The Crown

by Nancy Bilyeau

  Sister Anne and I had reached the archway to the church. The other sisters glanced at us, curious, as they passed. I asked quickly, “So she never saw the prince again?”

  “No, but she heard him. She heard him leave. About an hour later, she heard the orders called outside, in the front, for the royal horses. By the time she found a window, the prince and princess were riding away.”

  Most of the nuns had filed into the church, and Sister Anne plainly wanted to follow them. Sister Rachel scowled at me as she walked in, followed by Sister Helen and Sister Agatha. But I had to know it all—now.

  “So where was Prince Arthur that day?” I persisted, reaching out for her arm.

  Sister Anne pulled away from me, puzzled by my vehemence.

  “Please, I beg you, tell me the rest of the story,” I whispered.

  With a final shrug, she said, “Sister Isabel told this story to us many times, and she always said the same thing at the end. That there must be a secret room in Dartford. You see? She was very foolish.”

  A secret room in Dartford.

  “And Prince Arthur has been dead oh so many years now,” she mused. “So young to die only a few months after coming to Dartford. And of such a strange sickness.” She shook herself out of her reverie, and we took our places in church, she with the oldest, most senior nuns, and myself with the novices.

  I missed two of the responses in prayers that night because I was so distracted. If some sort of secret chamber existed, where could it be located? I knew the row of rooms in the front of the priory; they were orderly and sparely furnished. Between the walls? It didn’t seem likely, the prioress squeezing into a narrow hidden chamber, followed by a royal couple. And what happened in that secret room? Did it have something to do with the Athelstan crown? Katherine of Aragon’s dying words rumbled in my head: “The legend is true. The Athelstan crown. Poor Arthur.”

  More and more, I was convinced that to discover the hiding place of the crown I must learn more about King Athelstan. After Vespers, I murmured excuses to Sister Winifred and Sister Christina and darted out of the church.

  I scuttled in the opposite direction of the rest of the sisters, toward the passageway leading off the cloister garden to the library. The last light of dusk filtered down. A taper fixed to the stone wall flickered outside the infirmary, but I saw no sign of activity within. Brother Edmund must have retired to the friars’ quarters.

  I turned the handle to the library door. To my amazement, it opened. Inside, the room was dark, so I removed the wall taper to better see.

  I hurried to the section holding the books of general interest. Again, I saw the history of the Plantagenets, a collection of maps. But where I had found the dark-brown From Caractacus to Athelstan, there was now just a gap. Brother Richard might not have known its correct place, so I searched the entire library, checked every single book.

  I couldn’t find it. The book was gone, just like the letter from Prioress Elizabeth to her successor.

  It was as if someone knew what I searched for, and was able to move things just out of my reach, moments before.

  At that moment, I heard something. Whispering. Right outside the door. I blew out the taper and stood still. The whispering died down. I took a step to the door and heard something else. The patter of feet running along the passageway. Then silence again.

  My breaths came fast; I quivered with fear. I had learned just hours ago of a secret room, and now I heard furtive movements. But I couldn’t hide in the library much longer. Sister Eleanor always checked the novice’s room before retiring to her bed. If I were not in my bed, an alarm would be called.

  I turned the knob on the door, oh so slowly, and pushed it open a crack. Nothing. The passageway was dark and silent. I crept out of the library and made my way toward the cloister.

  Behind me, in the infirmary, I heard it once more. A burst of whispers. And then a girl’s giggle.

  The Westerly children!

  I stormed into the infirmary, and there they were, huddled near the fire that was no more than dying embers. Harold saw me first and gave a frightened cry, jumping to his feet. Martha threw her little arms around him but broke into giggles when she saw me.

  “Hello, Sister Joanna,” said Ethel, the only one who kept calm.

  “Children, what are you doing here?” I said. “I know you wish to be near your mother, but to hide in the cloister after dark? It’s completely forbidden.” I looked around the infirmary. “Do you sleep here?”

  “Cook let’s us sleep in the pantry,” piped up Martha. “As soon as dawn comes, we hide in the—”

  “Shhhhh,” ordered Ethel.

  There was a bundle in front of Harold. He tried to edge it out of my sight.

  “What’s that you have?” I demanded.

  The trio said nothing.

  I reached down and uncovered the bundle. To my surprise, it was a heap of fresh yellow cakes.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked.

  “Cook made them for us,” said Harold.

  Ethel said, “They’re soul cakes. We’re going to give them away in the village tomorrow, on All Hallows’ Eve.”

  I winced at her pronouncement of a pagan holiday.

  Ethel said defiantly, “When you get a soul cake on All Hallows’ Eve, you are supposed to pray for someone’s soul. It’s the day of the year when the wall is thinnest between the living and the dead. We’ll get lots of villagers to pray for our mother, that she doesn’t die.”

  “No, no, no,” I said, upset over her knowledge of druid practices. “In the priory, we will pray for your mother, as we always do. God will look after her.”

  Little Martha’s lip quivered. “You won’t take our soul cakes away, Sister? You won’t stop us from saving Mother?”

  I groaned. How to make them understand?

  “Is your father still in London?” I asked.

  “He’s still in Southwark,” Harold said.

  I heard a faint wheezing breath from the corner. It thickened to a gurgle. Their mother sounded even worse. Harold looked at his sisters and at me, his eyes filling with tears.

  I made my decision.

  “It’s dark now; you couldn’t make your way safely to town anyway. Get to the pantry, children.”

  “You won’t tell on us?” begged Harold.

  “Not tonight, but this is not a fit solution. I will pray on what to do and say.”

  I led the Westerlys out of the infirmary and toward the kitchen pantry. Martha slipped her hand in mine as we walked. Her warm, stubby little fingers gripped mine with surprising force.

  I settled them in their forlorn corner, which I now realized was the children’s usual sleeping quarters. They pulled torn blankets out from behind baskets. “Eat the cakes yourselves,” I pleaded. “Don’t use them for prayers. It’s against God’s wishes.”

  Martha threw her arms around my neck. A wet kiss covered my cheek.

  “I love you, Sister Joanna,” she said in her singsong voice.

  “I love all of you,” I said. My voice broke.

  Ethel looked at me, startled.

  I pulled Martha’s arms off of my shoulders and backed away. With a final awkward little wave, I left the children behind in the pantry, to make my way to my own novice bed.

  23

  The next day we lost the sun.

  It had been pleasant, this last October week. The afternoon sun warmed the gardens and grounds, caressed the red and orange leaves heaped everywhere. The sisters filled baskets with light-green quince fruit that had ripened in the cloister trees. Most mornings, the sour yet pleasing smell of bonfires drifted in through the windows.

  But a cold, fierce wind came before dawn on All Hallows’ Eve. It brought sheets of rain that ripped the last loose leaves from the trees. On an ordinary day at the priory, I would be inside, oblivious of the tempest. But this morning I tucked my letter to Bishop Gardiner into my habit’s sleeve and, with muttered excuses, made my way to the barn. After making s
ure no one was watching, I trudged to the leper hospital on the northwest edge of priory property, just beyond a hill fringed with tall trees.

  I had donned a cloak so my habit would not be soaked through. I could have pulled its hood over my head, but I scorned such protection. I wanted to feel the cold rain on my face. I longed for the wind to sting my eyes.

  My mood was wretched. I had written and sealed my letter to the Bishop of Winchester, and it was lamentably short. I relayed that Prioress Elizabeth had died on the morning of my return and that her last communication had gone missing. A story told by our oldest nun suggested that a secret room might exist at Dartford and that, when he visited the priory in 1501, Prince Arthur may have gone to this room. I had no precise knowledge of its location, but the room must be in the front part of the priory, not the cloister. There could be hidden the Athelstan crown. “Suggested . . . may have . . . might . . . could.” I pictured a clerk handing him my letter, and the bishop breaking the seal, impatient for news, his face darkening with rage after he’d raced through my few sentences.

  I reached the top of the hill and paused to take shelter under the trees. A red squirrel darted away from me, upset that I’d penetrated his dry domain within the bushes.

  Just below, in a hollow, stood the leper hospital. It had been abandoned before I came to Dartford; I didn’t know when exactly. Twenty years ago? Fifty? One hundred? Half the roof had collapsed. I could see the brown field through a ragged gap in the back wall. Green ivy choked every yawning window; the vines had long ago crawled inside, eager to claim the rooms once denied them.

  But what of the lepers, those poor despised souls? Had they gone to another hospital to be cared for, or were they driven to find corners of London to hide in, frightened and sick? There was no one to ask.

  Looking down on the hospital, the tears on my cheeks mingled with the raindrops. Fifty years hence, some girl might look at an abandoned Dartford Priory and wonder: What happened to the nuns once sheltered there? Why did they leave their parents and forsake marriage and motherhood to live in such a place? There’d be no one to tell the girl who we were or what we believed in: humble service to Christ, support of one another, learning, and contemplation.

  Halfway down the hill to the hospital, I stumbled and fell to my knees. Heavy rains had turned the countryside to mud. I recovered and walked a more careful path to the front archway. The door was long ago torn off its hinges—for firewood, no doubt. Carved in stone over the arch were the words LEPER HOSPITAL OF SAINT MARY MAGDALENE AND ST. LAUDUS. Below, in smaller words, was THE ORDER OF SAINT LAZARUS OF JERUSALEM. I knew a little of this order: a medical one created by the Knights Templar. The Crusades. My boy cousins loved playing crusaders at Stafford Castle. They’d storm down the wide halls, brandishing wooden swords and shouting, “God wills it!”

  I quickly found the window described to me. I felt along its sides. Yes, a wide opening existed. I took out my letter, which I’d sealed with wax this very morning. I removed the loose panel, slipped it inside, and replaced the panel. This hiding place had been well researched and prepared. For the first time, I wondered who would come for my letter and convey it over the channel to Bishop Gardiner. Some local man paid well for his trouble?

  I had no wish to linger in this forlorn place and left through the archway.

  I’d climbed halfway up the hill when something made me turn around and read the words over the archway again: The Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem. The Crusades. And then I remembered.

  Richard the Lionhearted. King of England, leader of the Third Crusade. The other man mentioned by Bishop Gardiner in the Tower. Do you know of Edward the Third’s son, the Black Prince? What of Richard the Lionhearted? Or our king’s dead brother, Prince Arthur?

  Although he had lived two centuries earlier, I knew more of Richard’s life than of the Black Prince’s. I’d always been interested in the Crusades. Richard, the Coeur de Lion, who fought the Muslims with tremendous bravery. He was imprisoned by another king on his way home from Jerusalem, and freed himself to reclaim his throne from his treacherous brother John. I remembered he married but had no children before he died in his middle years in the South of France.

  The South of France.

  How odd. King Richard died in the same part of the world where the Black Prince first took ill with the sickness that would kill him.

  My thoughts raced as I reached the trees again. This was not unlike working on one of Sister Helen’s tapestries. At first only she knew the meaning of the pattern; we wove where the cartoon bade us but didn’t know what world we created until certain things took shape: men and women, deities and beasts, forests and seas.

  I was beginning to see an outline to Bishop Gardiner’s strange pattern. With more perseverance, I might yet learn the secret of the crown.

  I moved just a few feet out of the shelter of the trees, back to the priory. Something caught my eye to the far right. I squinted in the rain.

  This ridge continued for a ways, then widened to a more circular, flat hill, bare of trees. A woman walked away from me on the hill, dressed in a plain novice habit, her hood down around her shoulders, like mine. It was Sister Christina.

  I made my way toward her, clinging to branches where I could. The scratchy bark hurt, but I had to keep from falling down the slippery hill.

  “Sister Christina!” I shouted as soon as I emerged from the trees. She had stopped walking but didn’t turn to face me; the wind must be carrying my voice away. It blew harder and colder now, though the rain had lessened.

  When I was almost upon her, I called her name again. This time she jumped in surprise. I saw her face was ravaged by tears, as mine must be.

  “What troubles you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. I didn’t pry; I shared her grief over the shadowed future of Dartford Priory. Her wide forehead crinkled with lines, as if she were an old woman. Her nose was red from the cold—or from weeping. Her slate-blue eyes looked tired.

  Suddenly, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it, hard. “Oh, Sister Joanna, forgive me for my anger with you.”

  “I deserve all of the censure that I have received,” I said. “But thank you, Sister Christina. I’ve missed your friendship.”

  We embraced, and I laughed a little; we were both so wet and cold.

  She looked at me thoughtfully. “You were willing to sacrifice everything—your place as a novice, even your life—to honor your cousin, who died because she rebelled against heresy. I now think that what you did was very brave.”

  I couldn’t bear her praise, minutes after hiding my spy’s letter.

  “No, no, no.” I shook my head. “It was wrong of me.”

  With a sweeping gesture, she turned around on the hill. “Do you know this place?”

  I shook my head.

  Now she pointed down, just to the side of her right foot. A gray stone was embedded deep in the ground.

  “There was a nunnery here, on the hill, centuries ago,” she told me. “This is the foundation. You can find most of it if you look hard; it forms a giant square. Walk it with me, please.”

  I followed Sister Christina, my eyes fixed to the wet ground. I could make out the intermittent stones peeking below the grass, in too straight a line to be of nature.

  “It’s said that King Edward selected this land for Dartford Priory because of the existence of an earlier nunnery,” she said. “But I doubt he knew what became of it.”

  “Why . . . what happened?”

  Her back to me, she said, “The sisters were members of the cult of Saint Juliana. Do you know it?”

  “I know Juliana was a martyr.”

  “She converted to Christianity and wished to live as a virgin, but her father was a pagan. He ordered her to marry a Roman like himself. They say the devil even appeared to try to persuade Juliana, but she stayed strong. She wouldn’t deny her faith, and she was killed for it. The Romans beheaded her.”

  I shivered in the wind. I felt so exposed
here, with Sister Christina. Below, at the priory, we could be visible. The prioress’s windows faced the hills. It was permitted to walk on priory property, as long as we did not leave the grounds. On such a day as this, though, a walk would prompt questions.

  But Sister Christina seemed bent on telling me of this lost nunnery, and I found her tale intriguing.

  “When was it built, this nunnery?” I asked.

  “I don’t know when it was built, but it was destroyed in the eighth century.”

  A century earlier than King Athelstan’s reign, I thought. Aloud, I asked, “Why was it destroyed?”

  She whipped around, her faced fierce. “Norsemen, Sister Joanna. That was when they were at the height of their power. The Norsemen invaded here and there, killing Christians. They stole our goods and burned our farms. But their favorite sport was the violation of nuns.”

  I flinched. “Sister Christina, that’s terrible. Don’t speak of it.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “The sisters must have hoped that their nunnery was far enough from the coast and close enough to London to be safe, but it wasn’t. A party of Norsemen found this nunnery—it was very small, perhaps eight women. They tried to get inside, to rape the sisters.”

  I put my hands in front of my eyes, as if to shield myself from a horror happening here, now.

  “The nuns got word that the Norsemen were on their way. They bolted all the doors. That wouldn’t stop the men for long—they had axes. But do you know what the nuns did?”

  “Sister Christina, I can’t hear this. I beg you. Any story of a woman being violated, I can’t—”