The Illuminator

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

He knew.

  She stood up and started to pace back and forth, her cloak swirling around her feet. She punctuated her words with clenched fists. He stared at the floor, her feet pacing in front of him. She was wearing the boots with the silver buckles, the boots he’d bought for her.

  “I will treat her like my own daughter, Finn, I swear it. She will want for nothing. She will be clothed and fed and cared for as though she were a daughter of Blackingham. Both Rose and the child. I swear it by the Holy Virgin.”

  What child? What was she talking about? He sat down heavily in the chair. It was still warm with her body’s heat. She had stopped pacing and the edge of her cloak was dangerously close to the grate. He bent over and lifted the edge away from the danger of an errant spark.

  He looked up at her towering over him. “Child?” he asked.

  “I did not mean to say it so bluntly. It’s just that I wanted you to know you can trust me. I know I should have told you before, but things were so strained between us and then the sheriff came … “ She held her gloved fingers over her mouth as if to hold back the words. Her eyes reddened. She gave a choked little gasp and then a second.

  She was crying! He had never seen her cry before and he was unprepared for the strange effect it had on him. He wanted to kiss her; he wanted to scream at her to stop. What right did she have to cry? He leaped to his feet and grabbed her wrist, forcing her to stand still. To look at him. She winced as if in pain but did not complain. He lightened his grip slightly.

  “What child are you talking about, Kathryn?”

  She removed her hand from her mouth as if to unseal her lips. Her voice was husky with unshed tears. “Rose is with child. She will deliver in May.”

  His thoughts scattered like birds at the sound of a clapper. He let go her wrist, rubbed his face with his hands. Rose. His Rose. Scarcely more than a babe herself.

  “She and Colin were lovers.”

  “Colin?”

  “You were as blind as I. It was as much our fault as theirs. We left them too much on their own while we—”

  “You don’t have to remind me, Kathryn. I remember well what we did.” Silence as deep as a gulf between them.

  “You sound as though you are sorry,” she said.

  “It’s a bad seed, Kathryn, that bears bitter fruit.”

  Her eyes glittered with tears. “I would not take back one moment. I would not change one of those bad seeds for the purest blossoms in paradise.”

  “My grandchild will not be a bastard. Your son will marry my daughter.”

  She opened her mouth to speak. He held up his hand to silence her. “Don’t say they cannot marry because she is a Jew. Don’t say it, Kathryn. If I hear those words from your lips, I’ll know you for a liar and a hypocrite whose heart cannot love. Don’t say the king will not allow it. The king does not know my true identity. Nobody knows but you.”

  “They cannot marry,” she said dully.

  He wanted to strike her. He grabbed his right wrist with his left hand to restrain himself.

  She tightened her shoulders in a flinching motion as though she read his mind. “They cannot marry because Colin has run away. I do not know where he’s gone.”

  “When?”

  “The same night you were arrested.”

  “Send your friend the sheriff to find him. Bring him back. Force him to face his responsibility.”

  “Colin doesn’t know about the baby. He probably left to get away from Rose. The temptation to sin—”

  “Are you saying that my daughter, who was a virgin when she entered the protection of your house, seduced your son?”

  “No. I’m just saying that—Finn, you know the power of temptation.”

  She begged him with her eyes. He turned his back to her.

  She reached out and touched the back of his right shoulder. Her voice was hardly above a whisper, but he heard every word. “I promise you, by the blood of the Saviour, I will take care of your daughter. And I will see that her child is cared for as well.”

  He took a sharp breath, seeking control. His ribs, only half-healed, pained him. The only sound in the room was the sound of Finn’s pulse pounding in his head.

  “I have to leave,” she said. “The road is dangerous after dark.”

  Not trusting himself to speak, he said nothing. When he turned, she was gone.

  The only indication that she’d ever been there was the fading scent of lavender, and the burden of the knowledge she’d brought with her. He listened for her footfalls as they echoed fainter and fainter down the stairs. He picked up the pewter cup and flung it against the wall. The cider splayed against the stone wall, then dripped in sticky, dark drops onto the floor.

  Kathryn called for the guard to open the door. Her groom, who was warming himself at an open fire in the courtyard, unhitched her horse and brought it forward.

  “My lady, just a moment, if you please. I have something that might interest you.”

  The constable. She’d forgotten about his request. She wanted to get on her horse and ride, put this miserable place behind her, let the wind dry her tears, the cold freeze her skin, until she couldn’t feel the ache in her chest. But there was nothing for it. The fellow stood there expectantly. He had done her one favor already, and she knew she would need another soon.

  “Quickly, please,” she said. “It’s a long ride back to Blackingham.” She followed him into the keep.

  He opened the padlock on a large chest in the center of the round guard tower and withdrew a longish object wrapped in a cloth.

  “I thought you might want to redeem this. It belonged to the prisoner. Of course, it cannot be returned to him.”

  He unwrapped a thin dagger with a delicately engraved knotwork on its hilt. Finn’s dagger. They’d been together—new lovers—in the garden the first time she saw the silver dagger. She had tangled her foot in the ivy and tripped and he cut away the offending vine and wove it into a wreath. “A garland of green for my lady’s hair.” And laughing, he’d kissed the tip of her nose as he’d placed it on her hair.

  “How much?”

  “Three gold sovereigns?” He looked at her appraisingly. He would bargain, but she was in too big a hurry.

  “It seems a fair price. But I have only shillings.” He might be in league with robbers. “If you will accept my pledge.”

  “Of course, my lady. Shall I hold it for you?”

  “I would like to take it with me. A swap?” She pulled a small ring from her little finger. “It’s worth at least three sovereigns.”

  The constable took the ring, held it up to the light, bit into its soft gold.

  “We’ve a trade,” he said, wrapping the dagger back up.

  Kathryn shook her head. “I don’t need the wrapper.”

  She took it from him and tied it to her girdle, beside her rosary. All the way home, each time the horse crossed a rough spot, she felt the handle dig into her waist.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Item: That no … rimers, minstrels, or vagabonds be maintained … who by their divinations, lies, and exhortations are partly cause of the insurrections and rebellion.

  —DECLARATION OF PARLIAMENT, 1402

  Colin sat at the end of the troupe wagon looking out into the empty marketplace through a curtain of rain. The heavy awning was pulled back, and he faced outward, legs folded under him, one already going numb. He tried to ignore the lovers’ grunts and moans coming from the back of the carriage.

  The Easter Cycle Pageant staged by the Bury Saint Edmunds Mercer’s Guild was rained out. The crowds, not willing to stand in the rain for the Resurrection, had gone home to their drowned hearth fires. The guildsmen had covered up their play wagons and followed. Now there was nobody left to applaud—or reward—the antics and songs from the company of gleemen who planned to work the crowds after the risen Christ had taken his bows. Only one of the poor priests who followed the crowds, handing out tracts against the abuses of the clergy, remained. He seemed not to notice that
all his hearers had gone away.

  The troupers didn’t care that their venue had been a washout. They’d entertained at a wedding feast in Mildenhall in March, and its lord had detained them for a fortnight of entertainments. They were well used and well compensated. Even Colin was tired of singing.

  Two of his companions had gone off laughing to the nearest tavern, seeking other “spirits” to revive their “doused spirits.” The third had sought diversion in the arms of a milkmaid who, with her tambourine, had joined their troupe at Mildenhall. She said their rebellious lyrics emboldened her to run away. But from the way the carriage was swaying, Colin suspected it had more to do with Jack-of-the-Plumed-Hat’s fine feathers—or fine something else.

  Colin wished he’d gone to the tavern with the others, though he would have felt the intruder there too. He shifted his weight to ease the pressure on his numb leg and tried not to hear the sounds of lusty lovemaking coming from the wagon’s deepest interior—even with no one around to see, he felt himself blushing. He longed for Rose, unable to purge her image from behind his eyes. The very thought of her nipped at his heels like a hellhound. The more he repented his sin, the more he longed for the one with whom he’d committed it. Misery puddled around him.

  He’d already decided the troupe would never make it to Cromer by summer. Cromer was north of Norwich; Bury Saint Edmunds was south, in the opposite direction. And the roads were flooded. Not that it mattered much anymore. His stint with the players was rapidly rendering him unfit for the company of monks. And he found the whole prospect much less appealing. All he really wanted was to go home.

  Could it be that he’d been wrong about the wool house? How did he even know he and Rose had caused the fire, just because they had been together there? Maybe it was John’s sin. Maybe he had done it to himself. Colin had seen him drunk often enough. Maybe John got drunk and knocked over a lamp. But one thing he could not reason away. Rose had been a virgin, and now she was not. And that was his fault. All his fault. None of it hers. And it was up to him to make it right.

  It was hard to ignore the squeals and moans behind him, even over the pounding rain. If fire were the punishment for lust, then this wagon would long ago have been consumed by a great conflagration. He looked out at a sea of mud, watched it splatter as the rain dripped from the wagon’s overhanging roof. The crazy priest—that’s how Colin thought of John Ball—was standing in the rain, his arms held heavenward, water streaming down his face, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was nobody left to listen. “Flee from the wrath to come. He will destroy the world, as in the time of Noah. God will turn his back on the corrupt whore of Babylon.”

  Colin saw him often, just one of the Lollard priests—though this one was more zealous than most-—who collected to spread their unorthodox doctrine wherever there was a crowd. While most of the others remained faceless, John Ball was memorable for both his zeal and his appearance. He was a stocky man in a poor monk’s habit, much given to grotesque gestures and inflamed rhetoric as he raged against Church and nobility alike for their greed, their exploitation of the poor. He despised the Divine Order of the classes and preached radical ideas of equality, not so radical as they would once have been to Colin.

  The same liberal notions that John Ball preached were in the songs of the other minstrels, tiny word seeds that caused him to question the Divine Order, too. Why would God ordain that some few should drink fine wine from silver goblets and wear rich furs, whilst others wrapped themselves in rough-tanned skins and drank dirty water from a wooden trough? Did God really decide who should serve or be served? Or was the Divine Order just some grand scheme, concocted by kings and bishops, to keep poor men in their place? The Church called it heresy to say that God created each man the same, or that each should earn his own reward.

  The crazy priest raised his voice in righteous cadence:

  When Adam delved and Eve span

  Who was then the gentleman?

  Familiar words, words of equality. Radical words that said rich and poor, noble and serf sprang from the same source. Colin had heard these same words sung beneath the great lord’s dais, many times. The lord and his guests always applauded, nodding their approval, as though such criticism were not meant for them, but some other nobility, in some other England. But now, on the lips of John Ball, whose eyes burned with fever like a mad prophet’s, the words seemed more dangerous. Colin had once seen him hauled off to the stocks for disturbing the peace. He wanted to stay as far away from the man as possible. But John Ball was less than thirty feet from the wagon. And he was in search of an audience. Flee from the wrath to come, indeed! Where? Not to the back of the wagon. He scrunched into the shadows, but the movement only drew the priest’s attention. John Ball stopped in mid-sentence, let his outstretched arms fall to his side, then folded them. They disappeared inside his voluminous monk’s sleeves.

  Colin tried to look away from the priest, who stared back at him. But each time he looked away, his gaze was jerked back by some invisible chain. The priest’s gray hair was plastered in strings around his neck and face. Water ran from his eyes and dripped off his nose like tears. Colin could feel his gaze penetrating the wagon, drawing him.

  The priest moved with purpose toward the wagon. It was too late to drop the flap. It’d be like slamming a door in the man’s face.

  “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? You would do well, lad, to heed these words.”

  “I’ve heard them before.” Was it his imagination or was there a cessation of the wagon’s creaking motion? Too late to retreat, though; he was already engaged in conversation with the infamous John Ball. “I sang those very words myself, to the accompaniment of my lute.” Now that was a lie. He never had. His repertoire contained only love songs. But his fellows had, and it was something to say.

  “Ah. But did you sing them from your soul? Do they set your heart on fire?” He beat his chest. “Do you see the starving peasant in his dirt hut when you sing them? Do you smell the stench of pus running from open sores on his rag-wrapped feet? Do you feel the king’s burden on his back, the Church’s knee upon his neck, the hurt within his heart?”

  Colin did not know how to respond to such inflamed—and alliterative— words. Behind him he heard a snicker and a giggle. He coughed to cover up the sound. A gust of wind blew the rain inside the wagon.

  “The rain comes in, Father. I must close the flap. I would invite you out of the rain, but the wagon is … fully occupied.”

  The old man’s eyes were the color of a stormy sea. “The old order will be destroyed. Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve? There should be neither vassals nor lords. God will not suffer such abuse in His name. Not the flood, this time. We will cast off the yoke of wicked ecclesiastics and evil princes. This time the punishment will come in fire.”

  “Yes, Father. I will remember.” But he was remembering the fire at the wool house. Whose sin? Which sinner?

  The preacher drew a damp pamphlet from inside his cassock and handed it to Colin before stalking off, mumbling and shaking his head, oblivious to the rain, no sinners left to heed his warnings but those in his head. Colin glanced at the pamphlet, struggled to make out the strange words in the gloom, On the Pastoral Office by John Wycliffe, Oxford. Not French or Latin, but English, but then that made sense if the message was intended for the lower classes. He started to tear it up and throw it into the mud with the other refuse left behind by the players, but instead he looked at it again, then folded the tract and put it inside his shirt. Maybe he should read it. At least the crazy priest had given him something to think about besides Rose.

  Behind him he heard the sounds of the tambourine and the high mocking voice of Plumed Hat. “When Adam delved and Eve span, oh, I feel it in my soul.”

  Answered by a high-pitched giggle. “That’s not yer soul yer feelin’.”

  “Your soul, then?”

  “A little lower than me soul, I think.” Another giggle.


  Oh Holy Mother, were they going to start all over? Colin loosened the tent flap, let it drop. It made a slapping noise, and the wagon was enveloped in darkness.

  “Hey,” the pair shouted in a single protest.

  The wagon smelled of mold and musky animal smells. Colin wrapped himself in a blanket, buried his face in his hands, and waited for the rain to end.

  The rains came to Blackingham, too, bringing floods to Norwich and to Aylsham and as far south as Cambridge. The shallow Yare and Ouse and Wensum overflowed their banks into the peat-robbed bogs and fens, where the only travelers were eels and water snakes that traversed the broad waters. They crisscrossed the lakes, leaving curving silent wakes behind them. With the floods came misery, and mud, and despair.

  Large numbers of pilgrims usually took to the roads in April on their way to Canterbury and Walsingham—fewer trekked to Norwich because it boasted no holy bones of long-dead saints, though some would make the trip to see the holy woman of Saint Julian. But this year, all roads from Cambridge north were abandoned rivers of mud. Only an occasional carter cursed and heaved along the road’s bleeding earth as he pried his cart’s wooden wheels from the muck.

  There was little traffic to and from the prison. Kathryn had not seen Finn since that first painful reunion. Agnes had told her that the dwarf had brought a message to Rose, but he had insisted upon placing it in her hands. The little man had carried no message for Kathryn.

  Rose was delighted. “I’ve had a message from my father,” she told Kathryn. “You were right. He says he’s happy about the baby, not mad at all. I’m so relieved.” Her teeth showed white against her olive-toned skin. “Half-Tom waited for me to write an answer. My father asked for a lock of my hair. See.” She indicated a shorter strand of hair that curled around her face. “I thought if I cut it here, each time it falls in my eyes, I’ll remember my father and say a Paternoster for him.”

  Rose glowed with health. She had started to improve the day Kathryn told her that she’d seen Finn, that he was well and asking for his pretty daughter. She’d put the very best light on his circumstances, not telling her about the pain she’d seen in his eyes. She’d lied, saying they had shared a feast of warm cider and sugar biscuits, and she’d promised to take Rose to see her father after the babe was born—yes, she’d told him about the babe— and no, he was not angry with her, though he might be a little bit with Colin. At the mention of Colin’s name, Rose bit her bottom lip and squeezed her eyes shut. Kathryn could almost feel the prickle of unshed tears in her own eyes. But her good spirits quickly returned.