Dunstan copies two letters and a reply

Dunstan’s head hung over his parchment. He wanted to write a poem for his mother, but, as always, he feared to begin. He knew it would never be good enough.

His mother. Every time he thought of her he felt a pain in his throat that would have been followed by tears if he had not already cried until his eyes were red and dry.

He had known she would die – his father believed she would, and therefore she would. He had thought he was prepared for it. He had learned that nothing could have prepared him for it.

His mother was gone. She had been gone for less than one day. That meant he had the entire rest of his life, minus the better part of one day, to live without her. He could not. He could not. His mother loved him and believed in him. Without her, he could neither love nor believe in himself. There was nothing left for him but to die young.

The sun had risen on that grim night, and the sun had set again. That was the better part of one day lived in a dream. He had never hurt so much for so long. And he had the entire rest of his life to live in this way.

All of the other children had been sent to stay at the castle with the King. Only he had been chosen to remain here with his father, and he never learned why. Only he witnessed that tempest of grief, and he never forgot it.

He picked up his pen again, though he was still far from finding the words for what he was feeling.

“I love you, Mother,” he wrote across the top of the page, in English. And then he wrote it again, in Latin. And again in Greek. And again in French. And again in Danish. And again in Norse. If Malcolm had been at hand, he would have asked how to say it in Gaelic. As it was, he could begin again in English. He could fill the page. This he could do. This he began.

He had covered nearly half the page when the door opened and his father stepped in.

Dunstan froze in terror. His father would see the nonsense he had been writing. He leapt from his chair and tried to come around the table to put himself between his father and the page. But his father was not looking at the parchment.

“A letter for you to copy,” his father whispered. His father had sobbed that day until he had lost his voice. Dunstan never forgot this either.

“A letter?” Dunstan squeaked.

“A letter and its reply. Here are they both. Please copy them into the book.” He handed Dunstan what looked to be a single piece of parchment.

“Both?”

“Here are they both,” he repeated. His father was eerily calm. Dunstan knew it for the calm of despair. “Afterwards, please go into my study and, under the date of today, enter into my journal the death of your mother and the birth of your sister, and ask for blessings on them both.”

“I?” Dunstan had never before written in the great journal of the years.

“You see, I cannot,” his father said simply.

Dunstan felt tears in his eyes again, come up from some deeper wellspring than he knew he possessed.

His father hugged him tightly. “You may finish your letter to your mother first,” he whispered. “Don’t forget to copy it into the book with the other.”

Dunstan knew his father had seen the parchment on the table, but he no longer cared.

“Now, I must go back up to your King Beebee. Perhaps he will know what to do with me. Let’s hope, eh? I shall see you in a while.”

His father kissed him on both cheeks and went out again.

Dunstan looked down at his scribblings. He had stopped in the middle of a “je t’aime.” He would finish this letter to his mother and copy it into the book.

But first he would copy the letter and its reply that his father had given him, for they had been written earlier.

He sat again and unfolded the parchment.

It was a letter from his father to Leofric, telling in few words of the death of his wife and the birth of his daughter, and asking Leofric for a name for the baby.

Dunstan had not seen the baby. He was not even sure his father had. She had been taken at once to Gunnilda Hogge, who had given birth to her own daughter only the day before. Perhaps only Bertie had seen her. Dunstan did not care to. They all said she would die anyway.

He had copied half of the letter before he realized that there was no reply included. He glanced over the parchment again, and then he saw that the single Greek word at the bottom that he had taken for part of the signature was actually the reply.

Leofric had wielded his quill like a knife and had slashed his reply more than he had written it: πελεια. Unlike Dora, Peleia meant nothing in English. But in Greek, Dunstan knew, it meant “dove.”