Yvolde sniffed. “She sounds of the west. Have you sent to Bath for news?”
“Nay,” Imeyne said. “My son’s wife would wait on his arrival. You have heard naught from Oxenford?”
“Nay, but there is much illness there,” Yvolde said.
Rosemund came up. “Know you Lady Katherine’s family, Lady Yvolde?” she asked.
Yvolde turned her pinched look on her. “Nay. Where is the brooch my brother gave you?”
“I … ’tis on my cloak,” Rosemund stammered.
“Do you not honor his gifts enough to wear them?”
“Go and fetch it,” Lady Imeyne said. “I would see this brooch.”
Rosemund’s chin went up, but she went over to the outer wall where the cloaks hung.
“She shows as little eagerness for my brother’s gifts as for his presence,” Yvolde said. “She spoke not once to him at supper.”
Rosemund came back, carrying her green cloak with the brooch pinned to it. She showed it wordlessly to Imeyne. “I would see it,” Agnes said, and Rosemund bent down to show her.
The brooch had red stones set on a round gold ring, and the pin in the center. It had no hinge, but had to be pulled up and stuck through the garment. Letters ran around the outside of the ring: “Io suiicen lui dami amo.”
“What does it say?” Agnes said, pointing to the letters ringing the gold circle.
“I know not,” Rosemund said in a tone that clearly meant “And I don’t care.”
Yvolde’s jaw tightened, and Kivrin said hastily, “It says, ‘You are here in place of the friend I love,’ Agnes,” and then realized sickly what she had done. She looked up at Imeyne, but Imeyne didn’t seem to have noticed anything.
“Such words should be on your breast instead of hanging on a peg,” Imeyne said. She took the brooch and pinned it to the front of Rosemund’s kirtle.
“And you should be at my brother’s side as befits his betrothed,” Yvolde said, “instead of playing childish games.” She extended her hand in the direction of the hearth where Bloet was sitting, nearly asleep and obviously the worse for all the trips outside, and Rosemund looked beseechingly at Kivrin.
“Go and thank Sir Bloet for such a generous gift,” Imeyne said coldly.
Rosemund handed Kivrin her cloak and started toward the hearth.
“Come, Agnes,” Kivrin said. “You must rest.”
“I would listen to the Devil’s knell,” Agnes said.
“Lady Katherine,” Yvolde said, and there was an odd emphasis on the word “Lady,” “you told us you remembered naught. Yet you read Lady Rosemund’s brooch with ease. Can you read, then?”
I can read, Kivrin thought, but fewer than a third of the contemps could, and even fewer of women.
She glanced at Imeyne, who was looking at her the way she had the first morning she was here, fingering her clothes and examining her hands.
“No,” Kivrin said, looking Yvolde directly in the eye, “I fear I cannot read even the Paternoster. Your brother told us what the words meant when he gave the brooch to Rosemund.”
“Nay, he did not,” Agnes said.
“You were looking at your bell,” Kivrin said, thinking, Lady Yvolde will never believe that, she’ll ask him and he’ll say he never spoke to me.
But Yvolde seemed satisfied. “I did not think such a one as she would be able to read,” she said to Imeyne. She gave her her hand, and they walked over to Sir Bloet.
Kivrin sank down on the bench.
“I would have my bell,” Agnes said.
“I will not tie it on unless you lie down.”
Agnes crawled into her lap. “You must tell me the story first. Once there was a maiden.”
“Once there was a maiden,” Kivrin said. She looked at Imeyne and Yvolde. They had sat down next to Sir Bloet and were talking to Rosemund. She said something, her chin up and her cheeks very red. Sir Bloet laughed, and his hand closed over the brooch and then slid down over Rosemund’s breast.
“Once there was a maiden—” Agnes said insistently.
“—who lived at the edge of a great forest,” Kivrin said. “ ‘Do not go into the forest alone,’ her father said—”
“But she would not heed him,” Agnes said, yawning.
“No, she wouldn’t heed him. Her father loved her and cared only for her safety, but she wouldn’t listen to him.”
“What was in the woods?” Agnes asked, nestling against Kivrin.
Kivrin pulled Rosemund’s cloak up over her. Cutthroats and thieves, she thought. And lecherous old men and their shrewish sisters. And illicit lovers. And husbands. And judges. “All sorts of dangerous things.”
“Wolves,” Agnes said sleepily.
“Yes, wolves.” She looked at Imeyne and Yvolde. They had moved away from Sir Bloet and were watching her, whispering.
“What happened to her?” Agnes said sleepily, her eyes already closing.
Kivrin cradled her close. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “I don’t know.”
20
Agnes could not have been asleep more than five minutes before the bell stopped and then began to ring again, more quickly, calling them to mass.
“Father Roche begins too soon. It is not midnight yet,” Lady Imeyne said, and it wasn’t even out of her mouth before the other bells started: Wychlade and Bureford and, far away to the east, too far to be more than a breath of an echo, the bells of Oxford.
There are the Osney bells, and there’s Carfax, Kivrin thought, and wondered if they were ringing at home tonight, too.
Sir Bloet heaved himself to his feet and then helped his sister up. One of their servants hurried in with their cloaks and a squirrel-fur-lined mantle. The chattering girls pulled their cloaks from the pile and fastened them, still chattering. Lady Imeyne shook Maisry, who’d fallen asleep on the beggar’s bench, and told her to fetch her Book of Hours, and Maisry shuffled off to the loft ladder, yawning. Rosemund came over and reached with exaggerated carefulness for her cloak, which had slid off Agnes’s shoulders.
Agnes was dead to the world. Kivrin hesitated, hating to have to wake her up, but fairly sure even exhausted five-year-olds weren’t excepted from this mass. “Agnes,” she said softly.
“You must needs carry her to the church,” Rosemund said, struggling with Sir Bloet’s gold brooch. The steward’s youngest boy came and stood in front of Kivrin with her white cloak, dragging it on the rushes.
“Agnes,” Kivrin said again, and jostled her a little, amazed that the church bell hadn’t waked her. It sounded louder and closer than it ever did for matins or vespers, its overtones nearly drowning out the other bells.
Agnes’s eyes flew open. “You did not wake me,” she said sleepily to Rosemund, and then more loudly as she came awake, “You promised to wake me.”
“Get into your cloak,” Kivrin said. “We must go to church.”
“Kivrin, I would wear my bell.”
“You’re wearing it,” Kivrin said, trying to fasten Agnes’s red cape without stabbing her in the neck with the pin of the clasp.
“Nay, I have it not,” Agnes said, searching her arm. “I would wear my bell!”
“Here it is,” Rosemund said, picking it up off the floor, “it must have fallen from your wrist. But it is not meet to wear it now. This bell calls us to mass. The Christmas bells come after.”
“I shall not ring it,” Agnes said. “I would only wear it.”
Kivrin didn’t believe that for a minute, but everyone else was ready. One of Sir Bloet’s men was lighting the horn lanterns with a brand from the fire and handing them to the servants. She hastily tied the bell to Agnes’s wrist and took the girls by the hand.
Lady Eliwys laid her hand on Sir Bloet’s upheld one. Lady Imeyne signaled to Kivrin to follow with the little girls, and the others fell in behind them solemnly, as if it were a procession, Lady Imeyne with Sir Bloet’s sister, and then the rest of Sir Bloet’s entourage. Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet led the way out into the courtyard, t
hrough the gate, and onto the green.
It had stopped snowing, and the stars had come out. The village lay silent under its covering of white. Frozen in time, Kivrin thought. The dilapidated buildings looked different, the staggering fences and filthy daubed huts softened and graced by the snow. The lanterns caught the crystalline facets of the snowflakes and made them sparkle, but it was the stars that took Kivrin’s breath away, hundreds of stars, thousands of stars, and all of them sparkling like jewels in the icy air. “It shines,” Agnes said, and Kivrin didn’t know whether she was talking about the snow or the sky.
The bell tolled evenly, calmly, its sound different again out in the frosty air—not louder, but fuller and somehow clearer. Kivrin could hear all the other bells now and recognize them, Esthcote and Witenie and Chertelintone, even though they sounded different, too. She listened for the Swindone bell, which had rung all this time, but she couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear the Oxford bells either. She wondered if she had only imagined them.
“You are ringing your bell, Agnes,” Rosemund said.
“I am not,” Agnes said. “I am only walking.”
“Look at the church,” Kivrin said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
It flamed like a beacon at the other end of the green, lit from inside and out, the stained-glass windows throwing wavering ruby and sapphire lights on the snow. There were lights all around it, too, filling the churchyard all the way to the bell tower. Torches. She could smell their tarry smoke. More torches made their way in from the white fields, winding down from the hill behind the church.
She thought suddenly of Oxford on Christmas Eve, the shops lit for last-minute shopping and the windows of Brasenose shining yellow onto the quad. And the Christmas tree at Balliol lit with multicolored strings of laser lights.
“I would that we had come to you for Yule,” Lady Imeyne said to Lady Yvolde. “Then we had had a proper priest to say the masses. This place’s priest can but barely say the Paternoster.”
This place’s priest just spent hours kneeling in an ice-cold church, Kivrin thought, hours kneeling in hose that have holes in the knees, and now this place’s priest is ringing a heavy bell that has had to be tolled for an hour and will shortly go through an elaborate ceremony that he has had to memorize because he cannot read.
“It will be a poor sermon and a poor mass, I fear,” Lady Imeyne said.
“Alas, there are many who do not love God in these days,” Lady Yvolde said, “but we must pray to God that He will set the world right and bring men again to virtue.”
Kivrin doubted if that answer was what Lady Imeyne wanted to hear.
“I have sent to the Bishop of Bath to send us a chaplain,” Imeyne said, “but he has not yet come.”
“My brother says there is much trouble in Bath,” Yvolde said.
They were almost to the churchyard. Kivrin could make out faces now, lit by the smoky torches and by little oil cressets some of the women were carrying. Their faces, reddened and lit from below, looked faintly sinister. Mr. Dunworthy would think they were an angry mob, Kivrin thought, gathered to burn some poor martyr at the stake. It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.
They came into the churchyard. Kivrin recognized some of the people near the church doors: the boy with the scurvy who had run from her, two of the young girls who’d helped with the Christmas baking, Cob. The steward’s wife was wearing a cloak with an ermine collar and carrying a metal lantern with four tiny panes of real glass. She was talking animatedly to the woman with the scrofula scars who had helped put up the holly. They were all talking and moving around to keep warm, and one man with a black beard was laughing so hard his torch swept dangerously close to the steward’s wife’s wimple.
Church officials had eventually had to do away with the midnight mass because of all the drinking and carousing, Kivrin remembered, and some of these parishioners definitely looked like they had spent the evening breaking fasts. The steward was talking animatedly to a rough-looking man Rosemund pointed out as Maisry’s father. Both their faces were bright red from the cold or the torchlight or the liquor or all three, but they seemed gay rather than dangerous. The steward kept punctuating what he was saying with hard, thunking claps on Maisry’s father’s shoulder, and every time he did it the father laughed, a happy helpless giggle that made Kivrin think he was much brighter than she had supposed.
The steward’s wife grabbed for her husband’s sleeve, and he shook her off, but as soon as Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet came through the lychgate, he and Maisry’s father fell back promptly to make a clear path into the church. So did all the others, falling silent as the entourage passed through the churchyard and in the heavy doors, and then beginning to talk again, but more quietly, as they came into the church behind them.
Sir Bloet unbuckled his sword and handed it to a servant, and he and Lady Eliwys knelt and genuflected as soon as they were in the door. They walked almost to the rood screen together and knelt again.
Kivrin and the little girls followed. When Agnes crossed herself, her bell jangled hollowly in the church. I’ll have to take it off of her, Kivrin thought, and wondered if she should step out of the procession now and take Agnes off to the side by Lady Imeyne’s husband’s tomb and undo it, but Lady Imeyne was waiting impatiently at the door with Sir Bloet’s sister.
She led the girls to the front. Sir Bloet had already lumbered to his feet again. Eliwys stayed on her knees a little longer, and then stood, and Sir Bloet escorted her to the north side of the church, bowed slightly, and walked over to take his place on the men’s side.
Kivrin knelt with the little girls, praying Agnes wouldn’t make too much noise when she crossed herself again. She didn’t, but when Agnes got to her feet she snagged her foot in the hem of her robe and caught herself with a clanging almost as loud as the bell still tolling outside. Lady Imeyne was, of course, right behind them. She glared at Kivrin.
Kivrin took the girls to stand beside Eliwys. Lady Imeyne knelt, but Lady Yvolde made only an obeisance. As soon as Imeyne rose, a servant hurried forward with a dark-velvet-covered priedieu and laid it on the floor next to Rosemund for Lady Yvolde to kneel on. Another servant had laid one in front of Sir Bloet on the men’s side and was helping him get down on his knees on it. He puffed and clung to the servant’s arm as he lowered his bulk, and his face got very red.
Kivrin looked at Lady Yvolde’s prie-dieu longingly, thinking of the plastic kneeling pads that hung on the backs of the chairs in St. Mary’s. She had never realized until now what a blessing they were, what a blessing the hard wooden chairs were either until they stood again and she thought about how they would have to remain standing through the whole service.
The floor was cold. The church was cold, in spite of all the lights. They were mostly cressets, set along the walls and in front of the holly-banked statue of St. Catherine, though there was a tall, thin, yellowish candle set in the greenery of each of the windows, but the effect was probably not what Father Roche had intended. The bright flames only made the colored panes of glass darker, almost black.
More of the yellowish candles were in the silver candelabra on either side of the altar, and holly was heaped in front of them and along the top of the rood screen, and Father Roche had set Lady Imeyne’s beeswax candles in among the sharp, shiny leaves. He’d done a job of decorating the church that should please even Lady Imeyne, Kivrin thought, and glanced at her.
She was holding her reliquary between her folded hands, but her eyes were open, and she was staring at the top of the rood screen. Her mouth was tight with disapproval, and Kivrin supposed she hadn’t wanted the candles there, but it was the perfect place for them. They illuminated the crucifix and the Last Judgment and lit nearly the whole nave.
They made the whole church seem different, homier, more familiar, like St. Mary’s on Christmas Eve. Dunworthy had taken her to the ecumenical service last Christmas. She had planned to
go to midnight mass at the Holy Re-Formed to hear it said in Latin, but there hadn’t been a midnight mass. The priest had been asked to read the gospel for the ecumenical service, so he had moved the mass to four in the afternoon.
Agnes was fiddling with her bell again. Lady Imeyne turned and glared at her across her piously folded hands, and Rosemund leaned across Kivrin and shhhed her.
“You mustn’t ring your bell until the mass is over,” Kivrin whispered, bending close to Agnes so no one else could hear her.
“I rang it not,” Agnes whispered back in a voice that could be heard all over the church. “The ribbon binds too tight. See you?”
Kivrin couldn’t see any such thing. In fact, if she had taken the time to tie it tighter, it wouldn’t be ringing at every movement, but there was no way she was going to argue with an overtired child when the mass was going to begin any minute. She reached for the knot.
Agnes must have been trying to pull the bell off over her wrist The already-fraying ribbon had tightened into a solid little knot. Kivrin picked at its edges with her fingernails, keeping an eye on the people behind her. The service would start with a procession, Father Roche and his acolytes, if he had any, would come down the aisle bearing the holy water and chanting the Asperges.
Kivrin pulled on the ribbon and both sides of the knot, tightening it beyond any hope of ever getting it off without cutting it, but getting a little more slack. It still wasn’t enough to get the ribbon off. She glanced back at the church door. The bell had stopped, but there was still no sign of Father Roche and no aisle for him to come up either. The townsfolk had crowded in, filling the whole rear of the church. Someone had lifted a child up onto Imeyne’s husband’s tomb and was holding him there so he could see, but there wasn’t anything to see yet.
She went back to working on the bell. She got two fingers under the ribbon and pulled up on it, trying to stretch it.
“Tear it not!” Agnes said in that carrying stage whisper of hers. Kivrin took hold of the bell and hastily pulled it around so it lay in Agnes’s palm.
The Doomsday Book Page 36
