The Mercy Seller: A Novel (v5)

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  “He is eating, but he is expecting ye,” she said. “I will be in the herbarium when ye’ve finished. I left some bread and goat cheese for ye as well.”

  “Thank you, Mistress Clare. That was kind.”

  Her visage seemed to soften, but it was so fleeting that he must have imagined it.

  “He tires easily,” she said, pausing as though she wanted to say more. She looked at him so intently that it made him uncomfortable. Then she lifted the latch and walked out.

  “I never know how to fathom that woman,” he said, kneeling beside the elderly friar, taking his hand, kissing it. “She has the countenance and tone of a harpy, and I think she bears a special antipathy for me.”

  “She is a bitter woman, but she serves me well. God will reward her for her service. Life rewards her for her bitterness.”

  “I would like to hear her story sometime, Brother.”

  “It does not concern you, Brother. Move around to my side so I can better see you. With these old eyes I can’t see what’s in front of me.”

  Brother Gabriel pulled his stool up to the old man’s knee so as to face him at an angle. The old man tilted his head.

  “Now tell me about how you do Christ’s work,” he said, his voice as thin and raspy as his skin.

  They talked as clerics do of church matters, church polity, church politics. Finally, Brother Gabriel told Brother Francis about his latest venture for the archbishop.

  “So the archbishop has singled you out for special work. I knew you would go far.”

  “It’s not an assignment I relish. I find myself becoming fond of Lord and Lady Cobham. I do not wish them ill.”

  “Then fight to save their souls. What harm can you do by restoring them to the bosom of the Church?”

  “Yes,” Brother Gabriel mused. “What harm?” That was a question he’d asked himself over and over, and he did not like the answer. But he did not want to have such a debate with his mentor. He could not argue against centuries of established doctrine. He was sure to lose. And worse, he would prove a disappointment to an old man who deserved better.

  The morning sun had finally broken through and laid a strip of light beneath the door, which Mistress Clare had left ajar. It came through the unshuttered windows too, lighting the gray stubble on the old man’s face. When had he become so old? Gabriel wondered. Where was I when his cheek began to wither and his eyesight began to fade? A deep sadness settled over him.

  “Father, will you hear my confession?” Like Brother Gabriel, Brother Francis was an ordained priest as well as a friar.

  “Of course, my son.” But the old man was seized with a paroxysm of coughing.

  Brother Gabriel looked on anxiously. “Shall I call Mistress Clare?”

  The old priest shook his head. “It will pass,” he said, motioning for his amice.

  Brother Gabriel handed the soft linen vestment with its silk fringe to the old priest, who fumbled for the embroidered cross, bringing it to his lips reverently, before placing the garment around his neck.

  Gabriel began. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have committed lust in my heart.”

  And then Gabriel told his confessor about the carnal images that haunted his dreams and the lascivious thoughts that plagued his days. He confessed too of the loneliness he felt and the fresh new doubts concerning his clerical duties.

  Brother Francis listened in silence. When Brother Gabriel had spit it all out, he pronounced his penance, light enough under the circumstances, much lighter than he himself would have given. Perhaps the old priest had not understood.

  “Is that sufficient? For such sinful thoughts as these?”

  There was a long silence. Had he nodded off? Had he not heard?

  Then slowly, with shaking hands, Father Francis took Gabriel’s two hands in his own brown-spotted ones. “We talked about this before, in your youth, remember? When you strayed from the Rule?”

  Brother Gabriel remembered it well. And felt great shame both at the memory and the stirring in his loins the memory prompted. He’d been heartbroken when the girl, for whom he thought to sacrifice his vocation, ran off with another. The bitterness of that heartbreak had made it easier to accept the Rule of celibacy. Easier to be alone. Until now.

  “You prayed for strength and you received it. Did you not?”

  “Yes, but the temptation has returned, and, like the demon returning to the possessed man in the Scriptures, has brought his fellows with him. I cannot fulfill my vow of celibacy. Not and stay sane.”

  “Have you used all the methods I taught you, distracted yourself with studying Holy Scriptures? Have you fasted? Prayed? Have you tried mortification of the flesh?”

  “Yes, yes, I have done it all. I can recite the Psalms and the Acts of the Apostles verbatim. The flesh beneath my cassock is raw from my camel’s hair shirt. I fear I may have misunderstood my calling. Else why … ?” Brother Gabriel raised his hands to his face and rubbed it as if to scrub off the skin of the flesh that tormented him so. “Perhaps I should renounce my vows, leave the Church.”

  “Nobody ever told you it would be easy.” The old priest removed his amice, kissed the cross stitched on it, folded it carefully, and handed it to Gabriel. “I would give you this advice,” he said. “A greater sin is to let this come between you and the work of the Church. It has already driven you from your duties. If you go back without some relief, I fear the object of your current fixation will interfere with the fulfillment of your calling.”

  “Relief? How can I obtain relief and stay faithful to my vows?” Then, thinking what Brother Francis might be hinting at, he said, “I’ve tried that too.”

  The old priest coughed, cleared his throat, and spit into the bowl Mistress Clare had left by his chair. He tilted his head back at an angle so that he could see his young charge from the periphery of his vision. Gabriel remembered the former directness of his gaze and was saddened.

  “I have known some good men, good priests, who in your place gained release through discreet intercourse … with an … appropriate woman.”

  Had he heard right? Was his confessor, his mentor, advising fornication? Was the old priest losing his moral vision with his sight?

  “Are you saying I should break my vows of celibacy?”

  The old man wheezed. It sounded like the sighing of a bellows. “It would be the lesser sin. After all, Saint Paul did say ‘it is better to marry than to burn.’ You cannot, of course, marry and retain your position. Though Saint Peter himself was married. And in earlier times the Church allowed us to marry.” The old man’s voice was so hoarse this last remark was almost a growl. “Surely you know you would not be the first. None of us is perfect. We are all flawed. A priest, even a good priest, can avail himself of some female company. As long as he is discreet.” The words came out intermittently with little rasps and coughs.

  Brother Gabriel could hardly believe his ears. He wanted to ask, “Is that what you did?” But he could not bring himself to ask this of the man who had been both Brother, Father, and father to him. The man he’d thought a saint.

  “There are two problems with such a solution, however,” Brother Francis said. “One would not want to despoil a virgin, of course. Yet some of the women of the brothels carry disease. A woman of the common sort but with some limited experience—perhaps a widow.”

  It wasn’t that Brother Gabriel was not aware that this went on among some in the Church. This and more. He’d heard the rumors among the boys as he was coming into puberty in the monastery, the jokes about unnatural relations among some of the monks. He’d heard of alliances with promiscuous nuns as well. But for the man whom he most admired to counsel fornication was almost sufficient to drive the lascivious thoughts away.

  “Of course, she would need to have no sign of the pox, and she should be … compensated. Else she might sow scandal. We have too much scandal as it is.”

  “But—”

  “Opus Dei is more important than your personal weak
ness. If you cannot destroy your lust, then you must control it through careful indulgence. Else the devil will use it to drive you from His work. The archbishop is right. All heresy must be stamped out. Nothing should interfere with your work. You are marked by God for greatness, maybe even a cardinal’s hat.” He paused and drew a ragged breath. “I am an old man and I must rest now. We will talk again later.”

  “Of course,” Gabriel said. For what else was there to talk about? Unless it was Gabriel’s desire for more than carnal release. But how to give voice to that longing for more than physical intimacy? Dare he say that he wanted a woman to look at him the way Lady Cobham looked at Lord Cobham, to have her eyes light up the way hers did when Sir John entered the room? Dare he ask, if marriage is a sacrament then why are we denied it? How could Father Francis, who had lived all his life alone, understand such a need?

  “Call Mistress Clare,” the old priest said. “The mornings are growing chilly. She’s probably freezing outside. That will not improve her temper.”

  Gabriel heard a rustling outside the door and suspected that Mistress Clare was not that far away. But when he opened the door, she was sitting on the turf bench of the herb garden, so still and erect she might have been a stone statue.

  “Brother Francis calls for you, Mistress Clare.” He could see his breath.

  She stood up. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as he. The sunlight picked out the gray of her hair, where the hood of her mantle only half covered it.

  “The first frost will come soon,” she said, looking at him directly. “Brother Francis will likely not make it through another winter.”

  He was taken aback by the flatness in her voice. “That’s a hard thing to hear,” he said.

  “I’m telling you only what is true. He is old and frail and weak.” She moved past him, the hem of her cloak brushing across his feet. “I am warning you because I know of your special bond. I want you to know that I will send for you when it is over, so that you may see to his burial. Leave the place where you can be reached with the prior.”

  She hesitated as though about to say something else, then turned and walked away. When she had shut the door, he sat down on the turf bench that she had vacated. The dew was still on the grass, but the spot where she sat was dry and warm from her body. He sat there for a long time pondering the advice that Brother Francis had given him. It was hard to know which gave him more unease: his father confessor’s advice or Mistress Clare’s warning.

  He tried to imagine his world without the old priest in it, the man who had been his spiritual touchstone in a world that made no sense to him. What would Brother Francis do? That had always been the question he asked whenever he was confronted with a problem.

  It had been a long time since he’d felt such uncertainty. He closed his eyes and the sunlit garden disappeared. He was once again a small boy shut in the closet in a house on Bankside Street, his hands over his ears, trying to shut out the sounds on the other side of the door. His heart hammering in his chest, he opened his eyes to still the panic.

  “A cardinal’s hat,” Brother Francis had said. That was what his mentor wanted for him. Was that what he wanted for himself? A bishop’s miter or even a cardinal’s hat? He tried to envision it, but all he could see was Arundel. Himself as Arundel. The image did not appeal. And yet, he reminded himself, the head that wore a bishop’s miter or cardinal’s hat would be so far removed from Bankside Street that he would never have to think of it again. The head that wore a bishop’s miter would have no time for lustful thoughts.

  But what thoughts would fill a bishop’s miter to crowd the unworthy thoughts out? Holy thoughts? Again his mind conjured Arundel’s worn and hollowed visage beneath his glittering white miter, and he knew what he was thinking. He was thinking how to trap and burn a man whose only crime was spreading the Gospel.

  A Gospel of heresy, Gabriel, a Gospel of heresy, he reminded himself. And if your calling is to rout out heretics in the service of your Church, then you’d best be about it.

  But he lingered just a little longer. The sun felt good on his tonsured head. He reached up to feel the bald cap of skin, the mark of Saint Peter that showed he was a slave to Christ. He’d been so proud the day the bishop had shaved his head, so proud to look like Brother Francis. It had been the first part of his ordination ritual; he was hardly more than a child, an altar boy, given to the brothers to serve God through serving them. And after the ceremony, after the final prayer, Gabriel had walked beside Brother Francis, thinking now they were alike, now they were brothers.

  He rubbed his hand over the stubble on his head. He shaved it once a month, and not as widely as some of his brothers—he thought that prideful and ostentatious, though he was always careful to preserve the heavy rim above his ears, his “crown of thorns.” But he’d neglected that too in his distraction. Soon that crown of thorns would disappear, if he did not shave it.

  As Gabriel got up from the turf bench, he pulled the hood up on his cope to hide his growing hair and tried to remember if he had packed his razor. He was still a slave of Christ. Or a slave of the Church. And that was the same thing. That’s what Brother Francis had always taught him. And like it or not, it was time to be about his business.

  FIFTEEN

  For childbirth red hair is sewed in a small bag and

  carried on the belly next to the skin during

  pregnancy …

  —A GYPSY GOOD-LUCK CHARM

  For the last two weeks, the little train of Gypsy vardos had made good time. At last they were out of the deep forests. Just outside Strasbourg they had joined with another Romani band, swelling their numbers to eight wagons. They had left some pilgrims behind in Strasbourg but picked up others who wished to travel through France under the Holy Roman Emperor’s safe conduct pass. On any given day they numbered about thirty souls.

  “We will make France before All Saints’ Day,” Bera boasted each night, “if the weather holds.”

  And the weather held. Warm, sunlit autumn days and crisp, clear, starlit nights made the Romani life more pleasant for Anna. But at night, when they gathered around the campfires for their dancing and singing, Anna mourned her loss of connectedness in a world that no longer made sense. The women left her to her own company. Even the children, whenever she made overtures to them, just stared at her with their big black eyes and ran away to hide behind their mothers’ skirts. Once or twice, after Bera had danced as light-footed as though he were dancing on eggs and was pleased with the shower of coins from the delighted pilgrims who traveled with them, the dark-skinned king squatted beside her for a moment or two, offering a flashing smile and a wink.

  On this night; they’d all come together around a great bonfire—even the traveling pilgrims who usually kept to their own campfires. The flames leaped as high and fierce as Bera’s flashing pirouettes. This night, when he squatted beside Anna, he tried to pull her into the circle of dance, but she, ever mindful of Lela’s watchful gaze, stepped back into the shadows. Though tonight she had not seen Lela sitting in her usual place at the end of her vardo, door open and curtain drawn back to watch the campfire rituals from her sheltered distance, because pregnant women were not allowed in the company of men.

  An overhanging branch stirred in a light breeze. Above the hiss and pop of the fire, Anna heard the dry crunch of pine needles and dead leaves underfoot. She looked up to see Bera. He had followed her away from the fire. She glanced apprehensively at Lela’s vardo, Lela still did not appear in the doorway. Though Anna and Bera weren’t strictly alone, they might as well be. The forest shadows separated them from the firelight circle.

  “Anna of Prague, you must come with me,” he said. “It is time.” He wasn’t smiling, and there was urgency in his voice.

  “Time for what?” she asked, her heart beating faster. He’d never sought her out except to ask for money. She steeled herself against his request.

  “It is time for my son to be born. Lela is calling for you.”

>   “Lela! Calling for me?”

  He reached for her hand.

  “But I—”

  From the other side of the trees, Jetta emerged. “Hurry. Lela is birthing. We need you.”

  But there had to be some mistake, Anna thought. Why would they want her help now—these women who wouldn’t even let her touch their food! She knew so little of women’s things. She’d been raised in the company of men.

  Ignoring her protests as though they were of no more importance than the smoke that blew from the bonfire, Bera and Jetta drew her toward the wagon.

  As she approached Bera’s wagon, the most colorful vardo of them all, painted bright green, the gold leaf on its carved doors visible even in the firelight, a woman’s scream reverberated from inside. Bera immediately let go of Anna’s hand and beat a hasty retreat back to the warmth and comradery of the fire.

  “Come,” Jetta insisted, pulling on Anna. Some part of Anna, unconscious as she had been when Jetta pulled her from the river, remembered that tug. Jetta was always saving things. And now she was expecting Anna to help.

  But Jetta stepped aside.

  “You’re not going in with me?” Anna asked.

  “There is not enough room in the wagon.”

  Wherever had they gotten the notion she knew anything of childbirth!

  “But I’m no midwife. I’ve never even seen—”

  “Rawnie bal,” Jetta said, reaching up to remove the kerchief from Anna’s hair. “Just touch her belly with your hair.” The old woman showed a gaptoothed grin. Anna had hardly ever seen her smile. “Just give her your luck.”

  “My luck?”

  Who would want my luck? Anna thought. But she was too flustered to linger long on that irony. Another ear-splitting scream hurtled from the caravan, like the high-pitched wail of a banshee. This bloodcurdling sound was followed by a stream of curses in Romani with a couple of Bohemian words thrown in for seasoning.

  “Lela hates me,” Anna hissed. “She will not let me near her. Or her babe.”