A buzzard roosted in an oak tree that anchored the hedge about a hundred feet from the road. No need to investigate; just hold your nose and ride on by as fast as you can. Too late for the poor sods there.
But as the buzzard receded from his peripheral vision, the smell grew stronger. His tired horse smelled it, too, and whinnied its disgust, but did not answer when Alfred dug in his heels. He should have remembered to feed the horse. “Just a little further, old boy, there’ll be a bucket of oats for you when we reach home.” He’d been thinking himself of something good from Agnes’s kitchen. But that no longer seemed appealing.
“Come on. Pick it up.” The horse clopped a little faster, then jerked sideways, startled by a buzzard suddenly flying up from the ditch along the road, where he’d been feasting on carrion. So. That was the source of the smell. This one didn’t even make it as far as the false cover of the hedgerow where his fellows had been cut down, where the startled buzzard was now perched in the oak tree beside its mate, waiting for the interlopers to pass on by. His gaze lingered long enough to see the corpse was dressed in poor priest’s garb, or what was left of it after the buzzard’s feast. Probably a Lollard priest dispatched by the bishop’s guards, not by the peasants. The rebels would have considered him one of their own.
His horse had stopped beside the body and stood with its head hanging down as though the last bit of energy had drained from it, yet Alfred did not spur it on. He was unable to draw his gaze away from the gruesome sight. The birds had picked the face clean. Empty eye sockets stared up at a hard sun in a cloudless sky. Some flies swarmed around the corpse’s lower extremities where the birds had not stripped the bones. There was something achingly familiar in the shape of the skull. The stench was overpowering. He pinched his nostrils shut. But he got down from his horse and walked over to the ditch. Gently nudged the corpse with his foot, turning it over. Maggots crawled in the place were the head had lain.
Alfred turned his face away to retch.
It was then he saw the golden hair, gleaming in the brittle sun like some lost treasure, and the skull—he knew that skull—picked clean as a chicken bone, the flyblown flesh oozing putrefaction in the heat. It all belonged to the brother with whom he had shared his mother’s womb. It belonged to Colin. Sunlight snagged on a patch of blond hair in the dust. Hair the color of light. Hair like the angels, he’d heard his mother say as he’d watched her stroke it when they were little. Stroked it in the way she never stroked his coarse red curls.
“You’re one of Sir Guy de Fontaigne’s squires,” a soldier said as he reined in his horse, motioning for his two fellows to pull up as well.
Alfred was still on his knees, picking up strands of Colin’s hairs, winding them around his fingers as though they were threads of gold. Something at least to take to his mother, some keepsake that she could inter in a velvet-lined reliquary along with his bones.
“Why are you sniveling over this piece of buzzard meat?”
He looked up at the sound of the soldier’s voice, recognized the crest embossed in gilt on the leather harnesses of the horsemen. The same crest on the letter he’d presumed to be from the bishop.
“He was no—”
“I know who he was.” The soldier laughed, leaning forward, the reins dangling loosely from his hands. “One of those poor priests with shite for brains. You should have seen the look of surprise on his face when my blade split his Lollard belly.”
A great surge of rage started somewhere in Alfred’s gut and bubbled like bile into his throat, pushing out a roar like a young lion. He leaped to his feet, drew his sword and lunged at the speaker in a whirl of motion.
Three flashing swords hewed him down before his blade drew blood. The soldiers never even dismounted.
Alfred’s body teetered for an instant before falling backward, and then, as if pushed by an unseen hand, it arced sideways so that it landed, not in the road, but in the ditch. It nestled spoon fashion against his brother’s smaller body, with one arm hugging his brother’s chest. The other hand still held the three strands of pale blond hair in his clenched fist.
“He was one of the sheriff’s men,” one of the riders said. “Shouldn’t we bury him or at least strip his livery?”
“Nay. Just leave him be. Whoever finds him will think they died killing each other.” Clicking his reins, he nodded at the pair of buzzards who had watched the whole affair from the oak tree. “They’ll do the work for us. One man’s skull looks much like another’s.”
THIRTY-ONE
For He will be seen, and He will be sought. He will be waited on and He will be trusted.
—JULIAN OF NORWICH, DIVINE REVELATIONS
Magda was playing with Jasmine in the little anteroom off the illuminator’s old quarters. The room that had been Rose’s now was her daughter’s nursery. “Her mother’s spirit will watch over her,” milady had said. But Rose’s spirit was not there. Magda knew such things. Besides, Cook said Rose’s spirit was with Jesus. There was no one to watch over the babe but Magda.
Lady Kathryn was weak and listless since her illness, and heartsick with Master Colin gone, so Magda took Jasmine in the afternoons while milady rested in her great four-post bed. Today, when Magda had gone to Lady Kathryn’s chamber after her kitchen duties, milady had looked longingly at the bed with her shadowy eyes and motioned for her to take the child away. She could see Lady Kathryn now, in her mind, lying in a heap behind the damask drapery that would be drawn against the light despite the summer heat. She could hear, too, in her mind, weak sobbing sounds, like little wounded animal whimpers. She could even feel the ache of milady’s pain pulsing in her own temples.
As Jasmine sang her child’s gibberish and rattled the oyster shells—the illuminator’s empty paint pots with dried residue of color clinging to their edges—Magda looked out the second-story window, keeping watch. She could see across the courtyard, past the gate and into the pasture beyond where the Norfolk sheep grazed. They looked like woolly pillows scattered on a green silk counterpane. Above them, more woolly pillows floated in a clear blue sky. If not for the danger, it would be a fine June day, a day to take Jasmine out to play in the sunshine. They could play hide-and-seek among the hedges and chase the butterflies that sucked the nectar from the honeysuckle. But not today. And maybe not tomorrow. Milady had said to keep close and keep watch.
She was keeping watch, looking out the high glazed window as she did every day, when she saw him, the evil one, the one who had tried to take her in the fields like an animal. She thought milady had sent him away. But now he was back, stomping across the fields with a ragtag band of workers armed with scythes and pitchforks. Some of them carried torches—in broadest daylight—and buckets. The sheep stopped nibbling the sweet summer grass and watched them with wary eyes. Magda couldn’t see their faces clearly from so far away. But she didn’t need to. The tall one in front, he had no soul-light. The sight of him made her sick to her stomach with fear.
Cook had said the rabble mob might come at night and murder them in their beds. Cook and Lady Kathryn slept in the day and held vigil at night. She should wake Cook. She could hear the men now, their coarse laughter in response to what the tall one said, their voices loud and shrill like her father’s when he drank too much. She wished she could say how many. There were more than the fingers of one hand but less than two.
She glanced nervously at the child playing at her feet. When she returned to the window, the tight knot of men had begun to unwind. Some of them were drifting off among the sheep. Maybe they had only come to steal the livestock and they would leave.
Milady had made apian. What had Lady Kathryn said her part was to be ? The one with the darkness hovering around him, the evil one, came on toward the house, bringing a little bunch of men with him. She could only see the tops of their heads and the sunlight glinting off the scythes they carried and their soullights blending into a dark cloud. She was glad her father was not among them. She would have recognized his flat, ro
lled cap with its ragged crown.
What was the plan? She had said her part over and over to herself as she lay awake on her straw pallet in Cook’s room. Now, the devil had stolen it from her mind. What was she supposed to do if they came?
She heard Cook’s voice, loud and strident, belowstairs. “What are you doing back here? Lady Kathryn will set the dogs on you. You’d best be gone if you know what’s good for you. And take that sorry lot with you.” Cook was awake then. Cook would send them packing, and then she would warn milady.
The bleating of the sheep drew her gaze to the pastures. The white woolly pillows wore scarlet ribbons around their necks. They bleated louder now, thin, helpless sounds that made Magda want to cry. The men weren’t stealing the sheep! They were slashing at them, slaughtering them in the field! Then leaving them to bleed to death as the men marched toward the house. One stuck his torch to the grass, and little yellow teeth began to chew the pasture. The acrid smell of the smoke made her nose wrinkle.
What was the plan? What was her part?
Take the baby, Magda. Take the baby to your mother’s cottage.
No, that was Lady Kathryn’s voice in her head. But that was not the plan.
A honeybee lit on the windowsill and buzzed away.
Magda remembered.
She scooped Jasmine up in her arms.
“Hide-and-seek with Magda? D-does Jasmine w-want to hide from milady and let her find us?” she whispered.
Jasmine bobbed her blond curls, giggled something that translated, “Jasmine hide.”
“Shh. She’s c-coming.”
Magda could feel the baby’s breath, feel her small body shiver with the stifled giggle she held back with a pudgy hand as they fled down the stairs to the kitchen, then out the back door to the old dead tree standing sentinel on what passed for a hill in flat country.
“We will hide with the honeybees. The bees are our friends,” she said, her voice so low it melted into the summer breeze. “But you must be very still and very quiet. Still as a mouse. So m-milady can’t f-find us.” They crawled in between the gnarly roots to the womblike space just big enough for the two of them.
“Me mouse.” The blond head bobbed a promise in an answering whisper.
“Suck on t-this,” Magda whispered, breaking off a bit of honeycomb and giving it to her as she covered the child’s head with her apron to protect her from a curious bee. But she knew the bees would not harm them. They would remember her gifts during the long winter, her gifts of sticks soaked in honey-and-rosemary water that kept them alive.
Magda could feel the child sucking on the honeycomb, feel its stickiness as it dribbled between her own budding breasts, where her heart beat the rhythm of a warrior’s drum. It was cool inside the tree and dark and smelled of honey and tree mold and earth, and the drone of the bees made a sweet lullaby. They settled on her arms in soft brown patches and lit on the apron that covered the sleeping child. But they didn’t sting. Not one.
Soon the sucking stopped, and the baby’s breath rose and fell moist and rhythmic against her skin.
But Magda did not sleep. Her bladder was full and she could not relieve herself. She would not sully the purity of the bees’ home. She tried to think of something else. She thought of Half-Tom and how funny he’d been when he heard her singing in the bee tree. How his kind eyes smiled at her. She wished he were with them. She felt safe with him. And he thought she was smart. She almost felt smart when she was with him. Her foot was asleep. She shifted her weight gently, so as not to wake the sleeping child.
The smell of smoke was strong now. From inside the house she thought she heard a woman scream. But she had to stay here. She must protect the child. That was her part. She prayed to the Virgin and to the god of the tree to keep them safe.
Finn heard the commotion before he saw it, but he paid scant attention. He was on the fifth panel of the bishop’s retable. He’d been working in a fever to finish it since Kathryn told him of her plans to marry the sheriff, her plans to take Rose’s child. It had become all there was of his life. He no longer feared that if he finished, the bishop would have no further reason to keep him alive. It was a last gamble. Please the bishop. Promise more. Use it as a bargaining tool for a pardon. So he ignored the shouts and curses coming from below, ignored even the constable’s voice rising loud and threatening above the rest. “Halt, I say. Disperse in the name of the king.”
Finn didn’t even look up. Whatever happened outside his chamber did not matter to him. He worked with the force of a whirlwind, his sable brushes scattered higgledy-piggledy, his paint pots no longer lined up neatly on his worktable. Patches of gold and crimson stained his shirt, and large brown circles spread beneath his armpits. For this last panel, the Ascension, he was unable to see the face of Christ. The Saviour’s triumph over suffering when Finn was so locked into his own torment was not something his muse could conjure. Frustrated with repeated efforts, he blotted out the figure’s upper body and in a fury of ocher blended it into the background so that Christ ascended into an opaque cloud. All but his legs, which dangled above the gathered apostles, was obscure. A suffering Christ he understood. A triumphant Christ eluded him.
Finn spread the last of the azure onto the Virgin’s cloak. The figures of the last two panels were clumsy, lacking the grace and detail of the earlier panels, but haste drove him with an overseer’s whip. He daubed the finishing touches on the apostles’ rapt faces—more fearful than triumphant; rapture, like triumph, was becoming a distant memory. He surveyed the whole. He took an artist’s pride in the five panels—not painted with the intricacy, the fine detail of his initial letters, lacking the imagination of his marginalia and the sensuous, convoluted swirls and knots of his carpet pages that so delighted the workings of his mind—but beautiful in their mass of color, color so vibrant it almost overwhelmed the senses. Even the hurried work at the last showed passion. On the whole it would do.
Send for the bishop to negotiate a furlough: that was his next task. Gain his release at least long enough to get his granddaughter away from the sheriff’s clutches. That was all that mattered. No use to reason with Kathryn. She’d made up her mind. He would take Rose’s child to the anchoress to be cloistered with her, just as Saint Hildegard of Bingein was given to the sainted Jutta.
A little bit of azure was left in the pot. He cut it with a glaze of white and applied it to the horseman’s cloak in the second panel, then stepped back to survey it. The mounted figure following Christ as He carried His cross looked more like a fourteenth-century courtier than a first-century Jew. It was no accident that the youthful figure bore a remarkable resemblance to the bishop, but without the arrogant expression. A flattering portrait by design.
Finn was applying the last stroke of blue, emptying his brush of its expensive pigment, when he heard the shouts from the yard, the clash of metal, this time too loud to be ignored. He went to the window and looked out. In the courtyard a melee had broken out. A couple of prison guards grappled with a score of rebels, who looked like burly farm laborers and seemed to be getting the best of the slack-bellied guards. The door at the bottom of the steps scraped—the unmistakable sound of metal against stone. More shouting, closer now. On the stairs. A rush of stamping feet, then a gruff, familiar growl behind him.
Finn turned to see Sykes crossing the threshold to his cell. Another quick glance out the window showed the constable on the ground, wounded or dead.
“So this is where ye’ve been keeping. Better quarters than the dungeon, I’d say.” Sykes waved a short-sword—Finn recognized it as one the constable sometimes wore—around the room, then picked up a half-eaten joint of meat from the remains of Finn’s meal and proceeded to take a bite of it. His mean little jet eyes bored into Finn as his broken teeth stripped the meat from the bone before flinging it into the air. Finn ducked to keep it from hitting him. Sykes laughed as he wiped the grease from his left hand onto his sleeve. His right hand still held the sword pointed at Finn. “Where’s
yer little midget friend, Illuminator?”
Finn tried to keep his voice calm, though his quick assessment of the situation made him feel anything but. “You wouldn’t be taking advantage of a little rebellion to settle an old score, would you, Sykes? Before you do something you’ll regret, you might consider that I’m under the special protection of the bishop. You’ve already committed an offense against the crown. Will you offend the Church as well?”
Sykes laughed, showing a jagged canine among his long yellow teeth. “Listen to them fine words. ‘Offend the Church, offend the Church’! What did the Church ever do for the likes of Sykes?”
He staggered a little. Drunk on ale or power? Finn wondered, half hoping it was the former. He would be easier to handle.
“The Church’s day is over. We’re giving them high-flying bishops and nobles a taste of their own.” He sniffed the air. “Smell that? That’s probably some nobleman’s fields, maybe even his castle aburnin’.”
Finn had noticed the acrid smell earlier and thought it was just some steward burning off his lord’s pasture to sow it fresh. But it was stronger now.
“And it’s not just here, neither. It’s all the way to Londontown. Won’t be none of them rich palaces or abbeys left standin’ when we’re done.”
So it was a mob, not just a prison riot. And they were burning and pillaging nobility in all of East Anglia. Blackingham would be undefended except for Colin. That meant the child was in danger. And Kathryn.
“Listen, Sykes, whatever it is you want, I’ll—”
More steps on the stairs. A motley crew, mostly peasants, one or two disgruntled guards, gathered behind Sykes. One of them warned, “Someone’s coming. The constable is dead. We’ve turned all the poor sods loose. Now we’d best git while gittin’s good.”
“Well, this here’s one bird’s not going to fly.” And Sykes lunged at Finn. But Finn had anticipated his move and ducked under, came up behind him, and twisted the sword from him. He shoved Sykes hard with his body, then bolted toward the stairs.
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