Roby wore the short cowl of a first-year novice, over which he put on a black cloak when the community got together. He was nineteen, with a disarming smile and a mental age of perhaps thirteen or fourteen. But what he lacked in quickness of intellect, he more than made up for by his devotion to Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux and everyone and everything in it, and he could speak and read Latin nearly as well as he could French.
As Ben discovered, Roby was a good teacher, too. Under his patient tutelage, Ben became pretty adept in the art of milking goats and cattle without getting butted or trampled to death or spilling milk everywhere. The only occasion when Roby burst out laughing was when Ben fell flat on his face trying to catch a running, flapping chicken that wouldn’t let itself be herded into the hen house. Roby’s mirth was like a child’s, which just made Ben warm to him more. They’d laughed together for about half an hour that time.
Afterwards, Ben had realised that it was the first time he’d laughed in months.
His contact with the monks themselves was more limited. They were men whose stillness and calm fascinated him. Observing their vow of silence, they seldom spoke to one another as they went about their duties, let alone to him. One exception to the rule was the weekly visit Ben received from Père Jacques, the Father Master of Novices, a kindly man Ben put in his late sixties. Ostensibly, the visits were to find out how Ben was, whether he needed anything, how he was recovering. The Father Master of Novices never probed, but Ben could sense the man was curious as to the intentions of this stranger in their midst.
Little by little, the serene daily rhythm of silence, prayer and hard work had seeped into his bones until it felt like part of his life. Every morning at quarter to six, Ben would get up, complete his exercises and then go and see to the livestock. At eight the bell tolled for the first time, and the monks would assemble for Mass. Ben’s morning was spent working, taking care of the gardens and the orchard. Lunch was at noon, a simple dish of vegetables, eggs or fish, eaten alone in his cell. The food was served by a monk pushing a wooden trolley down the corridors, on a tray slid through a hatch – like in prison, except here there were no locks on any door. Wine or beer were permitted in extreme moderation, though Ben avoided both.
The rest of the afternoon was spent working until Vespers at four, then there was a light supper. At seven the bell tolled again for prayer. An hour later was bedtime, but it didn’t last long. The Carthusians believed in a semi-nocturnal life, on the grounds that the stillness of night invited them to more fervent prayer. At eleven-thirty the bell summoned the monks to a session of prayer in their cells; then shortly after midnight the community made their way back through the barely lit cloisters and would sit in the darkness of the church in profound silence before the chanting of Matins began. It wasn’t until deep into the small hours that they returned to their cells, for yet more prayer, before they finally retired to bed for just two or three hours’ rest before the whole routine began again.
There was no TV. No radio, no phones. Secular reading material was strictly limited. Computers and the internet were unknown here. It was a life that had remained fundamentally unchanged since the founding of the Carthusian Order in the early eleventh century. The Order’s motto was Stat crux dum volvitur orbis: The cross stands still while the globe revolves. The existence this place offered was designed to make you lose all interest in the affairs of the outside world, and it was effective in ways Ben couldn’t have imagined.
Finally, one cold midwinter’s evening by the glow of a crackling wood fire, as the snow fell silently outside over the mountains and layered the roofs and walls of the monastery buildings under the silver moonlight, without being asked, Ben had told the Father Master of Novices what was in his heart.
Jeff Dekker, the former SBS commando who had been his business partner and closest friend, would have thought Ben had lost his mind. This was the guy who’d never once turned away from trouble, even when the odds were at their suicidal craziest. Who’d taken down the worst of the worst and protected the innocent as if he’d been born to it. Adventure and risk were in his blood.
But not any more. Those days were now over for good.
Ben had said, ‘I want to stay.’
It had been after that discussion that Ben had been taken to see the prior. The head of the monastery lived in just the same kind of humble quarters as the other members of the order. His name was Père Antoine. He was over eighty, with a face deeply etched by wrinkles and what would have been a leonine mane of pure white hair if it hadn’t been for the monk’s tonsure shorn into it, symbolising the crown of thorns worn by Christ.
The first thing Ben noticed about Père Antoine was his eyes. They didn’t belong in an old man’s face. They seemed to glow like those of a happy child, as if filled with some kind of inner light that poured out of him. Ben found them mesmerising.
The two men spoke in French, after Ben explained that his was fluent and he had lived in France for a while. The old man smiled at the discovery that ‘Ben’ was short for Benedict, and addressed him by the French version of the name, Benoît. He gently invited him to talk about himself, which was something Ben found difficult. Secrecy was second nature to him, instilled by years of covert military operations and the work he’d done since leaving the army. But that wasn’t the only reason it was difficult for him to speak openly. Here, now, in the presence of the old monk, Ben felt a sense of shame.
‘I’ve done a lot of pretty bad things,’ he confessed.
‘Père Jacques tells me you were once a soldier. For how many years was that your occupation?’
‘Too many.’
‘During those years, Benoît, did you kill many people?’
Ben said nothing.
‘The memory of your past pains you, I see. But you atoned for your sins by leaving that path.’
‘I’m not sure if that counts as atonement, Father.’
‘It depends on the reason why you left.’
‘I didn’t like people telling me what to do.’
‘You have a problem with authority?’
‘It depends on who’s giving the orders. If it’s someone I respect, that’s one thing. If it’s some government stooge with a secret power agenda who expects me to do his dirty work for him on the pretext of protecting the realm, that’s another.’
‘You did not find your realm worth protecting?’
‘Not if it meant taking the lives of innocent people whose countries we invaded simply for reasons of territory and economics. That troubled me then. And it troubles me even more now, when I think about the things I did.’
‘And if your order came from God?’
‘I’m still waiting for that one,’ Ben said. ‘That’s the truth.’
‘Perhaps it has come already, but you do not see it.’
Ben didn’t reply.
The old monk nodded thoughtfully and reflected for a few moments. ‘By choice, I know little about the modern world. But history, I do know. These things you tell me – it was always so. This monastery was built during the time of the First Crusade. It is convenient for us to forget that the Christian forces who established the Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem, in so doing, carried out the wholesale massacre of thousands of innocent Muslim lives. It was not an act of faith, but of pure murder.’
Ben