The Vanishing Point (45 page)

T
HE FIRST SEED
of this book was planted in 1986 at the University of Minnesota when I took part in Dr. Annette Kuhn's seminar "The Making of the Female Character (1450–1650)," which explored the lives of women in a rapidly changing world marked by the decline of the feudal agrarian system and the rise of mercantile capitalism. For me, one of the most intriguing periods of social transformation was the English Civil War and the English Revolution, which underlay it. For several decades in the seventeenth century, the world was turned upside down. Groups like the Ranters, Seekers, Diggers, and Levelers demanded an end to the rule of feudal lords. The newly founded Quaker religion offered a vision of gender and racial equality, a world without slavery or war, in which people bowed to God alone and not to their lords or kings. Of these groups, only the Quakers endured, but not without persecution. Many fled to the American colonies.

What tugged on my curiosity was the possibility that the idealism of the English Revolution somehow survived into the Restoration in the minds of ordinary people who were not willing to forsake their dreams and bow down to the new order. What would happen to a late-seventeenth-century woman who was determined to carve out her own destiny and who demanded the same liberties, both social and sexual, as a man? This was how May's character was conceived.

However, this proved to be my most daunting book to write. I was living in Germany in what, for me at least, was the preInternet age, and finding good research material was a perpetual challenge. Years later, when I showed an early draft of
The Vanishing Point
to my agent at that time, she advised me to scrap it; books set in this era didn't sell unless they were genre romance novels. Moreover, in her opinion the English setting of the opening chapters would be of no interest to American readers.

I will always regard
The Vanishing Point
as the book that no one wanted me to write and that perversely became my strongest book thus far, because I was forced to fight so hard to make it happen. This manuscript stretched me to my utmost through a period of considerable upheaval, as life circumstances took me from Germany to California and then to the north of England. In the Lancashire countryside the novel finally took root and gained a life force of its own. My characters' surnames were lifted from seventeenth-century grave markers in village churchyards. My present home is situated at the foot of Pendle Hill, on top of which George Fox received the ecstatic vision that moved him to found the Quakers. Commonword, the nonprofit organization I work with, is housed in the basement of a Friends meetinghouse in Manchester. The yew trees and hawthorn hedges that May longs for in her American exile grow outside my door. Every week I go horseback riding in the village of Grindleton, which, in the seventeenth century, gave its name to a short-lived utopian religious sect: the Grindletonians.

The writing and research for this book stretched over a decade, during which I consulted many books. Standout texts included Antonia Fraser's
The Weaker Vessel,
David Hackett Fischer's monumental
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America,
and
Frauen in der Geschichte,
volumes 2 and 3, edited by Annette Kuhn and Jörn Rüsen. Much of the herb lore comes from Nicholas Culpepper's
Complete Herbal.
The recipes Hannah discovers in her mother's receipt book are taken from Eliza Smith's
The Compleat Housewife
—an admitted anachronism, since that book wasn't published until 1742. Perhaps the most valuable information was imparted by the good people at Colonial Williamsburg
and Jamestown Settlement, who answered in detail my many questions about life in the colonial Chesapeake. The Sequose River, which appears in this book, exists only in my imagination. At a storytelling retreat at Ty Newydd in Wales, Hugh Lupton's inspired telling of the tale "Glamoury Eye" had a powerful impact on my story.

My thanks go out to all who read this manuscript in draft form, especially to Susan Ito and everyone at Readerville, Cathy Bolton and everyone at Womenswrite, Jane Stubbs, Margaret Batteson, and Susan Stern. My friend Cath Staincliffe, the acclaimed crime writer, taught me much about advanced plotting and how to weave multiple narrative threads together to achieve maximum impact and suspense.

I wish to express my profound gratitude to my agent, Wendy Sherman. This book would have taken much longer to see the light of day without her belief and commitment. My foreign rights agent, Jenny Meyer, worked hard to bring this book to an international audience. I am deeply indebted to my editor, Jane Rosenman.
The Vanishing Point
would be a much poorer book without her insights and critique.

 

Prologue: Apostate

 

Rupertsberg, 1177

 

T
HE MOST ANCIENT
and enduring power of women is prophecy, my gift and my curse. Once, centuries before my existence, there lived in these Rhineland forests a woman named Weleda, she who sees. She took no husband but lived in a tower. In those heathen times, her people revered her as a goddess, for she foretold their victory against the Romans. But the seeress's might is not just a relic of pagan times. Female prophets crowd the books of the Old Testament—Deborah and Sarah, Miriam and Abigail, Hannah and Esther.

And so, in my own age, when learned men, quoting Saint Peter, call woman the weaker vessel, even they have to concede that a woman can be a font of truth, filled with vision, her voice moving like a feather on the breath of God.

 

Mother, what is this vision you show me?
With my waking eyes, I saw it coming. The storm approaching our abbey. Soon I would meet my nemesis face-to-face.

My blistered hands loosened their grip on the shovel, letting it fall into the churned up earth. At seventy-nine years of age, I am no longer strong enough for such labors, yet force of necessity had moved me to toil for half a day, my every muscle shrieking. Following my lead, my daughters set down their tools. With somber eyes, we Sisters of Rupertsberg surveyed our handiwork. We had tilled every inch of our churchyard. Though the tombstones still stood, jutting like teeth from the rent soil, we had chiseled off every last inscription. My daughters' faces were etched in both exhaustion and silent shock. Our graveyard was a sanctuary as holy as the high altar of our church. Now it resembled a wasteland.

Tears caught in my eyes as Sister Cordula passed me the crook that marked my office of abbess. Whispering pleas for forgiveness to the deceased, I picked my way over the bare soil until I came to the last resting place of Maximus, the runaway monk whose plight had driven our desperate act. The boy fled to us for asylum after his brothers committed unspeakable sins against him. Despite our every effort to heal his broken body and soul, the young man died in our hospice, and so we gave him a Christian burial.

But the prelates of the Archbishop of Mainz, the very men who had ignored the cruelty unfolding in the boy's monastery, had declared Maximus an apostate. Tomorrow or the following day, the prelates would come to wrest the dead boy from his grave and dump him in unhallowed ground as if he were a dead mongrel. So we razed our burial ground, making it impossible for any outsider to locate his grave. Had the prelates ever imagined that mere nuns would take such measures to foil them, the men we were bound to obey?

Raising my abbess's crook, I spoke the words of blessing. “In the name of the Living Light, may this holy resting place be protected. May it remain invisible to all who would desecrate it.”

My heart throbbed like a wound when I remembered the boy who died in my arms, the one I had sworn before God to protect. He had committed no crime, had only been a handsome youth in a nest of vipers. Maximus had only an aged abbess and her nuns to stand between him and the full might of the Church fathers.

The November wind crested our walls, tossing up grave dust that stung our eyes. My daughters flinched, ashen-faced in the dread we shared. What would happen to us now that we had committed such an outrageous act of sedition? The prelates' retribution would be merciless.

Foreboding flared again, the fate awaiting us as terrifying as the devil's giant black claw rearing from the hell mouth. Somehow I must summon the warrior strength to battle this evil. Seize the sword to vanquish the dragon. Maximus's ordeal proved only too well what damage these men could wreak. In a true vision, Ecclesia, the Mother Church, had appeared to me as a ravished woman, her thighs bruised and bloody, for her own clergy had defiled her. The prelates preached chastity while allowing young men to be abused. In defending the boy, my daughters and I risked sharing his fate—being cast out and condemned. The prelates would crush my dissent at all costs. Everything I had worked for in my long life might be lost in one blow, leaving me and my daughters pariahs and excommunicants. How could I protect my community now that I was so old, a relic from another time, my once-powerful allies dead?

To think that seven years ago I had preached upon the steps of Cologne Cathedral and castigated those same men for their fornication and hypocrisy, their simony and greed.
O you priests. You have neglected your duties. Let us drive these adulterers and thieves from the Church, for they fester with every iniquity.
In those days I spoke with a mighty voice, believing I had nothing to lose, that the prelates would not trouble themselves over one old nun.

The men I'd railed against gathered like carrion crows to wreak their revenge and put me in my place once and for all. It was not my own fate that worried me, for I have endured much in my life. This year or the next, I would join the departed in the cold sod and await judgment like any other soul. But what would become of my daughters? How could I die and leave them to this turmoil—what if this very abbey was dissolved, these women left homeless? A stabbing pain filled me to see them so lost, their faces stark with fear. Our world was about to turn upside down. How could I save these women who had placed their trust in me?

“Daughters, our work here is done,” I said, as tenderly as I could, giving them leave to depart and seek solace in their duties in the infirmary and scriptorium, the library and workroom.

Leaving the graveyard to its desolation, I pressed forward to the rampart wall overlooking the Rhine, the blue-green thread connecting everything in my universe. Nestled in the vineyards downriver and just out of view lay Eibingen, our daughter house. Our sisters there, too, would face the coming storm. Then, as I gazed at the river below, an icy hand gripped my innards. A barge approached our landing. The prelates had wasted no time.

 

I was striding down the corridor when Ancilla, a postulant lay sister, came charging toward me, her skirts flapping.

“Mother Abbess! We have a visitor.”

The girl's face was alight with an excitement that seemed at odds with our predicament. She was a newcomer to our house and, as such, I'd spared her the grim work of digging up the graveyard.

“A foreigner! He doesn't speak a word of German.”

My heart drummed in panic. Had the prelates sent someone from Rome? Oblivious to my trepidation, Ancilla seemed as thrilled as though the Empress of Byzantium had come to call.

“The cellarer will bring up the very best wines, won't she, Mother? And there will be cakes!”

The girl was so giddy that I had to smile at her innocence even as my stomach folded in fear. I told her I would receive our guest in my study.

 

After washing and changing, I girded myself to confront the messenger who would deliver our doom. But when I entered my study, I saw no papal envoy, only a young Benedictine monk who sprang from his chair before diving to his knees to kiss my hand.

“Exalted abbess!” he exclaimed in Latin, speaking in the soft accent of those who hail from the Frankish lands. “The holy Hildegard.”

Our visitor appeared no older than twenty, his face glowing as pink as sunrise.

“What a splendid honor,” he said, “to finally meet you in the flesh.”

“Brother,” I said, at a loss. “I don't know your name.”

“Did you not receive my letter?” His soft white hands fluttered like doves. “I am Guibert of Gembloux Abbey in the Ardennes. I have come to write your Vita, most reverend lady.”

Lowering myself into my chair, I nearly laughed in relief. So I still had allies and well-wishers after all, though this young man could hardly shield us from the prelates of Mainz.

“My brother in Christ, you flatter me too much,” I told him. “Hagiographies are for saints. I'm only a woman.”

He shook his head. “Your visions have made you the most far-famed woman in the Holy Roman Empire.”

Guibert's face shone in a blissful naïveté that matched that of young Ancilla, who attended us, pouring him warm honeyed wine spiced with cloves and white pepper, but he ignored the fragrant cup. His flashing dark eyes were riveted on mine.