Prologue

What is a first line, but a door flung open by an unseen hand?

There, I have begun, after so long. Like a crow’s foot dipped in ink and dragged across the page, my hands shake so. Shall I sand these black scratchings from this fine vellum? No grey sheets these, all overused. I see virgin fields, ready for the plough. My best ink grips the page like mortal sin, desiring to remain. Here I am. If you would seek Dunstan, I will not deny my name.

My first recollection is of sweetness, of honey stolen from a pot on my mother’s shelf when I was three or four years old. I fell asleep in the sun with it smeared across my face and I do not think I have ever been as happy again. Yet I woke at the touch of some mindless creature, some fat fly or moth, struggling in the gummed mass. I sprang up, dashing at myself, feeling the hum of wings on my lips.

My mother came when I called, blotting out the sun. I have not forgotten the sensation of it, the strange thrill of fear and disgust – and I recognise it now. My oldest secrets rustle and climb to the edge like those winged things, wanting to be said. Like prayers, they wish to be wrenched forth, quivering wet in their birth.

I have broken my vows. I have betrayed those I loved and those who loved me. I have murdered innocents. There, in the bare English tongue all those with eyes can read. Too many know their English now. I look upon my words and I am afraid, though I have had my three score years and ten. I should fear nothing. It is true my hand shakes, yet my heart trips in my chest and I am light. I am all light.

Perhaps I will consign these precious sheets to the fire. No one will disturb me now; I have earned that much. These hands that hold the quill are just bones and paper-skin, so like vellum themselves as they whisper against each other. Brother Talbot once said they were a workman’s fists, all scarred and thick. Well, time served him well, didn’t it, with his delicate scribe fingers? I have trod down the soil over his dead face with my bare heels, and only the moon as witness.

I have worked my whole life, from six years old when I first piled bricks for workmen on my father’s land, in exchange for crusts of bread and a draught of cider. I have prayed and I have dropped my sweat onto the forge. I have made swords and I have used them. I have made a cask or two of wine in my time, taking grapes from different vines. I have pissed in a bottle once or twice as well, when I did not like a man – and I have watched him smack his lips and tell me it was so smooth and extraordinarily fine that I was half tempted to try my own vintage. I have loved a woman and she ruined me. I have loved a king and yet I ruined him. And all I have gained in return for my lifetime of labour is fame and power and servants and an abbey.

Still the creatures brush at me, the words crowd my lips. I will set my tale on calfskin, with ink and feather, seated on English oak, dressed in black wool and smooth flax linen. I am a man of this world and the next, but you will not see deception in me. All my deceptions are behind.

I believe I took my first breath in the year of our Lord 920. My parents were mismatched and somewhat more concerned with their own safety than with registering my birth. They fled from the older sons of my father, so my mother cooed to me later, the daft old hen. Four of them opposed the match and threatened to spill the old man’s blood.

I was born when King Edward the Elder was still on the throne, son to Alfred the Great and father to King Æthelstan. Those three men took our small kingdom of Wessex on the south coast – and by war and wit and cunning, they made it into England. That is what matters. Edward the Elder ruled as I grew, and I thought then that he always would be there, like a great oak in the forest. Well, I was wrong about that. His sons and grandsons would mean more to me.

Of all the estates of man in the world, the best is to be born the fine, shrieking son of a king. I have seen mighty lords fall to their knees at the sight of a babe, all for a crown painted on its crib. Yet there are more men than thrones and it does not come to many. If you can’t be born a king, be made a king, though that has thorns. When violent men secure your crown, they keep a knife at your throat ever after. Last, and not the least of these, is this: if you can’t be born a king or made a king, you might still anoint one.

In some ways, the third path holds sway over all. I chose the Church. I could be glib and say it came about because my father made a poor match, denying his future children the halls of power for the sake of youth and a saucy laugh, but a man can run mad winding his life back – and it is always more tangled than a single thread. There is never one truth, one love, or one enemy. I wish it had been so simple.

The calfskin sheets are smooth under my palm. The door is open and yet, somehow, I hesitate. Settle, Dunstan! These halls are the place for truth, much more so than the confessional. No, never there, though I have bored a priest or two in my time. A man must confess or be considered an unrepentant sinner, but only a fool would expect the seal of the confessional to hold. I would not whisper these words to any crouching priest, much less the open congregation. Should I tell a man who might one day consider me for high office that I lay alongside a woman and was taken with a strange sickness? Vows can be broken. God knows, I have broken them all.

There never was a sin I could not learn to love. Yet here I sit, with a quill and a vial of oak-gall black, and I scratch away. The ink is called encaustum, or ‘the biter’, for the way its acid eats the page and lasts for ever. Words can bite – and memories can worry you like a dog. The flames leap merrily as I write. They must consume all when I am done. They may take me too, in the end, but they will keep me warm first. Perhaps I will be found like poor Brother Severus, whose body vanished into ash and left only his feet and one hand still in the chair! What devil took him so, that charred him before he even went to hell?

Am I afraid of the other place? What fool is not? Yet I have raised great churches to set against my sins. It is my fervent hope that there is no eternal torment waiting for me now. How they would smile then, the dead, to see old Dunstan cast down! Made young again, perhaps, to be torn and broken for their pleasure. I could bear it better if I were young, I know. How those saints would laugh and shake their fat heads. I wonder, sometimes, if I can feel them clustered around me, all those who have gone before. Like bees pressing on a pane of glass, I feel their souls watching. Or perhaps it is just the wind and the scratching of woodworm in cantilevered joists.

Settle, Dunstan. Tell the story.