The Chalice (5 page)

I peered up the aisle. A large man stood alone, his shoulders shaking.

“That is so sad—they were devoted,” said Sister Winifred. Because of their work in the infirmary, brother and sister knew the townsfolk better than I did.

“We must try to help him,” said Brother Edmund.

Sister Winifred said, “But what of the rules?”

I winced. Brother Edmund had been told that he could not perform the work of a friar inside this church. Dominican friars chose a life that involved not just studying God’s wisdom but giving comfort to the people who needed it, the sick and poor and bereft.

Brother Edmund stepped forward as if he had not heard his sister’s warning. I went with him up the aisle, fiercely proud, as always, of my friend.

I heard the footsteps of someone hurrying to catch up—my heart pounding, I whirled around. Was a parishioner already trying to prevent us from providing counsel? But it was my erstwhile novice mistress Sister Agatha, her eyes bright with interest.

“Master Gwinn, can I be of service to you?” asked Brother Edmund. “I grieve for your loss. Your wife was a wonderful woman, a good Christian.”

Master Gwinn turned slowly. He wore the clothes of a prosperous man and had a thick black beard salted with gray.

“Yes, she was, Brother,” he said, his voice rough and broken. “It is very good of you to make inquiry. I confess, it’s a bitter blow. I’ve spent every day with my Amy since I was twenty years old. Our children—our grandchildren—I don’t know what to do.”

Brother Edmund laid a hand on the widower’s broad shoulder.

“She is in a better place, be assured,” he said. Although I knew better than anyone that Brother Edmund was not always certain of his own strengths, when he helped others, he radiated a confidence that helped many through their struggles.

It was no different for Master Gwinn, who nodded in gratitude.

“Oh, you poor man—you poor, poor man.” It was Sister Agatha who spoke, as she stepped toward Oliver Gwinn, her own eyes filled with tears. “You loved your wife so dearly.”

He looked at Sister Agatha and his exhausted, homely face was transformed. Instead of weakening him, her words of sympathy seemed to strengthen him. “Thank you,” he said.

“Are these people bothering you, Master Gwinn?” said a high, nasal voice.

At last, the chastisement. But who would it come from, I wondered.

A woman of like age to Oliver Gwinn’s pushed her way forward. She, too, was well dressed; her russet kirtle stretched over an enormous, sagging bosom. Her thick dark eyebrows nearly met in the middle, over ice-cold blue eyes.

“We are
helping
Master Gwinn,” I said to her.

She looked at me, and the rest of us, her face filled with distrust.

“Yes, Mistress Brooke, they are helping me,” said the widower.

“But that is not their duty—it is Father William’s,” she said, pointing. “And he comes now.”

I tensed as the vicar of Holy Trinity Church approached. He wasn’t hurrying. Father William never rushed; he had an indolent stride. The customary smile stretched across the lower half of his face. Above, his eyes examined us with the distaste of a man facing a perpetual running sore.

I realized someone else surveyed me—Mistress Brooke had not moved.

“I know who you are,” she said to me.

“Do you?” I shrugged. It was the shrug of my mother, I fear, one of her more imperious Spanish gestures.

“Is there a difficulty here?” asked Father William. He rarely addressed us by name, to avoid having to use “Brother” or “Sister,”
honorifics we were, strictly speaking, no longer entitled to. The kinder townspeople still used those names, out of respect. Father William was not kind.

Brother Edmund, several inches taller than the vicar, inclined in a conciliatory half bow.

“None at all, Father,” he said.

“Then I must ask you to join me in the chapel of Saint Thomas Becket,” he said. “I’ve already asked the others to await us. I have something to say to all of you.”

My spirits sank to the stone floor. I could feel Mistress Brooke’s glare on my back as I trailed the others down the aisle, to the chapel.

Sister Rachel, Sister Eleanor, and the rest of the nuns stood there, uneasy. We joined them, forming a defensive half-circle.

Father William folded his hands together to address the group.

“I feel it is only right and proper to prepare you for what is to come,” he said. “Lord Privy Seal Thomas Cromwell, our Vice Regent of Spiritual Affairs, has devised certain articles to be read before all the people of England. The king approved such articles, and so Archbishop Thomas Cranmer drafted the letters that will soon reach every parish in the land.”

He paused to look at the nine of us in turn, saving me for last. His eyes glistened as he studied my face, which must have been filled with dread.

“There will be changes in the observance of religion,” he said. “And you must conform, every one of you, to the will of our sovereign lord, the king.”

“We are obedient subjects of King Henry,” said Sister Eleanor. “If you will only instruct us in what is expected.”

Father William shifted away so that he was addressing Brother Edmund directly. I had noticed before how uncomfortable he was with Sister Eleanor’s role as our leader. He always endeavored to speak to the lone man of our group.

“This church,” he said, “is to be stripped.”

W
e left Holy Trinity in silence. The rain had stopped. A chalky white mist hung above the street, obscuring the buildings beyond the glazier’s shop. It was as if a cloud had descended to earth. The stench of the shambles—the sour smell of rotting fish—encircled us.

Sister Rachel broke the silence. “Heretical abominations,” she moaned.

“What are we to do?” whispered Sister Agatha.

Two men, curious, stood on the periphery of the mist. Whenever we—the diaspora of Dartford Priory—gathered together in town like this, we attracted attention.

“Sisters, hush,” ordered Sister Eleanor. “We will not speak of this matter here, in the open. We will return to our house.”

They departed, walking two across, as if they were presiding down the cloister passageway and not a stinking, mud-riven street.

Brother Edmund, Sister Winifred, and I remained, staring at one another as we struggled to take in what Father William just said.
Stripped,
what a terrible word. It meant that Mass would continue to be held at Holy Trinity Church. But the
way
we worshipped God—that would change. All of the candles were to be extinguished. Natural light would have to suffice from now on. The statues of the saints were to be removed
as evidence of “men’s superstition and papist idolatry.” The brass plaques, loving tributes to the memory of Dartford’s citizens, were to be torn from the floor. The mural of Saint George? Painted over. The chapel of Saint Thomas Becket would be dismantled, since the king regarded him as a rebel to royal authority, and all chapels and statues honoring him were to be destroyed.

Brother Edmund cleared his throat. “I must go to the infirmary. The candlemaker has dropsy, I fear.” He turned to his sister. “You don’t need to assist me, if you’d rather go home for a time.”

Suddenly I remembered. “My tapestry loom—this is the day I can take possession.” I tugged Sister Winifred’s sleeve. “Please come with me and Sister Beatrice to the Building Office.”

But Sister Winifred shook her head and coughed. Difficult moments often triggered one of her choking fits.

Brother Edmund signaled me to wait, and then hurried his sister across the street and into their home. When he returned, he said, “Perhaps tomorrow would be a better day for the loom?”

“But I’ve waited so long already, Brother.” I was much disappointed.

He frowned as he looked over my shoulder. “She’s watching us.”

“Who is?” I turned around. A woman’s face peered out of the window of the church. I recognized that suspicious countenance. Mistress Brooke.

“Do you know her?” I asked.

“Master Brooke, her husband, built the largest house in the Overy.”

“That does not give her the right to order us about.”

Brother Edmund shook his head. “Sister Joanna, please remember that we are without protection here in the town. We must, as Sister Eleanor said, conform.”

I gazed at the church window, at Mistress Brooke and the
leaping candlelight that surrounded her face, light that would soon be snuffed. With all my heart, I did not wish to conform.

It was then that John staggered toward us on the High Street. Years ago John went mad and, when his parents died, the almshouse overseen by the priory took him in. He had cousins in town but they could not cope with him. When the priory fell, so did its almshouse for the poor and unwanted. John was transferred to the town almshouse. He hated his new surroundings, and his madness turned riotous, like soup boiling in a pot too long. He refused to trim his beard and claimed to be John the Baptist. By night he slept, unhappily, in the almshouse. By day he roamed the streets, shouting gibberish. The crueler young boys threw rubbish at him. We who had lived in the priory felt compassion for John. Yet, in his mind, the exiles from Dartford were to blame for his misfortunes. Brother Edmund was, unfathomably, his chief target.

“Behold the great river Euphrates,” John bellowed. “The water dried up. I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come from the mouth of the dragon.” John turned this way and that, as if he were surrounded by rapt followers. “Behold, here is that false prophet.”

Brother Edmund, who learned months ago that it did no good to reason with John, said, “Sister Joanna, promise me to wait—do not go to the Building Office without me.”

“John never lays hands on any of us, I don’t fear him,” I said.

“It’s not John we should fear,” Brother Edmund said. “Sister Joanna, I must get to the infirmary.”

He smiled at me a last time and hurried down the street, bound for the patients who needed him.

John staggered after him, pulling on his beard. He shouted: “Brothers and Sisters, this man conjures up the spirits of the devils with his working of miracles. Do not follow him to the place the Hebrews call Armageddon!”

I turned away from John’s madness and crossed the street,
toward home. I regretted the lack of enthusiasm for my tapestry enterprise from Brother Edmund, Sister Winifred and the other nuns. They feared it was too fraught with risks. It was no small venture, I knew that. Tapestry looms and silken threads were extremely costly. But there was no other way to begin—I must make an initial investment to create my first tapestry. The proceeds from its sale would buy the materials for the second one.

However, my pension and Sister Winifred’s were very small: one hundred shillings a year. Novices received the least. And so I had purchased the wooden loom with my personal funds: the small inheritance from my father and the proceeds from the sale of his London house, along with part of my first year’s pension.

“But that was all the money you had—what are you to live on if this should fail?” Sister Winifred had pleaded. “And what do any of us know of running such an enterprise? Have you ever heard of a woman who sold tapestries by herself?”

I’d dismissed her concerns then, as I did now. My enterprise would
not
fail. Back home, while explaining to Sister Beatrice what happened at church, it hit me with savage force. From now on, I would not be able to worship God in the way that was most meaningful to me.

Sitting in the kitchen, my sadness flipped into fury. I had to do something.

“I’m going to the Building Office to secure my loom,” I announced.

“Did not Brother Edmund bid you wait for him?”

“Yes, that’s true, but . . .” I floundered for justification, and then burst out with, “He is not my
real
brother, not my father, and not my husband. He is a valued friend, but his concerns are unwarranted.”

My words of defiance drew a sidelong smile from Sister Beatrice. I realized how unprecedented this must be, my flouting of the wishes of Brother Edmund. We shared a bond that
was impossible to explain to others, forged during our frantic struggle to save the priory. There had been one night, in a traveler’s inn in the town of Amesbury, when we shared a room, that certain longings stirred. Brother Edmund left the room in the middle of the night rather than succumb to sin, while I dreamed a dream that disturbed me still. It was a night neither one of us ever spoke about, of course.

I said to Sister Beatrice, “It’s stopped raining, so we must take a walk in any case, for Arthur’s sake.”

The Building Office was up the High Street that led to the wide road stretching from London to the coast of Kent. We stopped along the way to allow Arthur to jump in puddles. I needed to calm him before we reached the Building Office. I did my best to ignore the head shaking of the townsfolk. Many did not like such boisterousness.

When we reached the top of the street, I knocked on the new, shiny door. The Building Office sprang up but six months ago. Important purchases of all kinds were routed through here, but its chief purpose was to facilitate the largest endeavor seen in Dartford for at least a century: the construction of a manor house for King Henry VIII atop the rubble of the priory.

The door swung open and I thought of yet another reason why Sister Winifred would not have wanted to come with me. Gregory, once the trusted porter of Dartford Priory and now the clerk of the Building Office, ushered us inside.

“I wondered if we’d see ye today,” he said gruffly.

Unlike the other sisters, I did not blame Gregory for taking this position, for putting his knowledge of the priory in the service of destroyers. All of our former servants had to shift for themselves, without the benefit of pensions.

No, if there were work to be found in Dartford, it must revolve around the building of the new royal manor house. Although most dissolved monasteries were made gifts to men loyal to the Crown, King Henry was keeping this one for himself.
But he had not preserved any part of it. Dozens of workmen had spent the entire summer swarming over the property, demolishing it.