*
Margaret. Marge. Grete. Peggy. Peg. Meggie. With a great deal of shared mirth they’d settled on Meggie as a sweet diminution, and Meg, too, and today was Meg’s birthday. Dear girl. Catherine had a surprise for her. A lovely dress—a gown made for dancing—that Catherine secretly ordered from Annie Duncan in the village instead of the Aberdeen seamstress she usually hired. But Annie was more than adequate and the yellow dress the color of gold proved it.
The friendship between them truly began, Catherine recalled, just after the dream about the women lying supine in terror of the unknown red-robed archbishop. “I can make nothing of it, Lady Catherine,” Margaret said, “but if you wish, I can consult the cards.”
“Cartomancy?”
“I learned the art at court. There was a copy of an old book—The Oracles of Francesco Marcolino da Forlì—that my kinswoman Lady Ashcroft studied and taught me. The cards can be very instructive—”
“Is it not forbidden?”
“The symbols—I swear it—are more Christian than Rome itself. And anyway, we can treat it as a game, a mere amusement.”
Catherine never noticed that Meg contradicted herself. (Were the shifting, subtle time-worn cards a game or divination?) Never agreed to the suggestion to read her own cards, and never taught Catherine the meanings of the faded polychrome pictures drawn on the cards. Catherine never noticed that their daily play grew longer and longer and passed, on her part, from keen interest to obsession. Margaret (Meggie!) had something—information—that Catherine wanted, no, began to hunger for. Catherine still loved William, Lord Barclay. The marriage had been arranged; she had the money, he had the title, but she loved him. What, Lady Catherine pined to know, did he feel about her? The cards were not always clear according to Meggie, but Catherine wanted—needed to know and she kept asking for another layout, a different spread. Time after time, day after day.
It never occurred to her that she, Catherine, had something that Margaret wanted even more.
*
In the early 1550s when Catherine had been a budding pre-pubescent girl of not quite ten, her father had had three priest holes secretly built inside the estate her paternal grandfather named Wellbridge Manor House. With the advent of Protestantism, it was a common practice in England and, her father reasoned, who knew when Scotsmen might also need them to hide vestments and tabernacles, holy water or even holy men themselves? One—the smallest—was revealed when the riser of a step in the grand staircase was turned, then lifted. A second called for putting out the fire in the great room, bracing a ladder inside the chimney and accessing a narrow stone shelf that led to an interior space. The last was concealed in one of the closets between her parents’ bedrooms, a closet in her childhood that had been her mother’s dressing room. A devout woman, Catherine’s mother wanted a place to pray, to keep holy things and Jesuit priests near her. Perhaps because Catherine had been punished not a few times when as a nine-year-old she was caught in one or another of the priest holes playing with her dolls, dressing them in the clergymen’s Flanders lace chasubles and French silk stoles on rainy days; perhaps because she was so very Catholic and William was not; perhaps because she liked having a secret when they married and by law he became the owner of her adored Wellbridge Manor House; perhaps she had a flash of prophetic intuition; perhaps for all these reasons or some other unknown even to herself, she never told Lord Barclay—or anyone else—about the hidden rooms and compartments.
Cues as subtle as the constantly fluctuating backgrounds and secret symbols in the cards. Margaret’s birthday feast. Sharp—excited—hand claps and flashing eyes during a Volta. A fan fluttering, slyly concealing then revealing a white bosom above the décolletage of a yellow dress the color of gold. Something in the way two particular wine cups tilted, clinked, and subtly lingered against each other during a toast. Something—
Catherine was inside the priest hole peering through the tiniest pinhead roundel of a carved oak floret watching her husband eagerly strip Margaret, watching Margaret enthusiastically assisting him, and then pulling at William’s clothes, watching them melt into each other’s flesh, hearing them sigh and moan.
Shifting embers masked the noise of a panel sliding. Catherine silently padding into the room. Her bare feet warmed against the stone flags in front of the fireplace grate; the orange-gold flames cozened her ankles and calves, then blazed upward toward her heart: She stood immobile until, knife upraised, she lunged.
Her aim was true. The dagger slashed past the thin hanging gauze that curtained the bed; its tapering double-sharpened point entered Barclay’s back between the left ribs and punctured his heart.
“Clean yourself up, you betraying bitch,” Catherine said, wiping the eight-inch blade on the curtain. Barclay was still sprawled atop his forever-more-lady-in-waiting who’d given a short scream when he’d opened his mouth to cry out; instead, he gushed silent blood over her throat and chin.
*
At first Catherine felt better than she’d ever felt before. A surge of powerfulness, of righteous anger and a sense of utter control coursed through her. No wonder men love war, she thought. No wonder that kind of killing was called the heat of battle. What triumph, what confidence, what a sense of certainty—surer than the constancy of sunrise and sunset, surer than cosmology and the belief that God’s ordered universe was nothing short of perfection itself. God’s in His heaven and all is right with the world.
Catherine was—yes, she was—invincible; nothing worried her. Her demesne—her own private world—was rife with potential. The body? Pfft. William Barclay—late of Wellbridge Manor House—could be left in the forest where his remains would be scattered by ravening animals; he could be hoisted into the priest hole above the fireplace where his corpse would be slow-roasted and eventually turned to ash; he could be said to return to court and thence, who knows where? There were so many possibilities: highwaymen and pox, robbers and brigands, accidents and mishaps—any of those might be the source of the fate that made him disappear unaccounted for.
Margaret, the betraying bitch who pretended to be Catherine’s friend could also be dispatched—perhaps even to lie eternally alongside Barclay: She could be poisoned or pushed down stairs; or, for that matter, she could be sent away; or branded as a heretic or a witch; or the victim of a hundred varying misfortunes. No question it could be done. Catherine, at first, wasn’t the slightest bit worried about getting rid of the treacherous lady-in-waiting whose rank was, of course, lower than her own.
Love drowned, and then died in the well of her rage and their perfidy.
Gone. I will get these letching turncoats gone.
And good riddance to them both!
An hour later, Lady Catherine lay in her own bed listening to the sound of Margaret crying softly while she scrubbed away traces of William’s blood from the stone floor, the wooden bedstead and her own treasonous bosom. The sounds cheered her. The slow whoosh of the brush, the small heaving air-gulps and whistling sobs, the rustling of newly-crimsoned curtains and coverlets.
Catherine lay supine on her back, her head on the pillow, rosary beads in hand, saying her nightly prayers when she began to feel the first twinge of unease.
“Hail Mary, full of grace… pray for us sinners,” she whispered. “Sinners,” she repeated softly. A tiny rill of guilt—wee and insubstantial as a first teardrop—seemed to course down her gullet. So what, she thought, shrugging a shoulder, there were worse sins and certainly worse sinners in the world; let Mother Mary see to them.
The phrase “murder will out,” rose up instantly—and unbidden—in her brain.
Where had she first heard it? Yes, Chaucer. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. A story about frightening dreams that were portents, about false flattery (just like Margaret!), about illicit fucking! (Just like Barclay and Margaret!) “Murder will out,” she murmured, then shook her head. The shame—the consequences! They wouldn’t hang her because she had a title; she would be beheaded.
She fell silent. The crystal beads lay dead in her fingers.
She was damned. She was going to hell. Her eternal soul had an ineradicable blot on it. Confession to the priest, even to the Holy Pontiff (the pope himself!) wouldn’t be enough—it was mortal sin. Unless—
Unless, she thought, I can atone—sincerely and completely—through penance...
But what about their sins, their penance?
Penance must be done….
Penitents, of course, could be bought. It was never Church doctrine, but the history of the thing was there. In this life… even in the afterlife, come to think of it… because why else would you say prayers for the dead? Why else make novenas to release sin-blackened souls from Purgatory? Why pay—make a donation—for flickering votive candles or a Latin mass for the dead? Yes, money could do a great deal, and filthy lucre could provide that first, all-important cornerstone for a forgiven—a cleansed—soul.
*
It was such a glorious moment in the history of St. Anselm’s that Bishop Anderson had summoned Archbishop Stewart all the way from Edinburgh to officiate at the consecration of the new anchorhold. The two clerics—one as tall and spare as birch, the other short and wide like clumped heather—blessed the small trefoil-shaped hagioscope that gave such a limited view of the altar, then they turned and led the procession from inside the church. Now they stood beneath the outside window, vestments billowing in the wind. Deep-voiced singing of the Gregorian chant, the De Profundus, the liturgy for the dead. The bronze censors that held the holy incense swayed in the sharp breeze, the heavy smoke shredded away before Catherine could breathe in its essence.
The window was shoulder height. She stared at a bonnie little blond-haired girl with a smudgy face who stood leaning against her mother’s skirts sucking quietly at the short finger in her mouth. The child looked enough like Margaret to be hers, Catherine thought. No, that couldn’t be. It was just the one time. Had to be. Barclay had been at court—but then again they fell into each other’s arms so easily—so readily—
The bishop began to fasten the shutters from outside the anchorhold. Behind them there was only a round, latticed hole (like a smaller version of the grate inside a confessional) accessible when the wooden shutters were open so the anchorite could speak with passersby, perhaps to ask for alms or dispense blessings—
Margaret, of course, wouldn’t be doing much talking. Not with the thick metal brank on her head that would be removed only at mealtimes. In winter, according to the prescribed ritual that was only once a day. She was supposed to do nothing but think and pray—and that was fine with Lady Catherine.
Once Catherine had donated the money to build the anchorhold (built in memoriam to her late husband—a nice ironic touch, she thought, which included a bronze plaque screwed into the wall facing the street which, alas, Margaret, that rutting bitch couldn’t see) his Excellency, Bishop Anderson had the thing constructed in record time. It wasn’t hard to persuade the fubsy little cleric that Margaret would make an excellent candidate for inhabitancy; it was easier still to convince her ladyship-in-perpetual-waiting under threat of Barclay’s flintlock rifle to beg this boon of his Grace. (“This kind of play acting should be a skip on the moors for the likes of you, Margaret. If you have any doubts about your ability, keep a lemon in your pocket you can clandestinely touch—then wipe your eyes—to shed tears. Get down on your knees. And don’t get up until he agrees, or tonight will be the last night you lay that lively blond whoring head on one of my pillows—or any other cushion. With the possible exception of a dirt headrest. So make it good, Meggie.”
Like some other anchorholds, this one had a door that was designed to be too heavy for its inhabitant to move by herself from inside. Door or not, you were never supposed to leave. There had been anchorites, Catherine knew, that had burned alive in their cells rather than flee, though she had her doubts about those solitaries—and how much straw they really still had up in the old brain loft after years of isolation. Never mind sanity—mentation itself was a difficult thing to hold onto when one lived forever walled off from humankind. There had to be a servant to see to the shut-in’s needs: food and water; clothes and bedding; prayer books and chamber pots. Catherine had paid for that along with everything else—that cold and desolate “everything else”—that now comprised Margaret’s drab bed and board, her constrained life.
*
The trouble for Catherine began because she couldn’t resist visiting the dank, drafty anchorhold. At first she did no more than whisper a few taunting words through the hagioscope after High Mass. “Enjoying the body of Christ, Meggie dear?” It was so pleasant to think that was the only “body” lusty Margaret could enjoy. She could clench her fists, of course, but she could not answer.
Then after a short time, the days were lengthening, spring was in the air and she wanted to observe Margaret’s suffering more closely. She’d walk along with the servant carrying the covered dish of haggis (secretly wishing she could spit on the anchorite’s dinner or slip in rat’s guts when the cook had her back turned, mixing them among the usual sheep’s pluck of innards).
She’d watch as the servant girl and the bell-ringer opened the heavy door, removed the mask-like brank and Margaret ate—slowly; as if it took some time for her to recover the ability to work her jaws. Catherine convinced herself she stayed through mealtimes to be certain that Margaret didn’t talk to her keepers about the disappearance of a certain local lord and the reason he vanished, while she—for the same reason—had been clapped in a cell to live out her days wearing brown wool rags and shorn blond hair.
But, like all interests—even overriding ones—with time the thrill began to pall; a certain jaded weariness set in watching Margaret eat her food with the slowness of a senile, toothless crone. Catherine decided to begin to pay “midnight surprise” pop visits to her pet anchorite. Yes, she thought, just to make sure Margaret’s belly wasn’t popping, too. Besides, it would be fun to scare her out of the three or four hours of sleep she was allowed, or to embarrass her whilst she was squatting on the chamber pot or picking vermin from her crusty scalp.
*
A full moon rode high above the stone Celtic cross topping the church steeple. It was Midsummer’s Eve. Catherine followed the winding path that led to the anchorhold’s outer window and opened the wooden shutters. She lifted the lantern and peered between the small interstices of the grate. Instead of spying her quarry lying asleep on the sharp twigs and moldy straw that made the mattress of her bed, there was no Margaret to be seen. It’s impossible. She’s got to be there! In her haste to shine the light into all the corners of the cell, it swung erratically. Shadows shifted eerily and she felt her heart quicken.
She entered the church and set the lantern down on the pew closest to the anchorhold’s entryway. Fueled by anxiety, she pushed at the heavy door. It squealed and grated against the stony floor, but finally yielded. Moonlight shimmered and glittering straw-dust danced on the swirling air. She stood blinking with disbelief, then retreated to snatch the lantern. Nothing. Nothing!
Her first inclination was to go and wake the sexton—not just to begin the hunt for the missing woman (missing whore!), but to ring the bells, to rouse the bishop, to sound the alarm and wake the very dead!
Catherine stood in that silvery, shifting chiaroscuro, heart beating madly—so wildly that at first she was aware of no other sound. Then, gradually, she heard a noise that sounded like the humming whir of a thousand flying insects. She blinked twice.
Margaret—naked except for a kind of muddy daub smeared from her head to her toes and bathed in moonshadow and moonlight—gently drifted down to the grimy floor from the highest roof beams.
*
“How now, Mistress Catherine?” Margaret walked (sashaying her hips like some incarnation of the goddamn Queen of Sheba) toward the bedstead where she slid her hands under the makeshift mattress and retrieved the filthy rag of a woolen robe. She slipped it on over her nakedness. “Cat got yo
ur tongue, Your Ladyship?” She laughed. “Let me help your poor mind—so confused and befuddled even though you weren’t the one living in near-total isolation—to grasp the situation.” Light and dark played over her. She rinsed her arms and face in the basin, then stood with her thin white moon-witched hands on her flat hips and stared at Catherine. “So uncertain, the cat must have your eyes, too…”
Catherine nodded. True, she was angry, but she was confused as well, and for the moment, her confusion and the resultant curiosity outweighed her irritation. “How…?” she began.
“How? How did I disappear? How did I seem to hang splayed from the ceiling and float gracefully—feet first—to the ground? Hmmm…”
“Yes, how?”
“Well, My dear Ladyship, it’s the same answer. In a word, transvection—”
“Trans—?”
“Transvection. Yes. Most commonly achieved by smearing flying ointment into the hair and skin and then… well, flying.” She paused. “You look so bewildered. And yet, you were right there—just beyond the squint, if I’m not mistaken—when His Grace and His Eminence chanted the liturgy of the dead. The De Profundis. Ringing any bells, Lady Catherine?”
Catherine nodded, and some of the dumb-cow look left her eyes. She was still befuddled, but she did remember the dedication ceremony.
“Good,” said Margaret, “because being locked in here liberated me completely. Think of the whole process like the miracle of transubstantiation. The wafer and the wine that become Christ’s body and blood.” She paused. “Only in this case, one can actually witness the miracle.” She gave a little laugh. “Certainly Bishop Anderson would call it a miracle if he could have seen me—not two hours ago—dancing at the very top of the Brocken in the Harz mountains in Germany…”
Never Fear - The Tarot: Do You Really Want To Know? Page 22