next in dignity … then a prince, an archbishop is his equal …
—FROM OFFICES IN A NOBLE HOUSEHOLD
(15TH CENTURY)
What proof do you have that what you say is true?” It sounded cold, but it was all Gabriel could think to say to the stranger who had just served him dried apple tartlet with cinnamon. Under calmer circumstances it might have occurred to him to wonder how she had come by such an expensive spice or if she had saved the little horde against just such an occasion. But his distress was too great to think of such things now.
The story Mistress Clare had just told him undercut the very foundations of everything he believed. That he had been divinely chosen, God’s anointed. That Brother Francis had been his savior and Holy Church his refuge. For if what this woman said was true, he was not only the bastard child of a profligate priest but both he and his mother had been cruelly exploited to satisfy the lusts, whims, and ambition of the man Gabriel had thought carried the very heart of Christ in his bosom. No. There had to be another answer.
Gabriel had never witnessed any spiritual or emotional or physical intimacy between Brother Francis and the woman he called Mistress Clare. Indeed, on more than one occasion, Brother Francis had referred to her service to him as an act of charity on his part. What was more, this reserved, cold woman bore no resemblance to the pretty, affectionate woman he remembered. How could he—how could they have lived thus if what she said was true?
She got up from the table, bent to coax the miserly fire in the grate. “He has made your heart cold, I fear,” she said with a sadness that touched him. “The proof you seek is locked inside you.”
“I’m sorry. It is just that you are so different from—”
“In the brothel on Bankside Street—” As she poked at the fire, a tiny orange flame danced to reward her efforts. She turned to look at him, her gaze guarded, inscrutable, as he remembered it. “Do you remember anything about Bankside Street?”
He saw again the little parlor with its grime-streaked window, the stairway to the hell above—“I’ll be Jane, Father, if ye’re partial to Janes,” He nodded for Mistress Clare to go on.
She put down the iron poker and moved to the small glazed window—her one luxury, she had told him proudly when she’d first showed him her tidy cottage—and looked out over the marshy wasteland. “You and I lived on the second floor with the others. There was a small wardrobe in our room. Whenever … whenever …” She took a deep breath. Apparently the memory was as painful for her as him. “He always insisted I lock you in the wardrobe before his arrival.”
Her voice was so low he had to strain to pick out her words. “You hated being shut up like that. You said it was too dark. But I never locked it even though he said to. I never had to. You were such a good boy. You never came out until he’d gone. But sometimes I could hear you crying.”
She made a fluttering motion in the air with her hand, a long slim hand with well-formed bones in spite of the roughened skin. It was a gesture of futility. And a familiar one. She’d made just that gesture the day she hugged him, and he had turned away, truculent at being embraced, angry that she came so seldom, angry that she was pregnant. It had been the last time he’d ever seen her. Brother Francis had said she’d abandoned him.
The air seemed close in the little cottage, stifling, the smell of cinnamon and apples mixing with the smoke from the fire, cloying. He’d asked for proof. This was his proof. Or was it? Jane Paul could have confided in her.
Mistress Clare continued to stare out the window with her back to him. The fluttering hand wiped at eyes he couldn’t see. There was the slightest movement of her shoulders.
“He didn’t want me to see him, then? Was that why he told you to lock me up?” Gabriel asked.
She turned to look at him, her face a mirror of the bitterness in her heart. “He didn’t want to see you! He took no interest in you. He did not want to be reminded of your existence. Until one day he came in the morning and saw you playing in the room downstairs. You used to play in front of the window on sunny days.” Her face softened. “You had a small stuffed horse. He saw you playing and saw what a handsome boy you were. And how clever. You made up games with the horse. Elaborate games where you did the voices. I saw him watching you. ‘That is your son,’ I said. I wanted him to love you. What a stupid, silly girl I was!
“When he said he was going to take you away, I actually felt relief! I wanted so much more for you, Gabriel. I gave you that name, you know. Whenever the light hit your hair you looked like an angel.”
The taciturn woman whom he’d never heard speak more than a sentence or two seemed to be a fountain of words. He wished he could turn it off. Too many words banging in his skull. He needed to think, but she talked on.
“At first, after he took you away, he let me visit you, though infrequently. I watched him turn you into a younger version of himself. Jane Paul died a little bit every day.”
Gabriel found his voice. “You quit coming to see me at the abbey. Why did you stop coming?” Half afraid to hear the answer. Even as a boy he’d regretted the hateful way he’d pulled away, feared that she’d felt his childish resentment and taken it for rejection.
“He forbade me to.”
“And you accepted that?”
“Not at first. I argued. Then I pleaded. By that time I was carrying his second child. He said I was not worthy to be your mother. Said Holy Church would be the only mother you needed. He called me a whore. Though I’d never lain with another man. You need to know your mother was not a whore. I was as faithful to him as though he were my husband. But he said that I would shame you with my presence.”
“What about the second child? Do I have a brother or a sister?”
She smiled a bitter, twisted smile. “It was a perfect girl child. Stillborn.”
“How did you come to live with him?”
“He took me in out of charity, as he often reminded me. He was not a bad man—just a blind one. A victim of his own ambition. I had nowhere else to go. I promised him that you would not know that I was your mother and that I would not try to see you.”
Gabriel tried to remember the first time he had seen Mistress Clare. Brother Francis had always visited him in the Dominican abbey. He’d never visited Brother Francis until long after he’d returned from his studies in Rome. He remembered how carefully she’d watched him then. He’d thought it was because she didn’t like him.
She turned back to stare out the window. The ebbing light picked out the bubbles in the bits of glass between the leaden seams. She was a figure in silhouette. An unknown woman, a featureless stranger. She was his mother.
He said softly to the back of that silhouette—or to himself, “It was my father who was the whore.”
All a lie. Every bit of it. Gabriel had not been called of God. He’d been called by his father and not to the service of Christ, but to the service of vain ecclesiastical ambition. And now his father carried the rags of that ambition with him into Purgatory.
And what had the son done in the service of that ambition?
The son had delivered a righteous man to the authorities and hurled the woman he loved headlong into danger. If the father was in Purgatory, the son was in Hell. He heard sobbing in the room and realized it was his own. The silhouette moved away from the window and came toward him.
He felt the cool touch of his mother’s hands on his face.
There weren’t a lot of places to search in the one small room and tiny anteroom shared by Bek and Anna: two small cots, their blankets neatly cornered, a narrow corner cupboard, gleaming starkly against the bare whitewashed walls, a washstand with basin and pitcher. Four wooden pegs stuck out of the wall on either side of the washstand. On these hung Anna’s two other garments, one cinnabar colored, one pale gray, both gifts from Lady Cobham, as was the squirrel-lined cloak hanging beside them.
The other hook held an extra shirt and breeches and a woolen doublet for Bek. The soldiers had already empti
ed Bek’s little box, spilling out his tin whistle onto the rush-strewn floor. She was glad she’d sent him with Sister Matilde and he was not here to see. She seethed, biting the inside of her lip, saying nothing, as the sergeant rubbed the fine English wool of her cloak between his dirty hands,
“Naught here, Your Excellency.” Only the sergeant searched the room— in the presence of the abbess, the archbishop, and Anna, the three of them standing so close Anna could almost see the pupils of Mother’s eyes through the thin gauze of her veil. From outside she heard the murmurs and husky laughter of the soldiers, waiting.
“What’s in that?” The archbishop swallowed a belch as he pointed to a carved wooden chest at the foot of her cot.
Before Anna could answer, the abbess, who had remained as still as a statue, interrupted. “Your Excellency, do you think it seemly for your men to go through a woman’s undergarments?”
“Well, you do it then.”
The sergeant stepped back. The abbess knelt and opened the chest. One by one, she took out Anna’s linen shifts and chemises and, rising, laid them out in neat stacks on the cot. When she had finished, the only thing left at the bottom of the stack was a necklace of some sort.
“What’s that?” the archbishop asked.
“It’s my cross. It belonged to my mother. It’s a family heirloom.”
“Then why aren’t you wearing it?” he asked archly. “Is it because like the Lollards you find the wearing and use of such icons mere ‘superstition’?”
He stroked his own gold pectoral cross. Its gems glittered with pearls and rubies even in the dim light of the oiled parchment that served for window glass.
“The silver chain is broken, and I had not the wherewithal to fix it.”
The abbess bent down to pick it up, but the archbishop was already scooping up the necklace and examining it carefully. He merely shrugged and laid it in a tangle on the pile of linen. He looked long and hard at the chest, his eyes squinting and his mouth skewed to one side.
He jerked his head in the direction of the chest, speaking to the sergeant. “Pick it up,” he said. “And turn it over. I’ve a notion something else is in there.”
The sergeant picked up the chest and, turning it over, laid it on the cot. He examined it carefully. “Sounds solid,” he said, pecking on it.
“As indeed it would,” Arundel said, “if it were filled with something solid—say something like, I don’t know, bricks …” He shot a sly look at Anna, the look of a fox sniffing his prey. “Or maybe … books?”
He bent down and ran his heavily beringed fingers along its carvings, pausing on two carved roses at the corner. He pressed with his thumbs on the centers and a lid flew open. The archbishop’s smile spread to his eyes.
Anna remained perfectly still. She would not give him the satisfaction of showing fear.
“How very clever,” he said. And then peering into the chest, “What have we here?”
“I am a scribe,” Anna said. “These are my own books. I put them there to keep them safe.”
“Take them out so that we may examine these volumes by which our scribe sets such store. She hides them away as though they were some secret treasure when most among her class display their wealth.”
The sergeant lifted out the two books and laid them side by side on the bed, next to her clean shifts—first the smaller, plain codex, the one with the leather binding whose jewels had been removed, then the larger one, the Wycliffe Bible. The archbishop pushed the sergeant aside and opened the larger book to the exquisitely colored and patterned carpet page—the only adornment of the text—the carpet page Finn the Illuminator had colored so lovingly. “This is our Bible, Anna. It will be yours when I am gone. And after—well, someday you will pass it on to your children.”
But the archbishop wasn’t looking at the beautiful carpet page. Anna followed his gaze as it settled on the title page. He recoiled as though he’d seen a viper.
He read aloud in a voice raspy with hatred: “ ‘The Holy Bible: A translation of the Holy Scripture into the Language of England.’ ”
“Oh, Anna,” the abbess said, her breathy voice filled with disappointment.
In trying to protect the abbess, Anna had handed the archbishop the very evidence he’d been searching for. Had she not confessed, the books, the evidence he sought, might never have been found.
“These are mine own books. The abbess knows nothing about them. They have been here with me in this chest as you found them since I arrived here. They were not unpacked until just now.”
The archbishop appeared not even to hear her. He turned the pages of the Bible. Anna wanted to scream at him to get his bony, shriveled, ring-encrusted fingers off them. He was not fit to touch the pages so lovingly copied. The room started to tilt around her. Mother appeared at her side, her arms around her for support.
“Here, Anna, sit before you fall.” She guided Anna to the chair.
“It is well she should sit to hear what I have to say,” the archbishop said. “Madam, have you ever heard of a law called De haeretico comburendo?”
Anna heard the abbess gasp, felt Mother’s arms grow rigid around her.
“Surely, Excellency, that would not apply to a stranger and a woman who could know nothing of our English law. Surely, merely to own a book would not carry so harsh a penalty, especially when the book is a family heirloom and Mistress Bookman could not have known the mere owning of the book was illegal?”
He waved her words away as though he were swatting at a gnat, acknowledging them only with a grunted comment. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse, else every churl and liar in the land would claim ignorance. As to her being a stranger to our shores, the laws and beliefs of Holy Church are universal.” He bent slightly—he was not a tall man—putting his face so close to Anna’s, she could smell his foul breath. “Madam, the De haeretico comburendo can be translated “On the Burning of Heretics” and it says that the mere possession of an English Bible is enough to procure for the sinner a sentence of death.”
“Excellency!” Mother gasped. “Please. Show the mercy our Lord would have you show. This girl is innocent. And you should know you threaten not one life when you threaten hers, but two. Mistress Bookman is carrying a child.”
“Bring me that other book,” he instructed the sergeant, who was looking at the smaller volume with a look of puzzlement on his face.
“ ’Tis some strange language. Not English. Not the tongue of Holy Church.” He held it out to the archbishop, who snatched it from his hand.
“It is Hebrew. I cannot read it, but I’ve seen this devil’s scratching before.” He thumbed through it, turned it sideways, then up and down. “Hmm,” he said. His eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “It seems, Sergeant, we may have caught ourselves more than a heretic. We may have caught ourselves a witch as well.”
“Faites flotteʐ la sorciêre!” Anna could hear the words ringing in her ears, could see the lifeless body of Jetta being pulled from the river. “Faites flotteʐ la sorciêre!”
She felt the leek soup she’d had at nuncheon rise in her throat. She tried to swallow it and gagged. Mother cupped her hands in front of Anna. “Here, Anna. It is all right.”
Anna threw up into the hands of the abbess, then put her head on her knees.
She heard water splashing into the basin. It sounded far away, like Mother’s voice. “It is only a book.” Anna could hear her washing her hands, then she handed Anna a wet cloth to wipe her face.
“Only a book, Abbess! It is a book of Jewish spells. A book for summoning angels.” He pointed to a diagram of a six-pointed star.
“But Anna is a dealer in books. She might have bought it for the parchment alone.”
“Then we will question her. If she is innocent her innocence will manifest itself to her interrogators.”
“Archbishop Arundel, have some compassion,” Mother pleaded. “What about the child?”
“She can have it in the tower. When the child is born it will be
given to a monastery. At least, that’s one soul that will be saved.”
Anna jumped to her feet. The room swirled. She fastened her gaze on the oil lamp mounted above the cupboard. The swirling stopped. The lamp centered. But the fury that she had bitten back as they rummaged through her personal belongings and desecrated her holy book seized her reason. She stood face-to-face with the archbishop, smelling his sweat, his rotten teeth, the stench of his stagnated soul.
She could feel Mother’s breath in her ear, hear her whisper, “Be calm, Anna. Think of the baby. All will be well.”
I am thinking of the babe, she thought. I have nothing left to think of but the babe. How can I be calm when my thoughts are a jumble of red and violet rage? She threw her head back and laughed, a wild, hysterical laugh that became a scream and bounced back from the walls, frightening even her.
The archbishop took a step back. “She is possessed.”
The spasm was over and in its wake Anna was suddenly calm. She felt spent.
Her next words were quiet and low. “You try to take my child, old man, and I’ll see you in Hell.”
She scarcely heard the sergeant behind her step forward. She stood wooden and staring at the archbishop, who would not return her gaze. The sergeant seized her hands and began to bind them together at the wrists with a leather thong.
“Not so tightly,” the abbess protested, her voice firm enough that Anna felt a slackening in the leather binding. “It will be all right, Anna. All will be well. We will pray for you and the babe,” she said as she drew Anna’s cloak around her, fastening it beneath her chin.
“Mother, do you really think anyone will be listening?” Anna said.
“Of course, Anna. He always listens. Do not lose your faith. You must have your faith to get you through. All will be well!”
All will be well—the phrase from Julian of Norwich that the abbess always quoted to the sisters. How often had she heard that same phrase on her grandfather’s lips? And where was he now? No, Anna doubted that all would be well. But she would not say so. Let the abbess keep her faith. She would need it. Perhaps she, like Finn the Illuminator, could have enough for both of them.
The Mercy Seller: A Novel (v5) Page 36
