The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  He did not praise the work—he never did, and Winifred never expected it. But she saw the admiration nonetheless in his eyes and felt a moment of pride. Therefore she thought this would be a good time to bring up her request once more to paint an altarpiece.

  He patiently listened to her explanation—“I wish to give St. Amelia something in return for all she has given me”—but he already intended to turn her down. Edman couldn’t afford to have Winifred take on a project that would take months—precious time stolen from teaching young nuns how to do illuminations.

  He cleared his throat and tried to sound as if he had given her request serious thought. “I am sure St. Amelia feels you have done enough in her service all these years, Mother Prioress.”

  “Then why can I not stop thinking about the altarpiece? It is in my mind day and night.”

  “Perhaps you need to pray on it,” he suggested.

  “I have done, and the only response I seem to get is more thoughts about the altarpiece. I even dream of it now. I feel the hand of God directing me.”

  He pursed his lips. This was dangerous thinking, that a woman take her orders directly from God. What if all women got this notion? Then wives would not obey husbands, daughters would not obey fathers and society would be thrown into chaos.

  “As it turns out, Mother Prioress, St. Amelia’s will not have any use for an altarpiece.”

  Her nearly nonexistent eyebrows arched. “How so?”

  “I am afraid,” he cleared his throat again, nervously this time, “that St. Amelia’s is to be closed down.”

  She stared at him. Silence descended over the chapter house. Through heavy doors came the sound of whispering footsteps. Finally she said, “What do you mean?”

  He stiffened his spine. “I mean, Mother Winifred, that these old buildings are beyond redemption and a waste of good money to attempt repairs. I have conferred with the Bishop and he agrees that you and your sisters should be relocated to the Convent of the True Cross and this place closed up.”

  “But our work—the illuminations.”

  “That will carry on, of course. And you will teach your skills to a younger generation of nuns that they can continue the tradition.”

  She went numb. Of all the possible bad news she had anticipated, this had not even brushed her mind. “And what of St. Amelia?”

  “She will be given her own chapel in the new cathedral at Portminster.”

  The hour was late, the chapel stood empty and silent, except for a lone figure illuminated by the flickering of a single candle. Winifred, on her knees.

  She had never known such despair. The day that had started out with so much color and promise was now as bleak as an English winter. To be moved from the only home she knew! To have to start, at this late stage in her life, to teach a lifetime of skills and knowledge to young girls. To have to tell her own dear, elderly sisters that they were to be relocated to unfamiliar lodgings where they were going to have to adjust, after years of familiar routine, to new ways and customs. How could such a thing have come to pass? Did not decades of servitude count for anything?

  But the worst, oh the worst, was to be separated from her blessed saint.

  For most of her life Winifred had prayed daily to St. Amelia. She never started or ended a day without a dialogue with Amelia. Winifred had never traveled far from the priory because she didn’t like to go far from her saint. It was Amelia who gave her wisdom and strength. Amelia was more than a woman who had died a thousand years ago, she was the mother Winifred had barely known, the daughter she never had, the sisters she had buried in the church graveyard. And now, as she sat alone in the chapel amid flickering candlelight and silent stone walls, Winifred was being forced to say good-bye. She felt as if she sat at the brink of a great, terrifying abyss.

  “Father Abbot,” she had managed to say when she recovered from hearing the shocking news, “I have lived here for over four decades. I know no other home. Here was where blessed St. Amelia gifted me with my talent for painting. How can I leave? If I am separated from St. Amelia I shall lose my gift.”

  “Nonsense,” the abbot had said. “Your gift comes from God. And you can still visit St. Amelia at the cathedral now and then.”

  Visit St. Amelia now and then. I shall perish…

  Now her heart was torn in conflict. From infancy she had been taught to obey father, husband, priest, church. But there were times in her life when she had felt she possessed better sense and could make better decisions than others. Take the midnight of the millennium for example: Father Edman’s predecessor had ordered her and her sisters to go to Portminster Abbey to pray, and to be safe. But Winifred had felt strongly that they were safer with St. Amelia and so she had disobeyed the abbot. As it happened, hysteria had broken out at the abbey on New Year’s Eve, there was a riot and people had been seriously injured because the abbot had not handled it well. His own panic over the impending millennium had merely inflamed the already impressionable people. Yet, because of Winifred’s willful disobedience, her sisters and lady guests had been spared.

  But what was she to do in this case? The issues were less clearly defined. She lifted her eyes to the reliquary on the altar, glowing dully in the candlelight. The burden of governing and caring for sixty nuns, lady guests and pupils, plus overseeing daily the physical and spiritual needs of flocks of pilgrims had not been half as great as the responsibility she now faced for her diminished family of eleven.

  Winifred experienced a moment of bitter recrimination: it wasn’t really about closing down an antiquated place, she thought, because with a bit of money and a bit of fixing up, St. Amelia’s could be self-sufficient again. It was about women outgrowing their usefulness, for what the abbot wanted was for Winifred to start teaching the younger sisters how to paint illuminations. “Let Agnes and Edith rest their weary hands and enjoy their final days in peace. Let younger hands take on the burden of work,” he had said. And she had argued that her sisters loved their labors and that to take them away would be to rob these women of their reason for breathing. But the abbot had refused to listen.

  It made Winifred feel ancient and decayed, a useless discard, like a broken sewing needle. Age counted for nothing; youth was all. And like a rotten pile of leaves must be swept aside to allow for new, green growth to bud up from the ground, so must she and her aged sisters be swept aside.

  For the first time in decades, Winifred was on the verge of despair. This sweet, humble priory had survived three centuries of storms, floods, fires, and even Viking raids. Now it was being toppled by a splinter of wood!

  Suddenly fearful that her thoughts were sacrilegious—for it was no ordinary sliver of wood the new convent housed!—Winifred clasped her hands together and cried, “O blessed Amelia, I have never asked you for anything.” It was true. While people came to the saint for favors and cures and answers to wishes, Mother Winifred, the saint’s caretaker for forty years, had only ever offered prayers of thanks. But now she had a request, and it wasn’t a material one, she wasn’t seeking relief from physical pain or asking for love advice or a husband—what Winifred begged for now was guidance. “Tell me what to do.”

  Forty years of self-control finally gave way. “Please help me!” she cried and did something she had never done before, she threw herself upon the altar and clasped the silver reliquary to her bosom.

  Realizing in horror what she had done—the reliquary was only ever touched with a feather duster—she quickly righted herself from the altar, mumbling apologies and making the sign of the cross, and in so doing caught her foot on the hem of her habit. Suddenly sent off balance, she grabbed for a handhold, clutching at the altar cloth without meaning to and, in falling, brought everything down with her—flowers, candlesticks, reliquary, and all.

  She hit the stone steps with a painful shock, did a half roll, banging her head so that she was knocked momentarily out of her senses. When her head cleared a minute later, Winifred found herself supine on the altar steps, he
r glazed eyes staring at the scaffolding overhead, a sharp pain in her skull. When she tried to move, she found her right arm pinned under a weight.

  The reliquary. Which had broken open.

  And the saint’s bones lay exposed for the first time in nearly a thousand years.

  Winifred shot to her feet and whispered, “Mother of God!” as she stared in horror at the defiled relics.

  Her heart thumped wildly as she tried to think what she must do. Had desecration taken place? Was there a special ritual for the replacement of saint’s bones? The abbot. She must let Father Abbot know at once.

  And then something stopped her. Checking her impulse to run from the chapel, Mother Winifred slowly lowered herself to her knees and gazed in wonder at the delicate objects strewn on the steps. Like seashells, they were, or tiny rocks found in a stream—fragile and vulnerable, a fingerbone here, a slender armbone there. To her amazement, the skeleton, for the most part, was complete, although all ajumble now, and crumbling to dust. The skull was still connected to the neck, the neck to the collarbones. The ribs had collapsed long ago, and the pelvis was in a hundred pieces. But it was the neck that now drew Winifred’s attention, for there was something about the bones there…

  She bent closer and squinted in the dim light of the chapel. At the base of the skull where the first two vertebrae joined…

  Her eyes widened. Scrambling to her feet, she seized the lit candle and brought it down to the bones. She held her breath as she watched how the flickering flame danced on the pale bones and caught the tiniest, strangest glint within them.

  She frowned. Bones weren’t supposed to sparkle.

  She brought the candle closer and bent nearer, narrowing her eyes, focusing, delving into the crack between the two vertebrae. A draft whispered through the chapel, making the flame dance, causing the glimmer to happen again. It was like the spark one sees when striking a flint, she thought.

  What was it?

  An eerie feeling crept over her as she knelt alone in the silent chapel with the thousand-year-old bones. Winifred suddenly had the strongest notion that she was no longer alone. She looked around and saw that the chapel was empty. No one, no thing, lurked there. Yet the hair beneath the back of her wimple stirred as if to stand on end; her neck crawled as if someone breathed upon it.

  Someone was there.

  And then she knew. All in an instant, in the most astonishing mental clarity she had ever experienced in her life: it was St. Amelia, wakened from her long sleep by the disturbing of her bones.

  “Please forgive me,” Winifred whispered tremulously as she tried to think how to gather up the pieces and replace them to the reliquary. It would have to be done as religiously and reverently as possible—and without anyone knowing. This much she knew for certain: that the bones had been meant for her alone to see, and no one else. It was a sign. St. Amelia was trying to tell her something.

  When the candle flame flickered again and once more caused a spark within the neck bones, Winifred reached out a trembling hand and, with outstretched forefinger, gingerly touched the dry, chalky spine. The vertebrae fell apart, so old and desiccated they were. And as they fell away, like the halves of a walnut, they exposed an object of such astonishing wonder that Winifred, with a cry, fell backward and landed on her buttocks.

  For imbedded in Saint Amelia’s neckbones was the most beautiful blue stone Winifred had ever seen.

  She kept it with her, secretively, hidden in a deep pocket of her habit. The blue crystal from St. Amelia’s throat. She told no one about it, after restoring the bones to the reliquary and the reliquary to the altar, for she needed to ponder the mystery she had uncovered. Why was the crystal there? How it had gotten lodged in the saint’s neck bones? And was it a sign from St. Amelia? But what else could it be? The bones had been sealed in their reliquary for centuries, for a thousand years for all Winifred knew, why should they have chosen that moment to reveal themselves? The answer was obvious: after the abbot left, she had been filled with such utter despair that she could have believed the sun would never rise again. And then Amelia had spoken through the blue crystal.

  But what was the message? Did it have to do with the move to the new convent? If so, was Amelia telling her to go, or to stay? Nothing had ever weighed so heavily upon Winifred’s mind and heart as this new turn of events. The women in her charge were depending on her to make the right decision.

  And they were all so helpless! There was poor Dame Odelyn, elderly and lame, waiting by the well for someone to come along and draw water for her. Odelyn had come to St. Amelia’s long ago when a Viking raid had wiped out her entire family. Heirloom jewelry, hidden in the well behind the manor house, had bought her a permanent residency at the convent. But ever since that day when she had had to climb down to retrieve the treasure hidden there by her father, barely able to make the descent for she had just crept out of her hiding place and seen the butchered corpses of parents and siblings, Odelyn had been terrified of wells. And then there was Sister Edith who was so forgetful that she had to be escorted out to the necessarium every night because she always lost her way. And Agatha whose arthritis was sometimes so bad she needed assistance in eating. The list was endless. How could Winifred tell these women that they were to be uprooted from the only life they knew, from all that was comforting and familiar, to be thrown into strange and unfamiliar surroundings?

  In searching for the answer to her conundrum, she focused on the blue crystal. She became obsessed with its colors and tried to recreate them when she mixed pigments. Holding the semitransparent stone up to light she saw explosions of cyan, ribbons of sky blue and cornflower, lakes of sapphire, ponds of aquamarine. But the color kept changing. She looked at it in sunlight and candlelight, during a storm and at sunset, and she saw azure, turquoise, marine blue, ultramarine, lapis, navy, indigo, teal. Winifred was fascinated by the color and composition of the crystal. The stone was not entirely transparent for there was a clouding in the heart, a gathering of particles that sparkled when the sun caught them just right. Whitish silver, taking a different shape depending upon which angle one observed it. She suspended the crystal on a fine thread and let it twirl slowly in the sunlight. The soul-substance seemed to move and change. It was mesmerizing. As Winifred stared, she almost believed she saw the phantom of a woman there, beckoning…

  She would have liked to capture it on parchment but that would take a miracle, for where on earth was she going to find such blues, such light and transparency, such liquid hues?

  “You did not touch your breakfast,” Dame Mildred said with great concern after the sisters had left the rectory for the scriptorium. It was unlike frugal Mother Winifred not to clean her plate; she had not even drunk her morning tonic. Winifred believed in the age-old health practice of chasing winter out of one’s blood by drinking a concoction of seven spring herbs. Ever since her days as a young novice she had annually revitalized her body by drinking a tea made from burdock root, violet leaves, stinging nettles, mustard leaves, dandelion leaves, daylily shoots, and wild onion. Foul tasting but so invigorating. “You’ve been out of sorts since the abbot’s visit.”

  Dame Mildred had always reminded Winifred of the small lap dogs that ladies preferred, the kind that could be carried in a sleeve and that peered out with big, liquid eyes. Winifred suspected that nothing eluded Mildred’s notice, especially as her domain was so central to the convent. Sisters came to her with their ailments and woes, asking for liniments, tonics, cures, and bracing nourishment. Dame Mildred was a tiny woman, but sharper for all her size than the cumbersome abbot. “Was his news so upsetting?” she pressed.

  “We are not to have our new roof this year,” Winifred finally said. It wasn’t the entire truth, but it wasn’t a lie either. She hadn’t told her sisters the bad news yet, wanting to pray on it. She had bought a little time by telling the abbot that her nuns would not be able to work on the latest manuscripts if they knew about the impending transfer to the new convent, and so
he had given her two month’s grace period, after that time the move must take place. In the meantime, Winifred pondered the miracle and mystery of the blue crystal, and tried to discover its message.

  Leaving Dame Mildred with a skeptical look on her face, Winifred went to the scriptorium where the sisters were already at work, silent and reverent, creating biblical scenes of such glorious color and vibrancy that they would be the talk of England. The pigments were the secret of creating remarkable illuminations. What good, after all, was the artist’s skill when inferior paints were used? But now they were low on supplies, and what was there was of poor quality. Winifred had tried to wrest some coins from the abbot for the purchase of new supplies, and he had refused her request, knowing that she would work miracles with what little they had, as she had always done in the past.

  Winifred thought now of the new ring she had not failed to notice on the abbot’s hand. A gift from a patron of the abbey, no doubt. The value of that one piece of jewelry could have kept her nuns in the best quality pigments for a year, perhaps she could have even purchased malachite from which to create breathtaking greens. But she and her sisters must be satisfied with obtaining greens from buckthorn and mulberry, and if really pressed, from the berries of honeysuckle and nightshade leaves. Probably they were going to have to resort to the juice of iris flowers, which was a delicate process and took patience and skill. The dark blue flowers did not appear to be a likely source of green for the purplish color that was first squeezed out was not promising. But as soon as it was combined with alum a clear and beautiful green appeared. The secret, Winifred knew, was to remove all the pollen.

  Was it fair that the abbot, with his beautiful ring, should force her sisters to go through so much extra work?

  And clearly they were going to have to make their yellows from apple-tree bark this year. If only she could afford saffron. Saffron was the indispensable element for imitating gold. A pinch of dry saffron in a dish, covered with egg white and allowed to infuse, produced a beautifully transparent strong yellow. Winifred liked to use this glassy saffron to strong effect for ornamental pen flourishings around colored initials, for goldlike frameworks of illuminated panels in books, and for golden glazes and touches in lines of writing in red and black.