and it had been expedient for both his sons to discover in themselves the stirrings of religious vocation—quickly. At St Dunstan’s Priory Oswald was sometimes admired, sometimes mocked for his elegance and refinement. William watched as Oswald broke his bread and dipped it in the milk, dropping lumps that he groped for and carried to his mouth, dripping milk and wet shreds of bread. Of the food he got safely into his mouth, some fell out, and what remained he had to push back to his throat with his fingers. Some he swallowed successfully; some he had to hawk back up and start again because it went the wrong way. William took a little cheese, a little bread, then found himself suddenly not hungry anymore.

  Abbot John ate his supper quietly and steadily, occasionally reaching out to guide Oswald’s hand or put back on his plate bread he had inadvertently pushed off. The cheese and the apples were beyond Oswald’s attempting. At the conclusion of their meal, the table around Oswald’s bowl and plate was strewn with spilled food, and the cloth that wrapped him was drenched with milk and soggy bread. John removed the cloth, careful to keep any mess contained within it, and used it to wipe down the ta
ble, talking amiably as he did so of their journey home. By the time he’d finished, the chaos of Oswald’s supper had vanished from view.

  “Are we going to Compline?” John was not sure to what degree his companions would feel comfortable participating in the life of St Olave’s.

  “For sure we are!” said William at once. “It’ll be one more strike against us if we are too corrupt to bother to worship God!”

  Oswald offered a comment with a conspiratorial nudge. After persevering with decoding his remark for quite some while, John and William grasped that what he had said was he would sing loudly. As they walked from the guest house across to the cloister buildings, John reflected that the refusal of St Dunstan’s survivors to take themselves seriously showed they had strength of character even if they had admittedly been lacking in virtue.

  After Compline, the community went into silence, and the three travellers returned to their rooms in the guest house, making ready to retire for the night. John could see Oswald’s distress and deep sense of misgiving as he prepared to leave him on his own. He could not even leave him a light to dispel the oppression of darkness. He contemplated changing the sleeping arrangement but suspected William might be dismayed to find himself rooming in with Oswald; and he himself felt so distressed and unsettled by this turn of events that he wanted some time to talk it through in privacy with William. He had taken a linen towel from the lavatorium, and he spread it on Oswald’s pillow to soak up the frequent streams of saliva that dribbled from his mouth.

  “Lie down,” he said to him gently. “I’ll stay with you for a little while. And we are only in the chamber next door. You would be able to find us, and we would hear you call. All will be well. These are good men here. Their welcome may have been frostier than it should have been, but you will sleep safe from harm. The worst they will do to us is leave us alone. Rest now, my brother. Say your prayers quietly until you fall asleep. Here, you can have my rosary.” John stayed a while longer until the atmosphere changed and he saw Oswald begin to relax; then he bade him good night and left the room. He joined William in the adjacent chamber and closed the door.

  Even so late in the evening, it was not quite dark at this time of year. The last light of day still filtered in through the small windows, but William had lit the candle, as much for hope and cheerfulness as to see.

  John crossed the room in silence and sat on the edge of his bed without speaking, bending to take off his sandals. His face was grave and troubled as he climbed into bed. He sat with his back leaning against the wall that the head of his bed abutted, staring straight ahead, thinking.

  William also said nothing, but he was waiting for John to speak, which eventually he did, words pouring out in a torrent of the distress he had succeeded in concealing from Oswald. “How could I have let this happen?” he berated himself bitterly. “I can’t live with this, William. I can’t bear it. My sister raped and battered, my mother murdered, and now this poor soul tortured and abused and left with his life ruined forever. Can’t see. Can’t speak. Can’t eat properly. What do they think of when they do things like this to people? Another human being—all the joy of life snuffed out and exchanged for terror and death in the work of one short evening. Who can make an eye? Who can give the gift of sight? Who can understand or make a copy of the tongue—to talk, to taste, to feel, to swallow, to moisten the lips, to kiss? How dare they destroy what they did not give and cannot make? What cruel, savage ignorance! The delicate, beautiful, intricate integrity of God’s creation, everything working together to make life joyous and sweet—aye, to make life possible at all—just thrown away. And am I not just as bad, just as much to blame? For I sat with him there in that alley in Chesterfield, broke bread with him. I found him, and then I left him behind, threw him back, to this! How could I have done it? How could I have left him? Oh God, I cannot live with the guilt of this. I cannot bear it. And my mother. And my sister. It’s too much, it’s just too much. I cannot bear it.” He sat trembling, unable to process the horror of all that had happened.

  “Sshh! Listen a minute!” William’s faint gleam of a smile shone for a moment, but he spoke soberly then. “Listen. Are you listening or just caught in a tangle of grief and guilt and shock?”

  The haggard strain in John’s face was accentuated by the light of the candle that burned on the table beside him as he looked at William. You’ve aged about ten years in this last month, William thought.

  “I’m listening,” said his abbot.

  “Good. Because there’s something and someone you’ve forgotten. Now listen to this. When I came to you before Easter, it was for exactly what we’ve seen today that I was afraid to be turned out. I’ve seen other men branded, gelded, mutilated—their hands cut off, their ears, their noses slit in two. I knew well what kind of business the pack would wish to do with me. We were a sinful house, Father; and worse than that, we were successful and rich. The world rubs along with sin easily enough—but success? The rich are hounded without mercy by a thousand hangers-on and must expect to pay out generously or be hated. We didn’t pay. We had no mercy either. And we were hated, me especially.

  “What think you? If you had not stood between me and Brother Thomas’s old loyalties—between me and Father Chad’s fears and Father Gilbert’s misgivings—where do you think I should have been? Dangling and jerking from a tree branch dying at my own hand most likely—and that would have been the easy, gentle choice. Or I’d have been kicked to death or choking on my own blood as they sliced out my tongue, groping blind and in agony as they tore out my eyes despite my pleading and my screams, crawling to some corner in trembling shock after they cut off my sex organs. I knew very well what my fate would have been, and the evidence of it we’ve found crouched in the alley this evening. It would have been me begging on the street corner with the flies crawling into my eye sockets to lay their eggs. And who would have saved me but you? I heard Brother Thomas say he wished I’d been burnt to death; I believe he also expressed the opinion that someone should flay the skin off my back just as Christ was flayed. Nay, it’s all right—it’s all right; I understand. He’s a passionate man, and we are friends now. But if you had stayed home with your mother, if you had stayed in Chesterfield with Oswald, who would have been there for me? You’d forgotten that, hadn’t you? You hadn’t thought of it like that. No, but I surely haven’t forgotten. If you had delayed one day to care for Oswald on your way home or to find means to bring him with you, then when I arrived at St Alcuin’s you would not yet have arrived home. And do you think they would even have let me in past the porter’s lodge if you had not been there? Well? You know as surely as I do, they would not. I give thanks every day that my life was given to me twice—once by the hand of God when I was born of my mother, and once by you. And you might take a break from beating yourself up over the things you missed and the things you got wrong to notice that sometimes you got it splendidly, mercifully right. Nobody can be every place at once and save everybody, but by God, Father John, I’m glad you were there for me!

  “And what if you had—quite reasonably—found yourself too fully occupied to come with me in search of Oswald? What if you had contented yourself with giving me directions to know where to look? Do you think these good brothers would have taken us in without you? Did it escape you, the way they looked at me and the opinion they hold of me? There would have been nothing but a bed in the lee of a hedge or huddled in a church porch all the way home if you had not been with us—and what if I had been recognized on the way? Oh, my lord abbot, it’s easy to make an inventory of the things you could have done and failed to do, but if you’re bent on doing that, you must remember the times you were there and it made a difference.”

  Abbot John sat quietly, digesting these words. “Thank you,” he said after a while. “Thank you, William. You always comfort me.”

  Mindful then of the Grand Silence, which should be broken only of necessity, they spoke no more. John blew out the candle, and they settled down
under their blankets, but neither of them could sleep. An hour dragged by, and another. Wide-eyed, John stared into the darkness, remembering his sister’s anger and coldness, seeing her face and hearing her words again: “No doubt it would have been different if you’d been there.” He tried not to think of his mother but found himself wondering how quick it had been and whether she had been very afraid. And he relived the supper they had just shared, Oswald’s painful, choking progress through a bowl of milky sops.

  Haunted by memories, John tried to pray. He prayed for himself, for forgiveness and strength; and for Oswald, for courage and grace; for his sister and the community she lived in now, that she would find peace. He prayed for the repose of his mother’s soul. And he prayed for William, who had been turning restlessly in his bed the entire time.

  “What? What’s troubling you?” Abbot John finally spoke into the midnight, addressing the edginess he could feel in his companion.

  “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “I suspect you have always been more than a little disturbing to everyone you meet.” William heard the smile in his abbot’s reply. “But, no, you didn’t wake me up. It’s just I can feel that something is troubling you.”

  He listened to the sound of William turning in his bed, sighing, finally struggling into a sitting position, and sighing again.