The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  The colors gave her hope. Maybe this year the abbot would allow her to paint the altarpiece.

  Her ebullience abated. She had had the dream again, although she couldn’t really call it a dream for it had come to her while she was awake. A vision, then, while praying to St. Amelia. And in the vision she had seen what she had seen countless times before: the life of the blessed saint, from girlhood to conversion to Christianity, from her arrest by Roman soldiers to a martyr’s death at the hands of Emperor Nero. Although Winifred had no idea what Roman soldiers looked like, or a Roman emperor for that fact, nor how people dressed and lived a thousand years ago—and of course no one knew what Amelia had looked like, certainly her bones had not been looked upon in centuries—Winifred nonetheless felt certain that the vision was accurate, for it had come from God.

  The problem was, how to convince Father Abbot. Like a bone between two dogs, the altarpiece was an issue that had been worried about by the two of them for longer than Winifred could recall. She would ask permission to work on something more challenging than a manuscript, and the abbot (both the present one and his predecessors) would counter that her ambition was unseemly and in fact verged upon the sins of pride and ambition. Although Winifred would acquiesce every time, for she had taken vows of obedience, her rebellious mind would secretly think: men paint great paintings, women are only good for capital letters.

  For that was precisely what Mother Winifred and the sisters of St. Amelia’s did: they painted capital letters, known as illuminations, which were famous the length and breadth of England. The only problem was, illuminations were not what Winifred wanted to paint, it was what the abbot wanted her to paint.

  She sighed and reminded herself that the life of a nun was not about wanting but obedience.

  Folding her hands into the voluminous sleeves of her habit, she started to turn away from the window where the rainbows of spring had distracted her, when she saw Andrew, the elderly caretaker of the priory, hurrying through the garden waving his hands. When she saw the look of worry on his face, Mother Winifred leaned out. There was no glass in the convent windows since the nuns could not afford such an expense.

  Tugging at his gray forelock, Andrew begged the prioress’s pardon and said as how he’d been up a tree cutting off old limbs for wood when he’d seen Father Edman on the road, coming this way. “Reckon it’ll be quarter of an hour afore he gets here.”

  Winifred reacted with mild alarm. Why was he coming now? The abbot came only once a month to St. Amelia’s, to hear confessions and to pick up manuscripts. He used to say the Mass as well but was too busy and important now to be wasted on a handful of elderly nuns. Lesser priests were assigned to that onerous duty.

  “I’m thinkin’ it be bad news, Reverend Mother.”

  Winifred pursed her lips. She had never known the abbot to alter his schedule for good news. Still, there was no need to spread alarm. “Perhaps he has come to tell us that our roof will be repaired this year.”

  “That would be blessed news indeed.”

  “In the meantime, do not tell the others. We need not trouble them unnecessarily.” Thanking the man, and asking him to let her know when Father Edman had reached the gate, she left the window. Keeping news of the abbot’s visit to herself, for she feared it would worry her sisters, she moved along the row of nuns who were already at work on this glorious spring morning in this eleventh century of our Lord.

  The convent scriptorium was a large room containing a long central table and writing desks along the walls where the sisters of St. Amelia toiled at their exquisite labor. The window shutters were open to admit the morning sunshine. The sisters worked in silence, their black-veiled heads bowed over their work. Winifred had once visited the scriptorium at Portminster Abbey, where silence was imposed upon the Benedictine monks there, although copying sacred texts was not a silent occupation. A few monks were starting to experiment with the new silent reading, but most still read to themselves the way people had done for centuries: out loud.

  While the monks at Portminster Abbey penned the actual text of a book, they left a space where the first letter on a page was to go because it was added last, here at St. Amelia’s. But even though it was the illuminations and not the text that were famous all over England, it was the monks who received the credit. Mother Winifred accepted this as the order of things, for she was obedient to the church and God and men. Still, she sometimes thought it would be nice if the skill, talent, and devotion of her sisters could be acknowledged just once.

  Which brought her thoughts back to Father Abbot. Her dream-vision had been so strong this last time that she felt an urgency to speak with him about it. Of course, she could never go to the abbot but rather must wait for him to come to her. In forty years of living at the priory, Winifred had rarely ventured beyond its walls, and even then it was to go only a short distance—on those occasions when members of her family died and were buried in the village churchyard. Once, she had attended the installation of Father Edman as the new abbot of Portminster.

  Father Abbot…How strange that he should be making this unscheduled visit on this particular morning. Dare she hope that this was the hand of God at work? Was it a sign that the abbot was finally going to relent and grant her wish? Was he going to understand at last that the altarpiece was not for Winifred’s own pleasure or pride, but a gift to the blessed saint in gratitude for what she had done for Winifred?

  When Winifred was a child living at home in her father’s manor house she had possessed an uncanny knack for finding lost things—a pin, a brooch, once even a meat pasty that had been carried off by a dog. Her granny told her she had the sight, inherited from her Celtic ancestors, but had warned her not to tell anyone for they might think she was a witch. So Winifred had kept her second sight a secret until it came out one day by accident, when the whole manor house had been turned upside down to search for a silver spoon that had gone missing. Fourteen-year-old Winifred had “seen” it in the buttery behind a churn, and when it was recovered, everyone had demanded an explanation as to how she had known it was there. She couldn’t explain and so had been deemed the malicious little culprit. She had received a beating, and the father of the boy to whom she had been betrothed called off the engagement, citing weakness of character on the part of the girl. That was when she had gone to the chapel at St. Amelia’s and prayed for help.

  While her mother and sisters had continued to offer prayers in the chapel, Winifred had gone exploring, and when she had stumbled into the scriptorium where the sisters were bent over their labors, and she had seen their palettes and pigments, their parchments and pens, she had known that this was where she was meant to be.

  Winifred’s father had been only too happy to grant the girl’s request to enter the convent, and here Winifred had lived ever since. Not a day went by in which she did not offer a prayer of thanks to St. Amelia who had rescued her from a deplorable future: an unmarriageable daughter, producing no grandsons, contributing little in return for her keep, eventually to become that most despised of worthless creatures, the maiden aunt whom families were required to support and to suffer in return for bad moods and bad embroidery.

  The scriptorium at St. Amelia’s smelled of oil and wax, soot and charcoal, sulphur and vegetative matter. A haze hung in the air as lamps burned day and night, not for illumination but for the harvesting of lampblack necessary for the making of inks. The nuns also made their own pigments: the finest deep blue was made from lapis lazuli, which came only from Afghanistan; to make red ink they used red lead, vermilion from cinnabar, or crushed kermes beetles; and a few colors the making of which were a secret known only within these walls.

  At the head of the central table was Sister Edith who was most deft at applying gold leaf, the first stage of illumination. It took a special hand to apply the gesso base and then the gold leaf on top of that; a keen eye to know when the foundation was just moist, to breathe on it only just so, to press the silk cloth thus, to wield the dog�
��s tooth burnishing tool to a point. A heavier hand or a dimmer eye than Sister Edith’s and the gold leaf decoration would be second rate at best.

  Another sister was painting a miniature of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were both naked, both feminine with rounded hips and bellies, the nun having no idea what a naked man looked like. As for the genitals, fig leaves were a godsend, for the sisters had no notion of how men were constructed beneath their clothing. Mother Winifred herself, for all her years, was ignorant of human anatomy, even female, having never assisted at childbirth or otherwise seen a woman exposed. She was familiar with the metaphors: the man’s key for the woman’s keyhole, his sword for her scabbard, and so forth. But the business of copulating and procreating was beyond Mother Winifred’s ken.

  She never thought about sex, or wondered what she had missed. As far as she understood it (mostly from tales she had heard from the lady guests at the convent), sex had been created as a sport for men and a misery for women. She remembered when her older sister had gotten married and the female cousins had come to help her pack for her journey, how the girls had giggled over the chemise cagoule, a voluminous nightgown with a small hole in the front, to allow impregnation with minimal body contact.

  “Why don’t you rest for a spell, Sister?” Winifred said now to the elderly nun who was about to paint the serpent.

  “I am sorry it is taking me so long, Mother Prioress, but my eyesight…”

  “It happens to all of us. Lay your brush aside and close your eyes for a few minutes. Perhaps a few drops of water would help.”

  “But Father Abbot said—”

  Winifred pursed her lips. She wished that Father Edman, during his last visit, had not been so loud in his complaints about the increasing slowness of progress. It wasn’t necessary to distress her sisters with his criticism. And it wasn’t as though the ailments could be helped. Agnes was getting on in years, it was only to be expected that her work would take longer.

  “Never mind the abbot,” Winifred said gently. “God does not wish us to work ourselves right out of His service. Rest your eyes and resume later.” She mentally added one more item to her list of requests to be made of Father Abbot: a medicinal eyewash for Sister Agnes.

  Bells chimed then, calling the convent members to terce, the third of seven canonical hours set aside during the day for religious song. Carefully laying down their brushes and pens, the nuns whispered a prayer over their unfinished work, crossed themselves, and silently filed out.

  After passing through the centuries-old cloister, they gathered in the choir that was the heart of their chapel: to the east of it was the altar where the sisters celebrated Mass; to the west, behind a wooden screen, was the nave where local people, pilgrims, and guests of the convent came to participate in the mass. The chapel, a small, modest building made of stone, was the heart of the collection of humble structures that comprised St. Amelia’s priory, built three hundred years ago. The sisters, living by the Rule of St. Benedict, which called for silence, celibacy, abstinence, and poverty, slept in cells in a dorter and ate in a large refectory. A slightly more splendid dorter was meant to house permanent residents who were not nuns but ladies of means who had gone into seclusion. There was also a guest house for pilgrims and travelers, although it stood empty these days. Next to the small church was the chapter house where the nuns gathered to read the Rule and confess their sins, and finally the scriptorium where they spent the majority of their hours. All of these stone structures were arranged around the cloister, a rectangle of arched colonnades where the sisters took their exercise. From out of these cold, gray, silent walls came the most astonishingly beautiful manuscripts in all of England.

  Winifred observed the handful of sisters as they filed into the choir box to sing. Once they had been a large group, but now it was dwindling, the members frail and elderly with not a single young novice among them. Nonetheless, Winifred was a strict disciplinarian and inspected her nuns every morning to make sure their habits were spotless: black tunic, scapular, and veil; white coif, wimple, and crown band. In inclement weather or for rare trips outside the convent, they wore black cowled capes. Each had a rope belt around her waist from which hung a rosary and a bread knife. Their hands were never to be seen but tucked inside sleeves, arms clasped at the waist behind the scapular. Eyes were always cast downward in modesty and humility. Although speech was allowed, voices were to be kept low and words to a minimum.

  As in all convents in England, membership was open only to noblewomen. Middle-class women had little hope of being allowed to join, and peasant women had no chance at all. Winifred would have liked to open the sisterhood to middle-class women of means and vocation, and perhaps even to the occasional worthy peasant girl. But those were the rules and she could not change them. St. Amelia’s was also equipped to take resident schoolgirls—daughters of wealthy barons—there to learn embroidery, etiquette, and, those with liberal-minded fathers, to read and write Latin and work basic sums so that they could someday capably run a household. St. Amelia’s also used to house widows with money and no place to go and women seeking sanctuary from abusive husbands or fathers who could afford to stay there—a feminine haven, free of men and male dominance.

  They had once been a thriving community of nearly sixty souls. Now there were only eleven, including Mother Winifred herself. The rest were seven veiled sisters, two elderly noblewomen who had been there for too many years to move to the new convent, and Andrew the elderly caretaker, raised at the convent from infancy when he had been left at the gate in a basket.

  It was because of the new convent ten miles away, built five years ago and housing a relic far more important than the bones of a saint, that St. Amelia’s was dying. The other convent was attracting the novices, lady guests, schoolgirls in search of instruction, pilgrims, and travelers, all filling the rooms and money coffers of the Convent of the True Cross. Winifred tried not to think of the empty writing desks in her scriptorium, the inkwells long since gone dry, and the remaining sisters who toiled over the illuminations and who, like herself, were growing old. The priory of St. Amelia had lost pupils and novices to the Convent of the True Cross because there had been reports of miraculous healings over there: wives getting pregnant, barons coming into fortunes. The abbot had told Winifred that it had been a long time since St. Amelia had performed a miracle. But Winifred thought Amelia performed miracles every day—just look at the illuminations!

  Nonetheless, the pilgrims had stopped coming. How could one compete with the True Cross? Pilgrims rarely visited both shrines—when one treks many miles for a blessing or a cure, one will choose a splinter from the tree of Christ’s suffering over the bones of a woman—and so St. Amelia’s was bypassed more and more each year.

  And finally, who could compete with youth and wealth? Winifred was in her fifties with no family left. When her rich and politically connected brother had still been alive, her place was secure. But he was dead now, her sisters and brothers-in-law all dead, her family penniless and just about gone. The new convent, however, was supported by the new prioress’s father, Oswald of Mercia, who was very rich and very generous. And of course, it had the full support of the abbey.

  Portminster Abbey, set high on a hill overlooking the small town of Portminster and the River Fenn, had its origins in a Roman garrison established in 84 C.E. on the east coast of England that had grown into a port town aptly named Portus, famous for its protected harbor and trade in eels, an industry that continued into Winifred’s day. In the fourth century, the remains of St. Amelia had been brought from Rome to Portminster by Christians seeking refuge from persecution by Emperor Diocletian. A group of hermit monks, living in a monasterium outside of Portus, embraced the fugitive saint and gave her refuge. Over the centuries Anglo-Saxon influence corrupted the word “monasterium” to “mynster,” and when a newly built church went up, it was given the name Portus Mynster. In the year 822, Danes pillaged and burned Portminster, but the remains of St.
Amelia were once again rescued and hidden away in a small community of holy sisters who lived in a priory that hugged the end of a forgotten Roman road.

  A century later, when Benedictine monks arrived and built an abbey at Portminster, there was debate over what to do with the bones of St. Amelia. Finally, it was decided they should be allowed to remain at the modest priory because by then a reputation had already been established about the miracles the blessed saint performed, drawing pilgrims and visitors from far and wide. Patron saint of chest ailments, Amelia was said to cure everything from pneumonia to heart failure—some even went so far as to declare that the blessed saint cured other afflictions of the heart, namely lovesickness. As a result, the priory had grown in fame and wealth. At the same time Portminster Abbey, which was eight miles away and governed the priory, had gained a stunning reputation of its own for producing exquisite illuminated manuscripts.

  As the nuns sang the religious chant for terce Winifred’s eyes strayed to the altar where the small reliquary containing St. Amelia’s bones stood. She pictured her imagined altarpiece behind it: a triptych of three wooden panels with gilt edging, each four arms’ lengths tall, three arms’ lengths wide. In the first she would depict Amelia’s conversion to Christianity; in the second her missions to the sick and poor; and lastly, Amelia clasping her bosom as she commanded her heart to stop in her breast before the Roman soldiers could force her to denounce her faith.

  Winifred’s eyes moved up to the dusty scaffolding that embraced the ceiling above the altar. The struts and braces had been erected five years earlier, when the abbot had promised roof repairs. However, with the opening of the new convent, and all of Oswald’s money pouring in that direction, the abbot had seen this repair project as a waste and it was called off. But the workmen had left the wooden scaffolding, and to Winifred its presence was almost a mockery.