Chapter
Thirteen

Brother Conradus promised to pray for their missing novice, and he’s as good as his word. He treads the cloister to the kitchen buildings with a most purposeful look in his eye.

Our Lady Queen of Heaven who watches over Father James working in the robing room is a being of indisputable glamour. Her mild and beautiful eyes, her rose-petal lips and creamy complexion, her towering crown and graceful fall of robes, combine into a heavenly sophistication beyond compare.

Our Lady of Good Counsel who watches over the kitchen is an entirely different perspective on the Mother of God. She stands on a table against the wall, near the scullery door. Our Lady herself is sometimes unsure whether the Good Counsel part of it is hers or Brother Conradus’s, because he has a lot to say to her. He likes this statue. She’s short and sturdy, with a capable look to her, holding the infant Jesus firmly; evidently not about to drop him or let him wriggle free. She has sensibly given him that lily to amuse him, since they will be here for a very long time. Her dress is a cheery red, and her veil faded blue. The baby Jesus in her arms has a lively, interested expression and sports a tunic in practical peasant russet. Nobody has splashed out on gold for this homely pair. Her nose is chipped, and one of her fingers has been knocked off. She was sent here from the chapel when Our Lady of Sorrows was donated. At her feet stands a pot, one of Brother Robert’s misshapes from his early days learning from Brother Thaddeus, with a casual posy of hawkbit, feverfew, tansy, and scabious, the last of the summer flowers, the ones Brother Conradus could still find to bring her.

“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum,” he murmurs as he fetches the flour and the yeast. “Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.” He goes for the jar of oil, and the precious salt. “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei” – he pauses before the statue, his head reverently bent – “ora pro nobis pecatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.¹⁵ Wait here. I’ll be back.”

He dashes into the garden to gather a big bunch of thyme – the best bread herb of all. Returning, he brings the fragrant bundle to the work-table, and begins expertly stripping the leaves from the tough stalks, into a small heap.

With a practised eye, he takes measures of flour, oil, and salt, and the mug of ale-barm¹⁶ that Brother Walafrid brings over from the brewhouse and leaves out for him.

He dissolves a little honey in warm water – a jug of cold from the well, warmed up with a dipper of hot from the kettle hanging on chains over the fire. He mixes everything with the effortless familiarity of daily practice; and with the firm rhythm of kneading begins his prayer.

“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum – what are we going to do about Brother Cedd? He wasn’t at chapel, Mother, and Father John is worried about him. Whatever does he think he’s playing at? What’s happened? Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Blessed Mother, what do your eyes see? You searched for Jesus, your lad who wandered off; please search for ours now. You found Jesus where he said he was bound to be, in the temple, about the Father’s work. Dearest Mother, search down your lad again. In the living temple of our lad Cedd’s troubled heart, maybe your lad Jesus is fielding difficult questions again. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis pecatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. Mother Mary, God trusted you with the care of his lad Jesus – for sure you can be trusted to look after ours. Now, look, Mother dearest, surely it’s like this. If your lad Jesus is hiding in the temple of our lad Cedd’s heart, well, if you go and hunt for him, search for him – your lad, I mean – look for him everywhere until you find him and bring him home, he’ll have our Cedd attached to him, won’t he, because that’s where he’ll be. So please… Mother, please… for me, for Father John, for Father Clement, God bless him, with his failing eyes… for Father Theodore – did you not notice, blessed Mother, he looks so sad today… for Cedd himself – he can do better than this… May it be so, dear Mother; may your lad Jesus find his way into our lad Cedd’s troubled heart, and may you track him down right there and bring him home. Brother Cedd, I mean. With Jesus in the sanctuary of his heart. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum…”

Our Lady is well used to the fantastical confections of Brother Conradus’s prayers. She can read between the lines. She gets the gist.

As he kneads the bread – stretching, pummelling, rhythmic – as he spreads oil on the lump of dough, covers it with a damp cloth, and sets it in a bowl to rise, all the while Brother Conradus does as he promised, holding before the blessed Mother of God, so fervently it cannot possibly escape the attention of her kindness, this lost sheep of the house of St Alcuin.

The plaster image is not the Mother of God. Of course it isn’t; Brother Conradus grasps that for himself with no difficulty at all. He knows that all earthly things – even this place that he loves, even his own body, even the holy bread of the Eucharist and the beauty of the Yorkshire hills as they cup the light – are no more than what is passing and must be left behind. But he knows, too, that beyond and somehow within these familiarities of his life – the flour on his apron, the breath in his nostrils, the scent of woodsmoke, and the faded blue of Our Lady of Good Counsel’s veil – lies the ineffable mystery of redeeming love. It is worked into his life as inextricably as ale-barm into his rising dough. And that’s why he directs his prayers through a plaster statue. They are aimed at what she is, not what she isn’t; not at a painted saint, but a love that never gives up on us, never abandons us, never turns its back.

He washes his hands. He takes off his apron and hangs it up tidily on the nail. “Ave Maria,” he murmurs as the bell for None begins to ring, and he heads off along the cloister towards the chapel, “gratia plena, Dominus tecum…”

The tinctures all done – cooled, strained, bottled, sealed – and Brother Michael’s poultice herbs delivered to the infirmary, Brother Walafrid and Brother Giles start the next job. This week Brother Mark has taken the second harvest of honey, and brought them the wax to make a new lot of candles; very welcome – the cost of purchasing them would be steep indeed.

It’s a slow process. They don’t have so very much wax that they can heat it in a big trough, suspending the wicks from huge, rectangular paddles. The amount of wax would go down in the trough too early, leaving insufficient depth for the outer coats. So they content themselves with the two tall cylindrical pots they have, using a round dipping paddle that can take six wicks at a time. The wicks are made of braided linen threads – three, or more if the thread’s unusually thin. Brother Giles cuts the resulting string to twice the length they want, plus an inch or so each side to allow for spacing and to attach the initial weights. Then he loops each length through two holes in the dipping paddle. They start with the church candles while the pot is full of wax, because those have to be tall. As the amount of wax in the pot goes down they use shorter lengths, making candles for men’s cells and for the lanterns.

Every time they do this (really every time – Brother Giles has begun to find it more than tedious), Brother Walafrid comments on how much pleasanter and easier it is working with beeswax like this, instead of the tallow he had to make do with before he entered monastic life. Brother Giles could tell you, because he knows it all by heart, that when Brother Walafrid was a lad, for a start he had only wool to use for wicks, because that’s what his mother used to spin; they didn’t have any linen. And you had to let the tallow cool to just the right temperature with every dip, or the whole candle would slip straight off the wool as the layers built up, and you’d have to drop it back in the pot, let it melt, and begin all over again. Besides all that, of course it had to be rendered down with pot ash at least three times, and therefore strained through a cloth even more times than that, or it wouldn’t harden sufficiently to set into anything you could use.

Oh, beeswax is a whole different proposition from tallow. It smells heavenly (as opposed to vile), it hardens fast, and adheres more evenly, which makes for a better burn.

Once the wicks are looped into the paddle, the little iron weights they keep for the purpose tied to the ends of each length, and the wax is fully melted, they begin the dipping. They have several paddles, and after every dipping they set each laden paddle into a rack with a drip-tray beneath, while it cools. Then they dip it again until the candles reach the dimension the monks want. At some point about halfway through, once the candles are heavy enough to hang down straight, they cut free the weights to prevent them being incorporated into the candles.

This is painstaking work, the more exacting because it does require vigilance – to get the work completed, the dips must be sufficiently frequent, but to get a good result, the thickening candles must be adequately hardened before each dip. That takes about a decade of the rosary.

The apertures for the linen thread in the dip paddles have slits extending from them clear through the edge, so each pair of candles can be eased off and hung as a pair over a rail when the job is done. This is the best way to store them; hanging there keeps them straight.

It’s a hot job in a closed workshop on a warm day. The embers no more than glow beneath the grille on which the open pots of wax stand; even so, working in a room with a fire and several pots of hot wax brings out a fine sweat on a man in a woollen habit, even if he has got his sleeves rolled up and his skirts kilted as high as decency permits.

It’s a pleasing piece of work, for all that; and nobody gazes more appreciatively on the tall, slender candles burning on the altar at Mass, or in the choir lanterns at Vespers and Compline, than Brother Giles and Brother Walafrid, who made them.