by Barbara Wood
They encountered more people on the road: farmers taking produce to the Portminster fair, knights traveling with guards, ladies in curtained litters. The road wound through forests of hawthorn, elm, and beech where glens suddenly opened to reveal patches of bluebells and streams collecting in dark, sun-dappled pools. Trails lead off the road to farmhouses and meadows with sheep grazing. And every now and then they encountered paving stones of ancient manufacture, reminding them that Roman legions had passed this way. And amid all these people, and the hues of spring, inhaling the woodland air and buoyed by morning birdsong, Winifred felt her confidence grow. She was doing the right thing, even though, had the abbot known, he would have called it disobedience.
The older ones in the group talked of Vikings, tall yellow-bearded devils who wore red cloaks over ring mail and were known to fight with bloodthirsty frenzy, like mad wolves. Memories of the Vikings gave these elders a kind of prestige, for it had been thirty years since the decisive Battle of Maldon when the Danes, with the help of Norway’s most feared Viking King, Olaf, defeated the Anglo-Saxons and laid waste to England. And even though the overthrow of King Ethelred by Danish king Sweyn, putting the Dane Canute in power, was of more recent memory, the younger members of the traveling group had no experience with such fear. Although there were still rumored attacks here and there by Vikings who refused to accept the new peace with England, the constant terror of the past one hundred years was over at last, England had learned to sleep easy at night, and the verse, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us,” had been stricken from the litany.
They came to a signpost with one arrow marked “Portminster,” pointing ahead, another bent to the left, pointing down a narrow lane, marked “Mayfield,” the third, a newer arrow, was aimed to the right and said “Convent of the True Cross.” It had not been Winifred’s intention to visit the new convent, yet she found her feet turning onto this new lane, along with the knot of pilgrims whose topic of conversation now shifted to speculation of what they could expect on the nuns’ dinner table.
They glimpsed the walls through the trees, and the first thing Winifred heard was laughter. Feminine laughter, coming from the convent. And then she heard voices—chattering, calling out, like excited hens. She frowned. How was one to concentrate upon spiritual matters in all that noise? As they passed through the outer meadow, she stopped and stared: two young women in novices robes were tossing a ball to one another, laughing, their habits blowing immodestly in the breeze. A third was teasing a little dog with a bone, pretending to throw it and then laughing as it ran to fetch. Two more young nuns stood on ladders in apple trees, their skirts tucked up as they called out merrily to one another while they plucked fruit. Passing through the main gates and entering the inner yard, Winifred was stunned to find a world of commerce busily at work with pilgrims, townsfolk, lady guests, and holy sisters all mingling. Wooden booths had been erected for the sale of convent trinkets—embroidered badges for pilgrims to prove they had visited the shrine, vials of holy water, rosary beads, statues, good-luck charms, sweets, and breads—with nuns involved in the exchange of money!
As Mother Winifred passed through the crowd that resembled a village fair, her initial shock turned to worry. There was no piety in this place, no dignity or decorum. The abbot had assured her these sisters followed the Rule of St. Benedict, but Winifred saw no modesty, poverty, humility, or silence here.
As she went up the steps of the chapter house, a certain irony struck her: that wealth attracted wealth. Whereas it should be obvious to any casual observer that it was St. Amelia’s in dire need of money, Abbey expenditures were clearly being squandered on this new place, founded by a wealthy baron who was himself sparing no expense. The orchards outside the walls! Winifred pressed her hand to her growling stomach as if to calm a petulant child. The thought had crossed her mind to steal a few apples and take them back to her hungry sisters.
The interior of the chapter house was like that of a wealthy man’s home, with silver candlesticks, handsome furniture, tapestries on the walls. And when Mother Rosamund came in to greet her, Winifred received a second shock.
This was what people were told: when the Dane Canute became king of all England, Oswald of Mercia led other Englishmen in declaring their allegiance to him. For this he was rewarded with lands in the shire of Portminster. And when Canute, in his zeal to become “a most Christian king,” announced his intention to build new monasteries, Oswald requested the privilege of building a convent in honor of his new liege. What persuaded the Danish conqueror was Oswald’s recounting of a tale about the year he had traveled to Glastonbury where it was said Joseph of Arimathea had brought the Holy Grail of Christ, and there, camping one night along the road, Oswald had had a dream in which the location of a precious relic was revealed to him. Deep in a cave was an iron chest containing a piece of Christ’s cross, buried there by Joseph himself. Oswald had brought it back to house it in his family chapel. It also happened that Oswald’s oldest daughter, Rosamund, was devoutly religious and had prayed, all during the battles between the Danes and the English, for Danish victory for she had felt it was God’s will—or so Oswald said. Because of the daughter’s prayers, and the piece of the True Cross, Canute graciously consented to the founding of the new convent in his name.
So the story went. But this was the truth: Oswald of Mercia, a coward to the bone, was fighting on the side of English king Ethelred when he saw which way the war was going. So he switched sides, turning on his fellow Englishmen. As for his daughter Rosamund, she was not so much religious as she greatly disliked men and, preferring the company of women, refused to marry, no matter how much her father threatened or bribed her. She also wanted power. So he hit upon the perfect solution: let her run a convent. It could be no ordinary convent but must have prestige and significance. And what better way to imbue an institution with significance than planting a very important relic within its walls—and what could be greater than the cross upon which Christ Himself had died? There, of course, had been no visit to Glastonbury, no dream, no cave, no iron chest containing the True Cross. The reliquary on the altar in the new convent’s chapel contained nothing but air.
Winifred now found herself face to face with the governess of the convent that was leading St. Amelia’s to ruin. Mother Rosamund was appallingly young. She could not have been in the order for more than six years. It had taken Winifred nearly thirty years before she had succeeded to the post of prioress. A stray lock of beautiful red-gold hair had escaped the confines of Rosamund’s wimple, and Winifred had the uncharitable thought that it was on purpose. She pictured the vain young woman standing before a mirror and burrowing beneath the starched white fabric with a sewing needle to snag just the perfect curl. But most shocking of all were the young woman’s hands—they were all over the place, like frantic butterflies tied to her wrists by threads. They fluttered up and down, in and out, her sleeves falling back to expose her arms past the elbows! Clearly Rosamund had had no formal training in the Benedictine discipline. And if this were so, then how could she, as the prioress, train her sisters?
Winifred’s heart was heavy. How was she to teach these frivolous girls the art of sacred illumination? She simply could not. She would tell the abbot that this new convent was an affront to the order and that he must personally step in and restore discipline. Winifred didn’t care how rich Rosamund’s father was; this convent was an offense to God.
“My dear Mother Winifred, how pleased you must be to face years of rest after all your service to God. To shed the mantle of prioress and be a sister again.”
Winifred stared at her. What was the girl talking about? And then it came as clear to her as the crystal blue of Amelia’s stone: of course there could not be two mother prioresses in one convent! Since the abbot had said nothing about this, it was obvious he was expecting Winifred to make the logical deduction herself. But it came as a shock nonetheless. That she should be stripped of her title and reduced to an or
dinary sister again, and compelled to address a girl who was young enough to be her granddaughter as “Mother”—it was unthinkable.
“Not that you won’t be having responsibilities!” the young woman added lightly. “My girls are looking forward to learning how to paint those lovely illuminations.”
Winifred’s head swam. Rosamund made it sound like a child’s game. “There is more to it than just painting pictures,” she said. “I will have to teach the making of pigments, their proper use—”
“Oh, but my father is going to provide us with paints! The very same paints that are used at Winchester! He will have them brought up each month special!”
Winifred felt her bones freeze. To use pigments that had been mixed by someone else? “But I always purchase my raw materials from Mr. Jaffar,” she said in a tone that sounded almost pleading.
“We have nothing to do with him,” Rosamund said with undisguised contempt. “He offended my father. That blackguard is not permitted to set foot on our property, and it extends all the way to the main road.”
Winifred felt the floor tilt beneath her. The edges of the room grew dim. She was near faint with the shock of what had just transpired. To no longer be prioress, to no longer have control over the manufacture of pigments that was her very reason for being. And now: never to see Mr. Jaffar again!
As Rosamund escorted her guest on a tour of the new convent, cheerily pointing out all the wonderful amenities and luxuries, Winifred barely heard a word. She stumbled with the gait of a woman who had suddenly aged by two decades. Her head spun with grief and disappointment and shock.
But as she was taken from room to room, through a cloistered garden and down flagstone paths, her shock turned to awareness, until gradually her eyes were opened at last and she was asking herself: how could she have even thought that she and her sisters would never move here?
It was another world, a wonderful world. Each guest room had its own necessarium—a little closet built off the outer wall with a pipe carrying the waste to a trench below. Such luxury, not to have to trudge through all weather when nature called! There were special amenities found only in the homes of wealthy nobles: candles marked to tell time, lanterns of transparent ox horn, the freshly swept floors covered with sweet-smelling rushes. And luxuries: in the yard behind the kitchen, hired servants were boiling sheets, cloths and undergarments in a wooden trough containing a solution of wood ashes and caustic soda. Boys working in the vegetable gardens, women feeding flocks of fat hens and geese. An old man hired to fashion bars of sweet-smelling soap.
The kitchen was five times the size of that at St. Amelia’s and its fully stocked pantry and buttery, for all of being five years old, still smelled of fresh wood and whitewash. Winifred’s eyes bulged at the sight of the noon meal laid out: a whole ham, slabs of rare beef, crusty bread, barrels of ale and wine. When Rosamund put a generous plate in front of her, Winifred said she had eaten fully before leaving St. Amelia’s, but so as not to offend, she would carry this meal back in a cloth and save it for later. In truth, it would be divided among the others, who had not tasted jam in a very long time.
She was then taken to the grand chapel where the pilgrims—knights and paupers, lords and clergy, the sick and the lame—all waited in line to pray before the magnificent shrine of the True Cross. This church had something her own little chapel did not have: a stained-glass window. And so much gold! So many candles, all white and straight. All for the reverence of a piece of wood, whereas the bones of a real woman, a woman who suffered martyrdom for her faith, were housed in a homely place where the candles were squat and smoked badly. Winifred did not feel bitter toward this contrast, only sadness, and suddenly wanted to gather St. Amelia into her arms and whisper, “This might be grander but you are loved more.”
Finally: this place had an infirmary, which St. Amelia’s did not. Eight beds and a nursing sister who specialized in ailments. Winifred’s eyes bulged at the sight of the medicine cupboard: the potions and lotions, ointments and salves, pills and powders. Several vials of curative eyewash. Remedies for arthritis. Rose-hip tonic for kidney troubles.
Marveling at the generous stock of medicines, and thinking of the private necessarium that Sister Edith would have, right off her own room so she did not need a nightly escort, and the young man in the outer yard who was ever ready to draw water from the well, thus putting fear of wells out of Dame Odelyn’s mind…
Winifred sighed. There was no denying it. This would be a haven for her elderly sisters. They would be well fed, taken care of. Never mind that they would no longer have duties. Peace and comfort mattered more.
She had been invited to stay the night, in the guest quarters where the mattresses were filled with eider down, but Winifred was eager to get back to her own home before dark. Thanking Mother Rosamund for the tour and hospitality, Winifred hurried from the chapter house as quickly as decorum allowed. After she passed through the main gates and followed the path back to the main lane, she paused beneath a leafy beech tree and, alone in the shadows, retrieved the blue crystal from her pocket.
As it lay in her hand, catching sunlight that filtered through the branches overhead, Winifred realized that the crystal had not been a sign after all. There was no message from Amelia, no significance to the stone’s discovery. It had been an accident, nothing more. Winifred knew now that she and her sisters must come here and live out their lives in this place. She would strive to do her best teaching the art of illumination to the novices, but she knew that the excellence that had once gone into her labors would not be there, for already she felt the creative spark fading. The gift St. Amelia had bestowed upon her many years ago had run its course. From now on, Winifred would be an ordinary illuminator; she would teach ordinary girls to execute ordinary paintings. And she would set aside once and for all her foolish dream of creating a splendid altarpiece for St. Amelia.
Mr. Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar returned after three days as promised. And Winifred had the money she owed him, for she had sold their one last item of worth, a handsome unicorn tapestry that had hung in the chapter house—what need was there for it now that St. Amelia’s was to be closed?
He said he was sorry to hear that she was losing her home, and said he would pray for their happiness and success in the new place. And then he did a surprising thing: he gave her a gift, something he could have clearly sold at a good price, a chunk of costly Spanish cinnabar. He placed it now freely in the prioress’s dye-stained, work-roughened hands.
Winifred looked at the offering speechlessly. The red stone, crushed, would make excellent vermilion paint, which they were badly in need of. “Thank you, Mr. Jaffar,” she said in all humility.
He further shocked her by taking her hand and holding it between his. Winifred had not felt human touch in forty years, and certainly not a man’s! And in that instant the strangest moment occurred: Winifred felt the warm skin beneath her fingers and for the first time in her life saw a member of the opposite sex not as a father or a brother, a merchant or a priest, but as a man. She looked into Simon’s dark lively eyes and she felt something unfamiliar move within her breast.
And then she saw a vision, a function of the Celtic sight that had once led her to lost spoons and meat pies, but this time it was something lost in the past: all in a flash she saw herself meeting this same man on the day before she first visited St. Amelia’s over forty years ago. But now he is an itinerant young man carrying juggling balls and a box of magic tricks. Their eyes meet as they pass in the lane, and then they are gone. But later, in the chapel at St. Amelia’s, instead of going exploring, fourteen-year-old Winifred thinks instead of the handsome young man she met on the road. She does not wander through the convent and happen upon the scriptorium, but instead returns home with her mother and sisters, to travel the next day to the market fair in town, where she encounters the young man a second time. On this occasion they speak, and the magic between them is instantaneous. He speaks with a thick accent and his clothes are
foreign. He says he comes from Spain and wishes to travel the country and bring dreams and joy to folk. He promises to come back someday and so Winifred waits for him. Five years pass before she sees him again, and there he is at the gate of their manor, with a brand new wagon and horse, and he is asking her to go with him. They will travel the world together, he tells her, and have many children and many adventures. So Winifred runs off with the stranger and never looks back.
She blinked and caught her breath and looked into Mr. Jaffar’s dark eyes. And she realized she had just been given a glimpse of what might have been.
“Where do you go from here?” she asked suddenly.
The question surprised him. “To the abbey, Mother Prioress. I sell medicines to the monks there.”
“Go inland,” she said. “Travel first to Mayfield.”
“But Mayfield is far out of my way, another two days’ journey. And then to make my way back—”
“Please,” she said urgently.
“Can you tell me why?”
“I have a presentiment. A feeling. You must turn inland from here, travel through Bryer Wood.”
He considered her words. “I shall discuss it with Seska, Mother Prioress,” he said, referring to his horse. “If she agrees, we shall make the detour.” Then he climbed onto his wagon, took up the reins and waved good-bye for the very last time.
“Where is Sister Agnes? It is time for us to leave.”
Dame Mildred came into the chapter house with the last of her packed goods—ancient pots and pans, a broken rolling pin, useless items that had sentimental value, which she could not bear to leave behind, even though Winifred had informed her she would no longer be doing any cooking. “Agnes is in the graveyard,” Mildred said, breathing heavily from the exertion. She had refused to leave even a spoon; her entire kitchen had been picked clean and packed into sacks. The man who was to transfer the sisters to the new convent was going to need more than one wagon. It was ironic: although the sisters had taken vows of poverty, the requirement to get into a convent was a payment in money and goods, to be held for common use. And so although Winifred and her ladies were themselves poor, they nonetheless had the accumulated effects of generations of women going with them.