Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (7 page)

Alice clutches her rosary to her mouth, kissing the crucified Christ.

‘But mercy prevailed,’ the Prioress soothes, ‘and the sinner was put in a cell, with her hands manacled to the wall, while chains were attached to her ankles and passed through a window to a heavy log of yew, so that all that night she was stretched by its weight.

‘The next day the sisters asked the canons to lay hands on the youth who had occasioned these ill deeds. One of the canons – a slight lad with a girlish frame – was dressed in the sister’s veil and sent to sit in the appointed place at the appointed hour for their meeting. Sure enough the corrupt youth approached her and fell on him whom he thought a sister!’

Again the sisters gasp.

‘Burning with lust, he was as a stallion brought to mare! But then those canons present, concealed in the undergrowth, jumped out and administered a bitter antidote to this lust with their staffs, beating him mightily so to extinguish his fever.’

Alice is delirious now, mumbling an endless prayer, dropping to her knees, righting herself, and all the other sisters are murmuring and chanting.

Katherine can think of nothing but escape.

The Prioress holds out a hand to calm them.

‘If it had ended there,’ she went on, raising a finger, ‘if it had ended there, then this shining example of zeal in defence of chastity might have been obscured for ever, but the virgins of the community asked the canons to hand the wretch over, as if to glean some information from him, and when they had him in their hands, such was their clamour for virtue’s reward, that they laid the youth out and, summoning their sister from her cell, they placed in her hands a knife taken from the kitchen and they forced her to unman the monster!’

A sister screams. Alice pitches against Sister Maria, who staggers and cannot hold her. She slips and falls to the ground, her head bouncing hollow on the flagstones. The infirmarian scuttles over and the sisters mill around her fallen form. Katherine steps back, and while the others are clustered around Alice, she turns and rushes for the door, not pausing to glance at the Prioress, who remains standing at the lectern.

Katherine throws open the heavy chapter house door and hurtles out into the cold white of daylight. From the tail of her eye she sees a blur of dark cloth. She manages two more steps until she feels a barking pain on her shin. She is tripped and goes sprawling in the snow. She tastes blood in her mouth. She looks up to see Sister Joan stepping over her, raising a staff and crashing it down on her, and after that, nothing.

She wakes on her back in one of the stables. Her feet are tied to an iron hoop set high in one wall, and Sister Joan is looming over her, tying her hands together above her head. When she is happy with the knot, Joan runs the rope from her hands through another hoop set on the wall behind Katherine’s head and she pulls on the rope, stretching Katherine so that she is lifted off the ground. The cords burn her wrists and ankles but she will not cry out. She will not let Sister Joan see her weep.

Joan ties off the rope and leans over her for a moment.

‘We ought to peel your skin,’ she says, ‘like they wanted to do to that nun.’

Katherine feels the older nun’s rough palm sweeping over her leg, from ankle to thigh, pushing away the skirts of her cassock so that they hang bunched around her waist. Katherine can hear her breathing thicken. After a moment Joan turns and leaves, locking the door behind her. Katherine lets out a sob and her tears run to meet the fine strands of hair at her temples. There is no air or light in the stable and she is unable to hear the ringing of the bell that has until that morning ordered her life, so she cannot say how long she is there. It feels like a lifetime and Katherine has soiled herself twice before the door is opened and the light from a pair of rush candles spills in. Two sisters – one of them Joan – step aside to admit the Prioress.

She sniffs in disgust.

‘Sister Katherine,’ she begins, ‘the sisterhood is roused and wonders what to do with you for the shame you have brought on our community.’

Katherine tries to speak but her throat is constricted.

‘I have asked them to let you leave the priory,’ the Prioress continues, ‘to go your own way in the world, but they respond that you will only broadcast our failure abroad and bring yet more shame on us.’

A silence lasts. The Prioress looks Katherine over, exasperated.

‘The nun of Watton cried out, child,’ she says. ‘She cried out to be beaten. She cried out that she deserved to be punished! Yet you lie in silence, as if your sin is worthy of neither comment nor shame.’

‘Holy Mother,’ Katherine whispers, finding her voice, ‘I spoke but three words to the canon. He came to my rescue as I was being pursued by men on horses beyond the walls. Had he not done so I would now be dead.’

‘Ha! Even now the devil disports in your mouth, child! For you make no mention of our Sister Alice.’

Katherine cannot stop herself gasping. She did not want Alice mentioned, to be blamed, to be involved at all.

‘Sister Alice said nothing to the canon. Not one word! She did not even look at him!’

‘But the canon looked at her! She will be reciting one thousand Credos in the chapel all night tonight and in the morning she will be taking up your penitential task of carrying the bucket from my cell to the dung heap—’

‘No!’

Katherine writhes but the Prioress launches forward so that her broad face fills her vision. Her breath is septic.

‘No?’ she asks. ‘No? You dare command me?’

‘Holy Mother, you cannot send Sister Alice out to the river tomorrow. Those men will be there. I know it! They will be waiting for her. For all that is holy, I beg of you!’

Her voice rises in a scream as the door is slammed.

The long night passes. Katherine wakes three or four times – never conscious for more than a few instants – and each time she hopes she is waking from a nightmare. Sometime towards the morning she is roused with a bucket of water sluiced over her body by a figure in the doorway. Her body arches, pulling on the muscles that have cramped in the night, grinding the ropes deep into the wounds in her wrists and ankles. Sister Joan is there with a knife and she slashes through the cords that bind Katherine’s hands to the wall. Katherine crashes to the ground. She does not scream. She has nothing left to give. She lies there as the Prioress comes in and looks her over again.

‘Is she alive?’ she asks.

Joan nudges her body with a clog.

‘She is.’

‘Get her on her feet and have her carry two buckets of water to the infirmary. She has a job to do.’

The Prioress leaves and Joan picks Katherine up by her armpits.

‘Walk,’ she says.

She takes her hands away. Katherine collapses. Joan tries again. Katherine collapses again. Joan hauls her to her useless feet and drags her from the room. As the blood begins to circulate Katherine cries out and throws herself down with pain. Sister Joan half pushes, half drags her outside into the yard.

It is dawn, and rain is falling. The snow has turned to slush.

The bell above is ringing a slow clap, like a knell, and she pulls on the well rope so slowly Sister Joan loses patience and helps with the bucket, pouring the water out into two small ones and even helping her to her feet. But then she walks behind her, cursing her, calling her a devil, a whore and worse.

The stone steps are the worst. The pain makes her dizzy. At the top Joan opens the door of the infirmary and pushes her staggering across the rushes. She has never been permitted to visit the whitewashed room above the calefactory. It is long and low, lined with two rows of six straw mattresses on each side and at the far end of the aisle, like an altar in a nave, a broad table dominated by the infirmarian’s bottles of tinctures and bags of herbs and her pestle and mortar.

At this far end of the room the Prioress stands hunched like a bird of prey over one of the mattresses. She glances up and then turns back to the mattress.

‘Here at last,’ she says.

Joan pushes Katherine, who hobbles down between the beds, the sound of her clogs softened by the rushes. Someone is lying on the mattress, covered in a linen winding cloth.

It is Alice. She is dead. Her veil is gone and her pale hair lies in a slack clot on the sheet beside her. Bruises cover her neck and her right eye is swollen. Her chin looks as if it had been rubbed with the same sand they use to clean the floors and there are what look like animal bites across her throat.

Katherine feels as if something had been pulled from inside her. Her spirit hurts as much as her body. She feels rage bloom within.

‘I told you—’ she starts, but the Prioress cuts her off.

‘If the child has come to grief it is through her own fault. She was once a fair and virginal example to us all but some corrupting malignity overcame her in the last days of her life, and she chose the devil over the Lord.’

‘No,’ Katherine says. ‘You did this. You caused this.’

‘Silence,’ the Prioress says.

Joan hits her.

‘Sister Alice was lured away from the path of righteousness by the many-horned legions of the devil.’

Joan hits her again, harder. Katherine staggers forward and puts the buckets down. The three women look at one another over Alice’s dead body.

‘It was you,’ Katherine says. ‘You did this just as much as those men.’

Before Joan can hit her again, Katherine turns and catches her fist.

‘Enough!’ she says and she twists the arm with a strength that surprises her. Joan flushes red and pulls free.

‘Anger is a deadly sin, my child,’ the Prioress murmurs. ‘And for your penance you can now wash our sister for burial. I will send some of the lay sisters with a coffin. The sooner she is buried the better.’

When they leave, Katherine stands over Alice, and, now that she is alone, her tears pour down her cheeks and fall on the rough material of Alice’s winding sheet. At length she takes a cloth from the infirmarian’s table and, kneeling by the head of Alice’s bed, she dips it into the bucket and begins gently to wipe her forehead clean.

As she does so, she begins to envy Alice. Her time in this world is done. She has journeyed ahead to a place where there will be neither tears nor suffering. Death is a release.

The bruises and welts on Alice’s face only become more livid as Katherine wipes away the dried blood and spit and tears. She smooths the cloth across her unblemished eye and it is then that the doubt begins. She puts the flannel aside and presses the tips of her fingers against those bruised lips.

Is it her imagination?

She puts her ear to Alice’s chest and thinks she hears something but cannot be sure. She hurries to the table where the infirmarian keeps her medicaments in neat rows, the largest jars at the back. She does not know what she wants or needs and the jars and bags are labelled with words she cannot read. She unstoppers one, then another, removing the pig’s bladder seals and sniffing each until in one – a large green glass bottle – a sharp smell brings tears to her eyes, sets her coughing and clears her head. She hurries back to Alice and pours some of the black viscous contents on to the cloth. She reseals the bottle and drops it on the mattress next to Alice’s, then holds the cloth below her nose.

There is an instant reaction. Alice’s eyeballs flutter.

Alice is alive.

A moment later she opens her eyes and stares at Katherine. The clarity of her white eyeballs against the bruising all around is astonishing. Then her hand moves. The fingers creep out to touch Katherine’s.

‘Stay here,’ Katherine says. ‘I’ll get Sister Infirmarian.’

Alice moves her head an inch and coughs.

‘Be still,’ Katherine says. ‘Don’t move.’

She crashes down the stairs and out into the cloister. Beyond, the Prioress stands by the well in conversation with Sister Joan. Both turn.

‘She’s alive,’ Katherine says. ‘Alice is still alive. Where is the infirmarian?’

The Prioress is startled.

‘She is in the almonry,’ she says. ‘Quick, girl, summon her.’

Katherine stumbles across the garth and out across the yard to the almonry. But here the door is locked. She hammers and pulls at the handles. There is no give. She shouts. There is no one there.

She retraces her steps. The cloister is empty and the Prioress and Joan have gone. Another sister sits in her carrel poring over a page. Katherine makes her start.

‘Sister, have you seen the infirmarian?’

‘She goes to the library after Mass,’ the sister tells her.

The library is on the other side of the cloister, up a small flight of steps above a storeroom. Another room Katherine has never visited. The infirmarian is there, standing at the lectern over a large book.

‘Sister Meredith,’ Katherine breathes. ‘Come. Sister Alice is alive.’

The infirmarian looks puzzled.

‘I am glad to hear it, Sister,’ she says.

‘Then come. She needs you.’

Sister Meredith leaves the book and follows Katherine out of the library and down the stairs. Katherine holds the door for her at the bottom and guides her across the garth.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks.

‘The infirmary, of course.’

‘What is Alice doing there?’

‘She has been attacked. I thought you would have known?’

Something is wrong. The old woman mutters as they make their way up the steps to the infirmary. The Prioress and Sister Joan are there already, beside Alice. When the door opens they both step away.

Something inside Katherine goes cold.

Sister Meredith hurries past them and kneels by Alice. Her hands play over the girl’s face and neck. Alice’s eyes are closed again and her hair is messed up on the sheet behind her head. Sister Meredith fetches a small copper bowl from her table, places it on Alice’s chest and pours in water from an earthenware jug. Then she stops to watch. After a moment she turns to Katherine.

‘But she is dead?’ she says.

The Prioress and Sister Joan are both staring at her.

The infirmarian leans forward and opens one of Alice’s eyelids.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You see? These marks? A sure sign that she died unable to breathe.’