By Sylvian Hamilton (3 page)

'We'll
go along in the stream as far as we can,' he said. 'Then out and back
south past the abbey. If they're looking for us, they won't be
looking that way, and if they use dogs, the stream'll throw them off.
They might not even realise I've switched the girdles; not for a
while anyway, if we're lucky. It would be a help if it snowed some
more. Cover our tracks.' His teeth were chattering.

Bane
silently offered an unstoppered bottle.

Straccan
drank, gasped, shuddered and drank again. 'Have you got any food?'

Bane
produced bread and cold meat, shouldered his pack, and they set off,
splashing along in the stream while Straccan chewed and swallowed.
His throat felt sore. 'This will give me belly ache,' he said. Ice at
the stream's edge crackled and clattered. He clenched his chattering
teeth. 'How far to the horses?'

'More
than a mile. Can you make it?'

'I'd
better. I doubt you could carry me.' He sneezed violently several
times. 'Bugger! I've got their sodding cold!'

It
began to snow.

Chapter
3

The
wicket shot aside with a sharp crack and through the aperture two
pairs of eyes fixed upon each other. The man outside the gate saw a
round pink velvety face with big brown eyes and a small pursed mouth
framed in a starched white wimple and black veil. Dame Laurencia saw
a lean face, still tinged a faded bronze from long-ago foreign suns,
with flint-coloured eyes round which fans of pale creases showed
sharp against the tan. The man had a wide thin mouth, square chin,
straight nose and cropped sunbleached hair beneath a russet cap which
he now tugged off. They stared at each other until Straccan held up a
lead disc, no bigger than a penny, on which was stamped Prioress
Hermengarde's seal. The nun smiled and nodded. 'Wait,' she said.

The
wicket snapped shut and Straccan heard her footsteps receding. He
stuffed his bonnet down the front of his dusty jacket, rubbed a hand
over the stubble on top of his head then turned and stroked the nose
and neck of his horse. Presently he heard feet again. Bolts were
pulled back and the gate creaked open. 'Come in.' Two nuns now: the
rabbity gatekeeper and another, tall thin and pale like a scraped
bone. Also a servingman, a groom by the look and smell of him.

The
pale nun said, 'Martin will take your horse. You have Mother's
token?' He held it up again. She looked at it suspiciously. 'Mother
Hermengarde died last autumn,' she said. 'Mother Rohese is prioress
now. She will see you.'

Inside
the gate they scattered in different directions; the gatekeeper to
her tiny room over the gate, the horse led one way, the man another,
across the cobbled yard where three lay sisters laboured at washtubs,
bony red elbows going up and down as they laughed and chattered,
openly staring at the man, splashes flying and their sacking aprons
soaked.

Through
a door, along a dark flagged passage. Straccan sniffed at the
unpleasantly familiar smells of damp, incense, candlewax and cooking
fish. The nunnery, he noticed, was much cleaner than any house of
monks –everything washed and scoured, including the ladies, to
within an inch of their lives. Monks cleaned what showed, dusted what
could be seen, leaving festering corners full of grease and dirt,
cobwebs behind curtains, dead rats under furniture, scummy residue
between flagstones. And they smelled of stale sweat. Nuns smelled of
nothing, a sterile sanctity. There was a distant thin musical thread
of women's voices chanting, piercingly pure. Black-clad nuns flitted
purposefully along the passages like enthusiastic bats.

Another
door. The nun knocked, a voice responded within and they entered the
small bright room, early afternoon sun spilling golden through two
lancet windows behind the Prioress's chair. Prioress Rohese was short
and sturdy with ginger eyebrows and instantly recognisable Angevin
features. Straccan sighed. Another of the old king's bastards. Old
Henry had done his best for them, those he knew about, and now they
popped up everywhere, always secure in positions of authority and
influence. Straccan supposed they had to start somewhere further down
their various ladders, but whenever he encountered any of them, there
they were at the top.

'I
am Mother Rohese.'

He
bent one knee and kissed the ring on the small square practical hand
held out to him, feeling the battery of eyes on his bared head and
the stubble filling the still-obvious tonsure.

‘
I
am Straccan,' he said. 'May I see my daughter?

'Certainly,
Sir Richard. Dame Januaria will fetch her. Please, sit down.'

The
tall nun left the room and another slipped in to take her place.

'Wine,'
said the prioress. The nun opened a small wall-cupboard and brought
out a pewter jug and two clay beakers.

'Is
she well?' Straccan asked.

'She
is, praise God.'

The
door opened and Dame Januaria ushered in a child, small for her ten
years, a little bundle of plain bunchy wadmal gown with bright hair
escaping from a grey hood. Very dark blue eyes under gull-wing
eyebrows. She slid a quick sideways look at Straccan as she bowed to
the prioress.

'Gilla,'
said her father taking a deep breath, longing to pick her up and hug
her, 'have you forgotten me?'

They
sat together in the guest parlour, sharing a sticky handful of
marchpane from Straccan's pocket. Gilla's legs swung; one hand held
the sweet, the other, small and warm and dry, held her father's hand
tightly.

'Where
have you been?' she asked.

'Oh,
to Winchester and Hallowdene and home again.'

'I
thought you were coming weeks ago.'

'I
know, sweetheart, I thought so too. But I was ill, stuck in bed in a
wretched little village.'

'Are
you well now?' The blue eyes examined him anxiously.

'Oh
yes. It was just a bad cold.'

'Will
you stay at home now?'

'For
a while. Would you like to come home to Stirrup with me for a few
weeks?'

'Yes
please!' The small face was transfigured by a brilliant smile, for a
moment so like her dead mother that Straccan felt an unbearable stab
of pain and remembered loss.

'I
will arrange it with Mother Rohese,' he said.

'Father?'

'What,
sweetheart?'

'You
didn't really think I'd forgotten you, did you?'

'No,
not really.'

'I
prayed for you all the time. I told Our Lady all about you. I bent a
penny to her for you. Well, Dame Mahaut bent it for me but it was my
own penny.'

'It
worked.'

'Not
properly,' the child said severely, 'or you wouldn't have caught a
cold. Father ...'

‘
What,
love?'

'Do
you think it might have been a bad penny?'

In
the Prioress's parlour once more, after Gilla had gone to supper too
full of marchpane and excitement to eat it, Straccan and Mother
Rohese met each other's steady assessing gaze. The prioress made up
her mind quickly. No fool, she thought. A careful man--intelligent,
discreet--he'll do.

'First,
as to Devorgilla,' Mother Rohese said, 'she is well, as you have
seen. She is happy here. She is not alone; we have three other little
girls. They play and laugh and get up to the usual sorts of mischief.
Have you decided whether she is to stay here, become a novice and
take her vows in this house?'

'No,'
said Straccan. 'She is only ten years old. I won't commit her to
religion yet. Later on, she can choose whether to stay or leave.'

The
prioress's arched eyebrows might have indicated disapproval, or might
not. 'At what age do you consider she will have the good sense and
experience to make this judgement for herself, Sir Richard?'

'My
contract with Prioress Hermengarde stipulates that Gilla stays here
until she is twelve. Paid for,' he added pointedly, 'in full with the
jawbone of Saint Luke on your altar, an authenticated relic of great
price.'

'Of
course, I am not disputing that, Sir Richard; you misunderstand. I
only wish you to consider Devorgilla's future, the future she would
have in our community. Security and the prospect of high office are
not to be discounted. Her companions, you see, have their futures
settled. Two will join the community here. The third is betrothed and
will leave us next year to be married. Devorgilla is neither one
thing nor the other. I believe she is aware of this ... limbo.'

He
had misjudged her, thought she wanted Gilla for her house a
well-endowed novice who mustn't be let slip through those capable
fingers. But she cared about the child. Had observed. Had considered.
It merited his respect.

'Thank
you,' he said. 'I will think about it. I'm coming again next month. I
want to take her home for Easter. I hardly know her.'

'She
is growing up,' the prioress said. 'She would be welcome among us,
she is loved here. But now, Sir, there is another matter on which I
should value your advice.'

It
was a strange story. One night at the end of January a group of
woodcutters had brought a dying man to the priory, dragging the great
long body on a woodsled, beating and shouting at the wicket after
dark, frightening the whole community. Badly injured by robbers, no
identification, not even a saint's medal round his neck. Just a dying
man, ambushed, stabbed, bleeding, grey and past speech. The
woodcutters had come upon him on their way home: two skinny
starveling thieves had thought better of facing four well-fed
peasants with axes, and fled with their victim's purse which they cut
from his belt with the knife they'd stuck in his liver.

The
prioress ordered him put in the infirmary –there was no one ill
there at the time –and though some of the nuns protested, she
overruled them.

'You
would turn away the wounded Christ Himself for being a man,' she
snapped. He died. There was time for the last rites, thank God, but
he was unable to confess, barely breathing, too far gone. When he was
washed and prepared for burial the infirmarian found ...

'This,'
said the prioress.

Straccan
turned it over in his hands. An old, very old, reliquary
-cylindrical, bronze, green with age. A spiral ribbon of worn symbols
in no language he recognised was engraved round it and on the lid was
a device somewhat like a starfish.

'Do
you know what it is?' she asked.

'It's
very old.'

'Look
inside,' she said.

He
tugged off the close-fitting cap. Inside was another cylinder, this
one of stiff rolled cloth tied with a cord threaded through a lead
seal. He slid the cord down and gently unrolled the material. Colour
sprang up from the surface, not cloth as on the outside, but long
narrow strips of ivory pierced and stitched side by side to make a
smooth surface from which the intense colour seemed to bleed into the
air. A painted face, a woman's, not young, not beautiful but utterly
compelling. Dark, unmistakably eastern, with great black eyes full of
such grief that it made him uneasy. Full lips, compressed. A red veil
hiding all hair, fastened under the chin with a fish-shaped gold and
gemmed clasp.

'What
do you think of it?' He heard the suppressed excitement in her voice.

'The
portrait is from Egypt, or perhaps Syria,' he said. 'Brought back by
a crusader, probably. This must have been a holy woman, perhaps an
early martyr.'

'Saint
Luke, they say, was artist as well as physician,' Mother Rohese said
eagerly. 'He painted from life the divine features of God's Mother.'

'Yes,'
said Straccan thoughtfully. 'If this was mine, I should like to
believe that. But there is nothing to say so. Unless you know whose
it is, you can only make guesses.' He turned the cylinder, angling it
to the light to see the inscription, but the strange glyphs were like
nothing he had ever seen. 'This case isn't Egyptian,' he said, 'nor
Byzantine, nor from anywhere I know of. It's much older than the
picture and they don't belong together. Someone just found the case
convenient to keep the picture in.' He rolled it up and slipped it
back in the cylinder. 'What do you want me to do?'

'I
hoped that you might know the picture,' said the Prioress.