The Breath of Peace

 

 

“Years ago, I read Pen's first book and knew that she was a fine writer. She still is. The combination of impeccable research and relational and spiritual adventure is irresitible. We are in a real place wih real people. A feast of characters and ideas.”

Adrian Plass, author,
The Sacred Diary
series

 

 

Other titles in the
Hawk and the Dove
series:

 

The Hawk and the Dove
The Wounds of God
The Long Fall
The Hardest Thing to Do
The Hour Before Dawn
Remember Me
The Breath of Peace
The Beautiful Thread
A Day and a Life
(coming June 2016)

 

 

 

 

Text copyright © 2013 Penelope Wilcock
This edition copyright © 2016 Lion Hudson

The right of Penelope Wilcock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Monarch Books
an imprint of
Lion Hudson plc
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,
Oxford OX2 8DR, England
www.lionhudson.com/fiction

ISBN 978 1 78264 173 5
e-ISBN 978 1 78264 174 2

This edition 2016

Acknowledgments
Scripture quotations marked NIV taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised. Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica, formerly International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. “NIV” is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790.
Scripture quotations marked KJV taken from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown's patentee, Cambridge
University Press.

Cover image © Brian Gallagher

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

 

 

 

For my dear friend Kay Bradbury who prayed me through the
writing of so many stories.

 

 

Again Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.' And with that he breathed on them…
John 20:21 NIV

 

I am the fool whose life's been spent between what's said and what is meant.
Carrie Newcomer

 

If you want to create evil in the world, all you have to do is pick on a little kid.
Clay Garner

 

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.'
Mary Anne Radmacher

 

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
Robert Brault

 

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
Jesus of Nazareth – John 14:27 KJV

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

 

The Community of St Alcuin's Abbey

Acknowledgments

Notes on the Text

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Glossary of Terms

Monastic Day

Liturgical Calendar

The Community of
St Alcuin's Abbey

(Not all members are mentioned in
The Breath of Peace
)

 

Fully professed monks

Fully professed monks now confined to the infirmary through frailty of old age

Novices

Members of the community mentioned in earlier stories and now deceased

Abbot Gregory of the Resurrection

Abbot Columba du Fayel (also known as Father Peregrine)

Acknowledgments

My thanks to singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer for allowing me to use the quotation from her song at the start of this book. Musicians are notoriously sticky about allowing song quotations, and she was very gracious in permitting me to do so. Information about Carrie's work can be found at CarrieNewcomer.com.

Notes on the Text

A note from the author on fourteenth-century English…

Once or twice, in a review or a passing comment, someone has remarked that occasionally this author loses her grip on fourteenth-century English, or that a word or phrase is used that seems out of place for the fourteenth century. Because I think readers may not always immediately see what I am doing here, I thought an explanatory note might be helpful.

The Hawk and the Dove series is set in the 1300s, and if it were written in fourteenth-century English, it would read something like this:

Fowles in the frith,
The fisshes in the flood,
And I mon waxe wood
Much sorwe I walke with
For beste of boon and blood.

Or this:

But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,
Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resound
To telle yow al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,
And whiche they weren, and of what degree,
And eek in what array that they were inne;
And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

Now, that would be fun! I would relish the challenge of employing my studies of English literature through the ages, and creating a modern novel written entirely in Middle English. The only snag would be that no one would want to read it, and even they thatte started wolde gyve up in a litel space, ywys, I wot it roghte wele.

So the challenge I took up instead of that one, was how to write novels set in the fourteenth century that allowed the modern reader to enter that world
as if it were familiar territory
.

Reading Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and the seventeenth-century poets George Herbert and John Donne, something that strikes me every time is the vivid homeliness of their language. The images are domestic and friendly, down to earth somehow, connecting the writer to readers of any era with an almost startling immediacy.

Here's Donne tackling the teasing art of seduction by writing about a flea:

Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
Me it suck'd first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled bee…

And here's George Herbert, with holier matters in mind, writing in 1633, in his poem
The Elixir
, about the transformative power of undertaking lowly tasks ‘for Thy sake':

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgerie divine
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and th'action fine.

There is a forthrightness, an earthiness, a picturesque domesticity about the handling of language throughout the middle ages right up to the eighteenth century, at which point the age of enlightenment kicked in to make a change of emphasis.

In writing The Hawk and the Dove series, I have tried to capture not medieval
usage
of language, but medieval
flavour
– the drollery of its wit, the warmth and immediacy of its style.