Toby Clements - Kingmaker - Winter Pilgrims

She cannot imagine what her punishment might have been had he been seen, for since the day she had joined the Priory, all those years ago, the Prioress had forever been inflicting ever crueller punishments. Katherine had still been warm with the memories of her mother’s love when she had come, or so she now imagined, and the sudden change in her life had seemed almost unendurably hard, but as the years passed, she’d come to see that the cloistered life needn’t be so harsh, only that the Prioress went out of her way to make it so.

In the early years she had spent weeks at a stretch alone in her cell subsisting only on rye bread and lentils. If she were lucky: salted fish. She passed the hours on her knees, praying for she knew not what, to a God of whom she was unsure, but as her life progressed from one hardship to another, each visited upon her for something she did not understand or did not do, she began to wonder if God was the merciful deity that the priests espoused. She began to wonder whether He was not an absent God, or perhaps a powerless one, for she could not believe he was a vengeful one, who wished her to suffer this way.

When she spoke of her thoughts to one of the other sisters, a girl to whom she believed herself close, the Prioress heard within the hour and that evening the whole community was called to witness Sister Joan holding her down while the Prioress thrashed her with a scourge, grunting at each stroke. The sin of Pride was deadly, the Prioress had gasped, and it needed eradicating. This was the first of many beatings Katherine received over the years and now, more than a decade later, the skin on her back and legs is capped by a hardened matt of needle-fine scars.

Only later was she entrusted with the daily task of taking out the Prioress’s nightly soil and her pisspot, but when Katherine had complained of it, had suggested the lay sisters should deal with it as they did the rest of the nuns’ excrement, she was beaten, and made to carry the bucket away while the blood dried against her cassock.

Now she leans forward to gain a view down the line of the sisters to where the Prioress kneels in profile, her heavy hands resting on the prie-dieu in an effigy of piety. She is not a pleasure to look upon, with a big jaw and heavy brows that glower even in prayer. She is immensely strong though, with a man’s shoulders, and when inflamed it is possible to see the blood of her Viking forefathers running through her veins.

Katherine watches as she rises now, her prayers at an end, and with a chopping gesture she instructs the sisters to rise too, to fall into their customary lines. After a pause she leads them across the nave to where Sister Joan stands at the north door. Katherine and Alice fall in beside one another and walk with downcast eyes, but as they pass Sister Joan, the older nun leans forward and pinches Katherine’s elbow to make her look up.

Joan’s eyes are like slits, and her tiny, pointed teeth are bared in a grin. She is laughing at something and pointing at Katherine. Katherine feels cold wash over her.

Of course the canon has been seen.

Almost blind with despair, Katherine follows the sisters through the cloister to the chapter house. Stark within, the room is dominated by a dais on which the Prioress sits like a queen, her head bowed in prayer. The stone floor is spread with rushes that sigh underfoot as they enter and take their places on the low bench and still without speaking each sister raises her hood to cover her face in prayer. When the Prioress has finished her own prayers she would ordinarily read to them from the Martyrology, but today she reads from the Rule of St Augustine, chapter four.

‘The fourth chapter of the Rule’, she announces, ‘deals with safeguarding chastity.’

Katherine feels something twist inside.

‘What should you do,’ the Prioress asks, ‘if you notice within your sister a wantonness of the eye? Would you admonish her so that the fault does not multiply, but stands corrected? Or would you treat it as an infirmarian might treat a wound?’

The Prioress looks around as if for an answer. There is none. She closes the book and steps away from the lectern.

‘Let me tell you this remarkable thing,’ she says, ‘for it is an example that might inspire you. During the time of Bishop Henry there was a convent of virgins at Watton in the province of York, to the north of here, and they took in an oblate, a girl of five. She passed her girlhood happily enough, in prayer and silent contemplation, but as she grew older, she began to show signs of girlish abandon.’

The Prioress pauses to let her words sink in.

Katherine’s eye is drawn to the tight-shut door.

‘Now one day,’ the Prioress carries on, ‘when some lay brothers were brought into the cloister to carry out some works, the eye of this girl fell upon one of their number, a handsome boy in the full bloom of youth.’

There is a stirring among the sisters, all of whom can imagine such a thing, though few have seen it for themselves. Alice at last seems to have understood what is being said, for she begins moaning and swaying again, as she had in the nave.

The Prioress continues, her gaze avoiding Katherine: ‘And this youth noticed the girl, too, and so it was that each watered in the other the seeds of desire, and soon their nods turned to gestures and they sought one another out in the secret darkness of night.’

The sisters gasp.

‘Block your ears, oh brides of heaven!’ the Prioress pronounces, enjoying herself, ‘for that night this girl walked out a virgin of Christ and in the next moment she was corrupted in the flesh as she had been in the spirit!’

‘Shame,’ a sister mutters. ‘For shame!’

Others agree. The Prioress lets them calm themselves before she begins again: ‘Soon the evidence of the nun’s wickedness was all too clear,’ she says, ‘and when the truth emerged that the girl was with child, the shocked virgins of the community clapped their hands together and fell on her, ripping the veil from her head. They whipped her without mercy! Some argued she should be tied to a tree and burned over charcoal. Others cried out that she should be skinned alive!’

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!’