He couldn’t even remember for how many drunken days he’d hung around in London after getting back from the States. Not long, though. The place held too many memories for him, because it was where Brooke had lived for most of the time he’d known her. He did remember getting thrown out of a couple of pubs – or maybe three – once with blood smeared over his knuckles, stumbling away down the street before the police turned up. It wasn’t his blood. He didn’t know whose it was, or what the fight had been about.
Somewhere along the dotted, meandering trail of bars that followed, one merging into another, people had started talking French at him instead of English. He’d no idea how that had happened, whether he’d crossed over the Channel by ferry or gone under it by rail. Whether he’d drifted back to France because his home for some years had been a former farm in Normandy, a place called Le Val. Or whether he might just as easily have ended up in the Netherlands, Norway or Iceland. None of this entered his mind at the time. All he’d wanted to do was lose himself. Didn’t matter where. Didn’t matter how.
Ben had been a hard drinker for many years, with a preference for single malt scotch when it was available to him. The habit had left its mark on his time in the military, and it had sometimes affected him in the career he’d pursued since. But there was hard drinking, and there was beyond hard; and then there was the kind of wild, insane, hell-bent suicidal self-poisoning where you didn’t even give a damn what you threw down your neck so long as you could keep it coming and it blotted out all thoughts, blotted out everything, slammed down the iron portcullis on the whole world. The more he drank, the more he wanted to escape from himself, the more he needed to get away from other people.
Maybe that was why he’d made his way into the mountains. Or maybe he could have blindly wandered off anywhere. That was what lost souls did, after all.
When he’d woken in his strange new surroundings that evening over seven months ago, reeling and sick from the whisky still in his system, his first impulse had been to escape. If he hadn’t been so dehydrated and weak, he’d have rejected the food and shelter offered by the monks and gone back to trying to kill himself in a new mountain lair – one where this time nobody could ever find him.
That was then. Something in him had changed. He felt strong now. Clean, clear, fit and alive. He hadn’t touched alcohol for one hundred and ninety-three days straight. Today would be the hundred and ninety-fourth, but who was counting?
He wondered where Brooke was right now. Most likely she was still asleep in her bed, with a little while yet to dream whatever dreams were in her mind before her day began. He pictured her lying there. He hoped she was happy, and thinking about her that way made him smile. There’d been so many days when all he could do was think about her and agonise over the love he’d lost and the life he’d walked away from. For the first months he’d been here, the mistakes he’d made still haunted him in the dead stillness of the night, when he’d light his candle and gaze at the photo of her that he’d been carrying for so long in his wallet that it had become frayed and worn. Sometimes it had hurt so much that he couldn’t bear to look at it.
But the rawness of the pain had begun to fade imperceptibly with each day he remained here. He didn’t fully understand why. Just knew that, thanks to this place, he’d slowly begun to discover within himself a strange kind of serenity. A feeling he’d never experienced before. One he’d been chasing all his life and never found. Until coming here.
Yes, he had changed, and he knew that it had been the Carthusian monks of Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux who had guided him on his path. For their friendship, and their trust, he owed them more than he could say.
Ben flipped himself out of his hard, narrow bunk. The stone floor was cold against his bare feet. Without hesitation, he dropped down on to his palms and did five sets of twenty press-ups, pausing a few seconds between sets, savouring the lactic-acid burn, letting the pain build up in his triceps and deltoids until the muscles screamed. Then he hooked his bare toes under the rough wooden edge of the bunk and did another five sets of twenty sit-ups. When he was done with those and his abdominals were cramping satisfactorily, he got to his feet and walked over to the massive stone lintel above the doorway connecting the small bedroom to the rest of his quarters. It had stood strong for a thousand years and could probably have held the weight of an Abrams main battle tank. He didn’t think he was abusing it by using it as a chin-up bar. He jumped up, hung from his fingers with his feet dangling above the floor. Knees slightly bent, he lifted himself up so that his eyes were level with the lintel, then slowly down. He did five slow, painful sets of those before he dropped lightly to his feet and dusted off his hands.
Before the day was done, he’d have repeated the whole routine seven or eight more times. The solitary hours the Carthusian monks devoted each day in their cells to prayer, Ben spent on exercise. The pain of physical endurance was his purification, the endorphin rush his little piece of heaven. He’d never been much good at prayer. Maybe that would change too, with being here. One small step at a time.
Ben slowly washed himself in the stone cubicle that served him as a bathroom. The water was straight from a mountain spring, not much above freezing. It reminded him of the things he’d liked about the army. So did the uniform, although the plain robe of a lay brother was unlike any other garb he’d donned in his life. He was getting pretty used to it now. Something about it seemed to fit. He put it on, tied up the sash belt, stepped into the pair of plain sandals he now wore instead of boots, then left his quarters and went out into the stillness of the monastery to begin another day.
One small step at a time.
He was in no hurry to leave this place.
The magenta glow of the sunrise, shot through with streaks of gold, cast its light through the ancient cloisters as Ben walked the same route he walked each morning to attend to the first of his daily duties. Soon the slow, heavy tolling of the bell would signal Mass, the only sound to break the silence as the arched passages filled with a procession of silent robed figures heading towards the church. Some were young men, still strong and upright. Others were bent and old, on crutches, with long white beards. They must have lived there so long, they’d totally forgotten any other life.
After the first week, Ben had expected the monks to ask him to leave; especially as he’d been so aggressive with them at first, demanding they bring him the remaining bottles from his pack. Their gentle refusal had been like some act of love. They’d gone on serving him his food twice a day, and nobody had said anything about leaving. After two weeks, when he was feeling slightly stronger and the violent craving for alcohol had become more bearable, they’d moved him from the infirmary to a small house just inside the main entrance, which was used as guest quarters. Slowly at first, he’d started to explore the monastery.
Nobody was stopping him from walking out of the gate, but something inside him did. For the first time, he’d felt the power of the place. He’d looked out over the ancient stone wall across the mountainside and the forests down below, and thought there was something special here.
It was so easy to forget that Briançon was just a few miles away, the highest city in Europe, with a population of eleven thousand people. The world beyond, with all its wars and politics and deception and unhappiness, might as well have belonged to another galaxy. It felt to him like an existence he could comfortably leave behind, shut the door on and never return to.
By the fourth week, he’d begun thinking that he couldn’t go on accepting the care of his hosts without giving something back. The winter was setting in by then, and you could smell the snow coming. From his walks about the monastery and its grounds, he could see there was so much work to do. So much he could offer in return, by way of thanks. Nobody had ever asked him, but from that day he’d begun tending to the livestock, the goats and long-horned cattle whose milk the monks drank and used to make butter and cheese. He gathered eggs from the hen houses, chopped firewood, helped out with general manual tasks like carpentry or masonry repairs on the ancient, weathered buildings. The monastery was also home to a small population of cats, employed to keep down