The Illuminator (63 page)

“And why would you marry with a man like that, Kathryn, a man whom you professed to despise?”

For the first time since she entered the room, she looked at him levelly. Her words were slow and deliberate.

“I am marrying him, Finn, to gain your freedom.”

The colors in the light, in the air would surely smother him. The reds, the blues, all mixing into dark purple, then to black. He fought to hold the light.
Inhale deeply, inhale the light.
It took an eternity to find his voice. When it came, he was surprised to hear it boom across the room, splitting the colors with a groan. Jasmine looked from one to the other of them, her eyes widening.

“Don't be a fool, Kathryn.”

Jasmine's mouth turned down, and her chin started to quiver. He was frightening her, but he couldn't stop himself. He slapped his hand hard against the wall.

“It's a trick. Don't you see? He's not going to let me go. The bishop likes having his own personal artist slave. And they still have not found who killed the priest. It's a crime that must be answered for, and I'm the answer. They will look no further. That's the way scapegoating works. Don't you understand?”

“What I don't understand is why you seem reluctant to leave. Is it that you want to stay holed up here forever, buried alive like an anchorite, with your holy paintings? Where you can nurse your grudge against me and spend what's left of your life grieving over Rose? Finn the martyr. Is that it?
Has this cell become more sanctuary than prison? Well, I'll not let you be buried alive, even if you are willing. Alfred will testify to planting the pearls in your room. Then they have no case against you. And Sir Guy has concocted a scheme whereby the archbishop's justice will be satisfied.”

“No. No! I will not consent to it.” He crossed the room and seized her by the shoulders. He shook her harder than he wanted to. “Don't you realize he is not to be trusted?”

Kathryn's eyes glistened. “I have no choice, Finn. He will see that you or Alfred or both answer for the crime and that my lands are forfeit to the crown. I have no choice. It's either go into a convent or marry Guy de Fontaigne.” She started to pace. “Don't you see? I either sacrifice you and disinherit my sons, or sacrifice myself.”

Kathryn in the arms of the hawk-nosed sheriff.
Finn shook his head violently as if shaking off the image. The image held on stubbornly, writing itself on his eyelids, searing into his brain. He wished that Guy de Fontaigne were here now. Finn would rip off his head with his bare hands.

Instead, he grabbed Kathryn by her shoulders. “Then, my lady, remember this on your wedding night.” And he kissed her hard, harder than he meant to, a kiss that held all the passion and regret and anger that lived in his nightly dreams.

When he pushed her away abruptly, she swayed for a moment, limp as a child's cloth poppet, as though she might crumple at his feet.

Jasmine started to wail and tried to climb Kathryn's skirts. Finn picked her up, but she held out her arms to Kathryn. The hexagram in the star around her neck peeped out at him from its tangle of filigree.

“Remember this, too. If I am released, I will come for my granddaughter and take her away. I'll not have her in his clutches.”

Our Fadir That art in heuenes, Halewid be thi name. Thi Kingdom comme to. Be Thi wille done as in heuen so in erthe. Gyve to us this dai oure breed oure other substance and fogive to us oure dettis …

—P
ATERNOSTER, TRANSLATED INTO
E
NGLISH
    
BY
J
OHN
W
YCLIFFE

K
athryn heard the door to her chamber open and cringed in pain as a shaft of light pierced the semidarkness.

“Mother, is it one of your headaches?” Colin asked.

His shorn head moved like an elliptical moon toward her bed, then hovered just above her. His hand felt cool on her cheek.

“You're burning with fever! I'll go get Agnes. She'll know what to do for you.”

“No.” The bed beneath her rolled as he sat beside her. She fought back a wave of nausea. “Tell them not to come up here. And tell them to keep Jasmine away. Don't even bring her to the threshold.”

“Then what should I get for you?”

She covered her mouth with her hand, lest her breath cast some foul spell on him.

“Nothing. It will pass. You've come too close already. Just go away and let me sleep.”

“I'm not going to leave you sick and alone! God will protect me.”

If he didn't protect His own Son, why would He protect mine?
“Then call Glynis,” she said.

“You're not Glynis's mother.” He raised her arm and probed tenderly at her armpit. She knew he was looking for the telltale bubo.

“There's been a report of plague at Pudding Norton in Fakenham,” he said. Worry abraded the melody in his voice.

She coughed, a wet, strangling cough, and he raised her shoulders and held her until the seizure passed. When she could talk again, she reassured him. “I've already looked, Colin. There's no swelling in my groin, either.”

“But your skin is so hot.”

“It's just an ague. Tell Agnes to make me a syrup of angelica root and leave it outside the door.” Another seizure of coughing. “Then you go away and stay away.”

He slipped soundlessly out, and she turned her head to the wall and went to sleep.

When she opened her eyes, it was morning and the bright light slicing through the window cut across her eyes like the sting of a lash. Someone—an angel?—separated itself from the light and bathed her face with cool water.

“Drink this.”

The cup's lip was cold against her mouth. She shivered. Two sips were all she could swallow. The smell of sickness was in the room. Hadn't she sent Colin away? Yet it was Colin's voice, Colin's face, but framed with a stubble of blond hair. Not Colin, who shaved his head each morn before he went out. Colin was on the highway preaching Lollard heresies. She closed her eyes against the throbbing light, but the darkness threatened to smother her.

“Keep the babe away,” she said to the angel who tended her so lovingly.

But instead of her voice, a piercing gibberish rode the air. Its shrillness ebbed and flowed like ocean waves. Demons arguing for her soul. Coming to claim her for her sins. She wanted to cry out to God, to plead for mercy, but there was no priest to plead for her soul. No priest. But the anchoress came. Smiling, gentle, telling her that all would be well. If only she could believe.

I will try. I will try to believe.
Her mind clawed at memory, prowling for the words to the
migratio ad Dominum.
But she could not remember the words her tutor priest had taught her as a child.
Receive my soul, Lord Jesus Christ,
her mind cried out. But she pleaded in her father's Norman French, and God answered only Latin prayers. He would judge her prayer profane, the words unworthy. Like Cain's offering.

The voices stopped, and she slept.

Once she thought it was Finn who tended her so gently. He had forgiven her, then. But it was too late. Her body was as dry as a husk of threshed wheat, and the tongue she would have used to thank him cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She was a moth and her wings would soon be dust. Dust everywhere, sealing her eyes, filling her ears, muffling all sound. So this was dying. This pressing heaviness that drove one's soul deep inside. Once she thought she heard Jasmine crying, and wanted her. But Jasmine could not come. She would never come again.

The anchoress lay awake in her cell, listening to the cathedral bells toll matins. The midnight silence swallowed the muffled peals, and quiet settled again, eerie and thick. As she recited the Hours of the Cross,
Domine labia mea aperie,
she thought, Lord, You will have to open my lips. I cannot. They're too stiff and cold. Then she repented the unworthy thought and muttered the response,
Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.

As she often did, she departed slightly from the scripted response of the Matins Hours, the
Deus in adiutorium meum intende,
asking not for help for herself but for the souls who crowded into her mind: the poor, the sick, the hungry, the many supplicants who, even in winter, found their way to her window. From outside, she could hear water drops plopping from the long icicles that hung from the church eaves, dripping onto the winter-hardened ground like Christ's tears. Soon the world outside her tomb would be the green of some long-ago-remembered spring.

And she would be warm again.

It was a sin to think of her creature comforts when so many had died in the harsh winter. A sin too, perhaps, to say her prayers from her bed, where she shivered beneath the single thin blanket she had not given away. The stone floor was so cold her chilblained wrists, wet with the tears of her passion,
stuck to it when she prostrated herself before her altar. Holy Church taught mortification of the flesh, especially during Lent, but what mother would willingly see her child's flesh so punished? And was not Christ her nurturing, loving, gentle Mother?

It was a sin, too, to worry about her security, when she should trust Him in Whom her true security lay. But she'd had no word from the bishop. It had been weeks since she sent him her
apologia,
her confession of faith, written in English. She supposed his silence to mean he accepted it, or that he thought her beneath further notice, or that he was too preoccupied with the Lollard rumblings to bother with her. She prayed to have enough faith to stop worrying about it. Prayed to feel the warmth of His Love.

Her hands, resting outside the coarse wool of the blanket, held the rosary. Except for the fluttering lips and the slight movement of blue fingers against the beads, she lay as still as a stone effigy carved onto a sarcophagus. Though she still recited the Latin Hours, in recent weeks she had begun to say her personal prayers in the Midland English dialect in which she wrote her Revelations.

Her lips moved only slightly now, murmuring these whispered English prayers, needs from her own heart. Prayers for Half-Tom, who braved the snows to bring her wood—
bless him, Lord, for the kindness of his heart;
and Finn the artist illuminator held by the bishop—
protect his body and his soul from evil;
and the mother of the dying child Finn had brought to her so long ago—
comfort her mother's grieving heart,
the dripping from the eaves accented her unlovely guttural English words; and Father Andrew, so unhappy in his parish and ill-suited for his curate's job; and her servant, Alice, who tended her devotedly.

Lastly, she prayed for Lady Kathryn of Blackingham and the two beautiful children she'd brought with her on that night when she'd come, distraught and angry, from Finn's prison. She had a sense the lady was as deeply troubled now as then, and in need of intercession.
Give her strength to face her trials; and faith; Lord, give her faith.