The Blessing Stone (41 page)

And then she frowned. “I must confer with the abbot.”

“What does he say to do with the stone?”

“He does not know of it yet.”

Mr. Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar stroked his beard. “Hmm,” he said, and Winifred read his meaning.

“I
should
tell the abbot,” she said in an unconvincing tone. “Shouldn’t I?”

He asked how she had come by this gem and when she told him, Simon the Levite said, “It would seem to me, my dear Mother Prioress, that it was to you alone this stone was given. A gift from your saint.”

When she bit her lip in uncertainty, Simon said gravely, “You are caught in a struggle.”

She bowed her veiled head. “Yes, I am.”

“It is a struggle between faith and obedience.”

“I feel that God is trying to tell me something. But He has told the abbot the exact opposite. How am I to choose?”

“That, dear lady, is up to you. You must look inside your heart and listen to what it is saying.”

“I refer to God, not my heart.”

“Are they not the same thing?” He asked further about the crystal, specifically how she thought it came to be lodged in the saint’s neckbones. Winifred then told him how Amelia had commanded her own heart to stop before the authorities could torture her into revealing the names of other Christians.

“Then,” he said, “it would seem, if this stone is delivering a message as you believe, that the message is one of following your own counsel.”

Her face brightened. “This was my thought!” And suddenly she was confessing to him about her dream to paint an altarpiece for St. Amelia.

“And what troubles you most,” the wise foreigner said, “is that if you go to live in the new convent, you will lose this vision.”

“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes…”

“Then you must listen to your heart.”

“But God speaks through the abbot.”

When he said nothing, and she saw the skeptical look on his face, she said, “Mr. Jaffar, I suspect you are not Christian.”

He smiled. “You suspect rightly.”

“In your faith, do you not have priests?”

“Not as you do. We have rabbis, but they are more spiritual advisors than intermediaries to God. We believe that God hears us and speaks to us directly.” He wanted to add that Winifred’s crucified lord had been a rabbi, but decided this was neither the time nor the place for such a topic.

He said, “I will be camping by the stream for a few days while I visit the farms hereabouts, after which I shall continue on to Portminster. Before I leave, you can tell me your decision. I pray, my dear Mother Prioress, that it is the right one.”

Mother Winifred decided to go to the abbey alone. Although it was customary for the members of her order to travel in pairs or groups, this was one journey she knew she must take by herself. She still had not broken the bad news to the others, despite the abbot’s orders that they must vacate St. Amelia’s as soon as possible. Perhaps she would have complied without hesitation if it had not been for the incident with the reliquary and her discovery of the blue crystal. But the incident
had
occurred, and she
was
in possession of St. Amelia’s remarkable talisman, and now she was under a compulsion to confer with the abbot over what to do next.

She had prayed all night, and though she had not slept, she felt strangely refreshed. Her foot was firm as it took to the path leading from the convent, her resolve and spirit strong, for with her she carried the blue crystal of St. Amelia.

When she arrived at the main lane, Winifred saw that she was not going to have to travel alone after all. She joined a group of pilgrims headed for the Convent of the True Cross—
they had walked right past St. Amelia’s.
“Got to get to the convent by noon,” their leader explained. “That’s when the sisters put out their table. I’m told we’ll have our fill of mutton and bread today.” Then he saw Winifred’s habit and, slow-witted soul that he was, her identity finally dawned on him. Turning bright red, he said lamely, “We didn’t want to impose on you good ladies of St. Amelia’s, being the ragamuffins that we are.” And he moved to the head of the group where he could let his embarrassment subside.

They encountered more people on the road: farmers taking produce to the Portminster fair, knights traveling with guards, ladies in curtained litters. The road wound through forests of hawthorn, elm, and beech where glens suddenly opened to reveal patches of bluebells and streams collecting in dark, sun-dappled pools. Trails lead off the road to farmhouses and meadows with sheep grazing. And every now and then they encountered paving stones of ancient manufacture, reminding them that Roman legions had passed this way. And amid all these people, and the hues of spring, inhaling the woodland air and buoyed by morning birdsong, Winifred felt her confidence grow. She was doing the right thing, even though, had the abbot known, he would have called it disobedience.

The older ones in the group talked of Vikings, tall yellow-bearded devils who wore red cloaks over ring mail and were known to fight with bloodthirsty frenzy, like mad wolves. Memories of the Vikings gave these elders a kind of prestige, for it had been thirty years since the decisive Battle of Maldon when the Danes, with the help of Norway’s most feared Viking King, Olaf, defeated the Anglo-Saxons and laid waste to England. And even though the overthrow of King Ethelred by Danish king Sweyn, putting the Dane Canute in power, was of more recent memory, the younger members of the traveling group had no experience with such fear. Although there were still rumored attacks here and there by Vikings who refused to accept the new peace with England, the constant terror of the past one hundred years was over at last, England had learned to sleep easy at night, and the verse, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us,” had been stricken from the litany.

They came to a signpost with one arrow marked “Portminster,” pointing ahead, another bent to the left, pointing down a narrow lane, marked “Mayfield,” the third, a newer arrow, was aimed to the right and said “Convent of the True Cross.” It had not been Winifred’s intention to visit the new convent, yet she found her feet turning onto this new lane, along with the knot of pilgrims whose topic of conversation now shifted to speculation of what they could expect on the nuns’ dinner table.

They glimpsed the walls through the trees, and the first thing Winifred heard was laughter. Feminine laughter, coming from the convent. And then she heard voices—chattering, calling out, like excited hens. She frowned. How was one to concentrate upon spiritual matters in all that noise? As they passed through the outer meadow, she stopped and stared: two young women in novices robes were tossing a ball to one another, laughing, their habits blowing immodestly in the breeze. A third was teasing a little dog with a bone, pretending to throw it and then laughing as it ran to fetch. Two more young nuns stood on ladders in apple trees, their skirts tucked up as they called out merrily to one another while they plucked fruit. Passing through the main gates and entering the inner yard, Winifred was stunned to find a world of commerce busily at work with pilgrims, townsfolk, lady guests, and holy sisters all mingling. Wooden booths had been erected for the sale of convent trinkets—embroidered badges for pilgrims to prove they had visited the shrine, vials of holy water, rosary beads, statues, good-luck charms, sweets, and breads—with nuns involved in the exchange of money!

As Mother Winifred passed through the crowd that resembled a village fair, her initial shock turned to worry. There was no piety in this place, no dignity or decorum. The abbot had assured her these sisters followed the Rule of St. Benedict, but Winifred saw no modesty, poverty, humility, or silence here.

As she went up the steps of the chapter house, a certain irony struck her: that wealth attracted wealth. Whereas it should be obvious to any casual observer that it was St. Amelia’s in dire need of money, Abbey expenditures were clearly being squandered on this new place, founded by a wealthy baron who was himself sparing no expense. The orchards outside the walls! Winifred pressed her hand to her growling stomach as if to calm a petulant child. The thought had crossed her mind to steal a few apples and take them back to her hungry sisters.

The interior of the chapter house was like that of a wealthy man’s home, with silver candlesticks, handsome furniture, tapestries on the walls. And when Mother Rosamund came in to greet her, Winifred received a second shock.

This was what people were told: when the Dane Canute became king of all England, Oswald of Mercia led other Englishmen in declaring their allegiance to him. For this he was rewarded with lands in the shire of Portminster. And when Canute, in his zeal to become “a most Christian king,” announced his intention to build new monasteries, Oswald requested the privilege of building a convent in honor of his new liege. What persuaded the Danish conqueror was Oswald’s recounting of a tale about the year he had traveled to Glastonbury where it was said Joseph of Arimathea had brought the Holy Grail of Christ, and there, camping one night along the road, Oswald had had a dream in which the location of a precious relic was revealed to him. Deep in a cave was an iron chest containing a piece of Christ’s cross, buried there by Joseph himself. Oswald had brought it back to house it in his family chapel. It also happened that Oswald’s oldest daughter, Rosamund, was devoutly religious and had prayed, all during the battles between the Danes and the English, for Danish victory for she had felt it was God’s will—or so Oswald said. Because of the daughter’s prayers, and the piece of the True Cross, Canute graciously consented to the founding of the new convent in his name.

So the story went. But this was the truth: Oswald of Mercia, a coward to the bone, was fighting on the side of English king Ethelred when he saw which way the war was going. So he switched sides, turning on his fellow Englishmen. As for his daughter Rosamund, she was not so much religious as she greatly disliked men and, preferring the company of women, refused to marry, no matter how much her father threatened or bribed her. She also wanted power. So he hit upon the perfect solution: let her run a convent. It could be no ordinary convent but must have prestige and significance. And what better way to imbue an institution with significance than planting a very important relic within its walls—and what could be greater than the cross upon which Christ Himself had died? There, of course, had been no visit to Glastonbury, no dream, no cave, no iron chest containing the True Cross. The reliquary on the altar in the new convent’s chapel contained nothing but air.

Winifred now found herself face to face with the governess of the convent that was leading St. Amelia’s to ruin. Mother Rosamund was appallingly young. She could not have been in the order for more than six years. It had taken Winifred nearly thirty years before she had succeeded to the post of prioress. A stray lock of beautiful red-gold hair had escaped the confines of Rosamund’s wimple, and Winifred had the uncharitable thought that it was on purpose. She pictured the vain young woman standing before a mirror and burrowing beneath the starched white fabric with a sewing needle to snag just the perfect curl. But most shocking of all were the young woman’s hands—they were all over the place, like frantic butterflies tied to her wrists by threads. They fluttered up and down, in and out, her sleeves falling back to expose her arms past the elbows! Clearly Rosamund had had no formal training in the Benedictine discipline. And if this were so, then how could she, as the prioress, train her sisters?

Winifred’s heart was heavy. How was she to teach these frivolous girls the art of sacred illumination? She simply could not. She would tell the abbot that this new convent was an affront to the order and that he must personally step in and restore discipline. Winifred didn’t care how rich Rosamund’s father was; this convent was an offense to God.

“My dear Mother Winifred, how pleased you must be to face years of rest after all your service to God. To shed the mantle of prioress and be a sister again.”

Winifred stared at her. What was the girl talking about? And then it came as clear to her as the crystal blue of Amelia’s stone: of course there could not be
two
mother prioresses in one convent! Since the abbot had said nothing about this, it was obvious he was expecting Winifred to make the logical deduction herself. But it came as a shock nonetheless. That she should be stripped of her title and reduced to an ordinary sister again, and compelled to address a girl who was young enough to be her granddaughter as “Mother”—it was unthinkable.

“Not that you won’t be having responsibilities!” the young woman added lightly. “My girls are looking forward to learning how to paint those lovely illuminations.”

Winifred’s head swam. Rosamund made it sound like a child’s game. “There is more to it than just painting pictures,” she said. “I will have to teach the making of pigments, their proper use—”

“Oh, but my father is going to provide us with paints! The very same paints that are used at Winchester! He will have them brought up each month special!”