I grunted. I refocused on John Donne.

‘Would you like me to read to you for a while?’ Brother Cosmas asked.

‘Is Brother Hugh—’ I started off.

‘Father Pietr left for Ormskirk this morning after Matins,’ he interrupted.

Ormskirk?

Ormskirk?

(!)

Damn. Damn. Damn. My spirits sank. How many miles to Ormskirk? I quietly wondered.

‘It’s about two hundred miles away,’ Brother Cosmas volunteered, without prompting, then picked up his book and sat down again (casual rearranging of the ebony folds of his robe). ‘We have reached Sonnet number 5,’ he informed me, then cleared his throat (from this I presumed that he had been reading to me prior to my regaining consciousness, which I found odd but strangely touching).

‘O, my black soul, now thou art summoned,’ he started off,

‘By sickness, Death’s herald and champion …’ he continued,

Thou’rt like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done

Treason, and durst not turn to whence he’s fled;

Or like a thief, which till death’s doom be read,

Wisheth himself deliver’d from prison,

Brother Cosmas paused, portentously.

But Damn’d and haled to execution,

Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned …

I inspected Brother Cosmas in profile, from below, as he read. He was a very small, compact, yet intensely sinewy man – early to mid-thirties? – who exuded an intense kind of vitality. His boyish demeanour – there were still traces of acne on his cheeks – stood in stark contrast to his slightly turned-down mouth and a series of dark rings around his eyes.

Yet grace if thou repent, thou canst not lack;

But who shall give thee that grace to begin?

Almost a kind of passion in Brother Cosmas’s voice at this point …

O, Make thyself with holy mourning black,

And red with blushing as thou art with sin;

First dolorous, then chastising, and finally …

Or wash thee in Christ’s blood, which hath this might,

That being red it dyes red souls to white.

… cheerfully sanctimonious.

I turned and attempted to crush my face into the pillow, but the pillow lacked sufficient substance to render this a feasible option. Brother Cosmas completed his Holy Sonnet and sighed again, then quietly turned the page.

‘I am a little world made cunningly …’ he started off, cheerfully (on what I presumed to be Sonnet 6). I clenched my teeth, almost regretting that I wasn’t still non compos mentis.

‘And how is the patient progressing, Brother?’

My head spun back around (what relief!) at the sound of a familiar voice. It was the lanky, strawberry-blond Brother Linus come by to check up on my progress.

‘He can answer for himself, Brother,’ Brother Cosmas responded. ‘He’s awake at last.’

‘But for how long, Brother Cosmas’ – Brother Linus smiled – ‘if you persist in reading him those dreary poems of yours?’

Brother Cosmas looked wounded. It was immediately clear to me that Cosmas suffered from a case of intellectual inferiority, and that Brother Linus (privately schooled? University educated?) enjoyed teasing him on this matter, quite relentlessly.