‘Who?’
‘Well, this is it. The strangest thing! The Prioress recognised her as being a girl who was once in her flock. A girl who made herself apostate on the very same day as you! Do you see? She was the selfsame girl as you allowed on your stolen punt!’
And now Thomas feels his mind slant, like a table being tipped, and all his thoughts rush to one side. His heart lurches, thumps, and it is hard to breathe. He presses his eyes with the heels of his palms, and sees stars within the darkness, and when he takes them away his wrists are slick with tears again.
‘Ah! She means something to you now,’ Barnaby says.
‘Tell me about her,’ Thomas manages. ‘Who is she? Please. For the love of God.’
‘I cannot say,’ Barnaby tells him, ‘for I do not know.’
‘You must!’
‘But I don’t. There is a further, deeper mystery to her, you see. The Prioress knows who she is, her real identity, if you like, but is sworn to secrecy, and will tell me nothing. When I sent message to the Prior of All, to enquire as to the girl’s identity, instead of enlightenment, he sent a messenger by return to say he is coming to see the girl in person, for there are, he says, divers matters at stake. Can you imagine? Did you know that neither he, nor his predecessor, nor his predecessor’s predecessor, ever thought to seek us out here in our muddy little world since the third year of King Henry the Sixth’s reign? That was nearly forty years ago now! Before you or I were even thought of!’
‘Does she have a name?’
‘Katherine.’
My God, Thomas thinks, and he whispers her name. ‘Katherine.’
But now Barnaby leans forward, staring and intent, the line of his mouth short and hard.
‘Do you really remember nothing of her?’ he asks.
And Thomas tries to think, but after a while he has to shake his head.
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I cannot even remember what she looks like.’
‘Nor how she came to pass herself off as Lady Margaret Cornford?’
‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘I remember nothing. If I ever knew.’
And Barnaby sits back frustrated.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Then that must remain a mystery until the Prior of All honours us with his presence. Then we will be allowed at the truth.’
‘Where is she?’ Thomas asks. ‘Where is she now?’
‘She is with the Prioress, well cared for.’
‘Can I see her?’ Thomas asks.
Barnaby laughs.
‘Of course not,’ he says. ‘She is in cloister.’
‘Please,’ Thomas begs again. ‘Please.’
He finds himself on his feet, looming over Barnaby who shrinks before him, but then as if on some unseen signal, the door opens with a clap and a man with a staff strides in and stands before Thomas. He is broad-chested, red-bearded, a head taller than Thomas, and the quarterstaff looks like a twig in his meaty hands. He looks at Thomas almost sadly; as if he might be a farmer about to reluctantly slaughter a favoured pig.
‘Please, Thomas,’ Barnaby says from behind him. ‘You know we cannot allow it.’
And Thomas subsides. He knows Barnaby is right.
‘So we must just be patient,’ Barnaby goes on. ‘And wait on the Prior of All, and then when he comes, all shall be known. All shall be revealed, and God willing, perhaps you shall see your Katherine once more.’
And now the bell rings in the church tower, summoning the lay brothers in for prayer from the fields and woods and riverbanks. It will soon be time for Vespers.
‘Will you join us to observe the hour, Brother Thomas?’
Thomas agrees to, because there is for the moment nothing else to do.
‘It will be good to have you back,’ Barnaby says. ‘We will find you a cassock, and Brother Blethyn will cut your hair.’
Thomas is half-standing and stops, confused.
‘No, Father Barnaby,’ he says. ‘I am – I cannot come back. I am no longer as I was. I feel as if I have – I have done things. I have seen things. I do not feel the same. I do not belong here. I cannot come back. I thought you knew?’
Barnaby hushes him.
‘All will be well,’ he smiles. ‘All will be well.’
Barnaby leads Thomas out of the almonry and over to the cloister where Thomas stands with the lay brothers and waits for Barnaby to vest himself and prepare to read the lessons. The brothers are all farmers with no land of their own. Rough men, unlettered, with chapped faces that are almost never inside under a protective roof or enclosed by cosseting walls, but out in the fields in all weather, and so they look on the observance of the hours as a time of rest, recuperation. He is familiar with them, or their sort, and comfortable in their presence.
But they are all looking at him now. He has removed his cap, but he has a full head of hair, and he wears his plated jack, with a knife at his belt, a heavy purse, blue woollen hose and polished brown leather riding boots turned down to the knee. The way they look at him reminds him of something, but he does not know what, and he sees their envy, and he feels a twinge of guilt, but it does not shift the sense of loss.
During the observance the words come back to him, but he knows he would not be able to say them on his own and they mean nothing to him, and afterwards, Barnaby summons him again. He walks with him along the cloister range to an iron-hooped door which he unlocks with a key as long as his forearm and while he does so, Thomas turns and looks out on to the garth, the small square of grass held bracketed by the cloister wings. He wonders if he can remember the fight Barnaby says took place, but he cannot. His gaze floats over the cloister walls, and he can hear the jackdaws clacking in their treetops and the geese chuckling in their meers, settling for the night in the world beyond, and he can remember nothing.
Barnaby swings open the door and fumbles with a lamp. When it is lit, Thomas recalls that the room is the sacristy, where they keep the altar silver, the transubstantiated hosts, and such coinage as they possess, but there is also the priory’s illuminated Bible, a book of hours made in Ghent and there, the smallest of the three, lying on top of the pile on a shelf made of stone, a bound book the size of a woman’s palm and as thick as a man’s thumb.
Barnaby picks it up and passes it to him.
‘Do you recognise it?’ he asks.
And Thomas does. It is his psalter, bound before it was ever finished. He opens it carefully. The early pages are filled with tiny, beautifully neat rows of perfectly exacted letters, each page begun with an initial lit with colours not seen in nature, or not at least by Thomas: rich reds, purples, the deepest blues, golds and even silvers. And folded within are scenes from the Bible – here is Christ being presented at the synagogue, here he is at the wedding feast in Cana – each design picked out with startling artistry. It is a marvel.
‘The time I must have spent on this,’ Thomas breathes. ‘But why is it bound? It is not finished. Look.’
Towards the back of the book he finds that in reverse of the normal practice, his former self had saturated the backgrounds to the pictures first, leaving the clothes and the faces of the foreground characters blank. On one page the pale ghost of Christ is betrayed by the pale ghost of Judas while the outline of St Peter looks on, expressionless, in a grey rocked garden bound with grapevines from which hang luscious blue fruits, so cleverly painted that you can see the powdery bloom against the gloss of their bulging flesh.
‘It was guilt, I think,’ Barnaby says. ‘The Prior regretted ceding to Giles Riven his demands – that he kill you – and when the ferryman told us about how his punt would sink, we presumed you drowned, and had gone ahead to heaven. We have prayed for your soul every week since then, do you know?’
Thomas smiles. He turns a few pages of the psalter.
‘You might yet finish it?’ Barnaby says. ‘You could unpick the stitches – like this – and resume your great work. It is good work, isn’t it? That glorifies God and Man?’
Thomas smiles again but fe
els the chill in the room and a shiver creeps over his skin.
‘No,’ he says. ‘That is not me now.’
‘But what about the Prior of All?’ Barnaby asks. ‘He will want to see you. He will want to know what has happened to his apostate Thomas Everingham.’
And now the slither of steel that had been present in Barnaby’s wheedling is revealed as a blade. Thomas feels himself becoming stonier still, and is about to say something when his eye is drawn to a worn leather bag that hangs from a peg behind Barnaby’s shoulder. He cannot stop himself reaching out.
It is something he recognises. Something he carried with him wherever he went, a comforting weight on his shoulder, something that fitted perfectly under his head when he slept, and now here it is. The pardoner’s ledger, in its worn and punctured and patched bag.
His hands are shaking and he cannot draw breath. He grabs the bag desperately, with a drowning grip, a madman’s grip, and wrenches it to him. He registers Barnaby saying something but it is as if he is in a gale with a wind blowing around him and Thomas can smell blood and hear the crash and slide of steel weapons and he can hear himself gasping for air. He feels great pain, his ribs being crushed, his back afire.
He cannot stand it. He needs to be free, out in the open, away from here. He stumbles and catches against the cupboard. A plate slides, the chalice jumps, the monstrance in its velvet hood falls with a bang and the host of paper tubes that fill the lower shelves come unbound and slither across the floor.
‘Blethyn!’ Barnaby is shouting. ‘Blethyn! Call Robert. Get the lay brothers.’
He barges past the two men and starts running. His boots slip in the grass and he goes down but he is up and quickly across the garth. He swings the bag around his shoulders, just as he has many times before, and takes hold of the post and hauls himself up on to the low wall and is about to launch himself on to the roofs again when the canon with the red beard appears. He is carrying, of all things, a quarterstaff and he uses it to knock Thomas’s legs, and Thomas scrambles and then falls. The bag catches, rips, and the book spills free and thumps to the ground next to him. Thomas gropes for it but the red-bearded canon is quickly across and plants a clog – a great wooden thing made with leather and nails – across Thomas’s wrist, pinning him to the ground.
‘Now then,’ he says, and he holds the staff over Thomas’s head and looks him in the eye, unhurried and calm. His beard is thrust forward, like a challenge. Thomas subsides. Whatever took hold of him has passed. He breathes out. He stares at the mud and then inches his gaze across to the book where it lies, roughly bound and carelessly cut, with a dent in it as if it has been stabbed by a madman.
‘He is possessed!’ Barnaby repeats. ‘He is fallen out of his wits!’
Now two more of the lay brethren are in the garth and stand confused to see the new arrival held to the grass.
‘We must keep him away from the brothers,’ Blethyn says.
‘What shall we do with him?’
‘Bind him, for his own safety, and ours. You, fetch the ostler. And bring straps.’
One of the lay brothers hurries off. Thomas says nothing. There are tears in his eyes again. By Christ, when will this stop? He does not know how he came to be here. He hears Barnaby and Blethyn talking and then sees their toecaps under their cassocks.
‘It is a humoral imbalance,’ Blethyn diagnoses, ‘brought on by a pernicious enthralment to sin. It is what drove him from us in the first instance, and since then it will only have become worse with temptation.’
Now the ostler is back and he helps the canon and two lay brothers bind Thomas – ankles, then wrists – with leather straps from the stables. They are strong men, particularly the red-bearded canon, and Thomas’s struggles only present them with a challenge to which they rise.
‘Feel him,’ Blethyn tells Barnaby and they crouch next to Thomas and press the backs of their cold fingers to his forehead.
‘Saints, he is hot!’
‘As I suspected,’ Blethyn says. ‘The devil finds it easy to take a soul already weakened by sin.’
‘He seeks our care,’ Barnaby explains. ‘He wants our prayers. For a cure. Take him to the stable.’
‘The ledger,’ Thomas mutters. ‘Let me have it.’
The ostler and the canon and the lay brothers hesitate as Barnaby crosses to the ledger and picks it up. He wipes the mud off its surface and holds it open and puzzles over it, just as he must have before.
‘Why?’ he asks. ‘What is it about this book?’
‘It is mine,’ Thomas says. ‘It’s mine.’
‘Yours?’
He looks back at it again, turning it in his hands. He stares at it and then after a moment he gives up and shakes his head and moves to put it back in its ripped leather bag, and so they pick Thomas up, one at each corner, and carry him across the garth and out into the yard just as if they were bringing in a yule log at Christmastide. Ahead of them the ostler’s boy leads Thomas’s horse out of the stable and they carry him in and deposit him face down in the horse-pissy straw.
‘The ledger!’ Thomas calls. ‘The ledger.’
Father Barnaby is standing at the door, looking disappointed in something, as if Thomas has not lived up to his expectations.
‘Oh, let him have it,’ he says and Blethyn, who has taken the book, looks at it in its bag one more time, then swings it by the strap, releasing it into the stable where it lands next to Thomas’s head and skids across to thump against the wall.
6
IT IS SISTER Katherine’s task to wash the clothes. Not only those of the sisters, but also those of the lay sisters, and the brothers, and the lay brothers. She has replaced the three lay sisters who might ordinarily have completed the task in two days, and it takes her seven, so that by the time she has finished her week’s work, the cycle begins again.
She does this in the stream, to the west of the sister’s beggars’ gate, where the banks have been worn shallow by generations of washerwomen, and there are planted three wringing posts, though of course she only uses one. The bed of the river is stony here, hard on the soles of her bare feet, and she sometimes wishes for the soft welcome of mud between her toes, but the water is so cold that soon her legs are numb anyway, so after a while it matters little.
All day she works, watched by the three lay sisters whom she relieved of the task. One stands on the bank nearest the priory, the other two on the far bank, making sure she does not bolt again, and now, two months later, they are yet to be bored of the task, and watch her every movement. They even watch which way her eyes look, and if she stares at something too long, a tree in the distance, say, or the ferryman on his punt, then one of them will get up and come and stand in front of it and tell her that she must not dawdle.
And so now here she is, her nails bleeding from the lye, her hands slippery on the beetle, up to her knees in cold, dark water, beating a pile of ragged linen with a stick, forcing the water through the weave in the hope that it will carry away the dirt as it goes. She has a rhythm, steady and unchanging, and she pounds away until she thinks that the shirt is clean enough to pass inspection. Then she stops beating it and throws it into one rush basket and collects the next dirty shirt from another rush bucket where it has been soaking in the lye that she has made herself from the ashes of the kitchen fire. Then she pounds that. ‘She doesn’t half hit the thing,’ one of the lay sisters calls across to the other two.
And she does. She goes at it with all her strength, all day, every day, and when the tears come, when she remembers what she has lost, and the wrongs that have been done her, she hits all the harder.
‘She’ll work herself to death,’ one of them says.
‘Or she’ll break the stick,’ the other laughs. ‘Then she’ll catch it from the Prioress.’
But she carries on, just as she has done for two months, beating away so that now her back is corded almost like an archer’s and her shoulders are rounded with muscle. They feed her more often than she
believed they would, with soup and bread and ale, and they leave it on a rock and step back to watch her eat. They are contemptuous of her, and she is glad, because she could not stand to be shown any kindness, and she knows that if she is not to die here in the priory, she will have to hurt these women, one day, maybe soon.
Each evening, when the mist begins to rise from the water, and the night bell rings, the lay sisters call her in and she climbs wearily from the stream and gathers her baskets and together they trudge back up to the beggars’ gate. They wait while Sister Matilda comes and unlocks the gate that she once slammed in the giant’s face. Then Sister Matilda admits her, takes her to her cell, pushes her in, and draws the bar of the door behind her.
Sleep always comes quickly. But every night she is woken with the other sisters and is led down the stone steps and across the yard and around the wings of the cloister to the nave, where she joins the community to observe the hour. She stands there with the junior nuns, dizzy with fatigue, listening to the lector read the psalms from the other side of the wall, and if she were not so tired, if she had not worked herself half to death to avoid just this situation, this would be the time she feared most, for this is when she must face the Prioress.
And there she stands, the Prioress, across the tiles from Katherine, a head above the next tallest sister, or she kneels at her prie-dieu with her huge hands clasped tight in that simulacrum of prayer, with that heavy brow lowered and her eyes tight shut, and whenever Katherine glances at her she cannot help but shudder. It is a mixture of fear and revulsion, very powerful, that sometimes makes her gag.
And the Prioress knows it. She plays on it. Sometimes she will ignore Katherine, and pursue this pretence of prayer; then at other times Katherine’s gaze will be drawn to her, and she will find herself staring into those eyes that carry such a charge of hatred that Katherine will almost cry out.
Kingmaker: Broken Faith Page 9
