Great Maria (v5)

by Cecelia Holland

  Maria kept silent. Stephen was probably somewhere out in Iste, but he would come back before sundown: he was afraid of the dark. She bent Saint Jerome over the rampart of the tower to throw a Bible at the Lion of Wrath. Richard should send Robert to the Majlas. He would be happier there with Ismael. She bit off the thread with her teeth.

  ***

  Stephen lay sobbing across his bed in the next room. Richard buckled on his belt again. He walked slowly across the bedchamber toward Maria. “When they get older, they’ll be better,” he said. “When they can go to war.”

  “If they don’t kill each other first,” Maria said.

  Jilly sat on the bed beside her. Her face was wrinkled up with worry. “’Teben is crying.”

  “’Teben was wicked,” Maria said. She brushed the little girl’s feathery brown hair. Richard had gone back to the door into the children’s room and was watching Stephen through it, one hand on the wall.

  “Papa hurt ’Teben.”

  “’Teben hurt Robert.” Who was away gambling or worse with Roger. “You must never hurt your brothers.”

  “Why?”

  “Straight to the crux,” Richard said. He lifted the little girl up in his arms. “She’s logical as a Greek.” He kissed her mouth. Jilly climbed energetically onto his shoulders. He sidled over and touched Maria’s cheek with the back of his hand. “You’re burning hot.”

  Maria shook her head. Her hands and feet were swelling, and the midwives had warned her to stay in bed as much as she could. Jilly settled herself on Richard’s back and kicked.

  “I’m finished with my work here,” Richard said. “There’s a robber by the East Tower I have to run down—I’ll take Robert with me.” He swung Jilly down the arms to the floor. Stephen had stopped crying. Sitting down beside Maria, Richard took her hand and straightened the thickened fingers. “Try to make this one a girl, will you?”

  Maria laughed.

  ***

  Two dawns later she woke up feeling as if someone had struck her across the back with a hammer. Richard had been gone a day. She lay alone in her bed until the maids brought her some breakfast, when Stephen and Jilly came in. Stephen went off to write a letter to Rahman, and the little girl climbed up onto the bed and played with Maria. She was agile as a cat; Maria had to stop her twice from climbing up onto the bedposts.

  The pains grew steadily stronger. She knew she was going to lose the baby. One of the girls had come in, the redheaded baby Jordan slung on her hip, and Maria gave her Jilly and asked her to find a midwife.

  “Mama,” Stephen said. “Is something wrong?” He hurried up to the side of the bed. Maria bit her lips at the pain.

  “Stephen, go away.”

  “Mama,” he cried, frightened.

  “Go!” The pain eased slightly, and she sighed. Like a beast it gripped her again. She let her eyes close. Her body clenched, wringing her until she screamed. Stephen’s footsteps pattered away.

  Blood gushed from her body. Slowly the pain subsided into a tight, cramped squeeze. She was drenched with sweat; she felt clammy and cold and dizzy, and she was lying in a pool of blood. She could not move. God was punishing her. She wondered in a daze what it was for this time. The women came in, trailing Stephen, burst into soft murmurs, and scattered around the room.

  Eleanor bent over her, kissing her. “Oh, Maria, Maria, my dear.” She lifted her up in her arms. “Louise, come help me.”

  “I’m…all right,” Maria said. She was shuddering with weakness. “What a mess.” Two of the women were pulling off the bedclothes. Even the pillows were splattered with blood. If they didn’t hurry it would ruin the mattress too. Eleanor went to help them, and she lay back. No baby. The baby was gone. Like a ghost a faint pain stirred in her womb. The women brought warm water and washed her.

  Someone was hammering on the door—she realized that the noise had beat unheeded on her ears, now and again, since the women came in. Stephen stood at the head of her bed, his face gray and his mouth working. She sat up.

  “Stephen, go away. Eleanor—”

  With Eleanor’s help, she got up, took off her filthy nightdress, and put on a clean one. Her knees were trembling so hard they nearly dropped her to the floor. The women bundled up the ruined bedcovers. Maria’s head floated lightly on her neck. The pounding on the door reached her ears again.

  “Who is that?”

  Eleanor hurried to the door and unbolted it, and Roger spilled in. “Maria—”

  “She has lost the baby.” Eleanor crossed herself. “Take her into the children’s room—put her on the boys’ bed. Jesus have mercy on her. See how pale she is.”

  Maria shut her eyes, jerked them open again, and saw them coming toward her in triple. Roger picked her up. “Maria,” he said; he carried her across the room. Against her forehead, his cheek was cool, stubbled with beard.

  “Here.” He put her down on the bed in the little room beyond hers, whose window opened east. The room was dazzling with sunshine. “Maria. Look at me, sweetheart.” He took her face between his hands.

  Eleanor scurried up beside him. “Let her alone.”

  Maria was unbearably thirsty. She tried to swallow. Stephen came into the room. Tears stood on his cheeks. He crept toward her.

  “Roger,” she said. Her dry voice wheezed. “Take him away.”

  “No,” Stephen screamed. He seized hold of the bedpost. “No. Let me stay here. Mama—” He struck at Roger, who lifted him effortlessly up. “Mama!” His fist bounced off his uncle’s shoulder. Roger carried him out of the room and shut the door.

  Eleanor brought Maria a cup. “Drink this. Oh, Maria, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  The wine in the cup stank of herbs and blood. She choked on it; her throat locked and would not swallow, but she gagged it down. She lay back. Eleanor knelt beside her, praying in a frantic voice. They had not made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Virgin since before Jilly was born. If she went to the shrine she would feel better. She stared at the sunlight on the stone wall, grieving for the baby.

  ***

  She woke up again after dark. Three or four candles burned on the chest beside the low bed. The doorway was outlined in light from the next room. Eleanor brought her a draught of herbs and wine and gave her some bread to eat.

  “My lord is here.” She fluffed up the pillows.

  “Richard? He came back? Where is he?” Maria propped herself on one arm to drink the wine. She moistened the bread in it and devoured it.

  “I’m right here.” Richard’s shape came in the door, from the light into the dark. Eleanor slipped out past him. He said, “You look hale as a horse to me. They gave me to think you were dying. You could at least look sick, if you got me all the way back here—”

  “Richard—”

  Flippant, he said, “I’m sorry you lost the baby, Maria, and I’m glad you’re not dead.” He turned his face away. Heavily he sat down on the side of the bed. In another voice, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  She put her hand on his forearm. He lay down beside her in the narrow bed, and they put their arms around each other. For an instant he held her so tight she clenched her teeth.

  Eventually he said, “Let me up. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

  “Stay.” She coiled her arms around his neck. Silent, they lay pressed together in the narrow bed.

  “I’m getting up,” he said at last, although he made no move.

  “Stay here. Just until I fall asleep.”

  “God’s death, you’re such a baby.”

  His body was warm and heavy in her arms. She closed her eyes, comforted.

  Thirty

  Father Gibertetto, the priest of Birnia, died of a fever. Richard sent to the monks of Saint Mary, to ask them to name another priest. The monks refused, since by custom the church of Birnia was in the diocese of Agato. Richard charged the monks a special tax on their guesthouse, but still they would not help him.

  In the spring after her miscarriage, Maria went with
Jilly and Eleanor to the shrine to worship, and they stayed in the guesthouse and attended the pilgrims while the monks were busy. After the crowds and noise of the cities, the little village made her content. To remind herself that she was a sinner, she meditated often on the Passion, and she fasted several times between Sabbaths, enjoying the lightness of spirit it gave her.

  Brother Nicholas, the monk who had helped her build the chapel, was now the abbot of the little band of monks who lived there. He still smelled like a charnel house, and they marked that he never gave them dirty clothing to wash. When he was not praying, he painted the interior walls of the chapel.

  When she had been there for several weeks and heard Brother Nicholas’s sermons, she went up to the chapel one morning to catch him alone. He was painting an angel in the back of the altar. She walked up slowly behind him, stopping when she caught the first whiff of his stench. Over his shoulder, he said, “Sit down, my sister, talk to me.”

  His paint-splotched hand loaded the brush and dabbed blue flowers beneath the angel’s feet. Maria sat down. It amused her that he should call her what Roger and William called her. His work covered most of one side of the chapel: beasts played in the night forest along the wall before her.

  “How does your lord, Maria?” Brother Nicholas asked. He painted the angel’s robe in long ripples, more like water than cloth.

  “Richard is well,” she said. Dirt grimed the monk’s neck and ears. He was filthy as a boy. “He is what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Absently he dipped the brush into the pot and set the paint down. “What concerns you?”

  “Sometimes—the way he talks—” Maria clasped her hands together in her lap. “He loves the Saracens and their works. He is turning into a Saracen.”

  The monk gave her a startled look over his shoulder. After a moment he took up a pot of darker blue, but he only toyed with the brush.

  “Tell me what I must do,” she said.

  He painted the folds of the angel’s robe. “You can see that I might not talk carelessly of such a matter, even to you, Maria. He must confess his sins alone, of his own will, and ask God for help. For your peace, keep in mind that God gave you charge of no soul save your own.”

  He stirred the dark blue with the brush. “If he is profane or violent toward you, of course, you must take care for yourself and your children.”

  Maria laughed. Before her on the wall was the golden lion, flowers strewn in its thick gilt mane, and its eyes bright as pomegranate seeds. “My children learn young to care for themselves.”

  He held his brush and pot on his knee; his curved mouth smiled. She saw how handsome he had been, as striking a man once as Roger, she guessed. He said, “Why are you so concerned? I know you serve Christ—is it for God’s sake? Or your husband’s?”

  “I pray,” Maria said, uneasy. “I try to remember God’s will.”

  “Who tempts you otherwise—your husband? Ah, my sister. Tell me what makes you blush so high.” He turned to paint more blue into the robe.

  “He tempts me,” she said, “or I tempt him—sometimes when I—when he lies with me, it is—” She could not say this to a monk, and the thought of lying with Richard made her feel as if she were melting. She put her hands over her eyes. “It is nothing, you know—” She laughed a strained laugh and took her hands from her eyes.

  Bent double to see, Brother Nicholas was painting the robe. Ahead of his brush, the paint lay flat against the wall. Behind him it curved into soft shadowed folds. He straightened.

  “Go on.”

  “Sometimes I think I am possessed. I do such things with him—I want to do such things—I hardly know what I do. I should refuse. But—but—” She twisted her hands, all her secret places softening and moist.

  Immediately she was stiff as a pipe reed, terrified that she had spoken of profane things in a church, and to a monk. He had led her to it, tempting her. But he was not watching her, he seemed unexcited, his hands steady with the brush and the pot of paint, his eyes intent on his work.

  “Yes,” he said. “Each child of Adam loves what delights the flesh.” He blurred the dark blue with the edge of his sleeve. “I know your sin in mine. I suspect you are right. We are possessed, you and I.”

  Silence fell. Maria drew her hands slowly over her bare arms. It comforted her to talk to the monk. She felt he would not judge her, that he liked her anyway. Outside, the larks sang like flutes in the high grass around the chapel. Brother Nicholas folded the angel’s hem with his brush.

  “I have read that the true Creation itself is wholly spiritual,” he said. “That this carnal world and our bodies are the Devil’s gross counterfeits of God’s work, and that is why our bodies die and molder. I don’t believe that myself, but it’s an instructing figure.”

  Maria squirmed around to her right to bring another part of the wall before her: the silver Unicorn, eyed in daisies, against the black forested wall. “What shall we do? About our common sin.” She had seen horses kick out precisely the way Brother Nicholas’s unicorn kicked.

  “Our sin.” The monk’s voice sharpened, amused. “You do not care much for philosophy, do you.”

  “I am too stupid,” she said, to make him feel better, and in a flash of bad humor added, “So Richard tells me, that I am a stupid cow, or some such.”

  The brush handle rattled on the paint pot. “You’re not stupid,” the monk said. “But craft or lack of it makes no difference, really. We are possessed, you and I, by ourselves, until we yield to God. We know how we sin, but we can’t let go. We have more faith in ourselves than in God.”

  Jilly rushed in the door and across the paved floor of the chapel. “Mama! E’nor says we must go back now.”

  “Sssh.” Maria caught her by the arm. “This is God’s house, be quiet.”

  Brother Nicholas said, “Why did you come here, my sister?”

  Maria pulled Jilly’s shirt straight. “Go outside and wait for me. Pick the daisies, we’ll chain them.” Jilly ran off. The walls of the chapel rang with her footsteps.

  “I like it here,” Maria said. “It’s quiet and good, and there is much I can do, useful things—new linen, and the laundry, and the guesthouse mending.”

  “Is he pleased that you come here? Your lord?”

  “He told me I should come. In Iste, after I lost the baby. He knows I’m happy here. I didn’t mean to make him seem unkind to me.”

  Brother Nicholas smiled at her. “Now you regret talking to me. I will keep your confidences if you will keep mine.”

  At first she wondered what he had confided, until she marked how lovingly he worked, the beasts in the forest decked out in flowers, and remembered what he had said about the carnal world. Jilly called, and she put her feet under her and rose, reluctant to leave him.

  “Thank you.”

  His head bobbed. “Come back. I am usually here.” Bent over, he stroked color onto the wall, his nose almost touching the paint.

  ***

  Every morning, she and Eleanor swept out the chapel, prayed until noon, and spent the afternoon in chores. After they had made the August cheese, Maria sat under the tree before the chapel door and sewed shirts for the monks. Jilly ran along the chapel wall, stalking butterflies. Two old people were climbing up from the village, bent together like two intergrowing trees.

  The worst of the summer’s heat was over. The sky was a hazy blue. Richard had told her to come to Castelmaria for the quarter-day, and he would meet her there. She missed him.

  “I cannot sew this seam,” Eleanor said, fretful. “It won’t lie flat.”

  “Let me see.”

  While Maria trimmed the seam properly, the other woman called to Jilly. The little girl was running down the hillside. “She never listens to me, the wicked child.” At a stiff trot Eleanor followed Jilly through the weeds toward the village. Jilly laughed in the distance, buoyant.

  “My lady,” said a voice she did not know. A man in a flat cap was walking toward her, leading
a gray palfrey.

  Maria put her sewing down. He bowed to her, a satiny smile on his face. “You are the lady of Marna.”

  “I am the lord of Marna’s wife,” she said. By his clothes and horse, she guessed he was a churchman. Eleanor was coming back up the hillside. Jilly struggled, captive in her arms. Maria stood.

  “My lady, my name is Mauger, a deacon of the Archbishop Robert of Sio, who remembers you with affection.”

  “I know him,” Maria said. “What do you want to say to me?”

  Mauger spread his hands apart. “Perhaps in another place. In quiet.”

  Maria rubbed her arms. The man looked like a moneylender, fat across the jaw. His neck rolled over his collar. His easy townsman’s manner hobbled her tongue. Eleanor came up to them.

  “Come down to the monks’ house, Master Mauger.” Maria took Jilly from Eleanor’s arms and started down the hill path, carrying the child on her hip.

  The deacon mounted his horse and cantered away down the road. Eleanor hurried avidly up beside Maria. “What is it? You left your work behind. What has you so flighty?”

  “He says he is from the Archbishop.”

  “Maria!”

  Maria put Jilly down on the path. “Go to the guesthouse.”

  The child raced off, shouting. Eleanor picked at Maria’s arm. “What can it be? Have you done something wrong?”

  Maria did not answer her. They went through the village. A fresh group of pilgrims was gathered around the well drinking. A local woman waved to her. Maria cut between the monks’ barn and a hut to reach the log guesthouse. Mauger was already there, his sleek gelding hipshot before the front door.

  “Eleanor,” Maria said, “feed Jilly, she must be hungry.” Wary, she went through the front door into the long, sunlit dormitory.

  The deacon was standing in front of her window, looking up at the chapel. He turned toward her. “My lady. Do sit down. I hope you are not wroth with me for disturbing your afternoon.”