The Illuminator (21 page)

“Without the help of a priest, you mean. I've heard such doctrine before from—well, never mind. Go on. What other visions did you have?”

“The last thing He showed me was His Mother, our Lady Mary. He showed her to me in ghostly likeness, a maiden, young and meek, little more than a child.”

He gestured toward the pages of vellum. “And this is what you're writing?”

“This is what I'm
trying
to write. But I find my gifts are insufficient.”

He picked up the pages, weighed them in his hands. “What I see here is a wonderful beginning.”

“But that's just it, I've finished. I've written all the shewings, and it isn't enough. My scribblings are not worthy of the joy that He revealed to me. I cannot show the overflowing nature of His love. My words—any words—are … insufficient. There are not words enough to tell.” The candle flame flickered with the force of her breath. “I can say it is the kind of love that mothers show for their children, that my own mother showed for her sick child, but it is more. So much more. Such words are inadequate, empty—when I remember the warmth in which He wrapped me. The closest I can come is to say His love is like—but oh, so so much greater than—a mother's love. He is a perfect mother with a perfect love for an infinite number of children.”

“A perfect mother? But He was a man.”

She shook her head. “I do not deny His maleness. Only that God the Father is our maker, whilst He, the Son, is our Nurturer, our Keeper, our Protector. His blood feeds us like mother's milk. The love He shows is best modeled in a mother's sacrifice. That's the only way I can explain it.”

Finn's face softened, like clay warming beneath a sculptor's hand. “I know something of that kind of love. I have a daughter. Her name is Rose.”

Julian nodded, indicating that she remembered, thinking it an odd name for a Christian child. Fanciful. But lovely the way he said it.

“My wife died giving life to our child. But you know the last thing she
said to me before she died? Rebekka, my wife, held our Rose against her— this tiny new-formed human being whose birth had caused her such pain—and whispered, ‘There is such joy here, husband, I wish that you could know it.'”

Rebekka! A Jewish name? A Christian and a Jewess? No. A man would have to be a fool, and she knew the illuminator to be no fool. Unless his Jewish wife had bewitched him. But a Jewess would not want to defile herself with a Christian, would not want to take such a risk for her own life. In France, a Jew could be beheaded for relations with a Christian. The Jews were charged with poisoning wells and causing the plague in '34. Julian had prayed for their souls when she heard hundreds of them had been herded into buildings and burned alive in the areas along the Rhine. She had wept, too. Some within the Church argued for tolerance, pointing out that the plague had occurred in places with no Jews, and in the communities heavily infested with them, the plague had passed by without exacting its death toll. Finn would probably be one of those tolerant ones. But tolerant enough to defy his Church and king by taking a Jew to wife?

She watched the way Finn's jaw muscles twitched, tasting the bittersweet memory of his wife. She waited for him to say more. When he didn't, she reached out to him, touched his hand as she said, “I know one thing, and one thing only truly, Finn, and that is that
whatever happens in this world, our Mother God will see that all is well.”

He looked at her in disbelief. “Anchoress, in the face of the child's death, having witnessed the grieving mother, how can you still believe with such surety?”

“I believe it because He told me so. My Mother God told me so. And my Mother does not lie.”

“I envy you such certainty,” he said. He tapped the pages of the manuscript with his fingers. “Let me take this first section, the part that tells of your illness. I will illuminate it for you. While you rewrite the rest.”

“I'm glad for you to read it, but the language is unworthy of illumination. It should be in Latin.”

“The language may make it more widely read. Have you heard of John Wycliffe?”

“Enough to know the bishop does not like him.”

Finn's frown made her laugh. She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You think that alone should be sufficient to recommend him.”

He answered with his crooked smile. “Mother Julian, you are a woman of great perception.” He stood up, gathering her manuscript in his hands. “John Wycliffe is translating Holy Scripture into this same tongue in which you write. I have a couple of apprentices who could learn on this, if you have a mind to trust me.”

“By all means, take the manuscript. I know my words will be safe with you, Finn. My only request is that the illustrations be simple, such as would befit humble words, not overblown or gaudy.”

“Mother Julian, you have more in common with John Wycliffe than you know.”

By now, the long East Anglian twilight had fled and the room was lit only by the single candle in the window. As Finn moved toward the outside door with the manuscript under his arm, Julian's gaze followed him to the threshold. A slice of night sky showed through her window as he opened the door. No breeze stirred in the cool October night and a full moon picked out blue-green patches of herbs beside the path.

“The frost will get these soon,” Finn said as he paused at the open door.

His horse whinnied, restless to be gone, having heard its rider's voice.

“It will be a cold ground to camp on tonight,” Julian said. “And it is All Hallows' Eve. Not a night to be abroad. It's a long ride to Blackingham. You might stay with the monks at the cathedral.”

Finn laughed. “I'll get a pallet at the inn beside the hearth. It'll be safer there among the vagabonds. The bishop has little liking for me. He thinks I deprived him of his property.”

“Thank you for your gifts,” she called to his good-bye wave, “and next time you come, bring your daughter.”

But he'd already shut the door. She heard the key grate in the lock, then the sound of it being replaced beneath the stepping-stone. She poured the last of the milk from the pewter cups into Jezebel's dish, brushed away the crumbs, and carefully wrapped the bread and sugar in oiled paper. She blew out the candle—candles were almost as precious as sugar—and made her way in darkness to her corner cot. Jezebel leaped onto her bed. A wriggling of the coverlet, and then a ball of fur curled into the warmth of her knee.

Rose had never felt so alone, not even when she was with the nuns at Thetford. Her favorite dress—her blue silk, the color of the sea on a sunlit day— didn't make her feel better, either. She'd worn it for Colin and he wasn't here. Lady Kathryn had said he was “resting” and would not join them for dinner in the solar. Lady Kathryn apologized that the board was not laid in the great hall. The sheriff said it was “cozy.” Rose found it stifling.

She distrusted the long-nosed sheriff, hated the way he looked at Lady Kathryn, hated the way he looked at her, too—his beady little jet eyes made her skin crawl. If only her father were here. When she was little, her father had never left her with strangers. Though Rose had to admit Lady Kathryn was hardly a stranger. She was Colin's mother. Might some day be her mother-in-law. That thought sent her heart racing.

Maybe she should ask to take Colin a tray. Nobody would tell her anything. They treated her like a child when it suited them to shut her out. All she knew was that the wool house had burned and John, the shepherd, had been killed in the fire. Burned up, like a soul in hell. A horrible thing. And now they were all supposed to sit here eating a stew of pigeons and leeks, as though nothing had ever happened. She and Colin had been together in the wool house last evening. Had they lit a candle? She couldn't remember. Sometimes they did. But they would have been careful to extinguish the flame. Wouldn't they?

Lady Kathryn smiled at her across the trencher she shared with the sheriff, a tired smile. Rose had helped her pull together the meal for the sheriff and the visiting priest. It would have been cruel to ask Agnes to do it. Agnes who'd been kind to her, Agnes worn out with grieving over the poor burnt body
of
her husband. Rose shuddered and reached for the little silver cross at her throat. Her hand touched only bare skin. She'd taken the cross off to wash the cord and forgotten to put it back on. She felt vulnerable without it. Naked. As though she'd forgotten to put on her shift or her shirt.

A greasy smear, a bit of fat, gleamed on the sheriff's beard. The smell of the stewed pigeon mingled with wood smoke from the fire they'd lit against the chill and the lingering miasma of the wool-house fire.

The door of the solar where they were dining opened into the courtyard.

Rose barely gained it before she started to retch.

If he defiles a vowed virgin, he shall do penance for three years.

—
T
HE
P
ENITENTIAL OF
T
HEODORE
(8
TH CENTURY
)

I
n the darkness of the cavernous kitchen, the perpetual fire in the giant stone maw had gone out. No smoke issued forth from its great chimney for the first time since the plague in '34, when Lady Kathryn's father was master of Blackingham. But the scullery maid, shivering on her bed of rags, knew nothing about that. She knew only that the hearth on which she lay was cold. Even the hound that sometimes curled into a ball beside her on the stone hearth had deserted her for a warmer bed.

But Magda had no other bed. It was two miles to the village where her family of eight existed in a squalid one-room hut, miles across fields where demons lurked in shadows, past the shell that had been the wool house where a man had died today in the devil's fire. But she could not have gone back if there were no shadows, no fresh-made ghosts. She could not face her father's temper, her mother's disappointment. Her father had cursed her for being stupid and beaten her when she pulled up the vegetables instead of the weeds in the pitiful patch of garden the family tended. Her mother, in desperation, had
brought her here. “At least, you'll be warm and fed,” her mother had whispered. “Do whatever they tell you.” She hadn't said, “You can't come home,” but the child had seen it in the slump of her mother's shoulders, hunched over to protect her swollen belly, as she walked away without once looking back.

So Magda accepted this turning as she accepted the changes in the season, as she accepted her father's drunken tantrums and her mother's yearly birthings, as she accepted all the things in her life over which she had no control. Nor did she expect any. She knew she was a simpleton. They had told her often enough—even a simpleton could understand. But they didn't know about the gift. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” her mother had said when her oldest son was crushed by an overturned cart. Maybe the gift was from the Lord, in return for making her simple. She knew that others didn't have it. Else why would they do and say such stupid things? Like the time her father traded their only pig for a cow that sickened and died the next day. Magda had known the trader was not to be trusted. His eyes showed his greed and so did the too-quick way he made the bargain. But her father had not guessed. So, she concluded, it was a gift that not everybody had, this ability to see inside people, to hear what they didn't say.

She knew other things, too. Like the color of their souls. The tall lady with the white hair, her voice was proud but her soul was blue, not the color of the sky but a greenish blue like the color of the river. The river, yes. A shady pool, reflecting willows weeping on the bank, white tufts of cloud floating in a sun-blue sky. And Cook—her soul was rusty brown, like wet earth, the kind clay pots were made from. It was sad about her husband. Magda had seen the shepherd only once or twice, and he'd seemed nice enough. His soul was brown, too, only lighter, the color of grass in winter. But the one Magda liked best was the girl who'd helped the tall woman make the pigeon stew. Rose and Lady Kathryn—she had learned their names. Said them over in her mind as she'd said the words to a song she'd heard the minstrels sing on May Day, said them over and over and over, until she remembered. From her corner she had stared at the strange color of Rose's skin, a pale fawn color, not pink and white like her own, and her hair, as dark and shiny as coal. But it was the two colors of Rose's soul, blending, glowing, one inside the other, a golden yellow like sweet butter inside a rosy rim, that fascinated her. She'd only seen one other with two colors. Her mother's soul was violet, and it had sometimes had a golden center. Not always. Just sometimes.