Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

The convent’s water proved healthy. A peat-colored but pure ground spring had been enclosed in a conduit that ran through the buildings, first to serve the kitchen before supplying the fish in the convent’s stew outside, then on to the nuns’ laundry, lavatorium, and, finally, to course along a helpful slope under the long, many-holed bench in the outhouse that was the privy. The bench was clean enough, though nobody had brushed out the runnel beneath it for many a long month-a job that Adelia reserved for the prioress, seeing no reason why Gyltha or the Matildas should have to do it.

But that was for later. Having done her best to ensure that the condition of her patients was not made worse, Adelia turned her energy to saving their lives.

PRIOR GEOFFREY CAME to save their souls. It was generous of him, considering the feud between him and the prioress. It was also brave; the priest who usually heard the sisters’ confession had refused to risk the plague and instead sent a letter containing a generalized absolution for any sins that might come up.

It was raining. Gargoyles spouted water from the roof of the cloister walk into the unkempt garden at its center. Prioress Joan received the prior, thanking him with stiff politeness. Adelia took his wet cloak to the kitchen to dry.

By the time she returned, Prior Geoffrey was alone. “Bless the woman,” he said. “I believe her to suspect me of trying to steal Little Saint Peter’s bones while she is yet at this disadvantage.”

Adelia was happy to see him. “Are you well, Prior?”

“Well enough.” He winked at her. “Functioning nicely so far.”

He was leaner than he had been and looked fitter. She was relieved for that, and also by his mission. “Their sins seem so little, except to them,” she said of the nuns. In their more terrible moments, when they thought themselves near death, she had heard most of her patients’ reasons for dreading hellfire. “Sister Walburga ate some of the sausage she was taking upriver for the anchorites, but you’d think from her distress that she was a Horseman of the Apocalypse and the Whore of Babylon rolled into one.”

Indeed, Adelia had already discounted the accusations made by Brother Gilbert against the nuns’ behavior. A doctor learned many secrets from an acutely ill patient, and Adelia found these women to be slapdash perhaps, undisciplined, mostly illiterate-all failings that she put down to the negligence of their prioress-but not immoral.

“She shall be reconciled through Christ for the sausage,” Prior Geoffrey said solemnly.

By the time he had finished confessing the sisters on the ground floor, it was dark. Adelia waited for him outside Sister Veronica’s cell at the end of the row, to light him to the upper cells.

He paused. “I have given Sister Odilia the last rites.”

“Prior, I hope to save her yet.”

He patted her shoulder. “Not even you can perform miracles, my child.” He looked back to the cell he had just left. “I worry for Sister Veronica.”

“So do I.” The young nun was ill beyond what she should be.

“Confession has not eased that child’s sense of sin,” Prior Geoffrey said. “It can be the cross of those who are holy-minded, like her, that they fear God too much. For Veronica, the blood of our Lord is still moist.”

Having seen him, complaining, up steps that were slippery from the rain, Adelia went back down the row to Odilia’s cell. The infirmaress lay as she had for days, her twiggy, soil-engrained hands plucking at her blanket in an effort to throw it off.

Adelia covered her, wiped away some of the unction trickling down her forehead, and tried to feed her Gyltha’s calf’s-foot jelly. The old woman compressed her lips. “It will give you strength,” Adelia pleaded. It was no good; Odilia’s soul wanted free of the empty, exhausted body.

It felt like desertion to leave her, but Gyltha and the Matildas had gone for the night, though reluctantly, and with only the prioress and herself to do it, Adelia had to see the other sisters fed.

Walburga, she who had been Ulf’s “Sister Fatty” and was now much thinner, said, “The Lord has forgiven me; the Lord be praised.”

“I thought he might. Here, open your mouth.”

But after a few spoonfuls, the nun again showed concern. “Who’ll be a-feeding our anchorites now? ’Tis wicked to eat if they be starving.”

“I’ll speak to Prior Geoffrey. Open up. One for the Father. Good girl. One for the Holy Ghost…”

Sister Agatha, next door, had another bout of sickness after taking three spoonfuls. “Don’t you worry,” she said, wiping her mouth, “I’ll be better tomorrow. How’s the others doing? I want the truth now.”

Adelia liked Agatha, the nun who had been brave enough, or drunk enough, to provoke Brother Gilbert at the Grantchester feast. “Most are better,” she said, and then, in response to Agatha’s quizzical look, “but Sister Odilia and Sister Veronica are still not as well as I’d like.”

“Oh, not Odilia.” Agatha said, urgently, “Good old stick, she is. Mary, Mother of God, intercede for her.”

And Veronica? No intercession for her? The omission was strange; it had been evident when other nuns asked after their sisters in Christ; only Walburga, who was about the same age, had inquired for her.

Perhaps the girl’s beauty and youth were resented, as was the fact that she was the prioress’s obvious favorite.

Favorite, indeed, Adelia thought. There had been agony in Joan’s face that spoke of great love when she looked on Veronica’s suffering. Being sensitive to the existence of love in all its forms now, Adelia found herself sincerely pitying the woman and wondered if the energy she put into her hunting was a way of redirecting a passion for which, as a nun, and especially one in authority, she must be clawed by guilt.

Had Sister Veronica been aware of being an object of desire? Probably not. As Prior Geoffrey said, there was an otherworldliness to the girl that spoke of a spiritual life the rest of the convent lacked.

The other nuns must know of it, though. The young nun didn’t complain, but the bruises on her skin suggested she’d been physically bullied.

When he’d finished in the upper cells, Adelia made the prior wash his hands in the brandy. The procedure bemused him. “Usually, I take it internally. However, I no longer question anything you would have me do.”

She lit him to the gate, where a groom waited for him with their two horses. “A heathenish place, this,” he said, lingering. “Perhaps it is the architecture or the barbarous monks who built it, but I am always more conscious of the Horned One than of sanctity when I am in it, and for once I am not referring to Prioress Joan. The arrangement of those cells alone…” He grimaced. “I am reluctant to leave you here-and with so little help.”

“I have Gyltha and the Matildas,” Adelia told him, “and the Safeguard, of course.”

“Gyltha is with you? Why did I not see her? Then there’s no need for worry; that woman can dispel the forces of darkness single handed.”

He gave her his blessing. The groom took the chrismatory box from him, put it in a saddlebag, heaved him up on his horse, and they were gone.

It had stopped raining, but the moon, which should have been full, was heavily clouded. Adelia stood for a minute or two after they had disappeared, listening to the sound of hooves diminishing into the blackness.

She hadn’t told the prior that Gyltha did not stay at night and that it was at night when she became afraid.

“Heathenish,” she said out loud. “Even the prior feels it.” She went back into the cloister but left the gates open; it was nothing outside the convent that frightened her, it was the convent itself; there was no air to it, nothing of God’s light, no windows even in the chapel, just arrow slits set into walls of heavy, unadorned stone that reflected the savagery they had been built to withstand.