The Chalice

by Nancy Bilyeau

After a few minutes more of this, Gertrude said, “James, take him out of here.”

  “Where?” said James.

  “If Joseph can’t be calmed, he has to go,” she said.

  James stared at her, incredulous. I saw my chance and took it.

  “Listen to me, James, you know very well this is madness,” I said quickly. “We must all get back to the Red Rose.”

  He looked from me to Gertrude and back again. Then, with a snort, he poured himself an ale, downed it in one gulp, and grabbed Joseph. The twins staggered out into the howling blackness.

  I felt my face flush hot as I sat on a stool, in this miserable tavern. I expected Gertrude to lash out at me for trying to recruit James to flaunt her. But instead she studied me with pride. “You said the wind would be dangerous, and you said that there would be no rain,” she said softly. “They were right—you do have powers. If only you would stop fighting me every step of the way, Joanna, and use them.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” I demanded.

  Instead of answering me, she said, “There are certain things you need to know before we proceed. Only you can deliver us from the destruction and the evil.”

  I snapped, “Sister Elizabeth Barton talked about deliverance from evil, too, and she is dead.”

  Gertrude took off her cloak and hood and sank into a chair. From the same tankard James opened, she poured ale into a chipped mug. The first sip made her wince, but she forced it down. “This tastes wretched, but we need to fortify ourselves,” she said. “You must drink, too.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Joanna, you had nothing to eat today,” she said, struggling to control her temper. “It serves nothing to weaken yourself.”

  “Gertrude, just tell me what is going to happen to me now.”

  She rose and took two steps toward me. “Orobas is one of the most gifted seers in all of England—in all of Christendom, I wager. He knows the ancient rites that others have long forgotten. To practice his art at the highest level, he must come here.”

  I peered around the tavern in disbelief.

  She said, “Joanna, we will soon make our way to a very, very old chamber far below this tavern. It was once a crypt for the dead.”

  “We are going to a crypt?” My voice cracked.

  “Orobas can obtain a vision of the future only under certain conditions.” Gertrude hesitated, as if trying to decide how to phrase something she knew I would not like.

  “Orobas must have contact,” she said. “He must have contact . . . with the dead.”

  Necromancy. My knees weakened and I sank to the floor.

  “Christ, forgive me, oh, please forgive me,” I whispered.

  “Orobas believes that we will see very clearly tonight,” said Gertrude, determined to pretend that I did not presently kneel on this filthy floor. “We will know what lies ahead, how long the king will rule and how to prepare the way for who succeeds.”

  I clasped my hands in front of me and closed my eyes.

  “Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us,” I prayed.

  A floorboard creaked. But unless Gertrude had somehow moved across the room, she did not cause it. I swallowed and forced myself to continue.

  Again, there was that creak. And a second later, the sound of walking from another direction. Without a doubt, there were now three people in this room.

  I stopped praying and opened my eyes. Inches away from me were taffeta skirts of deep maroon. As I rose to my feet, I looked at the woman who stood before me. Her bodice was cut low, almost as low as the woman’s at the gaming house. Long brown hair fell loose on her shoulders, even though she was no girl. She must have been in her thirties. Her eyes flickered with excitement, the same sort I’d seen in Gertrude’s eyes but more pronounced.

  “So you brought the bride of Christ, and just at the appointed time,” she said. “He will be pleased.”

  “Yes,” said Gertrude. “I’ve done all that was asked.”

  The woman’s stare never wavered from my face. She dipped a shallow curtsy. Her lips parted, and her pink tongue whirled in a tiny circle between her teeth.

  “My name is Hagar,” she said. “Welcome to Londinium.”

  17

  Hagar picked up a candle and turned away. Behind the bar, in the farthest corner, was a door. She pushed it open and stepped into a narrow walkway. Gertrude tapped me so that I would follow.

  About ten feet down the walkway was another door. Inside was a small storeroom with empty barrels lining a shelf. Opposite was a box heaped with bits and scrapings of rotted cabbage, carrots, and leeks. Tiny insects spun and dove into the pile.

  Hagar squatted in the middle of the floor. After a few seconds she found a chain and pulled it hard with both hands. A trapdoor shuddered. She scrambled to her feet, yanking it open. I glimpsed steps going straight down. Hagar started down.

  Gertrude pushed me forward. “You go next.”

  The top steps were broken, uneven. I took two steps and then paused. I did not want to steady myself by touching Hagar. My head ached, whether from thirst or weariness, I wasn’t sure. I rubbed my eyes. The brightness of Hagar’s candle made my vision swim.

  “Let me tell you of our destination, bride of Christ,” said Hagar, who stood on her step, waiting for me to gather myself. “In the city of London, there are places that people are drawn to for certain purposes. Celt, Roman, Saxon, Norman, all are compelled to this ground, century after century. Do you know why?”

  “No,” I said, faintly.

  Hagar said, “They come to this ground, over and over, to pursue justice. Today, in the Guildhall, sit judges and lawyers. They pass laws. The guilty are sentenced to prison or to hang. It was always so. In the beginning, when Brutus the Trojan founded this city, he tamed two giants of Britannia, Gog and Magog, and forced them to guard it. Then the Druid priests held their ceremonies here. They could be very precise with their knives, very cruel indeed. But nothing compared to the Romans.” Hagar pointed. “Beyond this wall of dirt was a gigantic amphitheater. They held the Roman games there, where condemned criminals were torn to pieces while thousands cheered.”

  As grotesque as her stories were, they drove back my dizzying weariness. The passageway we crept down had changed. The steps were made of quite different material. Pale, smooth stone. Much older, yes. And fashioned with definite symmetry of length and width.

  “Not much farther, bride of Christ,” murmured Hagar. “I heard the Marchioness of Exeter tell you we were going to a crypt. That is not strictly true. It began as a shrine. The Romans built this room off the amphitheater to honor the goddess Diana with prayer and sacrifice. The virgin Diana.”

  Hagar snickered. I hated her mocking of chastity.

  The steps had ended. We clustered in a shallow, hollowed-out area, a sort of cave that fronted a stone wall. It was made of the same light gray stone as the lower steps. Hagar gestured toward an arched opening to her left, its sides chipped and crumbling. “Bride of Christ, before you is the entranceway to Londinium,” she said dramatically.

  “It is not necessary to keep calling me that,” I said, irritated. “I am no longer a novice at Dartford Priory. My name is Joanna—”

  I placed it in that instant, between my given and my Christian name. I knew I’d heard the word Londinium spoken in the last weeks. The person who said it in a feverish whisper, at Gertrude’s party, was Jane Boleyn. Everyone had heard the rumors that the Boleyns trafficked in the black arts

  “No,” I cried, turning on Gertrude. “I can’t.”

  Gertrude took a step back. “What’s wrong?”

  “This is the place Lady Rochford told you about—it’s where the Boleyns summoned up their sorcery,” I said.

  Gertrude remained mute. I turned to Hagar. She stood perfectly still; her face a blank. It was all the confirmation I needed. Orobas once served the Boleyns.

  “I don’t care what you do to me, Gertrude,” I said. “Tell your husband, tell the world whatever you
want about me. I’m past caring about that. I won’t enter into the same devil pact as the Boleyns. I won’t.”

  “She was to come of her own free will,” Hagar said to Gertrude. “You were carefully instructed.”

  Gertrude shook her head, violently. “Joanna, no, no, no.” She seized me by both shoulders. “I realize that you hate me. I’ve lied to you and tricked you. But only because I had to. Please, please come with me. I won’t let any harm befall you. I am a Christian, the same as you. I love the true faith—just as you do.”

  “Yes, I follow the true faith, and I cannot think it is God’s plan that I should be subservient to evil,” I shouted. “It’s impossible.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “We have to find out how to defeat the king, Joanna. I know you’re afraid, but you are the last hope of our cause. Think of my son, and of my husband.” The tears streamed down Gertrude’s anguished face. “This is the only way—the only way. To commit a necessary act that will save the souls of so many good people, for this can’t you put your fears aside?”

  Gertrude’s grip loosened on me. She stumbled forward, burying her head on my shoulder. “I beg you,” she moaned. “I beg you.”

  I extricated myself from Gertrude. “I will go with you into this room, but I have a condition that must be met.”

  Her face went slack with relief. “Name it, Joanna.”

  “Henry plans to take you and Edward and the rest of the household west after his dinner for Lord Montagu. You must leave London as soon as possible, and swear to me before God that you will not conspire, not put your family’s lives at risk.”

  “But the cause I fight for, that’s why I’ve brought you here,” she stammered. “I must learn what is to be done.”

  “No matter what we hear tonight, you must do nothing,” I said. “If you don’t agree, I will not take another step.”

  Gertrude took less than a moment to decide.

  “I agree,” she said, resigned.

  I pulled the crucifix dangling from my dress. “Swear on this,” I commanded her.

  Gertrude bent down and pressed her lips to my crucifix.

  “Now I’m ready.” I turned to Hagar. “I come de libero arbitrio.”

  I glared at Gertrude to make sure she understood. I knew of her conspiracies, her secret letters. She had forced me to this dark and Godless place, but I was no fool.

  Hagar led Gertrude and me through the arched entrance way. There’s still the third seer, I told myself. No matter what happens here tonight, I don’t have to commit any act until I hear prophecy from a third—that is what Sister Elizabeth Barton said. And I will never do that.

  The shrine was about twenty feet long. It had not been well kept. The walls were damp and chipped. A pillar lay in pieces on the floor. A statue next to the door had long ago been toppled—only a pair of woman’s feet remained, rooted in mid-flight to a block of marble. One candle flickered in the corner. Hagar used hers to light two more. The stronger light revealed painted figures on the walls: wide-eyed people wearing capes and carrying shields stared back at me. Strange words were scrawled over their faces. There were two shallow circular pits carved out of the floor. A rectangular stone pressed against the far wall—long enough to contain a body.

  But realizing that this tomb contained human remains was not the worst aspect of this room. It was the smell: sour and rotten, like a butcher yard. This place carried the odor of fresh death, yet the crypt was hundreds of years old.

  At the far end of the room were two pillars equal distance apart. Between them was blackness. But then the blackness moved and turned into a column of its own.

  I froze where I stood.

  The black column moved forward, into the candlelight. A shining white head loomed atop it. I was looking at a man wearing a loose black robe, like a friar’s unbelted cape. And yet there were strange rippling movements beneath the loose robe. It was as if he were unfurling himself.

  The man opened the front of his robe and a boy emerged. He was no more than eleven years old. The boy stumbled forward, his eyes as blank as Hagar’s had been when I said the name Boleyn.

  “Come with me, Son,” said Hagar. She kissed him on the cheek and turned him toward the door.

  “Gertrude, no,” I said hoarsely. “This is monstrous.”

  She whispered, “It’s too late now, Joanna. We cannot leave.”

  A man’s deep, gravelly voice said, “Have you come to preach to me, bride of Christ?”

  The tall man moved toward us. This could only be Orobas. He was a terrifying sight. There was not a hair on his skull. He had a high, narrow forehead; his nose jutted out in a proud beak. Even in the candlelight, his eyes brimmed with contempt.

  “That is not a woman’s place, to preach,” he said. “It is the place of the priests and friars you serve. Don’t you know that they would burn with desire for Hagar’s son?”

  I fought down my urge to flee from this room. “You are wrong,” I said, forcing strength into my words. “You don’t know anything about those good men. And I don’t serve anyone but God and the Virgin.”

  He smiled, revealing a line of fine white teeth. “And me—tonight,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Ah, so full of righteous fury. You think you saw something, bride of Christ, but your perceptions, formed in such a narrow and dark little world, are inadequate to your surroundings tonight. It was not what you thought.” He gestured dismissively toward the mother and son in the doorway, and they left the chamber.

  “Hagar’s son is of an auspicious age and so I was drawing on his power, nothing more,” he said. “In the ancient world, only boys such as him could look into a bowl of shimmering liquid and read the portents of the future.”

  Gertrude shifted next to me. “The future is what we seek here,” she said, impatiently.

  He nodded. “And you shall have it. All is in alignment now for the visions. The handmaidens of Christ, the two who took the veil within the walls of chastity, will come together in this place, a shrine to Diana.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. “Gertrude was never a nun,” I said.

  Orobas made his way to the stone tomb. “But she was,” he said, spreading his hands over the tomb in a way that was oddly tender. “My most precious girl. Ethelrea. So unlike you in the end. But for a time she was exactly like you. A nun of Dartford.”

  “That’s impossible,” I retorted. “No sister of Dartford could possibly be interred here.”

  “Why not?” he asked, tilting his smooth head at me.

  “This is a room built by Romans, and they were gone from here more than a thousand years ago. My priory was built two hundred years ago.”

  He bent down and ran his fingers along the top of the crypt. “This is not a Roman tomb. It’s Saxon. When the Saxons occupied London, the amphitheater was still here, the shrine was still here. They made use of it. Such a practical people. A shrine became a crypt for a seventeen-year-old girl.”

  “She was a Saxon nun?” I said, wonderingly. And then I remembered that there had been a nunnery on the hill, hundreds of years before Edward the Third built a priory for Dominican nuns. The stone foundation was all that remained. The first nunnery burned down in the tenth century, when Viking warlords attacked them. “The Order of Saint Juliana,” I whispered.

  “You’re not stupid.” He walked back to the two columns on the other side of the room. “That’s rare in a female.”

  Ignoring his insult, I said, “I still don’t believe it. There were nuns at Dartford in the time of the Saxons, yes, but why would one be buried here, in London? And placed in a shrine to a Roman goddess?”

  Orobas returned to the tomb, carrying three small urns. He set each down with care, arranging them in a row.

  A surge of protectiveness rose in me. “If you are correct, and the woman in this tomb was a nun in life, you must not desecrate her remains with necromancer tricks.”

  His head shot up. “I don’t like that wo
rd,” he hissed. “Necromancers are fools. Clipping fingernails from children and using them to summon the spirit who will find buried treasure. Or asking questions of a corpse’s head with a mirror. I do not perform tricks. The ceremony I have mastered reaches back ten thousand years.”

  Gertrude pulled on my arm. “Be careful, Joanna,” she pleaded.

  I shook off her hand. “What should I call you, then?” I persisted. “Besides the name of the demon oracle you’ve assumed?”

  “I took the name Orobas for the same reason that a bastard named Giulio de’ Medici adopted the name Clement the Seventh once he finagled the papal election,” he said with a shrug. “It’s good for trade.”

  My first reaction was outrage at his disrespect for a Holy Father. But then I thought, He’s practically admitting he is a charlatan. My fear over the imminent ceremony lessened.

  “In response to your question, I am an evocator of souls,” he said. “We can begin as soon as you both let down your hair.”

  I was certain that he was no evocator of souls. I was full of cold fury at Gertrude for forcing me to endure this sacrilegious rite. All I wanted was for it to be over. Although it was distasteful to show my hair to this man, I removed my hood and unfastened my plaits, as did Gertrude.

  Orobas dipped his fingers in the first urn and made a circle around the shallow pit closest to us. Every second step he sprinkled a few drops of liquid onto the floor of the crypt. I tensed. Could this be the source of the foul odor that still turned my stomach?

  “It’s water,” Gertrude mouthed to me. I nodded in relief.

  In a singsong voice, Orobas said, “Heaven-born son of Laertes, you have to make another journey and find your way to the halls of Hades and dread Persephone, to consult the blind Theban prophet—”

  “That’s Homer—the story of Odysseus,” I said.

  Orobas’s eyes widened. He was as surprised by my knowledge as Gertrude’s physician had been, but he hid it more swiftly. “So you’ve been taught the ancient stories,” he said softly. He put down one urn and picked up another. “The great philosophers of Greece and Rome understood that the dead are always within our grasp. They spoke to them, just as Odysseus. But most of the dead are witless, that is the problem. They see and hear very little. A precious few, when the soul is detached from the flesh, know a great deal about what has happened and what will happen. “