The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (16 page)

Young Chaumonot turned to his companion. “The Holy House of Our Lady, in which God and Man were joined, which flew through the air, and before which I stand today, has saved me,” he said. “I was a beggar, filthy, covered in sores, sunk in error, and now I am made clean. What can I do to repay the debt I owe the Holy House?”

The priest answered him with another story, a poem about another Holy House. In a soft voice, he began to sing “The Ballade of Walsingham.”

1061

Beholde and se, ye goostly folkes all,

Which to this place have devocyon

When ye to Our Lady askynge socoure call

Desyrynge here hir helpe in your trybulacyon:

Of this hir chapell ye may se the fundacyon.

If ye wyll this table overse and rede

Howe by myracle it was founded indede.

Once upon a time, the priest sang, when King Edward the Confessor ruled England, a noblewoman had a dream. Her name was Richeldis de Faverches, and she was the lady of the manor of Walsingham in Norfolk. Her husband had recently died, leaving her with a small baby boy and a large country estate. Richeldis was a busy woman, with many responsibilities and much to worry her.

Each night her peasants corralled the livestock, her servants cleared the hall, and her workmen laid their tools aside, but Richeldis did not rest. Each night she placed her baby son in a basket next to her on the floor, knelt down, and turned to Our Lady. She prayed for the opportunity to honor her in devotion. She often fell asleep at her kneeler.

One night as she slept the angel of the Lord appeared and took the dreaming Richeldis to faraway Palestine. He showed her the church that Saint Helena had built over Mary’s little house and led her in. You will know by now what she saw.

Our Lady, seated with her child at the east end of the house, spoke to Richeldis and said:

O doughter, consider . . .

Of thys place take thou surely the mette,

Another lyke thys at Walsyngham thou sette

Unto my laude and synguler honoure;

All that me seche there shall fynde socoure,

Where shall be hadde in a memoryall

The great ioy of my salutacyon.

Fyrste of my ioys grounde and orygynall

Rote of mankyndes gracious redempcyon,

Whan Gabryell gaue to me relacyon

To be a moder through humylyte,

And goddys sonne conceyue in virgynyte.

“Be it unto me according to thy word,” said Richeldis, and in her dream she set about measuring the Holy House.

In the morning Richeldis rose from her kneeler and walked out of her house, out through her garden, to the meadow by the village.
There she gathered her people about her, and she chose craftsmen from among them to carry out the work that Our Lady had set her. She explained her intention: they were to build a replica of the Holy House of Nazareth, in which Our Lady had received the Annunciation and had raised Our Lord. As the men set to work preparing materials, Richeldis looked about the village for the right spot to build their Holy House, but none presented itself: the ground was riddled with springs and too boggy to build on.

At the end of the first day the workmen laid their tools aside, but Richeldis did not rest. She knelt down and turned to Our Lady, praying for guidance as to the location of her Holy House. Again she fell asleep at her prayers, but this time she spent a dreamless night, for no sign came to help her.

On the second day Richeldis rose from her kneeler and walked out of her house, through her garden, to the meadow by the village. She found it covered with a sparkling celestial dew. Our Lady had sent a sign to help her, for there were two plots in the meadow that the dew had not touched, each identical in size with the Holy House in Nazareth itself. Richeldis had asked for an answer, but she had been given a choice.

She chose the first site and set her men to work at once. They laid the necessary foundations and began to build the walls of the house on top of them. But somehow stone would not rest above stone, nor mortar set, nor timber align; and the Holy House was no closer to completion by evening than it had been in the morning. At the end of the second day the workmen laid their tools aside, but Richeldis did not rest. She knelt down and turned to Our Lady, praying for a solution to a devotion that seemed to have gone hopelessly awry. She fell asleep at her kneeler.

The next day was the third day. Richeldis rose from her kneeler and walked out of her house, through her garden, to the meadow by the village. Once more it was covered in a celestial dew. Where the workmen had left a hole in the ground with piles of building materials, there was now nothing at all. It seemed as if Our Lady had not answered the prayers of Richeldis de Faverches this time.

But then a sensation of being watched made Richeldis turn. She glanced toward the other spot that the miraculous dewfall had made
the day before. There, steaming slightly in the early morning damp, stood her Holy House, so perfect, so immaculate, so beautiful, that it might have been made by the hands of Our Lady Herself.

A prayer rose to the lips of Richeldis de Faverches.

O gracyous Lady, glory of Jerusalem,

Cypresse of Syon and Joye of Israel,

Rose of Jeryco and Sterre of Bethleem,

O gloryous Lady, our askynge nat repell,

In mercy all wymen ever thou doste excell,

Therfore, blissed Lady, graunt thou thy great grace

To all that the devoutly visyte in this place.

And it was surely granted, for soon enough

Many seke ben here cured by Our Ladyes myghte

Dede agayne revyved, of this is no dought,

Lame made hole and blynde restored to syghte,

Maryners vexed with tempest safe to porte brought

Defe, wounded and lunatyke that hyder have sought

And also lepers here recovered have be

By Oure Ladyes grace of their infyrmyte.

Young Chaumonot interrupted the song. “So there is a Holy House in Walsingham, then, that’s a miraculous copy of the very Holy House before which we stand, made by the hands of angels at the behest of the Virgin Mary? If it is so great and efficacious a shrine, why have I not heard of it?”

The priest answered him with another story, but this time poetry died upon his lips and he reverted to bitter prose. Many years after Richeldis de Faverches had died, he said, King Henry VIII visited the shrine of Walsingham. He walked barefoot into the village, as all pilgrims must, with his lady, Queen Catherine, at his side. Like all pilgrims, he stopped close by the entrance to the shrine to kiss a gigantic bone that came, he was told, from the finger of Saint Peter. He saw the breast milk of Our Lady, preserved in a crystal vial. He drank from the holy well that was claimed to cure diseases of the
head. He placed a gold circlet around the neck of Our Lady in the shrine.

Twenty years later he wanted it back. In 1534, a letter was delivered to the priory in Walsingham demanding that the canons acknowledge that King Henry—rather than the corrupt and distant pope of Rome—was the head of the Church in England. The prior agreed. He had heard about King Henry, and, more important, he had heard about what happened to those who crossed him. Besides, Rome was very far away. This was surely just an administrative change. Nothing would happen, he assured his canons.

Nothing did happen for a while, but then one day the king’s agents arrived and began to interfere in the priory’s affairs. Those few who objected did not last long: the subprior and his lay assistant were soon swinging on gibbets outside the priory walls, and within a year the place was closed. The king’s agents took the image of Our Lady that resided within the Holy House, and the milk of the Blessed Virgin in its crystal vial, and the finger bone of Saint Peter; and they carried these to London, where they were publicly burned along with thousands of other idolatrous trinkets.

The priory was demolished, its chapels turned into barns, and the Holy House itself was destroyed. The prior received a handsome pension of one hundred pounds a year for his assistance, and the ruins of the abbey were sold to Sir Philip Sidney for ninety pounds. All that survives of the dream of Richeldis de Faverches is one broken arch standing in a meadow outside the village, which on the days of Our Lady sometimes sparkles with a celestial dew.

1631

“B
UT WHAT CAN
the pious actions of a lady who died centuries ago have to do with me?” asked Chaumonot. “The Holy House of Walsingham is gone, but the Holy House of Loreto—the one true house, surely—is still here. Is that not enough?”

The priest answered the young man with a final story. Not so long ago, he said, in Prague, a Bohemian noblewoman had a dream. Her name was Baroness Beligna Katherina von Lobkowicz. The baroness supported the emperor Ferdinand in the Wars of Religion that ravaged
her country, and she feared and despised the reformed faith of his enemies. She had heard stories of the atrocities committed by the reformers in England, of shrines desecrated and icons destroyed, and she had seen the Protestants of her own land do the same. She had prayed long and often that the emperor would vanquish the heretic armies, and at the Battle of the White Mountain her prayers were answered: the Protestant forces were defeated. Now the baroness prayed to Our Lady for an opportunity to honor her, in thanks for the restoration of Bohemia to the Roman Catholic faith.

You will know what she was asked to do—an angel, some said, told her to do it in a dream. She looked to Vienna, where the empress Eleanora had just dedicated a new chapel in the Augustinerkirche to Our Lady of Loreto. This chapel, indeed, had been built in exact imitation of Our Lady’s dwelling; for the empress, who was herself an Italian, had sent her artificers to Loreto to study the Holy House. The chapel they constructed for her in Vienna was so detailed a copy that it even reproduced the cracks and irregularities in the brickwork of the original and was decorated with feigned fragments of a fresco damaged by fire. The same artificers now came to Prague, and they built for Baroness Lobkowicz an exact copy of the Holy House of Vienna, which was an exact copy of the Holy House of Loreto, perfect in every detail.

Baroness Lobkowicz is not alone, the priest told Chaumonot. All over Bohemia and the other lands engulfed in religious war the pious and the faithful are building copies of the Holy House. They are at work in palace chapels and remote abbeys, on hilltops and in villages, striving to honor Our Lady. They are building to replace the shrines that were desecrated and images that were destroyed. They are building because, in their devotions, their actions mean more than their words—the things they make more than the things they say.

1674

J
OSEPH CHAUMONOT KNEW
what he had to do. Made clean by the miraculous intervention of a building, he vowed to repay his debt to the Holy House by making another copy of it and by devoting his life
to its occupant, Our Lady of Loreto. He went to Rome, where he presented himself to the Jesuit fathers, the knights of the Virgin Mary; he ceased to be Joseph the beggar and became Father Joseph-Marie Chaumonot, Jesuit missionary to the heathen of Canada.

And the little shrine behind him now, far away from Loreto, or Palestine, or Bohemia—this little house in the forest clearing by the banks of the river Kaniatarowanenneh—was his Holy House and the payment of his pledge.

When Father Chaumonot had finished his story, the Huron elders sat on the ground around the Holy House he had made, and they sang in their own language the story of Mary that their sorcerer had taught them.

’Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled

That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead;

Before their light the stars grew dim and wondering hunters heard the hymn,

Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria.

Within a lodge of broken bark the tender babe was found;

A ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round.

But as the hunter braves drew nigh the angel song rang loud and high,