The Blessing Stone (36 page)

They embraced and kissed and said good-bye, with Cornelia protesting that she would see to her mother’s release. But Amelia knew it would not be so, that Cornelius held all the power here.

Her daughter had been gone only a few moments when Cornelius arrived, so that Amelia suspected he had been outside, waiting.

“Once and for all, wife, will you renounce this madness?” he asked, and when she shook her head, she saw the genuine bafflement on his face.

“Cornelius, I think when you took me to the circus it was to frighten me,” Amelia said. “I think you were hoping that my witnessing Rachel’s death would make me give up my new faith. But it had the opposite effect. Because of what I saw, because of what you forced me to witness”—her voice grew in strength—“because
you
murdered my friends, I am more firm in my resolve than ever. I shall never tell the names of my fellow Christians. And I shall never renounce my faith.”

He towered over her in his impressive toga of office—a garment that made crowds part before him—and she saw rage seethe in his eyes. But he said not another word, and as he turned on his heel and left, the door shutting behind him, Amelia knew that her cause was lost. Whether or not Nero was involved, whether or not the charges against her were true, she knew that somehow Cornelius was going to exact his final revenge on her. He was going to see her punished in the arena. And she would not be alone: he would crucify Japheth and Chloe and all the others, saving her for last.

Down the dank corridor and up the slimy stairs that were to have struck such fear into his wife as to make her obedient to him again, Cornelius marched with fury in every step. But already a new idea was beginning to form in his mind, a way to turn this ruined situation into an advantageous one. He would tell Amelia that he had managed to obtain her release by using his political weight and the prestige of his name and reputation. She would then gossip about it to her friends until, within a very short time, Cornelius would come out looking the hero.

So it was with some impatience that he wanted to give the order to the watch commander to have her released, as the two men had previously arranged. But the commander wasn’t there, but an underling who explained that his officer was away for the moment, and the key ring with him.

“Go find him then!” Cornelius barked, anxious now to get on with Amelia’s release and the gilding of his reputation.

Back in the dark cell, Amelia sat sick and terrified. She had broken out in a sweat and was shaking all over. She thought of the years still left to her, her family, the babies that were going to grow up, her house in the city, even the villa in the country was suddenly precious to her. She wanted to attend the toga ceremonies of Gaius and Lucius, to watch their eldest son win his first case in the law courts, to cradle her daughters’ new babies, to grow old and wise and cherish each blazing sunset. How she had taken it all for granted, her life, her family, when she should have praised every sunrise, embraced every day!

She prayed as she had never prayed before, this woman who had once been without faith but who was now so filled with faith that she prayed not only to her new redeemer but to Blessed Mother Juno as well. She prayed for a sign.
What should I do?

She listened for the answer, but all she heard was the oppressive silence of the massive walls that imprisoned her, and the faint cries of prisoners begging for release, for food, for water. She listened to the beating of her own heart, to the whispered fears of her own conscience. She prayed and listened. And finally, exhausted from fear and hunger and thirst, Amelia lifted the necklace from beneath her dress and gazed into the heart of the blue crystal, the cluster of cosmic diamond dust that had taken the shape of a crucified savior. And just like that, the answer came to her.

It was this stone that had given her faith in the gods again, and it strengthened her faith now. She knew what she must do.

With trembling hands she worked at prying the crystal free from its gold casing and when it was free, she held it up to the faint torchlight and nearly cried out at its beauty. Because of the gold backing, she had not seen its beautiful transparency, the utter sharpness and clarity of the image of Jesus within. How strange now to think she had thought this stone cursed, that the image was that of a ghost. But of course, that was what Cornelius had wanted her to think.

And then she thought of the pain that was to come, the torture and agony, and finally an ignominious death in the arena. She knew she hadn’t the strength to keep from revealing her friends’ names and whereabouts under torture. Her heart thumped. Her spirit wanted to be strong but she knew the flesh could be weak. But perhaps here, now, she would have the strength, before the torture began.

Suddenly she was thinking back to a day eight years ago when Cornelius, deciding over life and death, had chosen death. Now Amelia faced that same choice. Thinking of the innocent baby left exposed to die, she chose life: eternal life.

Having made the decision, she felt a strange calm steal over her, and suddenly all mysteries became clear.
Perhaps
, she thought,
when Jesus spoke of the end of the world, he had not meant that the end would come to all people at once, but rather to each in his time, as one dies and a new life begins. For me, tonight, the world comes to an end.

She held her breath and listened. She heard murmured voices at the far end of the corridor. She had to move quickly, before they came for her.

Swallowing the stone was not easy. As soon as she placed it on her tongue she broke into a sweat and became sick to her stomach. And she thought of all the life that was yet ahead of her, the beautiful house and her husband now wanting to be loving toward her, wanting to start fresh, to lavish her with gifts. But all she could think of was the man on the cross who had forgiven those who crucified him, and who had cleansed her through spiritual baptism.

She put the stone farther into her mouth and still could not swallow it. So she pushed it with her finger and when she started to gag she was afraid she would vomit it back up or she would black out and the guards would pull the stone out before it had done its work.

Gagging and bent over and in excruciating pain, she worked the crystal farther down her throat, mentally praying, “God forgive me for taking my own life but I am made of weak flesh. I cannot bear to lead my beloved friends into the arena with me, though our deaths be those of martyrs.”

And then the fierce instinct for survival rose up, and she panicked. Her heart raced and her hands clawed at her throat. Though it was her will to die, her body fought. Her lungs struggled for breath, her mouth stretched wide for air. Stabbing pains shot through her chest, and her head felt as if it were about to burst. She fell to the floor and flailed about like a fish pulled from water. She felt fire in her lungs, and bells clanged in her ears.
Dear God, end my misery!

And then finally a strange peace came and life ebbed from her body like the petals of a summer rose, dropping one by one. And thus did the blue crystal, this fragment of the cosmos—marvelous in its mystery and perfection, having long ago directed a girl named Tall One out of Africa, having led a woman named Laliari to lose her fear of the dead, and having shown a young man named Avram his place in the world—lodge firmly in the throat of a woman of tremendous faith. As blackness began to engulf her, as she prepared for death and her reunion with Rachel and cherished friends, and perhaps with the abandoned child who had been born perfect, Amelia did not miss the irony that the object with which her husband had intended to punish her turned out to be the instrument of her redemption.

Interim

The guards didn’t know how she had died but her face was engorged with blood, her tongue purple and protruded. The prison physician said that Lady Amelia had the look of someone who had died of a heart attack. The fear of torture in the arena must have been too great for her, he said. Cornelius remembered what she had said about his taking her to the circus backfiring. It was true. He
had
wanted to put the fear in her, but not to the point of killing her.

Then he saw something the others did not—the stone missing from the necklace, and he knew in that moment what she had done.

But not wishing his wife to achieve martyrdom status, preferring people instead to believe she had died of cowardice, he did not point out the missing blue stone and her heroic method of death. He kept his silence and became the model grieving husband.

Cornelia, on the other hand, went wild with grief, blaming her father for the tragedy. She forbade him to cremate her mother but instead had Amelia laid to rest in a fine tomb that resembled a house, complete with false windows, doors, and a garden, and Cornelia went every week to visit, making a great demonstration of her grief. As private revenge against her father, Cornelia took up her mother’s faith, although she did not believe in it, and practiced Christianity openly, turning her home into a church-house, flaunting it wherever she could until the day came when she realized she really was a Christian. In her new zeal she campaigned to keep her mother’s memory alive and so insisted that Christians commemorate her mother’s martyrdom on the day of her death every year, with Cornelia delivering an annual eulogy on how Amelia had defied the authorities and died for her faith.

When Cornelia’s first child—the baby that had been born the day Cornelius returned from Egypt, bringing with him the blue-crystal necklace stolen from a queen’s tomb—grew to manhood and he became a passionate Christian and a prominent deacon of the church, he ordered a silver reliquary to be fashioned to house his grandmother’s remains, and on a day of great veneration, before a gathered company of hundreds of Christians, the shroud-wrapped bones were reverently moved from coffin to reliquary and placed in a shrine where all could come and worship.

In her later years, Cornelia followed her mother and became a Christian martyr under Emperor Domitian who had her tongue ripped out during a spectacle in the circus.

Cornelius, having suffered no great loss from his wife’s death, was eventually appointed to the office of consul, thus getting a year named after himself and guaranteeing, he smugly believed, his memory in history. Unfortunately, the empire eventually passed into a new rule and the roster of consuls faded into oblivion. While his wife Amelia went on to become known for her martyrdom and even to have a church named after her, Cornelius Gaius Vitellius disappeared from history.

The bones of St. Amelia were moved from the family crypt during the golden era of Emperor Marcus Aurelius and placed in a newly built church where thousands came to venerate her. There she slept peacefully, her descendants commemorating her memory each year on the day of her martyrdom, until the final and most brutal of Christian persecutions broke out under Emperor Diocletian in the year 303
C.E.

The first edict of Diocletian was that Christian assemblies were forbidden, churches and sacred books were ordered to be destroyed, and all Christians were commanded to deny their religion and sacrifice only to the state gods. The penalty for failure to comply was death. During a secret meeting of bishops and deacons it was agreed that, although death meant instant martyrdom and therefore union with Jesus in heaven, it was also necessary to the faith that certain members survive and carry the word beyond the empire. Lots were drawn to select these missionaries. Relics and books and holy objects, among them the silver casket containing the remains of St. Amelia, were gathered up and spirited out of Rome in the middle of a stormy night, and launched in a ship upon a choppy sea.

There, upon waves as tall as buildings and in a night as black as ink, Lady Amelia, former wife of Cornelius Gaius Vitellius, was transported to the Roman province of Britain where Christian sympathizers lived in a settlement called Portus, once a Roman military garrison but now a thriving town known for its eels.

ENGLAND
1022
C.E.

Mother Winifred, prioress of St. Amelia’s, looked out the window of the scriptorium and thought:
spring!

Oh, the blessed colors of nature, God’s paintbrush at work: pale pink cherry blossoms, red and black mulberries, scarlet hawthorn berries, and sun-yellow jonquils. Would that her own paint palette were as rich and varied. The illuminations she could create!

The colors gave her hope. Maybe
this
year the abbot would allow her to paint the altarpiece.

Her ebullience abated. She had had the dream again, although she couldn’t really call it a dream for it had come to her while she was awake. A vision, then, while praying to St. Amelia. And in the vision she had seen what she had seen countless times before: the life of the blessed saint, from girlhood to conversion to Christianity, from her arrest by Roman soldiers to a martyr’s death at the hands of Emperor Nero. Although Winifred had no idea what Roman soldiers looked like, or a Roman emperor for that fact, nor how people dressed and lived a thousand years ago—and of course no one knew what Amelia had looked like, certainly her bones had not been looked upon in centuries—Winifred nonetheless felt certain that the vision was accurate, for it had come from God.

The problem was, how to convince Father Abbot. Like a bone between two dogs, the altarpiece was an issue that had been worried about by the two of them for longer than Winifred could recall. She would ask permission to work on something more challenging than a manuscript, and the abbot (both the present one and his predecessors) would counter that her ambition was unseemly and in fact verged upon the sins of pride and ambition. Although Winifred would acquiesce every time, for she had taken vows of obedience, her rebellious mind would secretly think: men paint great paintings, women are only good for capital letters.

For that was precisely what Mother Winifred and the sisters of St. Amelia’s did: they painted capital letters, known as illuminations, which were famous the length and breadth of England. The only problem was, illuminations were not what Winifred wanted to paint, it was what the
abbot
wanted her to paint.

She sighed and reminded herself that the life of a nun was not about wanting but obedience.

Folding her hands into the voluminous sleeves of her habit, she started to turn away from the window where the rainbows of spring had distracted her, when she saw Andrew, the elderly caretaker of the priory, hurrying through the garden waving his hands. When she saw the look of worry on his face, Mother Winifred leaned out. There was no glass in the convent windows since the nuns could not afford such an expense.

Tugging at his gray forelock, Andrew begged the prioress’s pardon and said as how he’d been up a tree cutting off old limbs for wood when he’d seen Father Edman on the road, coming this way. “Reckon it’ll be quarter of an hour afore he gets here.”

Winifred reacted with mild alarm. Why was he coming
now
? The abbot came only once a month to St. Amelia’s, to hear confessions and to pick up manuscripts. He used to say the Mass as well but was too busy and important now to be wasted on a handful of elderly nuns. Lesser priests were assigned to that onerous duty.

“I’m thinkin’ it be bad news, Reverend Mother.”

Winifred pursed her lips. She had never known the abbot to alter his schedule for
good
news. Still, there was no need to spread alarm. “Perhaps he has come to tell us that our roof will be repaired this year.”

“That would be blessed news indeed.”

“In the meantime, do not tell the others. We need not trouble them unnecessarily.” Thanking the man, and asking him to let her know when Father Edman had reached the gate, she left the window. Keeping news of the abbot’s visit to herself, for she feared it would worry her sisters, she moved along the row of nuns who were already at work on this glorious spring morning in this eleventh century of our Lord.

The convent scriptorium was a large room containing a long central table and writing desks along the walls where the sisters of St. Amelia toiled at their exquisite labor. The window shutters were open to admit the morning sunshine. The sisters worked in silence, their black-veiled heads bowed over their work. Winifred had once visited the scriptorium at Portminster Abbey, where silence was imposed upon the Benedictine monks there, although copying sacred texts was not a silent occupation. A few monks were starting to experiment with the new silent reading, but most still read to themselves the way people had done for centuries: out loud.

While the monks at Portminster Abbey penned the actual text of a book, they left a space where the first letter on a page was to go because it was added last, here at St. Amelia’s. But even though it was the illuminations and not the text that were famous all over England, it was the monks who received the credit. Mother Winifred accepted this as the order of things, for she was obedient to the church and God and men. Still, she sometimes thought it would be nice if the skill, talent, and devotion of her sisters could be acknowledged just once.

Which brought her thoughts back to Father Abbot. Her dream-vision had been so strong this last time that she felt an urgency to speak with him about it. Of course, she could never go to the abbot but rather must wait for
him
to come to
her
. In forty years of living at the priory, Winifred had rarely ventured beyond its walls, and even then it was to go only a short distance—on those occasions when members of her family died and were buried in the village churchyard. Once, she had attended the installation of Father Edman as the new abbot of Portminster.

Father Abbot…How strange that he should be making this unscheduled visit on this particular morning. Dare she hope that this was the hand of God at work? Was it a sign that the abbot was finally going to relent and grant her wish? Was he going to understand at last that the altarpiece was not for Winifred’s own pleasure or pride, but a gift to the blessed saint in gratitude for what she had done for Winifred?

When Winifred was a child living at home in her father’s manor house she had possessed an uncanny knack for finding lost things—a pin, a brooch, once even a meat pasty that had been carried off by a dog. Her granny told her she had the sight, inherited from her Celtic ancestors, but had warned her not to tell anyone for they might think she was a witch. So Winifred had kept her second sight a secret until it came out one day by accident, when the whole manor house had been turned upside down to search for a silver spoon that had gone missing. Fourteen-year-old Winifred had “seen” it in the buttery behind a churn, and when it was recovered, everyone had demanded an explanation as to how she had known it was there. She couldn’t explain and so had been deemed the malicious little culprit. She had received a beating, and the father of the boy to whom she had been betrothed called off the engagement, citing weakness of character on the part of the girl. That was when she had gone to the chapel at St. Amelia’s and prayed for help.

While her mother and sisters had continued to offer prayers in the chapel, Winifred had gone exploring, and when she had stumbled into the scriptorium where the sisters were bent over their labors, and she had seen their palettes and pigments, their parchments and pens, she had known that this was where she was meant to be.

Winifred’s father had been only too happy to grant the girl’s request to enter the convent, and here Winifred had lived ever since. Not a day went by in which she did not offer a prayer of thanks to St. Amelia who had rescued her from a deplorable future: an unmarriageable daughter, producing no grandsons, contributing little in return for her keep, eventually to become that most despised of worthless creatures, the maiden aunt whom families were required to support and to suffer in return for bad moods and bad embroidery.

The scriptorium at St. Amelia’s smelled of oil and wax, soot and charcoal, sulphur and vegetative matter. A haze hung in the air as lamps burned day and night, not for illumination but for the harvesting of lampblack necessary for the making of inks. The nuns also made their own pigments: the finest deep blue was made from lapis lazuli, which came only from Afghanistan; to make red ink they used red lead, vermilion from cinnabar, or crushed kermes beetles; and a few colors the making of which were a secret known only within these walls.

At the head of the central table was Sister Edith who was most deft at applying gold leaf, the first stage of illumination. It took a special hand to apply the gesso base and then the gold leaf on top of that; a keen eye to know when the foundation was
just
moist, to breathe on it only
just so,
to press the silk cloth
thus,
to wield the dog’s tooth burnishing tool
to a point.
A heavier hand or a dimmer eye than Sister Edith’s and the gold leaf decoration would be second rate at best.

Another sister was painting a miniature of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were both naked, both feminine with rounded hips and bellies, the nun having no idea what a naked man looked like. As for the genitals, fig leaves were a godsend, for the sisters had no notion of how men were constructed beneath their clothing. Mother Winifred herself, for all her years, was ignorant of human anatomy, even female, having never assisted at childbirth or otherwise seen a woman exposed. She was familiar with the metaphors: the man’s key for the woman’s keyhole, his sword for her scabbard, and so forth. But the business of copulating and procreating was beyond Mother Winifred’s ken.

She never thought about sex, or wondered what she had missed. As far as she understood it (mostly from tales she had heard from the lady guests at the convent), sex had been created as a sport for men and a misery for women. She remembered when her older sister had gotten married and the female cousins had come to help her pack for her journey, how the girls had giggled over the
chemise cagoule,
a voluminous nightgown with a small hole in the front, to allow impregnation with minimal body contact.

“Why don’t you rest for a spell, Sister?” Winifred said now to the elderly nun who was about to paint the serpent.

“I am sorry it is taking me so long, Mother Prioress, but my eyesight…”

“It happens to all of us. Lay your brush aside and close your eyes for a few minutes. Perhaps a few drops of water would help.”

“But Father Abbot said—”

Winifred pursed her lips. She wished that Father Edman, during his last visit, had not been so loud in his complaints about the increasing slowness of progress. It wasn’t necessary to distress her sisters with his criticism. And it wasn’t as though the ailments could be helped. Agnes was getting on in years, it was only to be expected that her work would take longer.

“Never mind the abbot,” Winifred said gently. “God does not wish us to work ourselves right out of His service. Rest your eyes and resume later.” She mentally added one more item to her list of requests to be made of Father Abbot: a medicinal eyewash for Sister Agnes.

Bells chimed then, calling the convent members to terce, the third of seven canonical hours set aside during the day for religious song. Carefully laying down their brushes and pens, the nuns whispered a prayer over their unfinished work, crossed themselves, and silently filed out.

After passing through the centuries-old cloister, they gathered in the choir that was the heart of their chapel: to the east of it was the altar where the sisters celebrated Mass; to the west, behind a wooden screen, was the nave where local people, pilgrims, and guests of the convent came to participate in the mass. The chapel, a small, modest building made of stone, was the heart of the collection of humble structures that comprised St. Amelia’s priory, built three hundred years ago. The sisters, living by the Rule of St. Benedict, which called for silence, celibacy, abstinence, and poverty, slept in cells in a dorter and ate in a large refectory. A slightly more splendid dorter was meant to house permanent residents who were not nuns but ladies of means who had gone into seclusion. There was also a guest house for pilgrims and travelers, although it stood empty these days. Next to the small church was the chapter house where the nuns gathered to read the Rule and confess their sins, and finally the scriptorium where they spent the majority of their hours. All of these stone structures were arranged around the cloister, a rectangle of arched colonnades where the sisters took their exercise. From out of these cold, gray, silent walls came the most astonishingly beautiful manuscripts in all of England.

Winifred observed the handful of sisters as they filed into the choir box to sing. Once they had been a large group, but now it was dwindling, the members frail and elderly with not a single young novice among them. Nonetheless, Winifred was a strict disciplinarian and inspected her nuns every morning to make sure their habits were spotless: black tunic, scapular, and veil; white coif, wimple, and crown band. In inclement weather or for rare trips outside the convent, they wore black cowled capes. Each had a rope belt around her waist from which hung a rosary and a bread knife. Their hands were never to be seen but tucked inside sleeves, arms clasped at the waist behind the scapular. Eyes were always cast downward in modesty and humility. Although speech was allowed, voices were to be kept low and words to a minimum.