‘You stay here,’ said Slovo to the novice – and then noticed de Marinetti’s flare of predatory interest. ‘On second thoughts, come with us; you’ve had enough novelty for one day.’
The garden was bare, a green graveyard of beheaded stems.
‘What hours of patient work,’ marvelled Callypia, ‘to sever and collect every bloom. Surely this is either a labour of love or hate …’
‘Two closely related emotions,’ commented Slovo, permitting just a modicum of contempt on the final word. ‘And the Prioress’s bed-chamber is …?’ he enquired.
The novice indicated a solid-looking barrier at one end of the ravaged field.
‘Brute force, if you please,’ said Slovo to Numa Droz.
The great Swiss casually applied his metal-shod boot to the door, which splintered away from the violence offered it. With contrasting gentleness, he then disengaged the wounded lock. The door swung open.
Admiral Slovo walked in like Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror entering Constantinople. The others, more like the disciples at the Easter Tomb, followed nervously.
In this case the tomb was not empty. The Prioress, having left the world behind, sat peacefully composed in her bedside chair, surrounded by her transplanted earthly joys. Every surface bore bowls and vases packed with the cut flowers, even the bed and floor were thickly strewn with them so that the otherwise bare and sombre cell was today positively aglow with colour.
Whilst his charges and followers looked on in wonder, saving the image for their old age, Slovo made a search and discovered the unsealed letter propped up before a wash-bowl of roses.
‘I have heard my call,’ he read dispassionately to the assembled witnesses, ‘and dutifully answer, being nothing loath to leave. I know my redeemer liveth.’
Thomas Cromwell sighed.
‘She always had to have the last word,’ he said bitterly.
‘She may just have felt Time’s heavy hand upon her,’ said Cromwell, ‘and made a lucky guess.’
Admiral Slovo made his move and doomed, three turns on, Cromwell’s rook to inevitable death.
‘One does not bid farewell to one’s oldest friends, as the Prioress did, on the basis of a guess. Imagine the embarrassment of waking the next morning!’
‘Perhaps she took poison to avoid that shame,’ hazarded Cromwell, grimacing at the chessboard in his unwillingness to admit defeat.
‘No,’ said Slovo, looking around the cleared garden. ‘I have a passing familiarity with the poisoner’s art. The Prioress departed at the call of Nature alone.’
‘And she’s been seen again!’ piped the Lady de Marinetti. ‘This morning! One of the novices told me.’
‘I have also heard these stories,’ said Admiral Slovo. ‘If true, she seems to have retained a custodial interest in her former garden.’
Former was the correct word. Plagued by boredom and lust, Numa Droz had pressed the sturdier nuns into service, turning the garden into the citadel he had proposed earlier. Already, in one short week, the plants were gone, replaced by rough rubble ramparts.
‘The dead,’ Cromwell spat, ‘are gone and spent and do not return to trouble us. That is their great merit. It has to be so for the proper ordering of things.’
‘How so?’ queried Admiral Slovo with polite interest at his soldier’s venture into statecraft.
‘Well, consider,’ replied the Englishman, boldly convinced, ‘if every subject disposed of by a Prince, came back to mock his Lord’s decision; if every felon hung returned to flout the Law’s due sentence, what then? Why, Admiral, there would be metaphysical anarchy!’
Admiral Slovo decided he rather liked the sound of that situation and was thus in favour of the two-way grave.
‘Besides,’ Cromwell continued, ‘the one redeeming feature of the woman’s death was in the proof it must have supplied her. Failing to awake to life everlasting she would – if she could – have conceded the explosion of her life-long fancies. Alas, however, she could not – for she was dead and I am right.’
Then de Marinetti gasped and pointed. Admiral Slovo smiled and Cromwell rocketed to his feet, propelling the board and chessmen into the air.
The Prioress was gliding alongside one of the walls, tending and scenting flowers that only she could see. They saw her as through a grey, gauzy film, a figure who flicked in and out of view as she passed open doorways between her world and the real one. The presence of the Admiral and his party was not acknowledged. Eventually, she entered some section of the parallel region not visible to man and disappeared from sight like an extinguished candle-flame.
Callypia de Marinetti sighed deeply and smoothed her hands down her silken gown. ‘I never knew,’ she purred, ‘that fright could be so delicious.’
Thomas Cromwell was less sanguine. He stared after the vision, his face set with barely checked ferocity. ‘I take this as an insult,’ he said quietly.
‘The important thing about a haunting,’ said Admiral Slovo, ‘is to stand still.’
‘Eh?’ snarled Cromwell angrily, wrenching his eyes away from the Prioress’s spectre as she advanced, yet again, along the departed flowerbeds. ‘Still? What d’you mean?’
Slovo fastidiously ignored the lack of respect, putting it down to stress. Over the last two weeks, Cromwell had been positively persecuted by the ghost, both by its frequent appearances – sometimes at most inconvenient and private moments – and by the implications of its presence. He had got it into his head that everyone – even the giggly novices – was laughing at him.
‘I mean,’ explained the Admiral patiently, ‘that we are permitted these visions through portals of communication. As you will observe from the irregularity of our view, they are random and transient. One moment she can be seen, the next she has passed from sight – only to reappear elsewhere. The correlation of dimensions between here and … somewhere else is not precise or predictable. If one were to move about during a manifestation there would be the danger of involuntary penetration into other realms. At such moments, who knows what awful gateways gape a mere hand’s breadth away from us?’
But Thomas Cromwell had been pushed too far to heed wise words. The future Chancellor of England was consulting his subconscious, travelling back down the years and communing with his roots. He was hearing the savage advice of Pagan Saxon ancestors. Even King Ambition was powerless before the winds that blew from those times and regions.
His eyes narrowed and the hands that would one day draft the dissolution of the monasteries and priories of his native land, twitched and curled with fury. ‘Mebbe so,’ he said, to no one in particular, the careful Court-English he was capable of replaced with a thicker, swifter dialect, ‘but I reckon I’m being buggered about! And it’s like this; I be fed up with it!’
He drew the concealed, serrated dagger that Slovo had noted on their first meeting and charged at the intermittent image of the Prioress. Admiral Slovo was intrigued to note the Englishman was still soldier enough to downgrade his anger into serviceable ferocity – and just as interested to see his theory confirmed as Cromwell was swallowed up and vanished from sight.
In her first interaction with the world since leaving it, the Prioress slowly turned to face Admiral Slovo and howled in triumph. It was not a sound that could have been emulated in life, being too octave-ranging for mortal chords. Also, somewhere in the interval of time, her eyes had been turned into fire.
Whatever the provocation, the Admiral was determined to heed his own advice. He held on to the arms of his chair and remained still; where Thomas Cromwell had gone, he did not care to follow.
Accordingly, during the long afternoon that followed, Slovo was captive witness to the hunting and harrying of Cromwell through the Prioress’s new home. No one else entered the ravished garden, warned away by Slovo’s terse commands. Only Numa Droz hovered alertly by the entrance, patiently awaiting the call to rescue his contract-master. Time hung heavy and horrible during the gory process but, as it turned out, there were diver
sions …
Before the noise of the multi-voiced howl had died away, the Prioress had sped out of sight. A few yards away, another window opened and Slovo saw her hurtling, most unlike an old lady, down some endless corridor. At its end stood Thomas Cromwell.
The two collided in a chaos of flapping black habit and gaudy mercenary’s garb. Cromwell, bone-white but resolute, made a masterly up-and-under killing strike to the sternum region. It went up … and up … and through, meeting no resistance, Cromwell’s whole arm following the blade. He had a moment to stand stupefied, harmlessly transfixing the Prioress. Then she laughed and blinded his right eye with a talon.
Again the vision faded.
And so it went on. A few more times, Cromwell turned to fight, his dagger passing uselessly through the spectre, while he suffered yet more grievous injuries. Thereafter, he relied exclusively on flight.
The Prioress’s private heaven, hell or limbo, whatever it was, seemed full of indeterminate landscapes of white. Admiral Slovo caught glimpses of hills and plains as well as featureless interiors of the same dull hue. Sometimes, Cromwell appeared to have taken refuge within a building and would rest, heaving for breath and bright with blood, against a wall. But soon enough he would be scurrying on, driven by the sound of the Prioress’s keening call.
On other occasions, a great time seemed to have elapsed and he was seen labouring over low foothills or salt-white marshes, fleeing the razor-sharp claws ever close behind. The Prioress’s unearthly exultations echoed all over the drear scenes and seeped out of the portals to echo in her one-time garden. Cold winds also issued forth and streamed back the Admiral’s silver hair, carrying with them the sounds of the hunt and the scent of despair.
In one of the less dramatic interludes, Admiral Slovo found himself thinking of what an Ottoman Bashi-Bazouk once told him (under torture, naturally). In Paradise, he had said, everything forbidden on Earth: wine, boys, a nice portrait on one’s wall, all were permitted. Eternal indulgence was the reward for a life-time of restraint.
For himself, Admiral Slovo considered that total self-control should extend beyond the tomb – Stoicism being an absolute concept – but, for others, he could see the appeal of the idea. To the Prioress, for example, after three-score years and ten of peace and loving kindness, might not a spot of vengeance be most welcome? Surely, in her case, the larder of stockpiled aggression must be more than overflowing. In fact Slovo was slightly disappointed and his decision to distance himself from the world strengthened. If that was the way she acted once the leash was off, what real conviction had attended the virtuous life before? Actually it was rather shocking.
It ended – or the beginning ended – in early evening, by Admiral Slovo’s time. By poor Master Cromwell’s reckoning perhaps whole days or weeks had elapsed.
A series of irregular portals winked open and in a deserted town square, lit by the moon of Slovo’s world, the Admiral saw Cromwell cornered – and then averted his eyes as the Prioress skinned the screaming soldier alive.
When it was done, she draped herself in the red pelt and eagerly ran off to an eternity of new wickedness. Except in dreams, Admiral Slovo never saw her again.
The obscure tides governing the display shifted and snapped the windows shut, at which point Cromwell was spewed forth on to the ground before the Admiral’s feet, naked but otherwise untouched – and miraculously alive.
Less grateful than he might have been, Cromwell staggered to his feet and felt his chest and arms, half fearful that their solid attachment was illusory. ‘I am whole again!’ he gasped.
‘Well, almost,’ said Slovo gently. ‘Save that she has carved the Papal Cross-keys upon your arse.’
Cromwell nearly turned to look but, higher sensibilities such as dignity now returning, he restrained himself.
‘I suspect it may be permanent,’ added Slovo rather gratuitously.
Cromwell nodded, ‘I will be avenged, you know.’
Slovo smiled. ‘How so? The Prioress is beyond your reach in the most profound of ways.’
It was Cromwell’s turn to smile and there was a greater coldness in it than ever. Previously, his ambition had been undirected, but now it was mounted upon a mission and accordingly speeded and energized in a way that, he sensed, would last him out his days. ‘She has left hostages behind, Admiral,’ he said, waving his bare arm to encompass the entire priory, ‘things that she cared about: bricks and mortar, institutions and a culture, a whole way of life! With these tools I’ll pay her back, blow for blow, wound for wound, as she watches down, helpless to intervene. And since I’m an honest man, Slovo, after my own lights, I’ll repay her with proper interest, you mark my words!’
Admiral Slovo did as he was bid and noted the simplicity and innocence of a civilization younger than his own. He firmly believed that Cromwell would be as good as his vow. Slovo also felt that though the die of history was cast, the protesting squeak of those that history would crush should be heard.
Aloud he said, ‘But concerning the life to come and such; surely the Prioress was right, was she not?’
Cromwell looked at the Priory Tower, seeing demolition gangs and secular inheritors. ‘She was right,’ he agreed. ‘That only makes it worse.’14
‘He’s even forbidden us the solace of sausage!’ The monkish face was alight with indignation, squinting against the Roman sun. ‘Can you believe that?’
Reawakened by the rebarbative images this statement conjured up, Slovo forced himself to pay attention. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Since time immemorial, eminent Admiral,’ said the monk in a whiney tone, ‘each brother has been granted a daily pork-and-blood sausage of the type we Germans love. By partaking so intimately in the raw components of recently living things, we draw near to the divinely created cycle of existence. Von Staupitz has now forbidden us this ration!’
‘Give us this day our daily sausage, eh?’ grinned Numa Droz, as huge and unlikely in his clerical gown as a lion in a mitre.
The monk wasn’t sure whether the jest was in mockery or support but, too frightened of this monster of a ‘priest’ to do otherwise, accepted it as the latter. ‘That’s right!’ he said. ‘And that’s not the least of his savagery. He’s watering the wheat-beer as well.’
Father Droz’s eyes – as evil as a goat’s at the best of times – flared. ‘Now that’s not on!’ he said. ‘I reckon you ought to go back to Efurt and cut a blood eagle on the bastard!’
The monk was perturbed now, worried by the floodgates of ‘sympathy’ he’d opened. ‘Oh, I see … um, what’s that?’
‘A blood eagle?’ answered Droz. ‘The Vikings invented it – I’ve always admired their good old ways. First you put your man down, though it can be done on women too. Then you get ’em face to the ground and cut through the back till you see the ribs and can pull ’em up and through. It looks like they’ve got wings, d’you see? An eagle, get it? They can live on for hours sometimes.’
When the monk could manage no response, Droz took the open-mouthed silence for approval. ‘There you are then!’ he concluded. ‘Simple, isn’t it?’
‘What I suggest,’ interjected Slovo, forcing himself to try and regain control of events, ‘is that you go and indulge yourself. Here is a florin. Over there is a purveyor of processed dead animals. Go and consume blood sausage therein until funds are exhausted.’
‘Well, actually, Admiral,’ replied the monk, ‘I’m not all that hungry at the moment and—’
‘I insist,’ said Slovo, so that even Numa Droz had to fight the urge to leap forth to buy sausage. ‘And do not return until you are surfeit. Otherwise I shall think your complaints of ill-usage are as empty as your monastery larder.’
The monk looked into the Admiral’s eyes and saw a blasted landscape not at all to his liking. He was up and away like a greyhound.
‘So, Brother Martin,’ Slovo resumed to the remaining monk, ‘perhaps you will have the chance to speak now. What say you about all this?’
<
br /> ‘I think I’d best say nothing,’ returned the dumpy and intimidated German.
‘Sorry. That’s not permitted,’ replied Slovo, with great finality. ‘Whilst His Holiness deliberates on your Order’s complaints against their new Vicar General, we are deputed to entertain and enlighten you. We cannot entertain a silent man.’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Droz, fixing the monk with his awful gaze. ‘Give us some of that tempestuous Teuton tomfoolery I’ve heard so much about – sausages, big women, Jew-baiting – anything that takes your fancy.’
‘This is my first visit to Rome,’ stumbled Brother Martin. ‘I am a little overwhelmed by it all and tired, yes, very tired. Perhaps I should rest and—’
‘No,’ said Slovo as decisive as before. ‘Tell us what you think of us Romans.’
The monk proved to have more backbone than first impressions suggested. His face directly hardened, his Latin acquired a harshness beyond that grafted on by a guttural mother-tongue. ‘You are loose-livers,’ he said. ‘I have never seen so many people seduced by the call of the flesh.’
Admiral Slovo leaned his chin on his hand. ‘Yes … that about sums us up.’
‘Present company excepted,’ added the monk – but only out of politeness, not fear.
‘I resent your prejudice, Brother,’ said Droz, smiling horribly, in a way which told Slovo that someone, somewhere, would suffer before the day was out. ‘But everyone’s entitled to their opinions, I suppose.’
Admiral Slovo called for another flask from the wine-shop owner and its speedy arrival smoothed over the awkward lull. He sampled its contents before asking, ‘So the new Augustinian General is giving your Order a hard time, is he?’
In fact Slovo knew full well that was so. Johann Von Staupitz – Thomist, Augustinian, member of the currently fashionable ‘Brethren of the Common Life’ and (more to the point) Vehmist – had been drafted in to do just that. Resentment boiled marginally below the violence point in the Order’s German houses as a result. Two eloquent (by the standards of their type) brothers had been deputized to take their grievances to Rome for restitution and it just so happened that Brother Martin Luther was one of them. It was he that the Vehmic talent spotters had adjudged ready for the influence of Rome and Admiral Slovo’s company.
Popes and Phantoms Page 21
