“I do not think your plan is working.” A deep chuckle gurgled up with the words.
“I’m glad you find it so amusing,” she said archly. “But Sister Agatha is really no laughing matter for either of us. I suspect she has already complained to Brother Gabriel about the heretical documents we copy. He seemed uncommonly attentive to her confession—or complaint.”
His tone turned serious. “I’ll wager the truth of that. Take care around him. He may be here to listen for more than confessions. He could be spying for the archbishop.”
“I thought of that possibility. I told him we no longer provided copies of the English Bible—a lie for which I’ve already begged forgiveness, pleading the service of a greater good.”
“For a holy woman, Mother, you have a surprisingly practical nature.”
She ignored his comment and the admiring tone in which it was delivered. “Brother Gabriel is charming company, but I’m glad to be shed of him for a while. At least until I can think what to do about Agatha.”
She stood up. “Come, I’ll get you the copies for tonight’s meeting, but I urge you to keep them well hidden. I sense a hardening of the Roman will, and the archbishop is overly mindful of his legacy.”
“I’m going to give the gospels to the congregants.”
“Well, be cautious to whom you give them, old friend. Brother Gabriel says even the mere possession of an English Bible will soon be sufficient for a charge of heresy.”
“I’ve heard that too. The law is close in Parliament, though I’m working just as hard against it. And I have some insight that the new king will lean toward tolerance. I know him. He is a man of reason. And rumor says that old Arundel is dying. Without the fuel the flame will die.”
Here was good news. She was surprised to hear that Henry IV’s heir would be kinder to their cause, but she knew Sir John, as a member of Parliament, was a man whose information could be relied upon.
“So. We are soon to have a new king and a new archbishop? And you are hopeful for religious tolerance?”
“I am hopeful, Abbess. I am hopeful, but I am cautious too. One can never be certain of tolerance when Rome is concerned.”
“No, never certain,” she said. “Not if one is prudent.” A tenor bell tolled three times, calling the sisters to prayer.
“We must hurry. We do not want Sister Agatha to see your arms loaded with texts.”
She led him from the sunlit garden, through the shadowy interior of the chapel, and into her visitor’s room.
“Wait here,” she instructed and went into her chamber and then into her garderobe. From the deepest corner of her wardrobe, where not even the chambermaid went, she brought out an armload of copied scripts.
When she reentered the visitor’s parlor carrying her load, he rushed forward to help her. “That’s a goodly haul! How are you able to copy so many?” he asked. “Especially if your nuns are reluctant?”
“Not all are reluctant. Some are very devoted to the cause. And each thinks the others are at work on other things. I sprinkle enough of the other—poetry, Latin texts, song sheets, husbandry pamphlets—to give us the look of legitimacy.”
She carefully checked to see that a few pages of “the other” were on top, then held open a large sack in which to place the lot.
“The bill of sale is tucked inside the last copy. You know we—at least some among us—would gladly copy them for nothing, but without your generous custom we could not continue. We are just a company of poor nuns. Not a decent corrody or endowment among us. We are extremely grateful for your patronage.”
“And I for your effort. If you and the sisters did not have to spend so much time filling my orders, you would produce enough of the other to keep your refectory provisioned. Just concentrate on keeping them coming. Don’t worry about the cost.”
She was grateful for the easy way he brushed off the expense, grateful too for the depth of his purse.
“How do you disseminate so many?” she asked.
“I send the Wycliffe sermons to Prague University by way of Oxford exchange students. The movement is ripe to bursting there. They translate Wycliffe texts into the language of Bohemia as fast as Rome can burn them. The lay priests can use as many of the Gospels, and more, as your industrious scribes can provide. The people are hungry for the truth of the Word.”
“It is a great risk, Sir John. Why do you do it?” She rubbed her left arm where the weight of the manuscripts had stressed it.
“You ask why? That’s an easy answer, Abbess. Once a man has seen the light of truth he cannot turn his back on it. Not and call himself a man. I could ask the same of you,” he said. “You could easily maintain your enclosure without copying contraband texts. This is a dangerous enterprise for you. Especially if Parliament bans possession.”
“Oh, I do it for him,” she said.
“For our Lord.”
“Him too,” she said, surprised by her own words. Surprised that she had given voice to some secret buried deep, so deep she’d never really acknowledged it to herself.
He smiled. “I’ll not chase that rabbit,” he said. “A lady is entitled to her secrets of the heart.”
She watched him out the door, carrying the heavy sack in one arm as though it were of no more consequence than a sack of turnips. She feared for him: trembled for his confidence in his power, in his ability, in his cause. He would not be the first strong man she’d seen brought down because he trusted too much in the power of truth.
“Secrets of the heart, “he’d said.
It was cool in her chamber. From the window that overlooked the cloistered garden, she could see that the yellow butterfly had returned and lit upon a marigold. Its wings pulsed in the stillness, barely moving, hovering in the heat. The nuns were all in chapel. Their plainsong chants answered the murmurs of the old priest as he read the Office. It sounded like the droning of summer bees. She would allow herself that most exquisite of all luxuries—to sit quietly in her shaded chamber. As the afternoon sun ripened the light-filled garden outside her window, and the cloistered creatures, human and nonhuman, went about their ordered work, she would linger over her memories, a happy miser examining each jewel in her chest of memory.
She drew back her veil, feeling a rush of air against her left cheek. For the first time in a very long time, she felt the wetness of a tear slide down her ruined face. That is why I do it, she thought. Not that she didn’t believe with her whole heart in the people’s right to address God directly, in the people’s right to read the wondrous truth of the Gospel in a language they understood. She likewise acknowledged the truths of the other doctrines the Church condemned in the Lollard heresy. So Sir John’s misinterpretation of her answer had not been wrong. She indeed did it for the divine Him.
But she could have served Him in any number of ways, all less dangerous. She willingly took the risk, laboring long past what her years should allow, for that other “him,” because with each stroke of her pen, each smuggled transcript, she felt his remembered presence. And she knew he would be pleased. Copying the Word was an occupation she shared with a lover long gone.
She tried to remember the shape of his hand cradling the pen, the lift of his brow, the touch of his hand on her skin. His face. But she couldn’t. All that had fled long ago. But for all these years, whenever her fingers cramped with fatigue and her eyes ached from strain, she had felt as though he were with her in the very room where she labored. She closed her eyes, willing that presence to come to her now.
Sometime later, she heard the sisters begin their silent shuffle back from the chapel, then the sound of voices in the refectory as they laid the table for the evening meal. She lowered her veil, lit her lamp, and took up her pen, waiting for the knock on her door that would summon her to a simple supper in the company of women.
Will Jaggers hated to steal from a priest. It was bad luck, and this one looked as though bad luck followed him, if his threadbare cassock told a true tale. Still, the priest probabl
y had bread, maybe a rind of cheese, in his scrip, and Will Jaggers had not eaten since yesterday, when he had begged a paltry crust from the kitchens of Rochester Castle, known more for the white lady that haunted its battlement than for its charity.
Though the morning was well on, the priest was still sleeping in front of his campfire, so it’d be easy pickings. But Will would have to roll him over. He approached the sleeping priest carefully, pulled gently on the strap of the scrip. The priest didn’t move. There was a flask inside the scrip—Will could
see by the outline—and judging by how soundly the man slept, it held more than water. Less gently, he rolled the priest onto his side to free the scrip, then swore under his breath, making the sign of the cross.
Will Jaggers had seen enough corpses in his life to know one. And if he hadn’t, the knife buried to its crude hilt in the dead man’s chest would have been clue enough. Poor sod. Probably never even had a chance to defend himself. Strange, though, he’d not looked to be robbed. More like he’d come crosswise with a band of zealots who disagreed with his particular brand of religion and thought to rid the world of one more heretic. He was one of them poor priests, one of them Lollards, not known for rich living. Just my luck, Will thought, to stumble upon a dead, poor priest instead of a rich friar. But it was not a total loss. With cold nights coming on, at least the cassock would be warm, and a poor priest could get better alms than a common beggar.
Will looked around to see that no one was watching, then dragged the priest behind the bushes and quickly stripped him down to his braies, which he left—a man should keep some shred of dignity even in death. He donned the brown cassock, posed momentarily with his arms crossed, hands hidden in the opposing wide sleeves. He tried the hood—yes, just the thing for a cold night, but not now, not with the bright afternoon sun shining down. He pulled it back, picked up the scrip, and turned it inside out. Only a scrap of paper fluttered to the ground. No food, not even a moldy crust, and the flask contained only water. He flung it to the ground in disgust and picked up the paper.
It was a map.
Will couldn’t read the words but it had a crude drawing of a castle with a hulking round keep that looked a lot like Rochester Castle. A line curved northeast and ended in an X, another crude drawing of a smaller keep, and the letters C O O L I N G C. It didn’t take a smart man to figure out that the priest was on his way from Rochester to some other destination. Will knew of one other castle in the area. Just north of Gravesend. Lord Cobham’s castle. He’d stopped there once. The cook had given him a pasty, a pot of ale, and some bread for the road. It was off the main road, out on a jut of land in the marshlands. A bit of a trek but maybe worth it. He’d likely find a good meal there.
As he covered the dead man’s body with brush—at least he would not lie exposed—he tried to remember the Paternoster but failed. In the end he just crossed himself and mumbled, “Good day to ye, Father.”
Then, feeling much less like a beggar, he headed west toward Gravesend. He walked sedately, arms tucked into sleeves.
Brother William. It had a good ring to it.
“Bless you, my son,” he said to a spindly bush. And Will smiled, thinking how convenient it was that he could give his blessing in English. He didn’t even have to worry about mumbling some Latin rnumbo jumbo.
A wiser man might have considered that an English blessing just might have been what spurred the purloined cassock’s original owner to his death.
As Brother Gabriel rode the five miles back from Cooling Castle, he chided himself. He should have seen Lady Cobham. Sir John must have wondered about the purpose of his visit—five miles north when the priest’s destination was south, and all on the flimsy pretext of saying farewell to two people whose acquaintance he’d so recently made, a clumsy ruse made clumsier by his adolescent embarrassment. He knew Lord and Lady Cobham suspected him of spying. A visit planned to put them off their guard had instead incited suspicion because of his stupid behavior.
He was just now nearing Rochester, this time bypassing the lane leading to the abbey. The abbey. Now, there was a place Brother Gabriel would be missed. He’d ingratiated himself with the sisters and found one in particular who was flattered by his company. Sister Agatha had a very loose tongue. She had said enough to let him know the abbey was hip deep in heresy. Though the abbess claimed to no longer fill orders for the English Scriptures, he knew she had at least one good customer. But how to prove it? Possession of a single copy, like the one Cobham kept boldly on display in his solar, was not enough to charge a nobleman with heresy—a peasant or even a merchant perhaps, but not an English lord who sat in Parliament, and not the abbess he protected either. Though truth be told, Brother Gabriel doubted that one small abbey could produce enough for export. He’d told the archbishop as much in his last report.
Arundel had suggested a brief time away from the abbey and the Cob-hams to ease suspicions. Take a two-week hiatus, sell a few indulgences on the Pilgrim’s Way before the season ended. Perhaps Lord and Lady Cobham, even the abbess, would become accustomed to his comings and goings, be more accepting of him as a semipermanent fixture in their community. Be less careful in his presence.
Gabriel was glad enough for the respite. He hated spying on the Cob-hams. He rather liked them—even envied the obvious comfort each found in the other, their easy intimacy, their wordless communication. But being in their presence had made him feel his loneliness keenly and he was glad to be leaving. He could not get the vision of what he had almost seen in the woods out of his mind—no matter how enthusiastically he pinched his thigh or tightened his hair shirt. He had been on his way out of the wood after watching Sir John scooping out the earth beneath the diverted waterfall and guessed its purpose when he’d seen the pair, innocent as children, enter the wood. He’d turned and bolted when he realized their intent.
But he’d seen enough to set his imagination to mischief.
The old lust he’d thought conquered long ago was roused. And the monk’s pepper he’d taken from the abbey’s infirmary was not helping.
As Gabriel neared Rochester, he steered his horse off High Street toward Boley Hill and into the hub of ecclesiastical buildings, past the great cathedral, the monastery, and the bishop’s palace. Here was his first stop: the narrow Pilgrim’s Passage leading to the tomb of Saint William of Perth, a shrine that rivaled the tomb of Thomas à Becket on the pilgrim road.
He dismounted and handed his horse off to an ostler, then reached into his velvet pouch and withdrew the bull bearing the seal of Pope Gregory XII; not the counterfeit seal of one of the antipopes in Avignon or Pisa, but the original imprint of Rome, the stamp of the true descendent of the Fisherman, given to Brother Gabriel in person. The imprint designated him as an official purveyor of Divine Grace from the treasury of forgiveness built up by the deeds of the saints.
As he unfurled the document and spread it carefully on a table provided for his use at the opening of the Pilgrim’s Passage, he did not feel the sharp thrill of exhilaration that the mere handling of it usually gave him. Nor did he look forward to this day’s preaching and dispensation of Grace to the long line of pilgrims pressing into the entrance of the narrow passageway. They waited patiently. Like customers outside a stall at the fair, and he just another merchant. More devil’s mischief in his mind, he thought, and set to work.
“With your gift to rebuild the basilica in Rome you will find pardon for your sins,” he intoned.
But shouldn’t Grace by its very nature be free? some Lollard’s voice inside his head insisted. He shrugged his shoulders as if to slough off that heretical thought and to get some momentary relief from the chafing on his back, but the movement accomplished neither.
“If you cannot go to Rome, your ducats and your marks will make pilgrimage for you to the Holy City. His Holiness himself assures your penance will be heard.”
But didn ’t Christ assure that already with his death and resurrection? If all it takes to secure forgiveness is
a bribe, then why are you wearing the hair shirt that’s rubbing your skin to one great open sore?
Here was the devil’s argument indeed, and inside his head! Gabriel could name the sin that let the devil in, but how to rid himself of it?
As a youth in the first flush of sexual hunger, he’d gone to Brother Francis for advice. “Discipline,” his mentor had said when he gave him the small corded and knotted whip, taught him how to wield it until the stripes on his back burned with fire. “Think of our Lord, think of his stripes,” Brother Francis had said. “Your celibacy is your gift to Him. As you grow older the blood will grow calmer, your animal lust will lessen.”
The pilgrim at the front of the line reached into her scrip and pulled out a coin.
“Pence for penance,” he offered her. She had a female companion, and he could ascertain, with the help of his accursed imagination, their provocative female forms beneath their pilgrim cloaks.
How many pence for peace? he wondered. How many stripes would it take to chase the devil from his head?
Sir John listened to the preacher who stood in front of his congregation of brothers. They sat on hewn log benches, arranged in rows from trees Sir John and his grooms had felled, all ears and eyes attuned to the brother who spoke to them. But Sir John’s eyes and ears were attuned to a different sound. The sound of hoofbeats, the archbishop’s men, soldiers flushing out their quarry.
“We meet here beneath this canopy of blue sky in this cathedral made by God’s own hand to celebrate the great love and sacrifice made for us by God’s only Son,” the priest, in his simple brown cassock, proclaimed in a voice loud enough to disturb the rooks roosting high overhead.
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