The Mercy Seller: A Novel (v5)

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  The stationer’s wife favored them with her gap-toothed smile. “And it’s glad enough for the business I am. It’s been slow, what with the snow and then the rain.”

  Anna watched carefully as the boy twisted his body on the stool. “I’m afraid my custom won’t help much. Just a couple of nibs and a bottle of squid ink.” She counted out the farthings, looked at a stack of fine vellum.

  “I can make you a good price.”

  “Perhaps later; my purse is thin right now. I thought I might find some business within the Jewish quarter. Can you direct me—”

  The woman’s gap-toothed smile snapped shut, her eyes squinting into little pinpoints. “The Jews! What would you be wanting with that lot?”

  “My … husband often did work for them. They are a learned people and value beautiful books. And they pay well.”

  She gave Anna a hard look. “Well, you won’t be getting any custom there. Haven’t been any Jews in France since before I was born. The king had the good sense to banish them all.”

  “Banish?”

  “They were lucky they weren’t all herded into a synagogue and burned. That’s what I’ve heard was done in other places. Not that I would hold with that, being a good Christian woman and all. It was enough to run them out.”

  Anna remembered the crowded settlement of Judenstadt, walled off from the rest of Prague. Remembered too how every year on Yom Kippur in the old/new synagogue, the Jews kept alive the memory of such a massacre in Prague. She bit back a sharp retort. It would not do for her to anger the only stationer within walking distance of her quarters. What good could her protest do, anyway?

  The woman was studying her thoughtfully. “If it be Jewish books you’re interested in, I have something to show you. Being a good Christian woman and all, I’ve not wanted to keep it, but it seemed a shame to burn it. I’ll sell it to you cheap.” As if Anna were not a good Christian woman.

  She reached under the counter and dragged out a bundle wrapped in sackcloth. “Mind you, don’t tell where you got it. I’ll deny it with my last breath. That’s part of the bargain.” She cast a furtive glance at the window before unwrapping the bundle. “My lout of a husband bought it from a tinker—the fool didn’t know what it was. He said the tinker’s grandfather brought it back from the last crusade. I think it’s some kind of Jewish black magic. But ain’t it beautiful!”

  Anna gasped. The book was bound in well-tooled leather, outlined with enameled crimson and gold leaf. There were a few holes in the finish of the leather, probably where gems, long since plundered and adorning the throat of some Knight Templar’s lady or a rich Roman cleric, had been encrusted. Anna could read enough of the Hebrew letters to make out the title. . The Key to the Wisdom of Solomon.

  Anna had heard of this book. The rabbi in Prague had once shown her a copy. And indeed it was a book of magic of sorts. But not black magic. Not witches’ magic. A book of magic incantation for summoning angels. She ran her fingers over the gilded Hebrew letters of the title. Her mind cautioned her. Turn away. If it’s dangerous for a citizen of the country, how much more so for a foreigner? Her mind flashed on Jetta emerging from the river, her body lifeless, her limp head thrown back over VanCleve’s arms, her long gray hair trailing strings of water. She pushed the image aside.

  “How much?” she asked.

  The stationer’s wife appeared to be calculating. Anna could almost hear what she was thinking. Here was a way to rid herself of the contraband book.

  “For you, two gold florins.”

  A ransom indeed. She dared not spend her little hoard for it.

  “My husband wants to burn it.” The woman gave an exaggerated sigh. “Seems a pity.”

  “How about a trade? I have two copies of Christine de Pisan’s The Treasury of the City of Ladies and three pilgrim guides. You should have no trouble selling those. I mean, if you were going to burn it anyway.”

  The woman made a great show of considering, biting into her bottom lip with her little saw teeth. “Well, there’s the leather of the back cover. I could salvage that.”

  “Five books and one ducat for the leather.”

  “Done.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  The woman bundled the book back into its plain swaddling, handed it to Anna. “Go ahead. Take it now. I trust you. We are both good Christian women,” she said, visibly relieved to be rid of it.

  The woman worked quickly, wrapping the book in the prayer shawl that covered it, as though she were afraid Anna would reconsider. As she placed it beneath the blankets in Bek’s wagon, Anna had another spasm of misgiving. Had she done the wrong thing? But they said the same thing about the Wycliffe Bible—that it was dangerous to own it. And no harm had ever come to her for having that. Again her mind betrayed her and she was transported back to the Vltava Bridge and Martin’s skull gleaming on its stake. But Martin and the others had not died for possession of the Book. It was hubris that killed them. Ddeek had often warned his little group of dissidents against the kind of intellectual and philosophical arrogance that could undermine their truth and endanger lives. Anna did not have to shout her views in the marketplace. Ransoming the book was a good thing.

  Somehow, she thought it was what Ddeek would have done.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  [L]et us leave celibacy for bishops … The holiest

  kind of life is wedlock, purely and chastely observed.

  —STATEMENT AGAINST CELIBACY BY

  ERASMUS IN ENCOMIUM MORIAE

  Brother Gabriel was weary after his crossing. He’d had little sleep and less food since receiving the packet from Archbishop Arundel informing him of Brother Francis’s death. But after the ship landed in Dover, he’d been suddenly impatient to return, though he knew there would be no friend to greet him in the old priest’s quarters. Nonetheless, he had hired a horse and come straight to Battle Abbey in the heavy twilight and the cold mist that settled like a caul upon his skin. He didn’t know what hour of the night it was when the abbey walls loomed before him. Only that it was late. A pale wedge of a rising moon within a veil of cloud lit the abbey grounds, reminding him of his last moonlit visit to the abbey, the last time he’d seen Brother Francis alive. He should never have stayed away so long, he chided himself. He’d known how frail the old priest was.

  “Look sharp, lad,” he shouted at the sleepy groom, who emerged rubbing his eyes as Gabriel rode through the gatehouse, unmanned now that the French raids had stopped. The abbey’s numbers were too depleted to guard walls beyond which no enemy camped. Its population had never fully recovered from the pestilence that swept England during the last century.

  “See that he gets a bag of oats. An ostler from Hastings will claim him tomorrow.”

  “Aye, Father.” The horse whinnied as the boy led him away in the direction of the stable.

  Oats for the horse maybe, but nothing for the rider, he thought, glancing at the darkened windows of the refectory, long since empty of the brothers who had eaten their silent supper. The kitchens too would be closed, the long deal tables scrubbed clean of every crumb.

  Two bells.

  The heart of the night. Anna and Bek would be sleeping in the little house in Rue de Saint Luc. At the sound of the peals the monks began their shuffling through the cloisters in answer to the matins summons. He would join them. He had neglected for far too long the Divine Office. Besides, only three weeks had passed since the prior’s death. They were sure to still be chanting the Office of the Dead.

  Brother Gabriel pulled his cowl low over his face, bowed his head, crossed his arms in the penitential posture, and joined the line heading into the chapel. He entered the familiar choir, his glance embracing the misericords where as a boy he’d traced the carvings with his fingers, impatiently waiting for the office to end. A few years later, as Brother Francis offered the mass, young Gabriel was thinking about the girl to whom he’d given his virginity. Thinking about carnal delights when he should have been thinking about the my
stery celebrated before him. Carnal sins! Ah, there was mystery there as well.

  Still thinking about his carnal sins—how heavily they weighed—he picked up the antiphonary, though he didn’t need it. He knew all the words by heart. It had been a stern requirement of Brother Francis for his young protégé.

  “Dirige, Domine, Deus meus.” He intoned the opening antiphon, joining his bass voice with the abbey choir.

  Maybe after this he would be able to sleep. He had not slept well in many nights. He would take a cot in the monks’ dormitory—surely no dreams of a red-haired woman would intrude upon that celibate company. Then tomorrow he would pay his last respects to the old prior and seek out the abbot to endow more masses for his soul.

  After the mass, he followed the line back through the cloisters. At the corner of the quadrangle where it turned, he glanced over at the little enclosed cottage set apart. A shadow passed in front of the window. The shade of Brother Francis, resting ill? He rubbed gritty eyeballs and looked again. The silhouette was gone.

  Mistress Clare. He had forgotten about her, would have thought her long gone by now. He wondered idly what she would do now that her job was finished. Wondered if she had family who would take her in.

  But that was not his concern.

  The morning meal was simple: coarse bread, yeasty and crusty, still warm from the kitchen, and porridge—with a rasher of bacon reserved for the visiting priest, the quaestor who held the key to the treasury of grace. Gabriel was first in line, filling his wooden bowl, then settling down to the trestle board with the brothers who followed quickly behind him. The monks passed the bread down the line, each breaking off a piece and passing it with no word spoken into the stillness except for the Psalm reader, who intoned the lesson from the pulpit high above them.

  Gabriel only half listened to the Penitential Psalms. It was a logical choice, part of the Office of the Dead, chosen like the mass to honor Brother Francis. The monotonous sound of the voice and the sound of swallowing—who knew that a couple dozen men all masticating under the rule of silence could be so noisy and so irritating to the senses?—was insufficient to distract Gabriel’s mind from the residual stiffness of sleeping on the hard cot. Neither the quantity nor the quality of his sleep had left him refreshed. His hip ached in the joint. And no wonder.

  He had dreamed again last night of Anna. This time she appeared in the guise of the angel who wrestled with Jacob at the foot of the golden stair. Like Jacob in his dream, Gabriel struggled with the winged creature, a fierce struggle worthy of a heavenly foe. Gabriel grasped and held the creature even as Jacob in the Book of Genesis had done, and the angel would have fled to Heaven up the celestial stair, had not Gabriel held on fast. But in the dream it was the priest and not the angel who was finally overcome, felled by the power of the beating wings that bruised his hip and sucked his breath away.

  He’d tried to cry out in the dream, but his voice was locked—he still felt the constriction in his throat when he swallowed—until at last he lay beaten and still, his eyes closed, his body naked and cold, curled in upon itself like a child’s. And yet the angel, not yet finished with him, hovered over him until he smelled its essence. Familiar, sweet. The smell of jasmine. Gabriel opened his eyes, looked into the creature’s face.

  Not the face of a male like the one Jacob wrestled, nor even some androgynous creature, as he’d always thought the angels to be, but a woman’s face—Anna’s face, with a nimbus of flaming hair burning with fire and yet not consumed, like Moses’ burning bush. He could feel the heat of it against his skin. Felt it now, just remembering—remembering too, even in the cold and silent abbey refectorium, her perfect face. In her bright blue eyes, angel tears, shiny as diamonds, hovered at the corners, never spilling.

  Gabriel wished at that moment with all his heart that Brother Francis were still alive to interpret his dream for him. Yet, some secret part of him, some perverse and secret self was glad that he would not have to suffer the reprimand.

  Domine, ne in furore tuo arguas me … The words of the psalm floated down from overhead, penetrating Gabriel’s remembered dream. O Lord, rebuke me not in thy indignation, nor chastise me in thy wrath.

  A brother nudged him, urging him to take the bread. His throat swelled, threatening to refuse the spoonful of porridge he had just scooped into his mouth. He shook his head. The brother scowled and passed it across him, even as Gabriel straddled the bench and rushed from the room.

  He opened the refectorium door to the withered kitchen garden, glad of the burst of cold air, glad to leave behind the brothers and their incessant gulping and swallowing, like pigs feeding at a trough. But gladder still to leave behind the voice and the psalm that begged mercy for the dead even as it mocked the sins of the living, David’s plea for mercy for his sins, his carnal sin with Bathsheba not unlike Gabriel’s own.

  Domine, ne in furore tuo arguas me. Gabriel could still hear the chanting of the psalm. He stumbled toward the chapel. He could also still see the vision of the angel before him, the angel with a face like Anna’s.

  Brother Francis’s body was interred in Saint Martin’s chapel, the circular offset to the left of the chancel. The flagstone of the floor had been lifted and the prior’s body deposited, encased in its shroud., in the excavation nearest the altar of Saint Martin. This was a signal honor because after the grave— called by some “the flesh-eater”—had done its work, his bones would not be removed to the charnel house, but would remain in proximity to the saint. From this honored place, the old prior’s soul could more easily progress through Purgatory. Most of the pilgrims who came to honor the saint would vouchsafe a prayer for the prior buried nearby. Spilled grace.

  Morning light poured through the window that depicted Saint Martin wearing his half-cloak as he wrapped the other half about the arms of a ragged beggar. In the background the goose that was his emblem looked on with favor, his beak opened wide, proclaiming the humble saint’s charity.

  Gabriel knelt on the floor, ran his hand along the raw seam where the stones in the floor beside the altar had been replaced. Even in the dim light of the chapel interior he could see the mortar was fresh. He traced the newly carved letters of Brother Francis’s name, rough-hewn but legible, in the headstone, then bent forward and pressed his lips against the cold stone. He felt a wave of remorse and longing as he tried to remember exactly what had been the last words he’d said to this man who had been like a father to him. Had he expressed affection? Had he expressed his gratitude? Even if he hadn’t, the old man knew how much Gabriel loved him, didn’t he?

  “Your name was the last thing on his lips.”

  A woman’s voice, familiar and yet not, nagged at the edge of recognition. He raised his head to see the speaker who stood in the door: a slender woman of late middle age and proud bearing, wearing a hooded cloak from which straggles of gray hair peeped.

  Mistress Clare.

  Probably come with some petty claim against the leavings of the old priest.

  He tried to hide the irritation in his voice, irritation that she should intrude upon his private grief. She had served Brother Francis faithfully. She was entitled to something, he supposed.

  “I have come to grieve. I will attend you later,” he said, not getting up from his kneeling position before the grave. Echoing off the stone of the chapel wall, his tone sounded hard-edged.

  She was as still as the statue ensconced in the wall niche overhead. Only her lips moved. “I will not be here later. I have come to bid you farewell. I have waited since his burial for you.”

  Irritated by something in her tone, as though she had some claim upon his attention, he started to demand she leave him to grieve in solitude. Still, she was entitled to some modicum of courtesy for her pains. No doubt she would want some more tangible remuneration as well. For that he would refer her to the abbot—unless of course she’d already exhausted that resource. He struggled to his feet, feeling a cold pain in the core of his leg that started in his hip joi
nt and shot down to the sole of his foot.

  “A warm poultice will ease that pain,” she said. “Brother Francis suffered from it also.”

  She said this last as though she drew some private satisfaction from his suffering. This surprised and puzzled him. She had ever been distant toward him, but he’d not thought her antipathy ran so deep.

  “I have never felt it before. It is no doubt caused by the long ride from the shore.”

  “That or the weather,” she said.

  He sat down on the lone bench that was provided for the penitents at Saint Martin’s chapel. A rainbow of light from the stained-glass window painted the other end of the bench.

  “You may sit here, and we will talk about your claim,” he said.

  She sat beside him, her plain dun-colored dress suddenly colorful, her complexion rosy in the wash of the red tint from the window. He could see that in her youth, she must have been a pretty woman. It struck him that he knew very little about Mistress Clare, even though she had hovered for years in the background. He tried to remember when he’d first seen her. He’d been barely beyond the status of a green youth, fresh from his studies in Rome, and she had been there then. Brother Francis had simply introduced her as Mistress Clare, and she had disappeared into the shadows, as became her custom whenever he visited.

  “I have no claims.” She said this a little indignantly, as though she found the very suggestion offensive.

  “I waited to tell you how he died,” she said, “and to assure you that your father’s body was tended properly before he was laid to rest.”