Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

‘We’ve known each other for years,’ said Adrian, as he stroked Christophe’s hair. ‘Our families shared the same premises. We had our pallets in the same corner. Now we argue sometimes. Christophe only cares about his bells and making music, while I worry about the troubles of the world. But we’re very close.’

  ‘You will make me jealous,’ I said. First they looked at me in surprise; why would a woman like me wish for the lot of two labourers?

  ‘You have a lifetime of friendship, while I had to cut myself off from my family in order to be free.’

  I saw the sympathy flicker across their faces, a visible change. ‘You have us now,’ Christophe said.

  I had no idea how long we would be together, and what could happen next. But it was enough to sustain me when both boys put their arms around me. Everything was soft and gentle, contrasting with the battle outside. Though I used to have physical relations with my husband, this was the first time I truly made love.

  You have us now.

  And I saw that they also had each other, in a different way than before.

  The only Holy Trinity is this, I said. My companions laughed.

  *

  We woke at daybreak. With morning some caution returned, and I decided to disguise myself by putting on a tunic, along with breeches and hose, I found in the house. We emerged to join a passing procession, composed mostly of journeymen.

  ‘A king! A king! We will find a king!’ People at the head of the procession pushed a large cart with an empty armchair placed upon it.

  I nudged Adrian. ‘What do we need a king for? We still have to fight off the current one.’

  ‘I think it’s a joke,’ said Adrian.

  Our procession turned a corner into a side street, which must have been overlooked by last night’s rioters. We interrupted a portly gentleman trying to move a well-padded commode out of his house. He turned with a start, his red face draining to white.

  The chair-bearers gave whoops of delight. ‘Don’t run! We will make you king!’

  Before he could object a group placed him on the chair.

  ‘You’re our great king Mr Fatso, you are!’

  We paraded him through the city as the new monarch. More people came out to cheer, pelting the anointed king with looted flowers and fruit. People bowed and scraped and displayed their bottoms as the throne went by.

  He looked about, bewildered. ‘Put me down,’ he commanded. But he seemed even more terrified when his ‘throne’ was set down in the market square.

  The draper who had called for the destruction of public records arrived with a scroll of parchment. ‘We were up all night drafting this. Now our new king will sign it.’

  He began reading: all the unfair taxes that burdened artisans and workers must be repealed. All debts cancelled in the spirit of Jubilee.

  ‘Go on, sign it! Sign it, your great big royal highness!’

  King Fatso did as he was told.

  A procession of petitioners asked his advice. ‘Should I tie up my master until he raises my pay?’

  ‘Do it, do it,’ the king said, prodded into assent by a playful poke in the back.

  The draper stepped forward. ‘Shall we attack the abbey of St-Ouen, which has been granted royal privileges over our city and robs us with its tithes?’

  ‘Do it, do it,’ advised King Fatso.

  We will, we will! We marched off to the abbey. We broke in and destroyed the gallows, ripped the monastery’s charters to shreds, stripped the abbot of his vestments, and forced him to sign a new charter that took away the abbey’s royal privileges over the town and granted rights to the workers of Rouen.

  After that, I wanted to return to ‘our’ house, the three of us, but there was too much to do. We had to secure more barricades, ensure supplies of food and water, organise defence.

  We eventually fell asleep, tangled together among cushions on the floor of an upper chamber in the Town Hall.

  *

  After the initial celebration, the city was tense. We expected the army, expected a fight. No one came.

  After a few days two messengers arrived to tell us about the revolt of the hammer-men, the Maillotins, in Paris.

  The king and his troops had set out for Rouen, but when the troubles broke out in Paris he turned his army around to go there.

  We carried on. Leaders of the guilds sat in the Town Hall. Bakers baked, produce-sellers made arrangements with farmers and weavers kept on weaving.

  As for myself and my lovers, we had to be discreet once the euphoria of the first few days departed.

  We didn’t even make love again, but that one time bound us. Christophe and Adrian both had jobs to do, yet I felt they were always with me. I heard the chime of bells as I walked. I heard the clack of looms. Other thoughts tugged my heart and mind, and I revelled in their richness.

  When we came together, we barely needed to speak.

  Some beguines had spoken of ecstasy, of connection to God or a universal spirit. But my connection to anything close to that came with two other human beings, through flesh and human passions.

  This is the real Holy Trinity. I had laughed when I said that, but maybe it frightened me too.

  Then news came of the bloody massacre of the Parisians, of hundreds hung and burned and beheaded. It wouldn’t be long before the king’s troops would turn around again, and come for us in Rouen.

  *

  Now I am close to the age of that half-blind rabble-rouser Nicolas, who first set me on my path. I live in a strange city, which resounds to the followers of Jan Hus. He was burned as a heretic, prosecuted by Pierre d’Ailly, the same inquisitor who would later persecute us in Brussels. Surely that bound Brussels and Prague together, as surely as the Harelle created the trinity of myself, Adrian and Christophe.

  When I first arrived in Prague I saw a strange wall on the other side of the river, running up Petrin Hill. It didn’t appear to serve any defensive purpose and its top was jagged, like teeth.

  ‘That is the Hungry Wall,’ Hans explained later. In the past century, when there was no work, a king gave the poor of Prague tools to build that wall. He also gave them scraps of food while they worked but he didn’t pay them. When the wall neared completion he ordered the workers to make the top uneven to look like teeth, as a reminder that the good king had given bread for the poor to chew.

  When I see that wall I don’t think of the largesse of a king who didn’t pay his labourers, but the most generous monarch of all. King Fatso!

  And I hear the clink of glasses, as Adrian and Christophe join me in a toast to King Fatso.

  *

  But I never knew what happened to them. While the army came down hard on the rebels of Paris, Rouen negotiated a surrender and suffered less. Ten leaders of the revolt had been hanged, but others were treated more lightly.

  ‘You must go,’ Adrian told me, when we were still in the bell tower. ‘It’s still possible to escape.’

  ‘And we must stay and keep our heads down. We’ll put in pleas for clemency. This is our city and we will not leave it,’ said Christophe.

  ‘I know of places where you can go,’ said Adrian. ‘My brothers among the cloth workers and the beghards can help you.’

  Perhaps their pleas were accepted. Perhaps they lived to marry and have children. They still speak to me, but I’m never sure where their voices come from.

  *

  I set off alone, heading back to Flanders. In Rouen we had fought and we had lost. But I felt haunted by my experience there, for better or worse.

  Perhaps study and contemplation could help me understand why I kept hearing those bells. And why, if I let my mind wander, I’d start tasting their passionate kisses full of wine, aniseed and cloves.

  On the way, I found Adrian’s associates, who directed me to a suitable beguinage.

  One of the women who welcomed me laughed at my name. ‘Seraphine! You should fit in here because we devote ourselves to spiritual liberty and seraphic love, as described by our great teache
r Bloemardine.’

  She lowered her voice. ‘Be aware, that what we say among ourselves and what we tell the priests and bishops are two different things.’

  ‘More like three or four things,’ added another sister.

  The beguinage was a large building set within woods on the edge of Brussels, along with a chapel and bell tower. It was old and run down, but I felt at home there. I settled into my routine of reading, prayer and meditation and discussion, along with work in the gardens and grounds. My early training in needlework was useful in the tapestry workshops.

  I absorbed the work of Bloemardine, especially when I read: ‘Love’s most intimate union is through eating, tasting and seeing from within.’ The body, according to Bloemardine, serves as a connection to divinity . . . and divinity itself can be human.

  ‘Love came and embraced me, and I came out of the spirit and remained lying until late in the day, drunk with unspeakable wonders.’

  I lifted a glass of wine to that!

  When I meditated, I listened for Adrian and Christophe. Ring the bells, Christophe said. Finish what we started. Adrian spoke above his loom, urging me to study more.

  And we spoke in both our languages, with words that sent insistent tongues between my thighs, around the tips of my breasts.

  I established the bell tower as my place to meditate. There I could look out over the woodland on one side, towards the city of Brussels on the other. Over the horizon, to the south, was where my lovers could be, touching me from afar. I reached towards them, hoping they would also feel my touch and share my delight.

  When presented with a choice of communal tasks, I immediately chose bell-ringing. Christophe’s dedication to that vocation became mine. I improvised as I tried to capture the chimes of the Harelle on the simple set of bells.

  Think of the cry for justice and for action . . . Haro! Haro! I shouted it as I rang. Think of the draper calling people into the streets, the closure of the city gates, merriment in mansion basements.

  Haro! Haro!

  Some sisters complained about my discordant bell-ringing, while others praised it for keeping them alert.

  But something was missing, a beat or a cadence. Could it be the carnal element between me and the two young men, which brought on the rough music and the bonding?

  For this, a few beguines had turned to their sisters, and I tried this too.

  *

  It happens sometimes that one never finds two creatures who are of one spirit in one realm, but when it happens by chance that these two creatures find each other, and cannot hide themselves, and if they then want to do so, they cannot . . . Such people have a great need to be on their guard . . .

  This passage from Margeurite Porete jarred me every time I read it. Porete was a favourite among the sisters, coming close to Bloemardine.

  But while Bloemardine died of natural causes in 1336 at an advanced age, Marguerite Porete burned at the stake. She was an educated woman who wandered about, expounded heretical views, published a book of them and got into trouble.

  I shivered when I saw the similarities to myself. Could I meet the same end? Beguines have faced persecution, with mass burnings at Narbonne. Then they’ve been tolerated, and persecuted again.

  Though I had no intention of producing a screed like Marguerite’s, I was already writing accounts of my travels and travails and thoughts. I would not be a bell without a tongue.

  Marguerite seemed a peaceful soul. While she refused to withdraw to a beguinage, she never took part in disorderly multitudes. I believed that life was behind me as well.

  When I read Porete’s passage about the two souls who are bound together, a word came to me: entwined. I thought immediately of my two young men. Could more than two souls become entwined?

  Now I had a name for what had happened. How could such an entwinement persist over distance?

  If Adrian and Christophe were alive, could they still haunt me? If they were indeed dead, did I feel their ghosts? When I heard their thoughts and felt them entwined with me, did it mean we were together on another plane of existence?

  I spoke to other beguines about this, leaving out the details of our first night together. One suggested this bonding can be forged in ‘turbulent and tender times’.

  But she cautioned me. ‘Beware . . . Your soul can be captured in hatred as well as love. This has happened to me.’ She added, ‘I came here to escape it.’

  But I came here to seek it.

  I watched seasons pass over the landscape from my vantage point in the bell tower. Even in the winter, I stayed up there, wrapped myself in blankets. My reveries warmed me more than my flasks of hot infusions.

  I was drifting in a boat down the canals of Ghent with Christophe and Adrian as white blossoms fell upon us. We found the hidden garden, where we knew entwinement again.

  *

  Like the sisters in Ghent, we also taught reading and writing among the city’s poor. Our lessons were basic, our words scratched on slates or wax tablets, but we incorporated philosophy and debate into them. We urged our pupils, young and old, to think for themselves.

  Bloemardine had the status of a local heroine in Brussels, and several groups had sprung up to engage with the ideas of this long-dead mystic. They appealed to people of all stations.

  During the Harelle the poor stood up for themselves, taking direction from no one. They were neither stupid animals nor voracious wild beasts, as members of my family believed. And now I found myself among artisans, weavers and street hawkers as they considered the implications of ‘seraphic love’. With so little love and pleasure in their own world, these ideas offered an inspiration the Church could never approach.

  This attracted the attention of the Inquisition, which launched attacks on ‘Bloemardine’s heresy’. They came poking about our beguinage, and stuck their snouts about the streets of Brussels.

  When I went into the town to teach lessons, I saw the inquisitors striding forth, expecting everyone to quiver with fear.

  Instead, children threw rocks at them. Old folks and working men and mothers also followed them, singing songs and laughing.

  *

  Then Pierre d’Ailly, the Bishop of Cambrai, ordered our house closed down and the property handed to Dominicans. Other beguinages met a similar fate.

  We dismantled our tapestry workshops and transported the materials and tools elsewhere. I would have burned the whole place down in order to keep it out of the greedy grasp of the Dominicans. I raged and raged, and my memories of the Harelle became strong again.

  I had turned to mysticism when I believed it impossible to change the world. I aimed to increase my knowledge and live a simple life. But as long as the Church and its Inquisition reigned, the spiritual life will offer no way out.

  Some women accepted transfer to an approved nunnery. Others went back to their families, perhaps making meagre livelihoods as spinsters. I no longer had a family, though.

  But help came from those who possessed very little. The artisans and weavers we had been tutoring helped some of us in turn. They took us into their homes. And we helped by bringing our looms and valuable tapestries with us, which aided their trade.

  I joined Henryk and Adele and their three children, the little darlings who had been at the centre of the stone-throwing gangs that followed the inquisitors. I had been accustomed to my austere but solitary room at the beguinage, so I needed to adjust to some extremely close companionship.

  My hosts introduced me to spiritual groups that were meeting in the city. I met the man known as Giles of Canter, who had formed a group called Homines Intelligentiae or Men of Understanding, along with William of Hildernissen. And this group included women of understanding.

  Our teacher Giles preached of an age of the Holy Spirit, where the Scriptures will lose their relevance, and the conventional ‘truths’ proved false. The Church’s doctrines of poverty, chastity and obedience belonged to the old Dark Age.

  ‘Farewell to virtues’, as Ma
rgeurite Porete wrote.

  While my life as a beguine had been devoted to simplicity and ‘voluntary poverty’, these people had no time for that.

  ‘We already live in poverty,’ said Adele, a petite sharp-tongued woman. ‘There is nothing voluntary about it. We have no need for purification and self-denial to become close to God; anyone who is poor is already close as can be. We claim our spiritual liberty now. The only purgatory is the poverty we live in.’

  As for Giles . . . he was a peculiar man. He once ran down a road, completely naked, while carrying a plate of meat on his head to give to a pauper. He liked his wine, and when he had enough of that he would also take his clothes off.

  I got tired of it, I must admit. ‘Giles, please! I have seen enough of you.’

  But another time when our group had enjoyed drink and stimulating discussion together, we all took our clothes off. It just felt like the right thing to do.

  Many women in the group first fell in love with Giles, though I have to say he wasn’t much to look at. He had a way of making love that he claimed was like Adam and Eve. Pah! I don’t know about that. He was very good at it though, and knew how to give a woman pleasure. It went on and on, without him spending himself, and there was no need to worry about pregnancy if it wasn’t desired.

  *

  But Giles was at least sixty and it wasn’t long before he died. This forced us to change. We were, after all, seeking our own illumination, not following one man. The other founder, William of Hildernissen, a less flamboyant sort, did not want to inherit Giles’s role. He proposed that we take it in turn to prepare a talk for each meeting.

  We met outside the city walls of Brussels in a tower belonging to an alderman. This meeting room was much more comfortable than Giles’s hovel. On a clear night we could see the stars through the windows. Our host placed cushions about on the floor, and we lounged on those rather than sitting in chairs. It was the ‘eastern fashion’, he claimed.

  At this time, new members were arriving, younger people who would have grown restless listening to Giles preach. There was Matthys, a headstrong youth who constantly demanded ‘action’ as well as contemplation. Sometimes I wanted to slap him, but I grew fond of him as well. I met Jehanne, a young woman from the south who had worked in the vineyards and spent time in prison for some sexual indiscretion.