“How does his grace?”
“I have not seen him since he was acclaimed. But be comfortable. After I have talked with him, I will send you word how the world is set.” The parson seemed to sigh at the way of that world as he, too, rose from his knees. “Beware how you walk in the city. And have fellowship with you when you do walk out. Exmewe is not yet found. This corruption may linger. A fog cannot be dispersed with a fan. Remember, for the passion of God, that these predestined ones are also troublous men. They might turn you towards great harm.”
“Then, father, I pray you, let me have the thing I came for. Absolution.”
Ferrour sighed again, and lifted up his hood. They stood face to face. He stared at Vavasour for a moment, and moved his lips as if he were thirsty and wished to drink. In a low voice he imposed the penance, at which Vavasour sobbed aloud. Then he made a rough sign of the cross upon the sergeant’s forehead. “Ego te absolvo,” he began as Vavasour whispered his act of contrition. When it was completed the parson took his arm. “God give grace all will be well. Come out into the air.”
They left the chapel, and walked into a paved courtyard.
“The moon is huge tonight, God bless her.”
The sergeant made no reply. He was already contemplating the nature of his penance which would take him beyond this familiar sky. John Ferrour had commanded him to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, leaving all his goods and possessions behind; he would be obliged to beg for his sustenance during the long journey, since he must proceed only with robe, stick and empty sack. He had kept silence while all good authority was set in doubt, and must pay the forfeit.
Ferrour had heard of the predestined men, since these arch-heretics had been reported in Antwerp and Cologne. But he had not known of their presence in London itself. No doubt, among the citizens, they had won converts whose names and numbers remained unknown. This Exmewe was a limb of the fiend. How could God permit heretics to work their will? Was all preordinate by Him? But if the time was prefixed, there could be no remedy through the agency of grace. Man was doomed perpetually. The parson had once told Henry Bolingbroke that the star which led the three kings towards Jesus from the east might well have been their belief which they acquired first at baptism. “The sacrament of baptism is called the east, where the sun first arises,” he had said, “for there sprang first to them the day of grace after the night of original sin.” But now all seemed to be in twilight. It was hard to see clearly in this world. What if sin came from God, the maker of all things? The predestined men might then have issued from the hand of God. God might have created damned souls. “Lord, in thy wildness,” he murmured to the cold air, “do not undermine my faith.”
The first fog of autumn was gathering in the courtyard of the palace. Westminster had once been marsh ground, and the palace itself had been built upon an island “in loco terribili.” It was terrible still, filled with the passions and envies of men fighting for power; the atmosphere of fog and gloom had never left it. As John Ferrour walked across the courtyard he encountered one of Henry’s men, Perkin Woodroffe, who had that day threatened Richard with sudden death. “The breaking time is over,” Perkin said to the parson after they had exchanged greetings. “We must begin to build.”
“Until the end of time shall undo it all.”
“Why, Sir John, you speak darkly. Be cheerful. Tomorrow is not born.”
“But then tomorrow becomes yesterday.”
“Your wit is marred, good parson. This fog has entered your head.” He stepped closer to him. “Be sure that it does not enter Henry’s. His will must be rightful and strong. A man who borrows hot coals to start his fire must run with leaps and bounds over all obstacles.”
“I will assist him as much as I may, Perkin. Christ keep you.”
Yet the parson secretly believed that Henry Bolingbroke was cumbered with corrupt humours. When the snuff obscures the light so that it cannot burn clear, then there is more smoke to add to the vapouring mass. He slipped upon a loose cobble, and fell heavily to the ground where he lay for a moment in severe pain. “Why, you have fallen like humankind.” It was Henry Bolingbroke himself, who helped him to his feet. “You should beware where you walk.”
“You represent grace, sir, after the fall.”
“They say that all mist is decaying cloud. But I believe that this fog issues from the earth.”
“It is decay, certainly. For me it is an allegory of sin.”
“Well said.” Henry clapped his confessor on the back. “We must always remember our frailty.” His hot breath mingled with the fog. “You stand at the door of my conscience. On this day of triumph, let us talk of things spiritual.”
“I must first talk of other matters, sir, which may concern you deeply. We have dark tidings to digest.”
The fog had now spread along the river, and had entered the walled city.19
Chapter Twenty-two
The Second Nun’s Tale
Ten days after Henry Bolingbroke had learned of the predestined men, Sister Bridget was standing beside the nun of Clerkenwell in a gallery of Westminster Abbey. Sister Clarice was peering through a squint at the ceremony in the chancel below. By the high altar sat Henry, wrapped in cloth of gold; his throne was of alabaster richly decorated with jewels, and the tapestry at his feet had been embroidered with gold and silver thread to represent the story of Samuel and Saul.
“I see the crown,” Clarice whispered to Bridget. “It has arches in the shape of a cross. A wondrous work to put on an unhallowed head. They have broken the temple, and stolen the vessel of grace.” The voice of Henry could be heard, reciting the coronation oath in English. Clarice was whispering fiercely once more, but she was no longer addressing Bridget. “He will sell the souls of the lambs to the wolf that strangles them. He will never have part of the pasture of lambs, that is the bliss of heaven. No holy oil will lift him there.” Clarice knew that the oil for the new king’s anointing had come from a miraculous phial which the Virgin Mary, in apparition, had given to Thomas Becket. It had been discovered by King Richard two years before, while he had been searching in the garderobe of the Tower for a necklace worn by King John. The nun knew this because Richard himself had told her so.
She had visited the broken king three days previously, in the company of Bridget. Richard had been informed of her prophecies concerning his deposition and death, and had asked to see her. When she was taken to him, however, she knew that he was not in his rightful mind. He was dressed in a white gown which touched his bare feet; on his head he wore a black skullcap, and he held out some papers as she approached him. “Be of good cheer, Dame Clarice,” he said. “Be of comfort. I am God’s fool.” He was sitting within a stone alcove, cut into one of the walls of his cell. “You prophesied my end, but you cannot prophesy my beginning.”
“Your grace?”
“You must get eight miles of moonlight and knit them in a bladder. You must take eight Welshmen’s songs, and hang them on a ladder. You must mingle the left foot of an eel with the creaking of a cart wheel. Is this more impossible than deposing a king? God’s anointed one?”
“To make a mirror bright, you must first cover it with black soap.”
“You are madder than me, maid. Or do you tell me that the holiness of the sanctified one will one day shine again?” He stood up, and then genuflected before Bridget. “How do you find me, nun?”
“I find that you are poor, sir.”
“Poverty is the eye-glass through which we see our friends.” He turned to Clarice. “I have come to love weeping. The tears trill down my cheeks. I am the fount of all waters. When do they crown this bug?”
“The thirteenth day of this month. The feast of St. Edward.”
“The feast of the good king who built the abbey. The stones shall smite and hurtle together. There will be a trembling of the earth.”
“If he is God’s foe, then –”
“The rain will fall upon the altars. That is my prophecy, nun.” He paced rap
idly around the confines of his stone cell. There was another alcove, where he could sit, and from its slit window the Thames could just be seen. “Read my dream, and I will say that you are God’s fellow. I dreamed that a king made a great feast, and he had three kings at the feast, and these three kings ate but out of one gruel dish. They ate so much that their balls burst, and out of their balls came four and twenty oxen playing at the sword and buckler, and there were left alive only three white herrings. And these three herrings bled nine days and nine nights, as if they had been the remnants of horse shoes. What is this dream?”
Clarice was confounded, but kept her composure. “It passes my wit, sir.”
“And mine.” He still paced about, his bare feet upon the cold stone. “They say that you have scrolls, and that you are an enchanter.”
“They say untruth. The only scrolls I carry are prayers to God.”
He stared at her for a few moments, but she remained demure; as modesty demanded, she looked away. “Do you bind your breasts with lace, ma dame?” She did not answer, but made the sign of the cross. “You do not blush. You are deeper than a well, Sister Clarice. In ghost and in body.” They spoke a little more, and Richard informed them of the holy phial. “This feigned king is but a painted image,” he told them. “The oil upon him will smell rank. It will reek to heaven.” He sighed, and sat down once more in the stone alcove. “Delightable to me are ghostly songs, releasing my travails in this wretched life. Sing one for me.”
So in a clear, calm voice Clarice began to sing “Jesus, mercy! mercy, I cry.”
When they left him, singing to himself in his chamber, Clarice murmured to the second nun that “his death is shaped before him.”
In this prophecy, as in so many others, she was proved correct. She also told Bridget that, if an unhallowed king such as Bolingbroke came to rule, then others must hold the power until an anointed one returned to the throne. She did not say who those “others” might be. “What I have done,” she told her, “I have done for the sake of Holy Mother Church. If the rulers are unclean, then Mary must be queen. We will lead, and others will follow.”
Four months after the interview in the Tower, the unhappy Richard was starved to death in Pontefract Castle.
Between the day of this encounter in the Tower and the day of the coronation in the abbey, there had been reports circulating through the city of arrests and imprisonments. William Exmewe had been taken up for treason and forced to abjure the realm. In a solemn ceremony at Paul’s Cross he was dressed in a long white robe, his shoes were taken from him, and a large wooden crucifix placed in his hand. Roger of Ware, Bogo the summoner, and Martin the law clerk were among the crowd taunting him. It was ordained that he should walk barefoot to Dover carrying the cross before him.
Among the dignitaries on the scaffold were Sir Geoffrey de Calis and the Bishop of London; William Exmewe looked at them both, and then nodded at the knight almost imperceptibly. It was enough. Exmewe had fulfilled his destiny. Dominus had not been, and never would be, revealed to the world.
The sentence was then read out to him. “You, William Exmewe, cannot stray from the high road and you may not spend more than one night in the same place. Your path is to Dover, where you will remain upon the shore. Each day you must walk up to your knees in the sea, until a boat is ready to take you away from this realm. Before embarking you are ordered to proclaim, ‘Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! I, William Exmewe, for the foul sacrilege which I have committed, will quit this land of England never more to return, except by leave of the Kings of England or their heirs, so help me God and all His saints.’ ”
And so it came to pass. When Exmewe arrived in France, however, he was taken secretly to a small castle outside Avignon where he was closely guarded for the rest of his life.
After his departure the citizens marvelled that, on the same day, Sir Miles Vavasour had gone on pilgrimage. There had been rumours, too, that a conventicle of heretics had been detected and destroyed; they were described as the “new men,” and nothing more was known about them.
Sister Bridget had informed the nun of these startling events; Brank Mongorray had been sent away, and Clarice spent most of her time in her chamber at the House of Mary. Bridget slept at the foot of her bed, and joined in her prayers. She trusted the nun of Clerkenwell, and never doubted for a moment that her intentions were holy. She was perturbed, however, on those occasions when Clarice ventured from the convent alone. She was absent for four or five hours, and would return without a word of explanation. When she had been imprisoned by the Bishop of London, Bridget naturally feared for her safety, but Clarice had been freed by Robert Braybroke after three days without incurring any noticeable harm; indeed she seemed refreshed by her ordeal, and had told the second nun that there was much spiritual comfort to be found in confinement.
She had now become so popular with Londoners that any further attempt to arrest or to silence her would be met with an immediate and violent reaction. The prioress, Agnes de Mordaunt, had given up any attempt to restrain or discipline her. “Mark well your bedfellow,” Dame Agnes had warned Bridget. “Be sure that she does not stray into the path of temptation and sin. Certain people may be injured or bewitched by immoderate praise. It is known as forspeaking, Bridget. I pray that Sister Clarice does not rely upon fickle fame.”
“I am sure that she does not, ma dame.”
“An hour’s cold will suck out seven years of heat. The wheel may turn for her. What was whole may be bruised.”
“I will tell her that you have spoken, ma dame.”
That is why, perhaps, Sister Clarice formally asked the permission of the prioress to attend Henry’s coronation; her presence had been requested by the senior clergy of the abbey, but she had agreed to arrive secretly and to remain in the upper gallery.
She was still looking through the squint. “Now, Bridget, the crown is upon his head. He holds the orb and sceptre. He sits very still for a condemned soul.” The sound of the choir, singing the anthem of jubilation “Illa iuventus,” surrounded the two nuns. “The archbishop has raised his right hand to heaven. Now he has extended it to the image of the Virgin on the north side of the altar. Now he genuflects. Henry rises.” She laughed. “A foul person richly dight seems fair by candlelight. Now Henry processes before the earls and all others.” Lessiez les aler et fair leur devoir de par dieu. They should do their duty before God, she had whispered fiercely to the second nun.
That evening, long after the ceremonies were over, Bridget was startled out of her slumber. Clarice was shaking her arm. “Bridget, come. Come with me. It is the time.”
“Time?”
“Follow me.”
The two nuns left their chamber, and walked quietly through the cloister. Clarice insisted upon silence and secrecy. A chariot, pulled by two horses, was waiting for them by one of the side doors of the convent; as soon as they had entered it the horseman raised his whip.
“Where do we go?” Bridget asked. She could smell the new straw laid at the bottom of the vehicle, and for some reason it instilled in her a profound unease.
“Not far, but a great distance.”
They were travelling south, across Smithfield, along Little Britain and down St. Martin’s; as a girl Bridget had walked through these streets with her nurse and companion, Beldame Patience, and their perpetual activity never failed to reassure her. She knew every shop and shack, every stall and tenement, but she was always surprised by the city’s endless life. Then she had been obliged to enter the convent.
“You need say nothing,” Clarice was telling her. “What you see, lay up in your heart for the fullness of time.” They were coming close to the riverside, and the chariot stopped by the round tower of Roman stone.
Two servants with torches came out of the great porch to greet them and Clarice, leading the way, entered the tower. Bridget noticed three men in sumptuous attire waiting in a passage, and, much to her amazement, they made obeisance to the nun. They followed her down a turning
stair of stone, into a large vaulted room where others were waiting. Bridget recognised Robert Braybroke, the Bishop of London, who had imprisoned Clarice a few weeks before. And was not that the archbishop himself? They were wearing cloaks of blue striped cloth. Why had they assembled in this place on the evening after the coronation?
Sister Clarice stood in the middle of them. “You know my name,” she said to them. “It has come to pass as we have wished. Exmewe has been expelled, and will not speak. He plotted with heretics, and he has gone out with the winds. The predestined men have been scattered, and nothing further will be known concerning them. Yet they have left a comfortable inheritance. This new king is not holy. He is a usurper. God is with us and now, through us, He will guide the destiny of this kingdom.”
“King Henry will argue –” the bishop began to say.
“There is many a man who begins language with a woman and cannot end it.20 No. We are the holy ones now. We are truly anointed. We will rule behind the king. So be of good heart. Dominus rises.”21
Chapter Twenty-three
The Author’s Tale
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1. By the time of Agnes de Mordaunt, the citizens of London insisted upon holding three days of mystery plays here, enacting the sacred history of the world from Creation to Judgement.
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2. There remains no trace or memorial of the convent in Clerkenwell except for one public house, the Three Kings, which stands on the ancient site of its hostelry. Its underground tunnels can still be seen, however, in the basement of the Marx Memorial Library at 37a, Clerkenwell Green.
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3. It was said that the Virgin had once appeared in this cloister to William Rahere, the founder of the priory, but at Rahere’s insistence no statue or altar had been erected; the Virgin’s words to him had not been recorded, but he had cried afterwards of the bush with red flames burning.
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