In the stillness of the garden, neither spoke while Anna’s mind whirled with questions—and a little resentment too, when she remembered her grandfather’s lifelong grief for this woman. Then, finally, in a voice so low Anna had to bend down to hear, the abbess began to speak again—about Anna’s mother, Rose, and Finn the Illuminator and a woman named Kathryn of Blackingham who loved them both. “I loved your mother like a daughter,” she said. “And I grieved for years her loss—and yours.”
By the time the abbess had finished her story, her hands were trembling and Anna was fighting back tears of regret for both Finn and Kathryn. The inchworm had once again made its way onto the hem of the abbess’s habit. Anna smashed it with the toe of her shoe.
“Do not be so angry, dear. You cannot kill death. Some of us even see him as our friend. You’ll know what I mean someday when you are as tired as 1.1 know you have questions, but I think I’d like to rest now. Help me back inside.”
Anna helped her up carefully, walked with her to her chamber door, helped her onto her bed. “Grandmother,” Anna said—the words did not at all feel strange on her lips—”I wish my grandfather could see how beautiful you are.” And she kissed the scarred temple gently, feeling its tautness against her lips.
The abbess patted Anna’s hand. “We’ll talk later. When you’ve had time to think about what I’ve told you. Brother Gabriel was asking for you earlier. I told him you’d be in the chapel this afternoon. He could seek you there. He has his faults, Anna, but I believe him to be a good man. He may yet be redeemed, with the help of the Lord and a good woman.”
Anna laughed in spite of herself. But the laughter quickly faded. She wasn’t at all sure, for she had seen the chameleon change his skin.
She went first to her room to wipe the red from her eyes. Then she went to the chapel. But not to see Brother Gabriel, she told herself. She wanted to confront another. So many questions. And where better to invoke the Spirit than in one of the places he was reputed by some to reside?
THIRTY-FIGHT
… beguile a woman with words;
To give her troth but lightly
For nothing but to lie by her;
With that guile thou makest her assent,
And bringest you both to cumberment.
—ROBERT MANNING IN HANDLYNG SYNNE
Brother Gabriel did not come to the chapel, though Anna lingered there until vespers. Stupid girl, to even expect it! But she had too much to think about to deal with him. Even the anxiety that the mere mention of his name engendered in her could not temper her joy. She was not alone. She had a grandmother. An abbess. A woman of prestige and some power. But, caution argued, a woman also under suspicion because of her association with Sir John. A woman so sick and frail that she might die in her sleep.
You should never have sent him away, Grandmother. She muttered the words under her breath like a prayer. How different would all our lives have been. The very thought of it grieved her like a fresh loss. But who could really know? Think of the good the two did separately for the cause, Anna. Think of the books they have copied, the souls they have reached.
When the violent bells tolled vespers and the nuns shuffled to their chanted prayers, Anna slipped from the chapel and crossed the dusky garden to her small quarters. She stopped outside Mother’s—Grandmother’s—door and listened. There was no sound. Softly she opened it and peeped in. The abbess lay as still as a statue upon her bed. A statue or a corpse. Please, no, Holy Jesu. Not when I’ve just found her. Then she saw the slightest movement of the old woman’s chest, and, relieved, tiptoed from the threshold, closing the door gently behind her.
She glanced in the direction of the guest quarters. That door was also closed. His chamber looked vacant, its lone glazed window like a giant Cyclops’s eye gleaming darkly. She’d known better than to trust him, so why did her heart freeze a little at the thought he’d abandoned her yet again?
Had he not meant the words he’d said in the tower room? Had it all been a trick? Why was she surprised? Or had her adder’s tongue stripped from him a faint resolve? Easily turned away, then, for all his determined rhetoric and protestations of love. The burning of the indulgences was all for show. He’d probably already replaced them. Come to think about it, she’d never really seen what was written on the paper anyway.
Or had he been frightened away because the abbess had told him that his betrothed had a drop of Jewish blood in her veins? Then you are not the man my grandfather was, she thought. And I will have no less.
She had removed her dress—these seams too would have to be let out soon in spite of the high-waisted fashion. She was standing in her shift when a gentle knock came. Her heart gave a little thump. But he would not come to her chamber. It would not be seemly.
“Mistress Anna.” It was the young novice. “I have a bundle for you.”
“Who sent it? Do you know?” Anna asked, taking the bundle from her.
“No. A young page brought it from the castle.”
Lady Joan had been so kind to her. She would know Anna was rapidly outgrowing her clothes. In spite of the great weight of worry she had about Sir John, she’d remembered Anna’s need.
Anna hurriedly spread out the dress on her cot. And yes, it was considerably fuller, even in the bodice. It was of an exquisite royal-blue damask with ribands of a darker blue and slashed sleeves inset with white cream satin. It was the most beautiful dress Anna had ever seen.
Generous indeed! But not at all what she needed. Where would she ever wear such a fine garment as this? It was not a dress for a humble scrivener— not even for the wife of a defrocked cleric, she thought bitterly.
Wrapped inside it was a garland woven with love knots of cream satin and lily of the valley and dried pink roses. It was a garland such as a bride would wear.
She lifted the garland gently, removed her caplet, and placed it on her head. A note drifted to the floor. She picked it up, read the words feverishly.
Anna of Prague, accept this dress and wear it to the chapel on Easter morn, the day of our Lord’s resurrection, the day when everything is made new and the world redeemed. After the Easter mass, I will meet you at the chapel steps, and before Lady Cobham and assembled witnesses and a priest I’m sure you will approve, I will make you wife. Your wearing of this dress will constitute your consent. My heart longs to see you in it. Whatever our future holds, we will face it together and will welcome our child into the world together. In time I shall regain the trust you no longer have in me.
The note was signed with a bold stroke, “Gabriel.”
She took off her cap and, placing the wreath on her head, held a candle in front of the glazed window to try to discern her reflection in the candle glow. The woman that stared back at her didn’t look at all like a Jewess, she thought. Her eyes were blue, and her red head was crowned with a garland of flowers. Hook like a bride, a Christian bride. But the candle glow picked out the pearls in the cross at her throat. Now that she knew it was there, she would never look at the cross again without seeing the star.
She sat down on her bed and picked up Gabriel’s letter. Read it again. And yet again. She didn’t know what to make of it either. Was it all a sham? Some new trick from a Roman spy to catch her out? She could not believe that of him. Did not want to believe that of him. But could anything good ever come out of that Roman nest of false religion and greed? She’d not thought so. Might it be that he was as confused as she? Just as desperate? Just as lonely? Could it be that there was more of VanCleve in him than Dominican friar? “Tell me what to do, Ddeek.” But no ghostly presence appeared to give her comfort.
Thinking that she was glad Bek was not here to hear her crying, she lay back across the bed and sobbed into her pillow. The flowery garland was knocked awry. One of its fragile roses shattered, scattering its dried petals on the floor in a pile of faded pink dust.
Brother Gabriel returned to the abbey after dark, stabled his horse, and walked across the quadrangle. No light em
anated from Anna’s room. He’d intended to return before nightfall, to encounter her in the chapel and press her for an answer, but the Lollard priest delayed him. It took some trouble to convince the man that Gabriel was not just another lust-filled, corrupt friar out to deceive some simpleminded girl into a clandestine marriage and then abandon her.
For two hours he’d listened as the man interrogated him. The irony did not escape him. How the tables had turned! A Dominican friar of the order that had led the Inquisition and routed out heretics for centuries now being called to defend his faith before a lay priest. And he could not. Using Wycliffe’s very words, brick by brick, the Lollard had dismantled the structure of theology that Gabriel had spent his young life learning, outlining the abuses of the clergy: the selling of that which should be free, the emphasis on prilgrimage and holy relics, the denial of the sacramental cup to any but the ordained “worthy.” Who among the friars and priests he’d known was worthy? Not the archbishop, who plotted the entrapment of a good man, not Father Francis, whose whole life had been a lie, and not Father Gabriel, certainly. No one was worthy—all were made worthy by the blood of Christ.
It was a good thing that he’d sent the dress provided by Lady Cobham on ahead. He had offered to pay her but was relieved when she refused, saying it was her gift. What funds did he have with which to purchase his bride a dress? Despite its great wealth, the Dominican rule allowed for no individual ownership. Though all the “impoverished” priests slept on down pillows and rode fine horses and drank French wine, they owned nothing. Every farthing Gabriel used, every morsel he put in his mouth—all belonged to the Order. He was bound by the rule of the beggar. Everything belonged to the institution he was renouncing. It would not be easy to break from that kind of bondage.
The import of what he was doing pressed on his chest like a weight. He could scarcely breathe. How was he going to feed a wife and child—two children, for was Bek not like Anna’s own child? He’d expressed this fear to Lady Joan, along with his gratitude when she offered the dress.
“You are a learned man, Gabriel. As is your bride. You will find a way— without selling your soul!”
She was the first to call him “Gabriel” aside from Mistress Clare, aside from his mother. Even Anna, after she’d seen him burn the indulgences and heard him announce his intent to renounce his calling and marry her, had still called him “Brother” with a sneer in her voice.
Would she come on the morrow? Would she be there in her bridal attire?
He removed his black habit and scapular, his fine white tunic, and folding them neatly, put them in a chest. He took the priest’s vestments from his cupboard, raised the amice and stole to his lips, and, folding them reverently, laid them on top. It was over. The next time he wore them it would be as a disguise.
Disguise came easily to him, Anna had said. Was she right? What truly lay beneath his skin? Was there a man with beliefs and courage and honor inside? Or was the man merely no more than an actor in a mummer’s play who took the form and mouthed the words his costume suggested? As a youth, when he’d lived in the insular world of the monastery, he’d taken their beliefs and thought them his own. But faith, unlike silver spoons and precious books, was not something a man could inherit. In the crucible of life, such faith crumbled to ash as easily as his paper indulgences.
How could Anna’s faith be so strong? And what about that Lollard priest who lectured him—and even Lord and Lady Cobham and the old abbess? Where did they find the moral courage to challenge the ordained authority of centuries of received wisom?
In the bottom of the chest lay the hair shirt and the “discipline.” He picked up the little whip, slapped it across his open palm. Such was the discipline of his mind that he hardly felt the sting of it. But it raised a welt inside his hand, reminding him of the legions of pilgrims, the flagellants who had no money to pay for penance, who marched barefoot through the towns beating their backs until they bled while women rushed to collect their blood and smear it on their own faces because someone had told them it was holy.
He flung the whip across the room. It made a hissing noise as it landed among the rushes, a coiled strip of braided leather with little bits of bone for fangs. Where in the Bible did it say that Christ and the apostles ever mutilated their own bodies? Had not others done that for them? Were there not always others to do that for the man or woman who sought the narrower path?
He could quote whole pages of Latin catechism, could read the ancient philosophers in Greek, but he could not summon one verse of Christ’s words to give him comfort. He had preached of hellfire and damnation and offered purchased grace to those poor lost souls who struggled in the slime of their own sin and the sins of others. He had not preached a personal God. And now he had great need of one. Great need of a presence who walked with a man like a friend, a Holy Spirit that truly comforted—not some magical Latin incantation or pious litany or piece of paper with the pope’s seal adorning it. Did such a being even exist? And if it did, how was he to find it?
He lay down across his bed and closed his eyes. Either Anna would come—or some grudging part of her would come to him—on the morrow, or she would not. Either way, he would not go back as he was. Easter morn would be for Gabriel, son of Jane Paul of Southwark, a new beginning.
Midmorning found Father Gabriel waiting alone in the small chapel at Cobham Castle, still pondering what he had done, what he was about to do. But he was not alone for long.
“Were you at the sunrise service?” Lady Joan asked, entering, her arms laden with yet more apple blossom branches and a garment of some sort. She placed the branches on the purple cloth beside the chalice and the candlesticks. “I did not see you, but then I hardly knew you just now. Those leggings, that simple doublet, you blended well with the crowd.”
“I am looking for the simple man inside me,” Gabriel said.
“But this is your wedding day! Don’t let it be too simple. Here.” She held out the garment to him. “I’ve brought you this surcoat. It’s one of John’s. The seamstress tucked it in last night,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders into it. She smoothed its ermine fringe and stepped back with a speculative gaze. “It still hangs a bit loose but fit enough for a bridegroom.”
“I thank you, Lady Cobham. Aside from the clerical robes, these leggings and tunic purchased last night are the only clothes I have.”
“Well they become you, sir. Better than the black habit.”
The light faded as a silhouette appeared in the open door. Gabriel looked up to see an angel standing in the door, an angel with a great mass of curls, loose and flowing free down her back and shoulders. Her head was covered with a gossamer veil held in place with the little wreath of flowers. She was wearing the dress of blue brocade.
As long as I live, never let me forget this vision of her, Lord, It was the first English prayer Gabriel had ever said. He was surprised at how easily it formed itself in his thoughts.
“I’m sorry. I thought the chapel would be empty—” Anna squinted into the shadows.
“Anna, you look beautiful!”
Anna recognized Lady Cobham’s voice, but she was with someone else—in the dim interior it was hard to see—a yeoman perhaps. Even the Lollard priests wore habits.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
It was VanCleve’s voice. Or Brother Gabriel’s. Neither. Or both.
Her eyes adjusted to the light. He was in layman’s dress.
“It is hard enough to make one’s way in the world. My child will not enter it carrying the shame of bastardy.”
“Our child, Anna.”
“I must go and see that preparations are ready for the bride ale,” Lady Cobham muttered. Before Anna could protest, she had bustled out the door.
“So,” Anna said into the awkward silence, “your costume leads me to think the archbishop has not been invited.” She hadn’t meant it to sound as hateful as it did.
“Our marriage must be a se
cret for now, to protect you and the babe from the enemies I will make with this action. But our vows will be witnessed by Lord Cobham’s crofters and retinue. There will be a nuptial mass. A Lollard priest has agreed to marry us. You will find such a vow binding.”
“But will you?”
“My vow is to you before God and our witnesses.”
She moved closer, into the chapel interior, so that she could see his face. “Well said, but Bro—Gabriel, there is something I must tell you, though the knowing of it may make you take back that troth which you plighted in ignorance. But to keep it from you would be less than honorable. Better our child should be a bastard than have a mother who is without honor.” She was startled to hear how much that little speech sounded like something her grandfather might have said.
Her hand went to the cross around her neck. She fingered it carefully, feeling for the points of the star. Did she trust him enough to tell him? His order had long persecuted the Jews. The very fact of her Jewish blood could be enough to gain her expulsion from England. From the only home she had. But how could she marry him with such a secret on her conscience? It would be hypocritical when she had berated him for his own deceit. She almost wished the abbess had not told her.
“My grandmother was a Jewess,” she said.
She watched his face for the telling frown, the bunched brow. But all she saw was the merest flicker of an eyelid. His gaze remained steadfast, direct, honest.
“My mother was a whore,” he said. “My father a corrupt friar even by my own Church standards. What have they to do with us?”
“They have much to do with us,” she answered quietly. His ready response had stripped the bitterness from her reply. “We must understand from whence we came in order to know where we are going.”
“You will tell our child, then? That he has Jewish blood?”
The Mercy Seller: A Novel (v5) Page 42