The Martyr’s Curse Read online

  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 less welcome animal visitors. To them, it was permissible to talk, and Ben enjoyed feeding them.

  His daily duties brought him into a little more contact with other inhabitants of the monastery. Through looking after the animals, he met Roby, the young man whom he had to thank for being here – for being alive – and each day they spent
some time together. Silence was strictly observed even during work hours, but Roby would often have whispered conversations with him. Ben liked him a lot.

  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.’

  Chapter Four

  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 looked at him.

  ‘The Church’s past is tainted by many sins, and to force good men to do evil in the name of God is but one of them.’ Père Antoine smiled sadly. ‘It surprises you, to hear me speak this way.’

  It did.

  ‘You speak of your shame for the things you did then,’ the monk went on. ‘But the goodness in you prevailed, Benoît. You left that life behind.’

  ‘I tried to,’ Ben said. ‘I wanted to use what I’d learned to do some good.’ He paused as he
tried to find the right words. ‘Things happen in this world. Things you couldn’t even begin to imagine from up here. K and R is just one of them.’

  ‘You are right. I have no idea what that means.’

  ‘Kidnap and ransom,’ Ben explained. ‘It’s a business, and a big one. The trade in human misery for money. The men who do it are pure bad, and too often, there’s nobody there to stop them. That was something I wanted to change.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Ben thought of the kidnap victims he’d removed from the clutches of their captors. A long list of names and faces that he’d never forget. Many of them had been children, snatched from their homes, from schools, from cars, so as to extort ransom from their families. He wondered where they all were now. Getting on with their lives, he supposed. He wondered if they too were haunted by old memories.

  ‘Saving the lives of the innocent is not something of which you should be ashamed,’ Père Antoine said.

  ‘Yes, I saved people. But to save them, sometimes unpleasant things had to be done.’

  ‘Violence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Killing?’

  Ben shrugged. He nodded. He glanced down as he did it. It was the first time in his life he hadn’t been able to look another man in the eye.

  ‘I did what I had to do to resolve the situation. Or that was how it seemed to me at the time. Perhaps there might have been another way.’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps this was the duty that God set in your path. He has many purposes for men of courage and integrity.’

  Ben smiled darkly. ‘Next you’ll be telling me that He moves in mysterious ways.’

  Père Antoine was silent for a long time, reflecting. ‘We have talked about the past. Now let us talk about the future. You have been here long enough to have seen a little of our life. The institutional framework by which we live is somewhat rigid, some might say uncompromising.’