The Hawk and the Dove Page 7

  It was gloomy in the chapel, on such an evening. A few candles flickered, but in the damp air their iridescent haloes seemed to hover close to the flame, and they scarcely illuminated the dimness. Peregrine could vaguely discern figures in the abbey church, on the other side of the parish altar, but could not tell whether they would be his guests, or the usual worshippers from the village, some of whom attended Vespers as well as the morning Mass.

  ‘Magnificat, anima mea Dominum,’ Brother Gilbert’s voice lifted in the lovely chant.

  ‘Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo,’ responded the brothers. ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my saviour.’

  ‘It’s true,’ thought Peregrine, with some surprise. ‘After all the struggle of the early years, I am content now. I love this place, and these brothers committed to my charge. I am content.’ He gave his mind to the chant again, which he had been singing without thinking, both words and tune being as familiar as his own skin.

  ‘Gloria Patri et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto …’

  After Vespers, as the brothers dispersed, Father Chad came round the parish altar to find the visiting family, as they sat in the gathering shadows. He led them out into the courtyard, to follow Peregrine, who was crossing to his house in the persistent drizzle.

  ‘Our lord abbot,’ said Father Chad, seeing the eyes of the mother of the family watching Peregrine’s awkward progress across the court.

  ‘A crippled man?’ she said in surprise. ‘There must be few so afflicted who rise to become abbot of a community. He must be an extraordinary man.’

  ‘He was not always as you see him now,’ Father Chad replied, ‘but he is an extraordinary man.’

  They followed him into the abbot’s house, and found him standing with Brother Edward before a bright fire of seasoned apple logs. The abbot’s house was built with a hearth and a chimney, so that a fire might be lit to warm and cheer the guests of the abbey, though Peregrine virtually never lit it on his own account, except in the bitterest of the winter weather, when his hands, too cramped and inflexible to write well at the best of times, refused to function at all in the cold.

  It was almost dark now, outside, but here the fire burned cheerily, and candles shone with a warm, soft light. The pilgrims came in gladly from the cold, and Father Chad introduced them to his superior. ‘Madame de Montany and her family, Father,’ he said, but Peregrine was standing staring at her, speechless, frozen to the spot.

  ‘Clare!’ he exlaimed at last.

  She, too, as she saw his face, gasped with surprise and stood still.

  ‘How came you here?’ she said now. ‘I had no idea…’

  As a young boy, Peregrine du Fayel and his two older brothers had been brought up on their father Henri’s manor under the wide, wild skies of the fenlands near Ely. Their neighbour, Robert de Montany, also a Norman knight, was a big kindly man, married to a gentle and sweet-tempered wife, Eloise. He had a son, Hugh, born within a week of Peregrine’s birth, and a younger daughter, Louise.

  On the other side of du Fayel’s boundaries lay the lands of the van Moeck family, Dutch aristocracy who had settled in England on land they had inherited. They felt at home there, in the flat, wet lands under the great, luminous sky. Pieter and Gerda van Moeck had two daughters, Anne and Clare.

  The children of the three households grew up together, played together as infants, rode and hunted and dined together as young people, and were all friends. Privileged young things, shielded from life’s hardships, with tolerant and indulgent parents all, the world was their plaything, and they enjoyed life to the full.

  When he was twenty-five years old, and she twenty-four, Geoffroi du Fayel, Peregrine’s oldest brother, was betrothed to Anne van Moeck. They married and settled in a manor farm given to them by Pieter van Moeck, Anne’s father, on the edge of the du Fayel lands, and from there Geoffroi took charge of the farm management of his own land, and most of his father’s too. Gerda van Moeck and Melissa du Fayel, having spent the last five years discreetly engineering the match, sat back complacently to await the arrival of grandchildren, at the same time having an eye to any possible developments among their remaining offspring.

  Emmanuel, the next of the du Fayel brothers, dark and quick-tempered, was by nature well adapted to bloodshed, and he took up arms in the king’s service, and went away to kill as many enemies of the Crown as he could lay his hands on.

  Left together, Peregrine and Hugh lived the easy lives of young noblemen, more play than work, and devoted their time to hunting and breeding horses and training falcons. Louise de Montany, a docile, home-loving body, they had little to do with, and Clare van Moeck, the youngest of them all, they tolerated and teased as a little sister, until the day of her sixteenth birthday, which was 17th March 1283.

  On that day, her parents gave a banquet for her, at which all three households gathered. Anne and Geoffroi, five years married now, were there with Pierre, their four-year-old son, and their tiny, toothless, hairless scrap of a daughter, but six weeks into the world. Emmanuel was still away, but the rest of the family was assembled.

  In the solar, during the hour before they dined, Gerda van Moeck was working at her embroidery in the pale, bright sunshine that streamed through the window. Hugh and Peregrine had ridden out together, ahead of their families, partly because Hugh wanted to show off the merits of his newly acquired horse to his friend.

  In age, the two young men were the same, but in every other way they were different, and Gerda van Moeck, plump and kindly, sat with her embroidery forgotten in her lap for the moment, watching them with amusement.

  Hugh, big-boned, blond and gentle, with a deep voice and a hearty, generous laugh, was extolling the virtues of his new mount to Peregrine. Everything about Hugh was open, ingenuous and relaxed. Peregrine, by contrast, had a gathered, flame-like intensity about him, and the watchful, fierce expression of the falcon he was named for. Just now, his face was lit with laughter as he teased his friend, mocking him for losing his heart and his wits with it, to a mere horse.

  The door of the solar opened, and Clare van Moeck shyly made her entrance, in her new dress which was her mother’s birthday present to her. It was a simple gown of delphinium blue, which gave her blue eyes the depth and clarity of jewels. Her mane of rich brown hair was gathered up in a gold net, and she stood within the doorway, her lips slightly parted and her cheeks a little flushed, graceful and shy in her finery. Both young men turned their heads at the same moment and saw her, and she was utterly beautiful. From that moment, and for the rest of his life, Hugh de Montany worshipped her. But as she stood a little self-consciously before their arrested gaze, it was Peregrine’s eyes she sought; and reading there the candid admiration she had hoped to find, her own eyes exulted. Clare van Moeck had grown into a woman, and Peregrine du Fayel wanted her.

  Gerda noted with satisfaction the impact her daughter had made. Two fish on the hook; it was well. Both the banquet and the dress had proved worth the trouble.

  From that day, and through the spring and summer of the year, Peregrine and Clare were more and more together. They rode and walked and talked together, having eyes only for each other. Late in the September of the year, as summer slid into autumn, there was a day when Clare stood laughing in the russet woodland and her glorious rich brown hair fell about the green gown she wore. She looked for all the world like a dryad of the autumn woods, and Peregrine took her in his arms and kissed her. Her heart triumphed. She had won him. He was hers.

  With approval, their families watched their young love blossom. Another such union between the households was welcome to both the du Fayels and the van Moecks. Hugh de Montany alone could not be glad, but he kept his heartache private, continuing a steadfast friend to them both.

  It was in the spring of the following year, when Clare was just seventeen, and Peregrine was twenty-four, that all this came to an end. For some little while now, the two of them had gone further in their love tha
n they should and, bedded in the fragrant bluebells in the woodland, or nestled in the warm-scented hay in the great barns of Pieter van Moeck’s farm, they had lain together as lovers, wrapped in Peregrine’s cloak, lost in each other and consumed in the ardour of their love.

  But somehow, unexpectedly, irresistibly, came the call of God on Peregrine’s soul. In the end there came a day when he held Clare in his arms and kissed her, and his face was sad but resolute as he told her his decision.

  ‘Clare, what we have done is sin. What is between us should have been saved for marriage. I have confessed it, for my part, to the priest, and I ask your pardon too.’

  Dumbly, bewildered, she shook her head and held him close; held him fiercely as she felt in her heart that for some reason she could not understand, he was no longer hers.

  ‘I have to leave you, my lady, my love, my heart.’ He looked down at her blue eyes brimming with tears, and kissed her brow, her eyes, her cheeks, her hair; then put her away from him with a sudden, rough gesture.

  ‘I am going to enter as a brother at St Peter’s Abbey,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘A monk! You?’ exclaimed Clare, her amazement for a moment overcoming even her sorrow. He looked at her, and she could not read the expression in his eyes, she who had thought she knew him like her own soul.

  ‘Yes. Me,’ he said simply.

  He tried to explain to her later the burning of his vocation, the passionate longing which is greater than the love between man and woman, with which his soul cried out for God. She did not understand, and she wept, but she did not try to dissuade him. Neither did his disappointed and astonished parents attempt to argue with him—they had given that up when he was two years old. He was received into the community of brothers at the abbey of St Peter, near Ely, at the end of May in the year 1284, and Clare van Moeck never saw him again.

  Until today.

  Brother Edward was as surprised to see Clare as Peregrine was. He had known her well as a little girl, and even during his days of itinerant preaching with the Franciscans, he had been a frequent visitor to all three households. He had watched the offspring of the three families grow up through childhood and lost touch with them only when his wanderings took him as far away as the North Riding of Yorkshire, where he had finally settled.

  He glanced at Peregrine, and seeing him momentarily incapable of speech, stepped forward with a welcoming smile to greet Clare.

  ‘What a happy surprise, my dear! How the years have flown since last we met—and you are no whit less beautiful!’

  ‘Madame de Montany,’ broke in Peregrine. ‘Then you married Hugh.’ He had gathered his senses enough to smile at her. ‘And these are Hugh’s sons, yes, I see they are. The image of their father.’

  ‘Hugh, and Edwin,’ said Clare. ‘And this is Melissa, my daughter—my first-born,’ she added softly, with a slight tremble in her voice.

  ‘Oh, forgive me,’ said Peregrine, who had overlooked the young woman standing in the shadows at the back of the group. His words died on his lips, and his eyes widened as she stepped forward, looking at him out of intense, direct, dark grey eyes, set above a nose like a hawk’s beak, a resolute mouth and a determined chin. It was like looking into a mirror.

  ‘I am pleased to meet you, Father,’ she said at last, and he held out his hand to her, like a man dreaming.

  ‘Daughter, you are welcome,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Clare held her breath as she watched Melissa take the scarred, twisted hand tenderly in both her own. What had happened to him? Melissa’s hands were as his had been, scholar’s hands, long and graceful; and they closed round his hand now, and released it again.

  ‘I did not know,’ he said, stating the obvious, looking from Melissa to Clare, and back again. ‘I did not know. But come,’ he recollected himself, ‘sit down and eat. You must be hungry.’

  From childhood Melissa had known the story of her father, and she well knew Henri du Fayel, Peregrine’s father, whom he strongly resembled. As Melissa was so like the du Fayels, and apart from the mass of her brown hair she was so unlike either Hugh or Clare, there had seemed no point in keeping the story from her. Both Clare and Hugh had the generosity to portray her father to his little girl as a man irresistibly called by God, not as a lover who had used and abandoned his mistress. Now, the man she had wondered about all her life sat before her, and she could not take her eyes off him.

  Clare, too, watched the man she had loved, and she wondered at the savage scar on his face, and her heart was wrenched with pity at his lameness, and the awkward fumbling of his hands. She watched the young brother, who waited on them at table, place the abbot’s food before him, already cut up, as a mother might give cut food to a child too young to manage on his own. At the sight of that plate of food, the words of astonishment were out of her mouth before she could restrain them: ‘Is that all you eat?’

  She spoke with the forthright familiarity of an old friend, and one who had seen her lover many times come in from hunting, to devour a huge plate of food with the single-mindedness of an unusually fastidious wolf.

  Her words broke the tension that bound the whole group, and Peregrine laughed. ‘No,’ he said smiling, ‘but it is not easy for me to eat with guests, Clare, because of my hands.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, gently; and he told them, briefly, factually, and without emotion, how he came to be so maimed.

  ‘I remember the man, and his sons,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘I remember the day he was taken away, and how he struggled and fought. It was awful. And this happened to you two years ago, you say?’

  ‘Three years at Easter. I am used to it now.’ These words were clearly intended to close the subject, and the talk was turned to old friends and family, and remembered places.

  ‘Melissa is to be married this summer,’ said Clare. ‘She is betrothed to Ranulf Langlon—do you remember the family? They are wool merchants from Thaxted. Ranulf is a fine young man.’

  ‘You are… twenty-five years old, this autumn it must be,’ Peregrine said to Melissa. ‘You have waited a while, then, to make your choice?’

  ‘Mother always counselled me to wait for a man I felt I could really love,’ replied Melissa. ‘She says a marriage where one does not love would be a weary business.’

  Peregrine glanced sharply at Clare, and she met his look steadily. ‘Would you not think so?’ she said.

  ‘I think,’ replied Peregrine carefully, ‘that as the years go by, the same love would enrich any marriage as the love which builds and enriches a community of celibate monks; and that is the love which is pledged to lay down its own wants and preferences for the sake of the other. The marriage that was built on natural affection, and had nothing of such love would, in the end, sour, however promising its beginning, I think.’

  Clare’s son laughed. ‘But you are not recommending, sir, that one should marry regardless of inclination or affection, unless one has to? That would seem noble, but not entirely sensible.’

  Peregrine smiled at him: ‘Edwin, heaven help me, I am a monk. It is not for me to advance opinions on marriage! All I am saying is that between any people, if their love has not that Christ-like quality of humble service, then neither is it built to last forever.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Clare, ‘even where your heart is given to love and to serve, it does not always follow that the one you love will be true to you, or to his own protestations of love. Men change, and love given does not guarantee love returned.’

  Peregrine dropped his gaze before her, his face ashamed.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I know.’ He was silent.

  ‘So you are travelling to Iona,’ remarked Edward cheerfully. ‘A beautiful place. Would that I could celebrate the Easter feast there with you. But you have chosen rough weather for your journey.’

  Young Hugh laughed; a laugh so like his father’s that Peregrine looked up, startled; it was as though his old friend sat there with them in the person of hi
s son.

  ‘Brother, we do not choose our weather,’ said the young man. ‘Pray for us, and the one who sends the rain may relent a little!’

  They talked a while longer, over the remains of their meal, and then it was time for the brothers to go to Compline, the day’s last office, after which the monastery was folded into the Great Silence, and no conversation at all was permitted until the following day.

  The pilgrims meant to rise early in the morning and be ready to depart as soon as they had heard Mass, so Edwin, Hugh and Melissa returned to the guest house, taking the chance to retire early and rest in preparation for their journey. Clare said she would come to Compline first, and then join them. Father Chad and Brother Edward went with the young people to the guest house to see that all they needed had been prepared for them. Peregrine set off directly to the church, it taking him a little longer than the others to make his way there; and Clare walked with him, suiting her pace to his slow and laborious progress.

  ‘Why did you never tell me?’ he said.

  ‘Because you would have married me,’ she responded sadly, ‘and I couldn’t bear to live my life as your second best, your dutiful choice. I kept it a secret until it could be kept a secret no longer, and by then you were clothed, and had taken your vows as a novice, and it was too late. I made them promise not to tell you.’

  ‘So you married Hugh.’

  ‘He offered immediately, to save me from shame.’

  ‘And two fine sons he has given you. You have found him a good husband, I think.’

  ‘Oh yes, he has been to me all that a husband should be,’ she said softly, ‘but you—’

  ‘Clare, don’t say it!’ he cried, harshly.

  ‘I have Melissa always to remind me. Every turn of her head and gesture of her hands is yours. That spring… how could I forget?’

  He flashed her one glance and then looked away. ‘Neither have I forgotten,’ he said quietly, ‘and it does me no good, and does nothing for my peace of mind, to remember.’