The Illuminator

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  Their merriment made Colin feel even lonelier. He was finally warm, so he moved away from the gathering in front of the fire, away from the smell of the roasting meat. One of the players had left a lute lying on a bench in a corner. Colin picked it up and began to strum it softly, singing under his breath.

  “You’ve a pleasing voice, lad.” It was the wiry contortionist. Colin had not been aware that he’d followed him. He laid down the lute, felt himself flushing. “I’m sorry. Is this your lute? I was just looking at it. I meant no harm.”

  “No harm done.”

  Colin didn’t know what to say. He hoped the fellow would go back to his companions. But instead, he motioned for Colin to move over and sat down beside him.

  “Are you from here?”

  Colin didn’t know how to answer that. He didn’t know where “here” was.

  “I’m from Aylsham,” he said, before he had time to think that his mother might have someone out looking for him.

  “Aylsham. That’s about twenty miles north of here. What are you doing way down here? You’re south of Norwich.”

  South! Sun on the right at daybreak, but there’d been no sun. Colin felt his heart sink into his toes. His feeling must have shown on his face.

  “Where’re you headed?”

  “I was headed to Cromer, to Blinham Abbey. I’m going to join the brothers there. I got a little turned around.”

  “You don’t look good, lad. When did you last eat?”

  Colin studied the rushes on the floor. “Not in a while.”

  “Landlord, half a pint and a joint of meat here for my young friend.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “You can sing for your supper. Anybody want to hear a song?”

  “Aye.” A voice from the back of the room. “A love song. No hymns or dirges. We’ll have enough of those soon enough.”

  Maud brought him a trencher of victuals and while he wolfed down the food, the wiry contortionist explained. “We’re cycle players on our way to Fakenham for the Easter Cycle. We’ll probably wind up in Cromer come early summer. We can always use a singer and a lute player. If you don’t mind a little face paint, you’re welcome to tag along. No pay, but all you can eat.” He motioned for Maud to refill Colin’s mug. “And you’ll pick up a little pay on the side. A pretty blond boy with a sweet voice—the ladies will ply you with gifts. We’ll play at a few feast days and banquets along the way. Makes for a nice change from the Bible stories. After Ash Wednesday, we’ll start the miracle plays. We should make Blinham easy by Pentecost.”

  Colin didn’t have to think about it very long. What choice did he have? After a week on the road, he’d wound up hungry and cold and farther away from his destination than when he started. He could either go with the mummers or go home. And if he went home … His mind conjured a vision of Rose, quickly replaced by the dead shepherd’s burnt face. If he went back to the warmth and safety of Blackingham, he would gain no atonement. Not for himself. Not for Rose.

  “Do you go through Aylsham?” he asked.

  “Aye, but we’ve no plans to linger there,”

  That was good. He could get a message to his mother to let her know that he was safe. He knew she would be worried. He could still make it to Cromer. It would just take a little longer.

  Colin stripped the last bit of flesh from the chicken bone and wiped his hands on his breeches.

  “Well, what say you, boy? Are you going to join our little band?”

  “I have to eat,” Colin said. “And it’s a long way to Cromer.”

  The contortionist laughed. “Well said. It’s settled then.” He picked up the lute and handed it to Colin. “Now, it’s time to pay for your supper.”

  Colin strummed the strings of the lute. “I know a love song,” he said, and he began to sing, his throat tight and nervous

  I live in love-longing

  For the seemliest oj all things

  Who may me blisse bring.

  And I to her am bound.

  Just another love song, he told himself, hardening his heart against the memory of the scent of her hair, the softness of her lips. But a hush fell over the players, and they nodded their approval as they listened to the plaintive sound of his voice.

  Finn remembered the dagger in his boot. They did not search him but merely pushed him down the stairs, still shackled, into the black pit beneath the ancient castle. He thought he recognized the blackguard who handed down his pail of slop on a pole. No recourse there.

  He must be patient, he thought, scratching the days on the rock that was his bed. Hard to wait, hard to be calm, remembering Rose’s stricken face, but wait he must. Some robed lawyer would come—sent by Kathryn—to plead his innocence, to restore justice. These things take time, he thought on the second day, remembering Kathryn’s eyes when she’d lied. There is some misunderstanding. Kathryn will sort it out. Alfred will explain why he planted the pearls. On the third day, he screamed his anger, his righteous protest and threats—sometimes answered with rough laughter, or, more often, answered not at all—until he lost his voice.

  When there were seven marks on his stone, he briefly entertained an idea of attacking his jailers. He need not wait to be rescued like some helpless maiden imprisoned in a tower. But to escape would mark him as an outlaw and mark his daughter, too.

  In the end it was the filth that made a coward of him. It was not the darkness of his dungeon cell, not the cold; not the hunger, not the thirst that his daily ration of fetid water with its film of mutton grease could never assuage; not the raw despair that tormented his mind—more frequently with the passage of days—a despair that bespoke certain knowledge that he should never escape this oubliette, into which he’d been cast like Satan into hell. It was not even the fear for his abandoned Rose or the pain of remembering Kathryn’s betrayal. (This last had swirled around in his head until he vowed not to visit there again, only to find his mind besieged by those very same thoughts— why? why? why? The words screamed inside his head like a grand inquisitor’s litany.) It was none of these. It was the squalor: the lice he picked from his body and his beard—day by day, hour by hour, second by second—and, cursing, cracked between dirty fingernails, the pus-filled scabs that crusted over his vermin bites; the mildewed slime coating the rock ledge that was seat and bed and table. It was the stench of his own excrement—this was his undoing.

  He couldn’t even pray. What god would hold congress in such filth?

  There was little difference between night and day, just a thickening and thinning in the smothering blackness, but he had marked the passage of days by his daily ration of slop and scratched the tally on the rock. Now he traced them with his hand. Twenty-one marks. Twenty-one days. How could a man be reduced to a beast in so short a time? He was too weak to drag his shackles even a few feet to stab at the night vermin who beaded the dark with their eyes. What could the dagger avail him now, unless he wished to fall on its point like Saul falling on his sword? One quick thrust up and under his rib. A sound, a scraping of a rat’s teeth against a well-gnawed bone of uncertain origin quelled that temptation. That and the thought of Rose.

  In fitful dreams, Kathryn came to him, sitting beside him in the autumn garden. There is the smell of succulent fruit in the air, and the smell of roasting meat from the smoking shed. Her head is bowed over her own art, her little bone needle gliding in and out, marking a curved path on the fabric. One half of her face hides behind her silver hair, the other in the shadow of a hawthorne branch. He kneels beside her. He touches the ribbons on her sleeve, parts her hair and whispers into the porcelain trumpet of her ear. She laughs, like clear water bubbling in a stream, clean and pure and sweet. She lifts her face to receive his kiss. A flash of arm and she stabs his eye with her little bone needle. He sees nothing but white-hot pain.

  He always woke to lick salty tears from the corners of his mouth.

  To fight the demons in his living nightmare, he painted bright pictures in his mind, laying
out the colors and the miniatures of Saint John, conjuring a Book of Hours. He painted enough pictures on the canvas of his eyelids to fill a lifetime’s work. Not the luxurious Gospel the abbot had commissioned, certainly not the plain illustrations of the Wycliffe text. A Psalter, as glorious as the God that David and Solomon celebrated, all in azure and crimson, bordered with acanthus leaves in gold leaf and bound in hammered gold set with a coronet of rubies. A book to make the bishop of Norwich drool with greed. A book to rival the legendary Herimann’s Gospel commissioned by the duke of Saxony in 1185, the great Aurea Testatur, witnessed in gold. His eyelids hurt to dream it.

  And then there came the day when he had not even the strength to hold this bright vision. There was only the cold, and the gnawing in his belly, and the smothering darkness, and the stench.

  It was on such a day the bishop summoned him.

  SEVENTEEN

  I saw his (the monk’s) sleeves were garnished at the hand

  With fine grey fur, the finest in the land,

  And on his hood, to fasten it at his chin

  He had a wrought-gold cunningly fashioned pin.

  —GEOFFREY CHAUCER,

  THE CANTERBURY TALES (14TH CENTURY)

  Finn lay curled on the stone slab of his cell in the half-sleep half-stupor when he was awakened by the guard’s foot in his stomach. It prodded his belly, thrusting upward. For a minute, Finn’s breath fled and then returned abruptly, bringing with it a tearing pain. The guard fastened wrist irons on him and dragged him to his feet. He tottered like an old man. A shaft of light spilled through the opened grate above his cell, stabbing him in the eye like Kathryn’s little bone needle. He squinted at his tormentor, who laughed.

  “Ye don’t know me, do ye? Don’t recognize Old Sykes, the one what ye ill-treated over a bit of harmless dwarf-baiting?”

  Finn had recognized him, all right. That first day. But he had hoped Sykes had been too drunk to remember their encounter in the Beggar’s Daughter. Vain hope, that. Sykes remembered and was here to exact his due. Finn said nothing. Best to let the fellow spin himself out. Less sport if his antagonist met no resistance. Finn didn’t have the strength to resist anyway. He hunched forward, elbows in, to provide support for his hurt ribs.

  “Not such a fine gentleman now? The smell of ye makes me sick. We’ll have to clean ye up, else the hangman won’t come near enough to noose ye. Not so tough now without that pretty little dagger, are ye?”

  The dagger. Maybe here was the chance, after all. Finn wriggled his left foot inside its boot. Flat leather where the dagger should have been sheathed. He’d a vague memory of throwing it at a pair of glittering eyes in the dark. He’d not troubled to put it back. It would have meant groping on the slime-caked floor with his hands, and to what avail?

  The guard shoved him toward the stairs. He stumbled against the first riser. He still wore the leg irons—had worn them so long they were like a part of his body, even the chafed skin around his ankles had toughened into a protective scar.

  “I can’t climb with the shackles on. You’ll have to loose them.” He had to speak low because of his hurt ribs. Breath cost too much to squander.

  “I don’t have to loose anything. I can just kick ye up the stairs, like the sack of dog shite ye are. But that might overwork me kicking leg and I might want to use it later, mightn’t I?”

  He loosed the iron cuff from one leg so that the chain and the loose cuff clanged behind Finn as he climbed.

  “If ye’ve any idea o’ running, I’d advise agin it.” To prove his point he stepped abruptly on the chain. Finn lurched forward, stifling a groan.

  When they reached the bare dirt yard outside the dungeon, Finn stumbled again. The light blinded him and caused his head to throb. The noise was deafening to a mind wrapped for weeks in silence—neighing horses, squawking barnyard fowl, angry shouts, barking dogs and clanging guardsmen— an assault on his senses. He had an almost religious longing for the insulated quiet of his cell.

  It was a cold bright winter day and he wore only his filthy shirt. He started to shiver uncontrollably.

  “What ye got there, Sykes?” This from one of the men hanging around the stables.

  “I got me some crow meat. But got to scrub him up first or e’en the buzzards will have naught to do with him.”

  “Need any help?”

  “Wouldn’t want to share the pleasure.”

  Finn lurched blindly, goaded by Sykes, until he stumbled against a wooden trough and felt himself pushed in. The water was a shock, numbing even the pain of his ribs. He struggled to get out, his free leg thrashing against the lip of the trough, his body half out, but a brutish hand held his face down. So the hangman was to be cheated after all. He forced himself to cease struggling, to go still like a possum in a hound’s mouth. Knowing he was no match for his assailant, he resisted an urge to fight. Dissenting voices were muffled by the water rushing in his ears.

  “God’s Blood, Sykes. Ye’ve drowned ’im. The bishop ain’t going to be pleased. Haul ’im out.”

  A second longer and his lungs would burst.

  “Now, I said.”

  The hand moved from his forehead, and Finn’s head lunged upward sputtering water. Sykes grabbed the fabric of his shirt, bunching it when it tore, and pulled him out. Another guard came running forward and wrapped him in a blanket.

  “Despenser wants him alive, you fool.”

  “I had to clean him up, didn’t I? Couldn’t have the bishop’s delicate nostrils offended. Wouldn’t be seemly now, would it?”

  “Seemly. I’ll show you seemly, you idiot’s spawn.”

  By now, Finn was standing, streaming water, wrapped in a horse blanket, which, if not altogether clean, was an improvement over the one he’d left behind. He couldn’t stop his body’s shaking, but the cold water—there was a broken crust of ice on the horse trough where he’d been pushed in—had helped to clear his head.

  The bishop had summoned him. So at least he was to have a hearing. He’d better start to prepare his case. He stood in the courtyard, shivering, listening to them argue over him as he tried to rebuild the broken scaffolding of argument he’d constructed in his mind early in his confinement.

  Sykes skulked back to the stables as his captain took charge of removing the shackles. Finn rubbed his ankles. They felt light, alien, without the irons.

  “What day is this?” Finn directed his question to the newcomer. His teeth chattered, cracking his words. He couldn’t stop shaking.

  “January seven. Yesterday was the Feast of Epiphany.”

  Blessed Redeemer. He’d been in that cesspit for over a month. He started to tremble more violently, each shiver jarring his broken ribs.

  “Come on. We’ve got to get ye thawed out and cleaned up proper for the bishop.” The constable looked at Finn as though the latter was going to be a burdensome and difficult task.

  “I am to have a trial then?”

  At last someone had sounded an alarm. Lady Kathryn had finally brought some influence to bear. His ill treatment was only the fault of the scoundrel Sykes.

  “I don’t know about a trial. Only that the bishop has summoned you to the tower chamber.” The constable motioned for Finn to follow him.

  Once inside the keep that served as guardhouse, Finn warmed his exterior by a charcoal brazier and held a cup of broth between his hands as though it were the Holy Grail. His gorge seemed to rise if he risked more than tiny swallows. At least the trembling had subsided. And if he held his upper body perfectly still, the pain was tolerable.

  “Has there been anyone else asking for me? A lady, the mistress of Blackingham, or my daughter? Her name is Rose.”

  “Not that I’ve heard. And I would have heard. I’m the constable in charge.”

  Then, as if to prove it, he turned to shout orders for a bath to be drawn and placed in front of the fire. Finn’s last bath had been in front of Kathryn’s chamber fire. Before she had betrayed him. He would never be clean again.
r />   “Now that I think on it. There was one came asking for the illuminator. That’s you, right?”

  Finn nodded.

  “Said he carried a message from Blackingham. A dwarf. Funny little man. I sent him to your jailer.”

  His jailer. Sykes. So they had not abandoned him completely. Kathryn had probably sent Half-Tom and Sykes had stopped him.

  The guard stood up, his keys jangling, and threw Finn a scrap of towel.

  A clean towel. Finn’s eyelids smarted. Surely, he was not going to cry in front of the guard over the sight of a clean towel and a chunk of soap.

  “I’ve got rounds to make,” the constable said. “This castle holds some noble guests. Frenchies, mostly. Being held for ransom. They pay me a little extra for a few luxuries.” He winked at Finn. “There’s a duke from Bordeaux has a special fondness for blondes with big arses.”

  He pitched Finn some clean breeches and a shirt, not fine lawn, but good English broadcloth.

  “Sorry, no razor, of course. But here’s a comb for your head and beard. Use the fine-toothed end. The bishop has no liking for lice.”

  Finn took the comb, added it to the pile, which he held away from his body so as not to contaminate the clothes with his filth. “One more thing. If I might ask, though under the circumstances I’m not able to offer you immediate recompense for services.”

  The constable grinned. “You can ask.”

  “I think Sykes has cracked my ribs. If you could bring me a length of strong cloth to bind up my rib cage, I will remember your kindness.”

  “I think that can be arranged for a special prisoner of the bishop.”

  “A clean one. If it’s not too much trouble?”

  The constable laughed and Finn realized he might have given the man more insight into himself than might be prudent under these circumstances. He was so overcome with the thought of being clean again that he’d only half heard the constable’s response. Had he said the “bishop’s special prisoner”? That had an ominous ring to it.

  “A clean one it shall be. And I’ll send a boy to help you bind it and some poppy juice for the pain. Then the constable will take you to the bishop.” Then, all laughter gone, he added, “If you’ve any notion of trying to break away from one of my lads, I wouldn’t. The castle is secure and this meeting you have with Henry Despenser may be the only chance you have. Do the best you can to please. I’ve known men of high birth to disappear from within these castle walls.”