The Illuminator (51 page)

Kathryn kept close watch, dividing her time between Rose and the child. The baby thrived. Rose did not. She continued to bleed steadily. Nothing alarming at first. But then, when it should have lightened, the flow increased. “Flowers,” that's the name men gave to this secret property, this monthly purging of women's bodies, a woman's flowers, a pretty term to mark the natural properties of a woman's body. Unnatural now, dark flowers, soaking sheet after sheet of clean white linen.

Candles burned for Saint Margaret, day and night, in the room where Rose bled. Kathryn had moved her into Finn's bed. The small antechamber where she usually slept was now a nursery. Magda's mother made the two-mile trek from her own cottage each day to tend and feed Jasmine. Kathryn had asked what arrangements she had made for her own children and was told that, since the fields were flooded, her husband had naught to do anyway but tend the little ones. Once or twice, Kathryn had seen a small boy in the kitchen with Magda and Agnes, but she said nothing. As long as the woman cared for Jasmine, she would allow her the comfort of having her own child nearby.

Each day, Rose grew paler. The veins in her small round breasts looked like tracings of blue lace beneath transparent skin. She kept trying to feed her
child, and when there was no milk, the babe cried. After each futile effort, Kathryn would take Jasmine away and give her to the nurse, and Rose, exhausted, would lie back wearily on her pillow. She would say nothing, but Kathryn learned to watch for the little stream of tears that formed in the crevices between her nose and cheeks.

Kathryn placed a healing stone of jasper beneath Rose's pillow and drowned her in tea of honey and motherwort. She soaked linen rags in an infusion of lady's mantle and packed heavy compresses between her legs. On the fourth day, Rose's skin was hot to the touch, and she no longer tried to feed the baby; once, when she heard it crying in the antechamber, she cried out as though she was frightened, asking, “What's that noise?”

Kathryn moved the nurse and the baby to her own chamber. She had tried once before. She wanted this child close to her, but its mother had protested. She did not protest now.

Rose's fever proved stubborn. She became delirious, singsonging bits of nonsense, love songs—Colin's songs, Kathryn remembered—and calling out—sometimes for Finn, sometimes for Colin, in muttered half-whispers. Kathryn bathed her in cool water, but still the fever climbed.

On the fifth day, Kathryn sent for the priest at Saint Michael's. Rose's soul must not be unshriven.

“Tell the groom I will have him beaten if he does not return with the priest before nightfall,” she said when told that he complained that the road was too
slabber'd and sost.
“He'll not melt. I'll have his hide if he tarries.”

She sat by Rose's bedside, murmuring prayers and endearments.

By nightfall, the priest arrived, shaking the water drops from his cloak like a shaggy beast.

“Where is the girl?” he asked, obviously not happy to be called out on such a night.

Kathryn took him to Rose's bedside. She lay as still as a corpse, eyes closed, their lids thin and blue-veined, her skin as pale as bleached linen. The last time Kathryn had removed the dressing from between her legs, just two hours ago, it had been as dark and sodden as the rain-soaked earth outside.

“We'd better hurry,” the priest said, arranging his vestments, taking out his holy water, his crucifix. He began to recite the
Commendatio animae.

“Qui Lazarum
… ”

The girl opened her eyes just once during the Office of the Dead and
looked wildly around the room. Her eyes were wide with fear and something that looked like surprise—but weren't the young always caught unaware by death? Or was it the priest's presence that alarmed her? Her gaze fastened on Kathryn. “Jasmine,” she whispered, clawing at the air as if the babe were being handed to her.

“Jasmine is asleep,” Kathryn said in her gentlest voice, though she was fighting her own fear and surprise, and she'd seen death aplenty. I'll take care of your little girl,” Kathryn said. “I will guard her with my own life, Rose, I promise you. She will be my daughter.”

The girl nodded, lay back down and was very still. Her breath was so slight that once Kathryn held a candle flame to her face to see if it flickered. After a while, Kathryn felt a gentle pressure on her hand. She had not even been aware that she was holding Rose's hand.

“Tell Father”—Kathryn leaned close in to hear—“tell Father I'm sorry.”

Kathryn sat beside Rose's body for a long time, listening to the hissing of the rain. It came down in torrents, leaked into the flue, making little sizzling noises and filling the room with smoke. Kathryn touched Rose's face. It was already cold. The priest had gone to the kitchen seeking his supper and then his bed. In the morning he would baptize her grandchild properly, in the lady chapel, dipping the baby three times in the font with Kathryn standing as godmother. But there would be no celebration. The child's mother would be lying beneath the baptismal font, below in the family crypt—consecrated ground—beside Roderick. Roderick sleeping for eternity beside a beautiful woman, sleeping beside a Jew. The only fruit he could not despoil.

There would be no father at the christening, either. Had Colin reached the Benedictines now? She'd had word from a tinker who'd been with his troupe at Colchester that he was safe. He might even now be singing his pretty love songs, blissfully unaware his love had died.

When the roads dried out, she'd send a message to the monks at Cromer. Knowledge of his child might bring her child back to her.

She started to pull the bell that would summon Glynis to assist her in preparing Rose's body, and then she remembered. There were those who said that Jews bore some special marking, some deformity on their bodies— Roderick had said he'd heard it on good authority that the women's clefts
were horizontal like a mouth. Well, she knew that to be a lie. Rose's womanly parts had been like her own, though she had to admit, she'd had an anxious moment before summoning the midwife. She had finally decided, spurred on by Rose's pain, that if that was true, the midwife's silence could be bought.

She gathered a basin of lavender water left in her own chamber and began to bathe each limb, washing it carefully. There were no marks, no deformities. Everything about Rose was perfectly formed. Kathryn braided the dark hair, winding it in a coronet around her face, weighted the eyelids with two coins, and tied a blue silk band around her head and under her jaw, then dressed her in her father's favorite dress. She looked like a bride in her pale blue dress, as beautiful in death as she had been in life.

Kathryn thought she should remove the little cross on its silken cord. A gift for Jasmine from her mother. Just as Rose's mother had passed it to her daughter. She removed it carefully, examining it really closely for the first time. The intricate filigree was exquisite. It reminded her of the knotwork borders on the carpet pages Finn made for the Gospel of John. Six tiny pearls formed a perfect circle at the apex of the cross. Representing the sun perhaps? But it was not like the Celtic crosses she'd seen in the old Saxon churches in Norwich that mixed the symbol of the sun with the cross. A heresy, some said. This circle was
inside
the intersection of cross arm and stake and looked more like a star, a six-pointed star, but so cleverly worked into the swirling motif that it disappeared if one stared at it. Probably a trick of her imagination.

She wondered if Finn had designed the beautiful ornament for his Rebekka. A small surge of jealousy pricked. What right had she to be jealous? Kathryn looped the silken cord around her rosary—she would not profane it by putting it around her own neck—and wished Finn could see how beautiful his daughter was in death and how tenderly she was cared for. He might find comfort there.

Holy Mother, where was she going to find the strength to tell Finn his daughter was dead?

When the body was scented and dressed, Kathryn thought of pulling the bell. She could leave this last task to others and go to bed. But instead, she fetched the cerecloth from a cupboard and started to sew. It was important she do this final thing herself.

The heavy, wax-soaked cloth resisted the needle and soon the serge was
illuminated with little drops of blood from Kathryn's pricked fingers. Rose would take something of Kathryn with her to her grave.

It was almost dawn when she finished. The rain had ceased. So long had her ears been accustomed to the drumming of the raindrops that the silence seemed threatening. Her crofters would be glad. The rivers would recede. Her pastures would dry out, and the new green would carpet the hillsides. The roads would become passable again. She would have to make the trip to the prison once more. She would have to tell Finn how she had sewn his beautiful Rose into her shroud. She would tell him, too, how she had embroidered it with her tears.

She hoped desperately that he would let her keep the child.

Our faith is grounded in God's word; and it belongeth to our faith to Believe that God's word shall stand in all points.

—J
ULIAN OF
N
ORWICH
,
D
IVINE
R
EVELATIONS

K
athryn lay awake each night, awful words marching through her mind, heavy-booted soldiers laying waste to sleep.
Naught else could have been done for her, Finn … her suffering was easy
…
a peaceful drifting away … she is safe in the arms of the Holy Virgin … I've bought masses for her soul… the child will comfort you.…

Empty words.

Surely he must be preparing himself for the possibility of his daughter's death. So many women died in childbirth. He'd lost his own wife in just that way. He may know already, she thought, through some fatherly intuition born of his closeness to his daughter.

The pain in her head returned again and again as she waited for the broad floodwaters to recede. Some days she considered the coward's way. She would send a letter by one of the groomsmen. Once, she went so far as to take pen in hand, but as she looked at the sharpened quill poised above the parchment, she saw his paint-stained fingers sketching a red-breasted bird in their
September garden, his fingers guiding Rose's to form the graceful capitals their art required. Kathryn's own fingers trembled so, she could not form the strokes. She crushed the blank parchment in her fist and hurled it into the fire.