The Breath of Peace (2 page)

In practice this means knotting and weaving modern phraseology into a net capable of catching that elusive earthy quality. So, for example, in this book (
The Breath of Peace
) there is a riff running about William's ‘scary eyes'. In terms of the story, this works with the purpose of continuing the process, wrought over the course of the previous three novels, of allowing the reader to follow through deepening insight into a character whose presenting face is essentially unlikeable. Theologically, this is about redemption beginning with learning to love the unlovely – the heart of compassion and the nature of grace: ‘while we were yet sinners…' (Romans 5:8). In introducing the question of the ‘scary eyes', the theme of learning to see things from someone else's point of view begun in
The Hardest Thing To Do
is taken to the level of being actually behind or within the eyes of the individual whose gaze is threatening, disturbing and unsettling – and realizing that
to that person
the unnerving gaze is unintentional; and in any case he is the one person in the world who has no means of experiencing or perceiving it.

But the term ‘scary' has a very modern ring to it. So the question I tossed about for a while was whether to avoid the modern idiom, or use it in this case. I decided to use it because the modern reader, familiar with it in daily speech, would grasp immediately its affectionate and less than serious application. If someone says to you, ‘You have scary eyes!' they are not taking you entirely seriously – it's meant, but it's slightly teasing. The phrase originates with Madeleine in this story, and allows the reader to keep the awareness that William
has
a disquieting presence – even his wife finds him somewhat unnerving at times – while at the same time moving closer into this vulnerable and damaged person beset by the fears and shame that overrun his inner world.

‘Scary' is flippant, teasing, affectionate, light, gently mocking – and, familiar with these nuances in daily speech, a reader will instantly catch these resonances. But how does this sit with a fourteenth-century context? Of course this exact use of ‘scary' does not carry over from the modern day to the fourteenth century, but the flavour – the gentle mockery, the teasing – does. To use an archaic form would have the disadvantage of imparting a mannered and wooden quality to the interaction, which was precisely the thing I wanted to avoid. Madeleine speaks to William within a relationship of intimacy – an intimacy further underlined by his being a man so very hard for anyone to get close to. Use of a term stiffened by the distance of history would not do here. The idiom is modern, but used with the purpose of bringing to life for the modern reader a domestic relationship from a distant historical context.

Similarly I will use phrases like ‘not the sharpest knife in the box' or ‘what are you like?', ‘does my head in' or ‘I see where you're coming from' or ‘get a grip', because there is no inherent reason why they could not have been formulated in the middle ages – they don't rely on a specific historical context in the way that ‘on the level' (a phrase imported from Freemasonry) or ‘all guns blazing' (obviously post-medieval) or ‘nineteen to the dozen' (from the nineteenth-century Cornish tin mines) would do.

On the other hand, when one of the people working editorially on the text, for one of the earlier novels, suggested that I put in the mouth of Abbot John the words ‘Are you kidding?' I rejected that instinctually, because it has the wrong flavour – it is
too
American, too modern, too specifically rooted in our contemporary world – and because there are other words – jesting, joking, etc. – that serve the exact same purpose without stepping out of the medieval world.

Modern idiom in these novels is primarily chosen where it serves the purpose of conveying nuances of relationship – because these novels are about the delicate intermingling of gritty, earthy, difficult daily relationship in community with the leavening, beautifying, fragrant threads and root-hairs of divine grace.

The great cause of writing fiction is to weave a bag to carry truth. It is a means of bringing truth home. The art of storytelling is to present a context ‘long ago and far away', allowing us to examine without feeling defensive the issues that belong to our lives, our dilemmas, our day. The marriage of the far-away and the here-and-now is achieved by the use of language. The Hawk and the Dove series comes from the days of fire and stone, of ox-carts and rushlights, the days before tomatoes and potatoes were on the menu: but the stories in it are yours and mine, and what we rely on to make the bridge is the way in which language is used.

My first love as a reader and as a writer is poetry – I came only gradually to prose and have learned to love the handling of it more slowly. Thus I write first and foremost as a poet, balancing the word-music and cadences of every sentence, sitting with a thesaurus always open in search of words that convey not approximately but precisely the heart-meaning of the trail of grace I am trying to coax the reader along – until you can see it; until a man's weeping makes your belly contract with his, until his quiet joke and sly grin stays with you, and makes you smile as you remember it while you're in your kitchen chopping vegetables for your supper.

Nobody could know better than I do that I cannot always have got the balance right – that sometimes my choices of modern idiom may have been ill-advised, and my research of an immersion into the medieval and monastic world is sometimes patchy and incomplete. But it has been a study and a love affair of a lifetime, and in this series of novels I give it my best shot.

Chapter
One

An owl hooted, soft and eerie, in the blackness between the dripping trees that bordered and hung menacing over the lane. She took in the sound, and then she stopped dead. That was wrong. No owl perched so low. It was a signal. It was a man. Her heart thundered, battering erratic, high in her chest. Again the low, unearthly call floated through the cold mist. Madeleine stood trembling, sick with terror, her knees shaking, unable to move. How many of them were there? Footpads? Thieves? Or worse?

She almost fainted as she saw the human clot of shadow emerge from the trees against the wall.

‘Who goes there?' She tried to sound sharp and challenging, but her voice shook with undisguisable fear.

As the man came towards her, she could not run, could do nothing; blind panic stopped her throat and then in the glimmers of moonlight shining fitful through the trees she recognized a familiar outline and gait in the vague shape approaching her… ‘W-W-William?' She could hardly gasp out the question.

‘Oh, my sweet, did I scare you?'

And relief drained every ounce of strength from her so that she all but collapsed into his arms.

‘My darling!' He was laughing at the situation, holding her close to him, laughing: ‘My darling, it's only me!'

It was the laughter that did it. Incoherent rage took hold of her, and she pulled back from his arms.

‘What a stupid, stupid thing to do! It isn't funny! How was I supposed to know it was you? You frightened the wits out of me! It could have been anybody standing there in the trees! Why didn't you bring a lantern anyway? What did you think you were doing, crouched in the hedgerow mooing like a cow fallen in the ditch?'

‘I wasn't mooing. I was being an owl!'

‘An owl? Oh, Lord! You almost scared the life out of me! All I knew, standing there in the dark, was that someone, something – some fell being, I knew not what, but no owl – was hiding in the trees! Saints alive, William de Bulmer – what kind of man are you?'

‘A penitent one.' He tried to take her into his embrace again, and she would have nothing of it. He tried another tack. ‘Why were you out so late, anyway? I was worried about you. That's why I came out to look for you.'

‘Look, let's not stand here in the lane, shall we? It's dark, it's freezing cold, it's wet, and I'll bet you've let the fire go out!'

‘Madeleine…' His hand found hers. ‘Don't be cross with me. I didn't mean to scare you. I didn't think.'

She allowed him to hold her hand, but he felt no returning pressure of affection. The silence that emanated from her as they splashed through the mud and puddles of the rutted lane felt icier than the raw February night.

William cursed himself. To come upon an unidentified man waiting for her on the lonely road home would have been terrifying. Madeleine never spoke about the night the villagers had come for her and her mother, burned their cottage to the ground, killed or stole their livestock and left her mother dead and Madeleine stunned and bleeding. But she never mentioned it because she wanted to keep the horror sealed away, not because she'd forgotten. And he should have realized. Should have been more thoughtful. As they trudged without speaking the last few yards to their gate, he tried desperately to remember if he had in fact thought to build up the fire before he set out. It was difficult to think. More anxiously pressing was the increasing certainty that he had forgotten to shut the hens in. This he dared not admit.

They walked in silence until they came to the stone walls that encircled their homestead, Caldbeck Cottage. He opened the gate and stood aside for her to enter, latching it securely behind them.

He had a bad feeling that she was probably right about the fire. He had taken scraps of left-over bread and vegetables to their sow, Lily, mixed in with her oat mash along with the buttermilk from the morning, and a few apples from the store. He had milked Marigold, Madeleine's much-loved goat brought with her from St Alcuin's. He spread fresh straw in her stall, in the pig sty, and in the palfrey's stable, when he fastened them in for the night. The animals had no need of mucking out. At the beginning and end of the short months of summer – in May and in September – they cleaned out the animal housing, but through the long cold months of the northern winter the build-up of litter on the floor offered a valuable source of warmth, and made the food go further – a cold animal is a hungry one. The goat's housing and the stable smelt sweet; the odour of their dung was not offensive. William felt less sure about the fragrance of a pig.

The trips across from the hay barn and the straw barn made extra work. Madeleine had wanted to store some bales in the goat shed and above the stable, but William had adamantly refused. There had been an argument about that as well, he recalled.

‘No,' he had said: ‘absolutely not. The hay cannot be stored in the same building with the straw, and neither one in the same building with the beasts. And the hay store cannot even be near the straw, or the beasts, or the house. It only takes one bale, just one damp bale, to combust, and we lose the hay, the straw, the beasts and the house if they are all cheek by jowl. It must be separate. No, Madeleine! It
must
be.'

‘William, you're being too particular. It's not a great farm! And anyway, we won't be buying damp hay, we'll be choosy, we'll check. It's just so much work traipsing back and forth all weathers to lug it in.'

‘I am
not
being too particular. If we inadvertently roast that goat something tells me you, for one, won't be able to face eating her for supper. And we rely on the milk. Yes, we have enough money on deposit if we live frugally. We can hope to build up and increase what we have here, and we shall prosper. It would take only one fire to dash our hopes and dreams, and set back by several years everything we've planned. I've known barn fires, and seen the wind take them across the thatches of one building after another, wreaking devastation. We can't make ourselves safe against everything, but not doing what we can is just madness.'

‘I still think you're making a mountain out of a molehill. I've husbanded animals all my life and always kept a few bales in with the beasts. It helps keep them warm, for one thing. I've never had a fire, not once.'

He looked at her. ‘What are you talking about? Your house burnt down.'

Irritation twitched her face. This thrust annoyed her intensely. ‘Aye, and yours did too, wherever you kept your dratted hay! That's not the point.'

And so it had continued, back and forth, for the best part of an afternoon: but he would not budge. When they moved in, he had not the skills to build and thatch a hovel for storing hay, so a precious portion of their money had been spent on hiring a handy neighbour to do that for them. The incident had made William feel suddenly defenceless and lonely. The shared skills of a monastic community of men had made for great strength and security. Leaving that behind at the age of fifty with very little experience of mending and building made him very vulnerable by comparison with everything he had known so far, even if they had inherited an income as well as a house. This was what made him so adamant about the hay store. This house and money that had been left them represented the chance of a lifetime. It would not come again. He knew he would never be able to live with himself if he stood watching impotently as flames reached the thatch of his home, and he with no means of fighting it but himself, his wife, a well and a small stack of leather buckets. He refused to take the risk.

‘Nobody ever thinks they're buying damp hay,' he insisted. ‘Nobody goes to the farm and says, “Ooh, that's cheap, must be damp, I'll have it all.” It takes you by surprise. That's why it pays to be cautious. It's not the things you know are going to happen that ruin a man, it's the things that catch him out.'

‘What?' she snapped. ‘You mean, like spending the entire fortune of an abbey on a ship not safe in harbour and watching it go to the bottom of the sea?' It was an unkind dig, raking up his past mistakes, and she felt a pang of guilt even as she said it and watched him turn his face away, stung by the taunt.

‘Aye,' he replied quietly, after a moment's silence: ‘exactly like that. Well, let's not do it again. I haven't been lucky with risks.'