The Mercy Seller: A Novel (v5)

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  Any other time Kathryn might have laughed at the spectacle. But not today. She raised the thin gauze of veil that usually covered her scarred face, so that the two women could see the displeasure in her countenance.

  Sister Matilde’s mouth froze on the complaint she was about to utter, her lips pursing in a perfect O. Sister Agatha’s mouth clamped down into a thin line, her bottom lip protruding slightly, pushed up by her heavy jowls. Sister Matilde’s eyes sparked blue fire. Sister Agatha’s squinted into little pinpoints of pure anger in a face the color of a boiled ham.

  Kathryn sat back down, grateful for the barrier of the wide oak desk between her and the storm. She motioned for them to sit also.

  Matilde squeezed her wide posterior into an opposing chair.

  The abbess reflected idly that both women might need to be rotated to garden duty. Their sedentary occupations were not serving them well.

  Agatha remained standing, tapping her foot. “Reverend Mother, it’s disgraceful. It’s unbecoming. It’s … it’s heresy!”

  “Your intemperance, Sister, is likewise unbecoming. Tell me, calmly, what it is that has you so overwrought.”

  Matilde answered for her. “Overwrought seems to be Sister’s natural state. Maybe she requires a draught to improve her bowel function.”

  Kathryn favored Sister Matilde with a disapproving look. The nun ducked her head to hide the smirk at her well-delivered barb, but Kathryn knew she would later relate it to her sisters to their great amusement. While Sister Matilde, because of her humor and her kindness and her wit, was well loved in their little cloistered community, Sister Agatha’s self-righteous piety did not make her popular among the nuns. They should have left her behind at Saint Faith when they split off into their new abbey. But Agatha was an excellent amanuensis. Her script was flawless, her hand flowing.

  “Sister Agatha’s bowels are not your concern, Sister Matilde.”

  Emboldened by the rebuke, Sister Agatha scolded Matilde, “You’d better save your concern for the state of your immortal soul.”

  Sister Matilde looked up, no longer smiling. “It’s the English Bible, Reverend Mother. Sister Agatha takes it upon herself to chastise me for reading it.”

  “It is only out of concern for Sister Matilde’s soul.” Agatha’s round little eyes bulged in righteous indignation.

  Matilde’s usual tender visage hardened. “Look to your own soul, Sister. Leave mine alone. Our Lord said to get the beam out of your own eye before—”

  Kathryn raised her hand. “Enough! Sister Agatha, you know the rule here. You know that we serve as amanuenses for all manner of literature. Copied pages are what we produce. As other houses produce bread or wine or cheese, we make books. Making books provides us with a roof over our own heads and allows us to minister to the poor of Rochester.”

  “But Reverend Mother, Sister Matilde was not merely copying it. She was reading it.” Her voice shrilled in outrage. “I saw her lips moving!”

  Kathryn lowered her own voice to counter Agatha’s shrillness. “It might do us all good to read it. The words of our Lord in any language are instructive to our souls.”

  Sister Agatha’s face flushed as red as the scarlet cloth covering the Holy Virgin’s shrine behind her. “Profanity. That’s what it is—”

  “We have had this discussion before. Many times, Sister.” Kathryn lowered her veil to indicate dismissal. “If you don’t wish to copy the Wycliffe Bible, you may work on The Life of Saint Margaret. We have several orders for that. Or Julian’s Divine Revelations, or Saint Bride’s.”

  “Saint Bridget’s? I shall not touch that either. There’s another woman with too much learning for her own good.”

  The abbess felt her spine stiffen of its own accord. “Perhaps you need to work in the garden for a while. A little tilling of the soil, a little gathering of the fruits, might give your scribe’s hands a necessary rest.”

  Sister Agatha’s face betrayed her shock. “But I’m the best—”

  “Pride is a deadly sin, Sister. And spiritual pride is the most damning of all.”

  In the moment before Agatha lowered her head and murmured, “As you wish, Reverend Mother,” Kathryn saw the resentment in her eyes and knew that it would fester.

  But she would not deal with that today. Not on a day when she had to reconcile the abbey’s flagging accounts. Not on a day after she had slept so badly, her dreams haunted with old memories, old yearnings.

  After the two women departed, this time progressing through the door in single file—one sober, one scarcely concealing her animosity—Kathryn covered her right eye with her hand, looked out into the room. This was a test she performed periodically. Lately, her vision in her damaged eye seemed to be improving. She could now tell light from dark, sometimes even shapes and shadows, insubstantial as ghosts.

  Today, through the haze of light she saw such a form, an old ghost. He was so real she could see the faintest smudge of azure paint clinging to the edge of the sable-tipped brush he held in his hand, the azure that matched the blue of his eyes. Her old heart almost stopped its beating. She reached out to touch him. But where his hand had been, her hand encountered only the cool metal bar of the door left open by the departing nuns.

  A trick of the mind. Nothing more.

  But the seeing of it had left her with a feeling of unease, a wrinkle in the peace she had worn like a mantle for these many years. It was probably just disquiet brought on by the warring nuns whose souls were in her care. But disquiet it was. And more. A kind of aching loneliness and impending loss as one might feel at the deathbed of a loved one.

  Foolishness. An old woman’s fancy. Best to work through it; experience had taught her that. Whenever her spirit sagged, she picked up her quill and dipped it in a pot of ink. She did that now.

  But she did not apply it immediately to the parchment over which the nib was poised. Instead her mind was snared by the image of a child pretend-painting with the light from a sunbeam. The image brought tears. She wondered—not for the first time over a span of years—what had become of Colin’s little daughter. Her granddaughter would be a woman grown now. Probably with children of her own. And Finn? No. She would not think of that. She’d long ago made peace with her choice. She would not gainsay it this late in her life.

  She didn’t know how long she sat thus before her reverie was interrupted by a gentle knock.

  “Mother, there is a friar to see you. A Brother Gabriel. He says he’s been sent by the archbishop.”

  “I shall attend him in the parlor,” she said.

  A friar? What business would the learned preacher have here? She hoped he was only seeking hospitality for the night. The friars with their “pure” doctrine made her nervous. When she read of the Pharisees who challenged Christ, she pictured them in Dominican robes.

  She covered up the manuscript she’d been copying and checked to see her face was covered.

  With an unquiet soul she went out to meet the friar, closing the door firmly behind her.

  SEVEN

  Do not fear those who kill the body … everyone

  whether priest or layman who knows the truth ought to

  defend it to the death; otherwise he is a traitor of the

  truth and of Christ as well.

  —JAN HUS IN A LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF

  PILSEN, OCTOBER 1411

  As Anna hurried across Old Town Square, the light was bouncing up from the cobblestones in waffling waves of heat. Týn Church, with its twin irregular towers bristling with spires and pinnacles, shimmered in the Prague summer sun.

  It was eerily quiet. Not even the pigeons strutted on its steps.

  She went up to the great doors. No notice of public punishments or ecclesiastical censure posted there. None posted on the town hall doors either.

  This feeling of foreboding was silliness. The church was quiet because of the heat. Her imagination was running away with her. Martin and the others had probably been threatened and then released.
She had determined to go back and tell her grandfather that he need not worry, that this was obviously a fool’s errand and her time was better spent washing their dirty linen, when she heard faraway shouting coming from the direction of the Vltava River. More specifically from the stone bridge. Angry shouts. Catcalls.

  As she moved toward the crowd, her anxiety increased. A public whipping? She did not want to see the poor unfortunate. She’d seen a public whipping once. She should go instead to the university and see if the students had been released.

  The crowd noise increased.

  The whipping she’d witnessed had been a poacher caught in Hradcany while killing the king’s deer. They’d brought him to the Old Town Square to make a lesson for the people there. A mercy, a boon granted by King Wenceslas, the burghers agreed, to whip the villain instead of hanging him as the law decreed.

  It had not looked like mercy to Anna. They’d stripped him to the waist, this man whose crime had been to find meat for his family in the dead of winter. The king’s guard had tied him to a pole while his wife watched them turn his back to raw meat. The soldiers had held her back as she’d struggled and cried out her husband’s name. Karl. His name had been Karl. He’d been about Martin’s age.

  Martin! But no whippings were carried out by the king’s men, and the king was a supporter of the Hussites. Wasn’t he?

  Besides, she reasoned, they would not hold a whipping on the bridge.

  A dunking, then! The bishop’s public warning for them all. The bishop would not need the king’s permission for that. Martin hated the water. He would not even grapple for fish in the shallows.

  She picked up her skirts and ran.

  As she approached the castellated tower entrance to the bridge, she encountered students running the other way. One pushed her roughly aside. “Watch where you’re—”

  “Anna.” Someone, an older man, grabbed her arm. It was Jerome. “No. Anna, don’t. You don’t want to see—”

  “I have to go to him. Whatever his punishment is, he needs to know I’m there to give him courage.” She wrenched free, her heart pounding, started to push through the crowd.

  Past the tower gate.

  “Anna, they will see you there, and you—”

  Past the great bronze crucifix that decorated it.

  She was vaguely aware of Jerome tugging at her skirt. Then it pulled free.

  “Anna, please. Think of your grandfather, please. You’ll endanger us all.”

  She pushed on, not knowing if he was still behind her. Not caring. She broke to the front of the crowd, suddenly grown silent.

  All eyes gazed upward. Hers followed.

  There, beside the great bronze crucifix of Jesus, stood three poles. Like the three crosses on Golgotha, she would later think when, in the heart of the night, again and again, her mind replayed the grisly images.

  On the top of each pole was a human head.

  Jan from the trivium on the left. And Stasik on the right.

  And impaled on the middle pole was the once beautiful head of Martin, his curly black hair dripping blood onto the stone of the bridge.

  Finn watched for Anna’s return. He had seen her cross the square, then seen her disappear in the direction of the river. His anxiety and the bright light spilling through the open door made his head throb. Little shallow breaths were all he could manage, and he knew he had a fever. He could tell from the parched skin on his lips and the way his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. And he was cold. Despite the waves of heat dancing in the sunlight, he shivered beneath a blanket, longing to close his eyes against the brightness. But he did not. He watched for Anna.

  She appeared at last in the doorway.

  She did not cross the threshold, just leaned into the post. Her face was bleached white and her skin drawn tight against the bones.

  Fear clutched at his heart. It had finally come. And for all the archbishop’s threats and Hus’s warnings, it had caught him unprepared.

  He got up and moved as rapidly as he could to the door to catch her before she fell.

  Her eyes were wide and staring. “Ddeek, they have killed Martin. They … they cut off his head.” Her voice broke on the last word, filled with disbelief, and so low he could not have heard her had he not been holding her in his arms. “All their heads.”

  Beheaded? Had he heard aright? He had to stay calm for her sake.

  “It will be all right, Anna.” He thought, even as he said those same words he always used whenever she’d cried, how foolish he sounded. This was not some child’s skinned knee, some favorite toy broken. The man she was to marry was killed almost in front of her. He should not have sent her. He should have gone himself. But he’d not thought it would come to this. Please, dear God, let her have been spared the actual execution. “Tell me, child.”

  “On the bridge. Their heads on pikes … on the bridge.”

  He guided her to the wooden bench beneath the window, feeling the weight of her in his arms, on his heart. “Tell me all of it,” he said as he stroked her head. “I am here.”

  “They are dead,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. “Their heads on poles on the bridge. All three. Jan, Stasik. And Martin. Martin is in the middle. Like Christ.”

  He closed his eyes and drew a pained breath at the vision her words conjured. He had known the persecution was coming, but he had not thought it would burst like a summer storm over their heads. He had thought they would have more warning. What thunder they had heard had been distant, far on the horizon. He’d thought there would be time to protect her, if not himself. What a selfish, blind fool he had been!

  “Martin was going to ask you. I made him wait. I should not have made him … He would not have been so careless. It is my fault … my fault … for making him wait.” She started to sob, great ragged breaths tearing at her chest, stealing both her breath and his.

  “Shush, child. Of course it’s not your fault. If anyone besides the bishop is to blame, it is I. Not you. I should have seen it coming.”

  She started to stand up but sank to the floor, hugging his feet, hiding her face against his knees. He could feel the quivering of her shoulders through the cloth of his breeches as she struggled to gain control.

  When Anna was a child, he’d never taken her to look at the heads of the criminals on pikes as other parents did—the object lesson: behave or your head might wind up here someday. Or if you can’t behave at least be smart. He should have, he thought. It would not be so hard for her now. It would be a common thing. It was a common thing. And yet this time it’s lads you know and love, lads you helped lead into danger, a voice inside his head insisted.

  Stasik and Jan. And Martin. Their young lives snuffed out like candle flames. And what of Anna now?

  His old heart hammered erratically. He sucked air to fill lungs that felt as though they were leaking. Time! There was not enough time!

  “Hush, Anna. Pull yourself together.” The words came out in a wheeze. “You must be strong. We can mourn for Martin and the others later. Right now we must act to save ourselves. Get up and go fetch Jerome.”

  “Jerome was there, Ddeek. Jerome was at the bridge, where they … where I saw …”

  “I know, child, I know what you saw. But we have not much time.” He gathered more breath, felt the wheezing in his chest. “Jerome will go back to the university to warn the others. Tell him I need to see him right away. I must give him instructions.” He touched her cheek. It felt cool against the palm of his hand.

  She lifted her face from his knees and looked up at him, rubbing the tears from her eyes with her sleeve. Now, she held the back of her hand to his forehead. It was as cool against his face as her face had been against his hand.

  “Ddeek, you’re burning up! I must get you to bed. Find you a doctor.” But she did not move. “I must … find a doctor …”

  “Anna—”

  She moved like a sleepwalker as she put his arm around her neck, and standing up, half lifted, half dragged
him from the chair. As they struggled up the stairs together, the room swirled around him.

  “Find a doctor. That’s the next thing …” She had stopped crying, but her voice sounded strange and far away.

  “No, Anna … Jerome—”

  “Do not worry about Martin,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “He has no need of Jerome now. The angels will bear his soul to heaven. But you and I are still here, and we must fend for ourselves. I have to take care of you now. I should have taken care of Martin. I still have you. I will take care of you.”

  He opened his mouth to answer her, but there was not enough breath. He felt the bed rush up to meet him.

  When Finn woke hours later, Anna was leaning over him, bathing his forehead.

  “Ddeek, you’re awake. Thank God.” She smiled bravely, as though the horror she had witnessed had only been a bad dream.

  She looked like his beautiful bride, like Rebekka the day he had pledged to protect her—but he’d been unable to protect her from death—and like their daughter too, their Rose, who had died giving birth to Anna. And when she touched his face so gently, he saw Kathryn. The day Kathryn had come to him, in the prison at Norwich, with his tiny granddaughter in her hands and offered her up like a sacrifice.

  “Jerome came while you were sleeping, Ddeek. He brought you this.” She spooned some vile-tasting liquid the color of squid ink into his mouth. He almost choked swallowing it. “Jerome says he thinks we will be safe enough for a while. The authorities will wait to see how this works out. If it shuts Hus up. They will not risk the anger of the crowd again so soon.”

  Finn tried to prop himself up, but when he was too weak to speak above a whisper, he motioned for her to lean over him.

  “You must leave, Anna. You must go to England. Get a paper and a quill. Write down the name I’m going to give you.”

  “Shush, Ddeek. We” she pleaded. “We must go. I will not leave you.”

  He could see fear and grief and disbelief in her eyes, but he had no time to assuage it.