‘That’s why we call her Finbarr,’ said Weasel, ‘to fool people.’
*
Dame Elizabeth Zouche never left the Abbey alone on her coach-journeys to inspect her properties, or to spend time at Place Farm in Tisbury. Apart from servants, at least two nuns always accompanied her. They were chosen from among the Nondescripts, as Anne Cathcart classed them, because they were meek and middle-aged and we could never bother to remember their names.
There was also one special nun who was her companion and assistant in her own house. When I first came, that position was held by Mary Amor, the sister who showed me around the Abbey when I arrived. Then the Chambress complained in Chapter that had too much to do and asked for a special assistant to act as her deputy when necessary, and the Abbess gave her Mary Amor.
‘The Abbess may be asking for you now,’ said Anne Cathcart.
‘Why do you think so?’
‘You are clever and strong and in good health. There is not much competition.’
She gestured toward the scatter of nuns and novices who like ourselves were walking at that hour in pairs or on their own around the cloister, and I saw our sisters through Anne’s critical eyes – too old, too young, or too silly, dull, or ugly, too weak in mind or body, or untutored, or witlessly devout. The able ones are busy already on Abbey matters, or too grand. The Fairheads could hardly be expected to spare the time. These were bad thoughts, of a kind to be owned up to in the confessional, though I did not do so except in the most general terms – ‘uncharitable thoughts about my sisters’.
‘Why would she not ask for you?’
‘Dame Elizabeth Zouche does not favour me. She never has. I know too much about her.’
‘Like what?’
I should never lead Anne on. She seduces me.
‘For a start, the Zouches are lucky rascals. They always were. They have noses like hounds. Ever since they arrived from France long ago they have followed the scent of money. They are courtiers, office-holders, collectors of royal appointments. They have influence. When times change they fall, and lose all they have won, or if they are clever they change direction. And they marry well and carefully.’
She told me that there are two branches of the Zouche family, one with estates in a county far from here, and another, who are the lords of Cary. I became more interested. Cary is but a short distance from Bruton. Our Abbess, Anne said, is inward with the Lord Zouche of Cary.
‘And yet, though the Zouches have many Elizabeths among their sisters and cousins, I have never to my satisfaction understood where our Dame Elizabeth fits in, or who her father is. Yet she is surely a Zouche, she has that Zouche hair, fair and frizzy, dry like hay. And those wide-spaced eyes. You can tell a Zouche at twenty paces. I have made enquiries about her background, believe me. And she knows it.’
‘How could she know?’
‘In another life I was acquainted with a Zouche who was lady-in-waiting to Mistress Anne Boleyn. When she was riding high, I wrote to her and asked her what she knew about our Abbess. She sent me a most disobliging reply. When Dame Elizabeth was in London and conferring with the great men of the town, I was – betrayed.’
For the first time, I saw Anne Cathcart blushing crimson, and discomfited.
‘I and the Zouche girl,’ she said, ‘had what I prefer to call a disagreement. About something else. I should never have approached her. The Abbess knows about that disagreement, too. She never speaks to me. She affects not to see me at all.’
She changed the subject back to the next assistant to the Abbess:
‘There is of course one other possible candidate. Sister Eleanor Wilmer.’
‘How so?’
‘She is well qualified for the post, and she has infinite capacity for devotion. If she were to devote herself to the Abbess, she might not spend quite so much time on her knees pestering Almighty God. And I know she is interested, because I saw her running after Sister Mary Amor and questioning her about her duties.’
I thought about what Anne said about the Abbess affecting not to see her. I know that the Abbess did see me, by which I mean she looked at me, ever since I spoke up about blowflies. She had never spoken privately with me, but I saw her watching me in Chapter, and if I looked towards her in choir – when she was in choir, which was by no means always – I would always meet her eyes. Her gaze was neutral, speculative.
Dame Monica told her I was good at reading and writing, and I was given pen and ink and a piece of vellum to copy out the Lord’s Prayer to show her what I could do. The vellum had been written on before, and scraped down to use again, so it was not smooth and I was not best pleased with my work.
But I was sent for.
Her house is a mansion, with a stone-tiled roof. You approach it through an archway on the east side of the cloister. To me, it is a palace. When I knocked on the great door at the appointed time, a little maid in clean clothes told me that Dame Elizabeth would receive me in her bedchamber. I followed her through a hall room and another room and another room and up a wide staircase with carved banisters.
Her upstairs chamber is large and high, with dark chests and cupboards. Two doors opening into other rooms. Everything gleamed. A lot of red, and hangings on the walls. The two big windows were shuttered. There are polished tiles on her floor, new-made rush mats, and a table at the foot of the great bed with gold and silver boxes arranged upon it.
There the Abbess was, sitting up in the bed, supported by pillows, the bed-curtains open. With her right hand she was holding up what looked like a letter to the light of the tall candle that stood beside the bed, and with the other hand she clasped a crumpled paper to her bosom. Other documents, ledgers and rolls were scattered over her coverlet and piled on the small table beside the candle. Hooked over the carved bedhead was something I had never seen before, a string of red beads with a crucifix dangling from it. I thought it might be a necklace. Later she told me it was called a rosary, that the stones were garnets and that it had been sent to her from Rome. If you say a prayer for every bead, you acquire significant graces and indulgences.
She was wearing a nightgown and long sleeves. Her cap was tied under her chin, with her Zouche hair showing at the front.
‘There is a stool,’ she said, ‘under that table. Bring it out and sit down. I will attend to you presently.’
Her mouth worked in and out as she strained to read the letter. I sat on the stool and while I waited I studied her bed-curtains, which were of a greyish background colour embroidered all over with wavy blue streaks signifying water, and swirls of curving dolphins in a darker blue. I could tell they were dolphins. I fingered through my tunic the emerald dolphin on its chain round my neck.
I read the letter aloud to her as she asked, and she nodded and told me to come back after dinner the next day.
News travels as fast as an infection in the Abbey. By daylight end it was common knowledge that I was the chosen one. It was unheard of for a novice to be the Abbess’s assistant.
When I went to my cubicle that night there was a dead rat on my bed. I picked it up by the tail and dropped it down one of the holes in the reredorter, praying that the running drain below would carry it away. Sometimes in dry summer weather the water in the drain falls and ceases to run, and nothing is washed away at all. In winter it can freeze over. Modern contrivances have their disadvantages. Shovels and middens cannot go wrong.
I have no doubt about how the rat came to be on my bed. I imagined challenging Eleanor Wilmer, and imagined what she might say: ‘You are that rat.’
Even though I would not challenge her, and even though she would not really have said those words, they remained in my mind as if she had indeed uttered them. From then on whenever we were thrown together I do believe that a dead rat was in the mind’s eye of us both.
I spent so much time with the Abbess in the time that was left to us that my conversations with her become confused in my mind. The Abbess likes to talk. I found this difficult at first.
The monastic way of speaking little except at certain times and in certain places suits me, though I do like talking to the little boys. I feel soiled after my conversations with Anne Cathcart but I cannot resist her. When I was a child, I would sometimes not speak for a whole day at a time.
‘The cat has got your tongue,’ my father would say, tickling me to make me laugh.
Spending most of the day in silence, thoughts bubble up in your mind which would never come if you were chattering freely. You have time to follow where they lead, or else dismiss them. Only if I am unwell, or low in spirits, does the silence seem an enemy, closing in on me, closing me down.
The Abbess said: ‘So you are a FitzJames. Through your mother, I seem to remember. I have not met your father. A fine man, no doubt, but—’
‘He is a fine man, Madam.’
‘Do you understand what will be required of you from now on? You will be with me whenever I need you, as my witness. I shall be discussing grave matters with government servants and the King’s Commissioners and what is said must be recorded. You will sit out of their sight and take notes. Can you do that?’
‘Yes, Madam.’
‘In the Greek language, the word “martyr” means “witness”. A witness for Christ. You will be my witness. You will be my martyr.’
‘Yes, Madam.’
‘There is one more matter. My eyes are no longer good. They have grown dim. I can read easily in daylight, at a window, and preferably in sunlight. If the ink is pale, if the writing is small and cramped, I am lost. If I am passed a paper to be read by the light of candles I put it by and say I will read it later. I will need you to read letters and documents aloud to me, and to write letters at my dictation. Can you do that?’
‘Yes, Madam.’
‘I do not wish this weakness of mine to be generally known. I do not wish it to be known at all.’
‘No, Madam.’
‘You will be privy to the inventories, accounts, rolls and records, such as are kept by me here in my house. You will not be responsible for other records or the cartulary of the Abbey’s temporalities, which are held in other offices. Everything here must be in order and up to date. The Commissioners and their clerks are hoping to discover irregularities.’
So I was to be busy. My hours in the Library became curtailed. One of the doors from the Abbess’s bedroom leads into her private parlour, the other into a bare chamber. There, with a stool and trestle and writing materials, I began to sort out jumbled papers and documents, and to copy letters received, and to transcribe in my best writing the letters that the Abbess dictated to me and which she would sign, the ‘Z’ of ‘Zouche’ elaborate with trailing curlicues.
‘We will be seeing much of Master John Tregonwell. He is one the King’s Commissioners. Their job is to persuade monastic establishments to surrender their property to the King and vacate their Houses.’
‘How can that possibly be, Madam?’
She flapped her hand at me. Irritated.
‘This is nothing new.’
That was what I had heard the Abbot of Bruton say, down by the river.
‘They have always said that surrender is entirely voluntary. Now they are saying that they are inviting surrender, and making it seem like a threat, though only to small, unprofitable Houses. In our case, of course, surrender is unthinkable, and indeed unthought of. We are a Royal foundation, and rich, and many hundreds of people depend upon us for their livings and their well-being.’
‘Of course, Madam.’
‘They used to say long ago that if the abbot of Glastonbury could marry the abbess of Shaftesbury, they would be richer than the King of England. You have probably heard that. Master Tregonwell, by the way, is from Cornwall.’
‘I have seen Cornishmen in the market at Bruton, and tried to talk to them. They have different words,’ I said.
‘It is another country. The clever and rich ones have our words too. The younger sons who will not inherit property come upcountry to make their fortunes. Master Tregonwell is one such. He is inward with Master Thomas Cromwell. He is familiar with the King. He has decided to appoint himself my rent-collector.’
The Abbess sighed and made a face.
‘I thought it wise to agree. It means he now pries into the accounts of all our temporalities.’
But he still had to come to her, she said, to have the mark of the Great Seal affixed to the foot of any legal document. Only the Seal transformed a piece of writing into a deed. The Abbess of Shaftesbury has custody of the Seal, and is the only person who could authorise its use.
‘Master Tregonwell acted for the King in the matter of his divorce, and then in the proceedings against the Lady Anne Boleyn. Or the late Queen Anne as I should say. The wrong words at the wrong time get one into trouble. Now we must say, Queen Jane. The King needs a son.’
The Abbess knew about these upheavals as they happened, and so now did I, though I did not understand all the implications. She received letters from London and from the Abbots and Abbesses of other Houses. I read them out to her, and she puzzled them over them again for herself, screwing up her eyes, folding and unfolding the papers, lips tight closed. Sometimes she passed news on to the community in Chapter. We knew when Queen Anne was beheaded, leaving a little daughter whose name is Elizabeth. It is curious that I learned more about what went on in the great world shut up in a nunnery than I ever did living free in a town.
‘The Cornish people who came to our town,’ I told her, ‘did not go to Mass.’
‘Cornwall is a godless country. Or they follow their own gods.’
‘In my town, the Cornish people who come, they go out together into the woods, to the spring where our river starts from. They tie scraps of cloth to the trees round the spring. It is something holy for them.’
‘Superstition. There are still country people who do that around here.’
I thought of Our Lady’s Girdle. A scrap of cloth. But red silk, kept in a gold box, in God’s House. Not just any piece of rag. Did that make the difference? Would its power fail, now that it had gone from Bruton Abbey and was no longer a sacred relic? I had heard from one of the sisters that there was another Our Lady’s Girdle, at Westminster, and she believed that to be the real one.
I asked the Abbess about it.
‘There is the True Thing,’ said the Abbess, ‘and then there are fakes. It need not signify. A portrait of a person is not the real person. A copy of that portrait is not the real portrait. What signifies is the meaning. Our own divine worship is but an a simulacrum of the perfect worship of the saints in Heaven. In that humble spirit it is graciously received by God. The only truth is God Himself. While we are in this world we strive to be close to Him by whatever means.’
Perhaps, I thought, the new Queen Jane will wear the Westminster Girdle.
‘Of course,’ said the Abbess, ‘all devotion is heartfelt. Nevertheless, ignorant people are pitifully deluded.’
She was still talking about country folk and the rags in the trees.
Our own most sacred relics at Shaftesbury Abbey are, as everyone knows, the bones of St Edward the Martyr. They are kept in a lead casket within a gold ossuary in a side-chapel in the north transept of the Abbey Church, and we have a constant stream of pilgrims from all over England coming to venerate them and acquire virtue and indulgences thereby. Miraculous cures have been recorded, but not I must say for some time. The pilgrims are lodged and fed, but they pay to venerate the relics.
We acquired a house at Bradford-upon-Avon centuries ago so that, if the Abbey were ever again in danger from attack by Norsemen, there would be a safe place to hide the relics. That house is still maintained, said the Abbess, with a few of our nuns and a priest. ‘But it is no safer now than anywhere else.’
No one imagined that danger to the holy bones could ever come from within, and nor did we, not even now.
*
One day I ventured to say: ‘Those are dolphins, Madam, on your bed curtains. A dolphin is the e
mblem of the FitzJames family.’
‘Sister Philippa and Sister Joanna worked them for me when I was elected Abbess. Those two were great needlewomen in their time. They toiled together on my bed-curtains for upwards of three years.’
‘And the dolphins?’
‘That was the ladies’ choice, and their design. Dolphins do not belong to the FitzJames family. Dolphins can mean many things. They are swift and agile in the water, representing a keen desire to seek after Christ. A dolphin guides souls across the waters of death. A dolphin can represent human love. A dolphin can represent Christ himself. Christ is the True Fish.’
Christ as a fish, however true the fish, is as far beyond my comprehension as rags in the trees. I will take my dolphin as a symbol of human love.
‘Your friend Dorothy Clausey. You know that she is the daughter of the late great Cardinal Wolsey?’
‘I do, Madam.’
‘You do. And that her mother is Joan Larke. I used to know Joanie in London. She is a dear good woman, and has fallen on her feet I am happy to say.’
Ha! I know something that Anne Cathcart does not know. I said nothing for fear of interrupting the story.
‘Joanie’s brother was the Cardinal’s chaplain, so it was all in the family so to speak. Joanie had another child, a little boy, before she had Dorothy. Then Wolsey became a great man. Even before he was Cardinal, once he was a bishop he could not have these unofficial children and this unofficial woman dangling about him. He found a husband for Joanie, and boarded their two children out, in different families. Dorothy was taken in by the Clauseys until she was old enough to come into the Abbey.’
‘So Dorothy may not know her own brother?’
‘Probably not. Their mother had more children with her husband. Then he died. And when the Cardinal lost favour, and died, that was when I had letters from London instructing me to continue caring for Dorothy. And Joanie, widowed as she was, has gone and married a marquess as her second husband.’
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