The Mercy Seller: A Novel (v5)

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  “Rome calls what we do here heresy, gainsays our truth for their falseness. It is the pope and his minions who worship as the pagans worship. It is the pope and his minions who kneel before relics in golden caskets, encrusted with jewels, to practice their idolatry. It is the pope and his minions who kneel in great stone cathedrals built with money from the poor. They sell the devil’s lies and peddle false forgiveness. You, my brethren, will go forth to preach the Truth. Grace is free. Grace demands no coin except obedience. We do not worship a cross of gold. We worship the Lord who died upon that cross. And it was not made of gold but of wood. And He is no longer hanging on that tree but is risen.”

  Sir John’s most trusted retainers stood well armed, facing outward in a circle, to protect the congregation of worshippers. If any party from crown or Church came to Cooling Castle seeking him, Joan was instructed to tell them that he and his men had ridden to Herefordshire to a convocation. They would be sure to follow, thinking to catch him out. He knew she could be trusted to get rid of them. As a last resort, she’d said she would plead illness, hint of plague, while pretending to offer hospitality, in order to speed them on their way. Or, she’d said with a gleam in her eye as she inspected the blood puddings and pasties to feed his guests, she’d just tell them that she was “feeding the local lepers as a penance,” and invite them to stay.

  After the service, if all was clear, she would send a groom to summon them to the hall, where they would feast on roast capon and custards, and maybe there would be apple tartlets coddled beneath great lumps of clotted cream—

  He really should be listening to the sermon.

  “We confess, each man of us, our sins directly to God. We mumble no Latin prayers that we don’t understand. We read his Word for ourselves in our own language, and we will go forth from this place to free the people of the calumny of an apostate pope who endangers the souls of God’s people with chains made of superstition and forged in the fire of greed.”

  One of the priests led a couple of converts, a yeoman and his wife of about the same age as Sir John, to the baptismal pool. They shivered in the twilight breeze. The waterfall had been dammed up and the pool reflected the indigo of the sky overhead. The first evening star had appeared beside a pale quarter moon.

  He said his own private prayers of thanks as the community of brothers intoned the “Our Father.” Said it in plain language—a man’s language that a God in whose image he was made would understand. Sir John’s God was not still hanging, bloody and defeated, imprisoned like a dead idol above some altar. He sighed in the wind and shouted in the thunder and laughed in the ocean’s roar. And Sir John hoped He was watching them now, with approval. Let it be so, he prayed silently. They all had a lot riding on His approval. Leaves rustled in the canopy overhead. The voice of God whispering? “Free my Church,” it said.

  Or was that just his imagination? Would he have to listen harder, longer, on his knees for that still, small voice?

  The next day, after the last lay brother had received his parcel of food for the road from the generous kitchen of Cooling Castle, after Sir John and his lady had retired to her chamber, Sir John watched his wife as she stood in front of her pier glass, brushing her chestnut hair.

  “You are satisfied then, my lord, with the convocation?” she asked.

  “Very satisfied, my lady. All went as planned. It was a goodly meeting. We gave out every last one of the translations.”

  “Give me the bill of lading for the abbess, and I will see that she is promptly paid. The abbey runs on a tight resource.”

  Too late, Sir John remembered. He groaned.

  She laid down her brush and turned to him. “What is it, husband? I told you not to eat that last portion of—”

  “Every last one. We gave out every last one. The bill was in the last one.”

  Now it was Lady Joan’s turn to groan. “Does the abbess put your name on the bills?”

  “Always. I insist on it for her protection. She just writes ‘Gospels copied.’ She does not say ‘English Gospels.’”

  “But John, if it is found with the book—”

  “It is too late to worry about it now. Anyway, the brother who has that book will see the bill and destroy it. And if he doesn’t, well, it’s not like our efforts here are secret. Brother Gabriel has already seen the Wycliffe Bible in our solar.”

  “But owning it might be tolerated,” she said. “Whereas disseminating it would not be.” She paused, her hand on the brush, but she did not take it up again. “At the least, it means you must make another trip to the abbey to ask the abbess what she is owed.”

  He nodded. “We’ll probably hear no more about it. It has probably already been lost or thrown away. Unless it is found with the book, it can be of no importance.” But he didn’t sound convincing even to his own ears.

  She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “What’s done is done and cannot be undone. We will think no more about it,” she said, taking up the brush again.

  As Sir John felt the smooth touch of her lips against his skin, he winced at the memory of one ill-at-ease brother who dozed through the Bible reading and devoured his food like a wolf. Oh, bugger it! It was just a piece of paper.

  “Did we have any of those apple tartlets left?” he asked.

  “You are a man of insatiable appetites, husband.” She laughed and made a clucking noise with her tongue as she dragged the brush through her unbound hair.

  “I know,” he said, and putting his arms around her waist, he guided her hands to lay down the brush.

  TWELVE

  Let him [a monk] confine himself within the walls

  of his cloister … for the world is … polluted by

  the contamination of so many crimes that any holy

  mind is corrupted by the mere consideration of it …

  —PETER DAMIAN IN THE MONASTIC IDEAL

  (11TH CENTURY)

  Gabriel was weary from his travels: two weeks of castle yards, country markets, churches, town crosses from Maidstone to Bodiam Castle, all in need of “Grace.” More than once it had occurred to him that he was hardly more than a tinker with a pack, and then he would remind himself that in his pack he carried the Grace of God, and it was profane to even think thus.

  By the time he finally reached Hastings, it was late September. A cold rain was falling, and he thought of seeking shelter, but knew he was nearing his destination at Hastings Field. Senlac. The old Norman name meant a lake of blood, and the sodden earth truly did look as though it were sweating blood. The locals spoke of hauntings from the old Norman battle where William killed King Harold. He could almost believe it on such a shrouded afternoon when the mists rolled in from the sea, mingling their salt smell with the smells of earth and moss.

  He could see the gray stone dormitory of Saint Martin’s Abbey looming on the hill in the distance. He knew Brother Francis was there. Gabriel would find comfort in the old man’s company. And absolution. It had been too long since his last confession. His soul was burdened, heavy with longing for something so elusive he couldn’t even name it. He tugged on his cowl, shielding his face from the rain, and spurred his horse to pick its way up the hill among the red puddles that bubbled up like blood.

  “Have ye finished, Brother Francis?”

  Mistress Clare could feel irritation pulling her angular face tighter, disapproval pursing her mouth to a thin line. The old man didn’t eat enough to keep a cuckoo alive. Never mind that she’d stood on swollen ankles to chip the beef into tiny bites—after she’d cleaned his chamber pot and swept his hearth, after she’d ironed his shirt and scraped the muck from his boots, after she’d bathed his crepey skin oh so careful like lest she tear it. Since gentleness had long ago fled Mistress Clare’s nature, it was a testament to her pure determination that the skin on Brother Francis’s arms remained unmarked by the dark purple discolorations he was prone to. Next she’d be chewing his food for him, like a mother—or grandmother, for she was long past
the age for one of her own. But Brother Francis was not her child.

  He had not touched the beer either. Time was when he would have had a second, and even a third, serving of both. She looked at him in amazement, never ceasing to be surprised, as though somewhere inside the puckered cheeks and sunken eyes that constantly searched the shadows around him, she could find lurking the vital hulk of a man she had once known.

  “Shall I call one of the novices to read to you?”

  She had never learned to read. “What use does a charwoman have for letters?” he’d said whenever she mentioned it to him. And he’d looked at her blankly, not meaning to be unkind, but genuinely puzzled, as though he were surprised by the inappropriateness of her request.

  He did not answer her now, just shrank down inside his woolly blanket, shivering.

  “Are you cold? Shall I add more peat to the fire?”

  He closed watery eyes and shook his head, reminding her of a terrapin hunched inside his shell.

  “It will only smoke,” he said. “Smoke makes me cough.” And he coughed, as though to speak of it made it happen, a wet, phlegmatic cough that left his skinny frame shivering and weak. She reached for the horn spoon, dripped a decoction of comfrey leaves down his throat, and, catching the excess drool with the spoon, tipped it back in.

  Outside, the rain ran in silent rivulets down a black-paned window. Inside, the old man coughed.

  By all the saints, how could she endure it! Both. Or either. Her ears hurt with the sound of his hacking, and she ached in her bones from the dampness seeping through the bare stone walls.

  She shared the small apartment with Brother Francis, if sharing it could be called. The old priest lived more in his head than in the real world. That much, at least, had not changed. Most of the time, he hardly acknowledged she was there. She was, like the candles and the chair on which he rested and the bed on which he slept, just another furnishing, old and worn with too much use. A woolen curtain separated their two rooms, which were attached to the end of the monks’ dormitory but with a separate entrance. Her room served as a small larder/cupboard from which she prepared the meals he ate. At one time he had taken his meals in the refectory with the monks. Now he seldom ventured away from the tiny brazier over which he huddled. Sometimes the monks, and other visitors, for he was well respected, came to him. At such times, she was pressed to serve them too.

  He had not always been thus. Time was when he’d been a strong barrel of a man. Heavy bearded, muscular in mind and body. Now, sometimes, he looked at her as though he hardly knew her, studying her face with half-blind eyes, cocking his head so as to see her from the outside rim of his failing eyesight.

  “You are Mistress Clare,” he said, as though she had just dropped in to visit him, as though she had not served him every day and every night for nigh onto twelve years.

  “No, Brother Francis. I am lady-in-waiting to Her Majesty the Queen of England.” And then, instantly repentant, trying to soften the harsh edge of her voice, patting his shoulder, “Of course I’m Mistress Clare, Father, and that’s the hard luck of it for both of us, I reckon.”

  She removed the bowl of soup, the untouched beer, and opening the door, flung the contents out into the rain, narrowly missing the rider who was preparing to dismount. His face was hidden by his cleric’s cowl, pulled low, but she would recognize his comely form anywhere.

  “Ye’d best wait until the morning. I was just about to put Brother to bed. Like as not, he’d not even know ye, tonight.”

  The rider nodded and turned toward the guesthouse.

  Mistress Clare stood in the doorway, heedless of the driving rain as it blew under the lintel, wetting her skirt and her stained apron. She clenched the empty beaker and the bowl so tightly that her big bare knuckles turned from red to white. The utensils would surely have shattered had they been made of finer stuff.

  Only when she heard the old priest call her did she close the door, shutting out the rain and the wind, and enter the cluttered emptiness of the old priest’s quarters. For a long time she lay on her cot in the dark watching the rain crawl down the dark window like widows’ tears. Just before the cock crowed dawn, she entered into a murky half-sleep.

  Brother Gabriel woke to the peal of predawn bells tolling vigils. Opus Dei. God’s work. He listened for the shuffling of feet down the dormitory stairs, and when the sound had been replaced with the first faint notes of plainsong, he stirred from his own bed, thinking to join his brothers in the choir. He was slipping through the cloister, since it was closest to his guest cell, when he heard a faint rustling. At first he thought it some small nocturnal creature on its perpetual quest for sustenance, but the rustling grew to a shuffle and was accompanied by a faint sniffling. Nocturnal creatures did not sniffle.

  There it was again. Unmistakable this time.

  At the intersection of bench and wall, Gabriel thought he saw a patch of darkness, a mere thickening in the weave of night. It shivered and drew in toward the wall. With head bowed and folded arms, the posture of the contemplative monk on his way to prayers, Gabriel proceeded through the night corridor. The sniffling stopped as he neared the corner of the bench.

  Gabriel slowed.

  He could almost feel the creature lurking there, holding its breath. Probably one of the infantes, the oblates, shirking the praying of the hours. But why would the child huddle here in the cold and the damp? Unless he was a runaway. This would make some lord who’d paid the Church handsomely for his child’s education and subsequent vocation very unhappy, but Gabriel had a moment’s sympathy for the boy’s need for freedom. He had felt the same need often as a child. Only he’d had no place to run.

  When Gabriel’s foot was adjacent to the bench, he thrust his leg out, pinning whoever it was against the wall. Bending down, he pulled the quivering boy to his feet and across the quadrangle to a flickering lantern hanging outside the chapter house. The shadows danced. The cloister promenade at night was a frightening place to a boy. Gabriel remembered it well. Perhaps it was that memory that caused the gruffness in his voice as he addressed the child.

  “Let’s get a look at you,” he said, holding the squirming boy under the light. He was only about six, around the age Gabriel had been when Father Francis had first brought him to live with the brothers.

  “Are you going to beat me?” The voice was small yet brave, almost defiant, demanding to know the worst. Defiance was not a good trait in a boy in a monastery. Gabriel remembered that as well.

  “Should I beat you? Does somebody beat you?”

  “Brother Bartholomew.”

  “And why does Brother Bartholomew beat you?”

  “Because I don’t go to choir.”

  “Why don’t you go to choir? You’re not a sleepyhead, are you?” Gabriel tousled the boy’s mop of curls. The guttering lantern light fell across the child’s face, highlighting the heavy eyelashes, pointing downward. The child’s voice was no longer defiant when he answered.

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what are you afraid?”

  Gabriel suddenly remembered the large carved crucifix hanging overhead in the chapel, and how when the brothers sang the kyrie he’d been afraid the wooden Christ would be awakened from his agony and start to bleed, dropping great crimson drops on his head. He would sing softly, afraid to add his voice, and then afterward he would be ashamed because he had been afraid of the blood. The saving blood. He’d never told anybody that he was afraid. Surely it was a mortal sin to be afraid of the Savior’s blood.

  He’d learned not to look at the crucifix whenever he entered the choir.

  “I’m afraid of the devils that are there,” the small voice answered in a whisper.

  “Devils? What devils?”

  “The devils carved in the misericords.”

  Misericordia, from miserere, to be merciful. As a boy, before he’d learned his Latin, he’d thought the name for the carvings was from miseria, for misery. Perhaps the carver had thought so too, for
there was little mercy depicted there. He remembered tracing the horned devils and the grotesque gargoyles carved in the hinges of the choir seats.

  Gabriel held the boy out at arm’s length, forcing him to look up so he could see his face. “You’re not running away, are you?”

  “No. I was just hiding from Brother Bartholomew. He won’t think to look for me out here at night.” A note of hope, even bravado, crept into his voice. “By morning he will have forgotten.”

  Gabriel made a mental note to speak to Brother Bartholomew.

  “Well—what’s your name?”

  “Andrew.”

  Gabriel could hear the soft plainsong from the chapel. Vigils would be ending soon. “Well, Andrew, you come back to the refectory with me. We’ll forage for a bit of bread and cheese, and I’ll teach you how not to be afraid of a figure carved in wood. I’ll show you how to carve one for yourself.”

  The child slipped his small hand in his. Gabriel felt his heart squeeze.

  “What about the night shadows? I’m afraid of those too.”

  “The shadows, Andrew, we all have to live with. We all have to learn to deal with them in our own way. But you have a brave heart, and you can do it. That’s how brave hearts are made stronger.”

  “Is that how you get to be a man?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is, Andrew. I suppose it is.”

  THIRTEEN

  To bewitch your enemy, get some of his combed out

  hair, steep it in your urine and then throw it on his

  garments—He will have no rest by night or day.

  —FROM A BOOK OF GYPSY SPELLS

  Anna hated being beholden to Bera and his sullen, pregnant wife. She had tried to give back the red skirt, but Lela refused it.