‘The child has been forgiven,’ said Pare Aldonza. The elderly chaplain was trying to comfort the abbess. The old lady was trembling and tearful. Her clouded eyes watered, and her gnarled hands shook on her sticks.
‘But . . . murder!’ she said.
‘Yes; she has been forgiven murder. Old friend, collect yourself. The cardinal baptized her after the time of her captivity. She has been baptized in the blood of Christ, washed in the blood of the Lamb, and stands spotless in the eyes of her saviour. No sin can follow her across the water of Jordan. You know all this well. Be calm. Remember your faith in the Lord Jesus.’
‘Murder!’ the old nun said. ‘We have given house room to a murderess.’
‘No!’ he said. ‘Her sins are all forgiven her. Confiteor unam baptisma, in remissionem peccatorem; come, say it after me.’ He looked around the room at the white-faced company – Sor Blancha, Sor Agnete, Sor Eulalie . . . A deep affection for his charges lurked beneath his reverent demeanour. It cohabited in his heart with some degree of scorn for those whose innocence was protected by retreat from the world. The nuns were God’s daughters, no doubt, for they were like children who still lived in their parents’ house.
‘I acknowledge one baptism, for the remission of sins . . .’ They chorused the words after him.
‘How many times have you said this?’ he asked them. ‘But this that you ask me now is what it means.’
They were abashed. ‘I am ashamed of my lack of faith,’ said the abbess. ‘I was distressed, and I have led my daughters into my own error. You must give me penance, Father.’
‘There, there,’ he said, so far forgetting himself as to pat her gently between the shoulder blades. ‘Do not distress yourself. We will all pray to the Apostle Thomas each day this week. And be of good heart – we are all forgiven in Christ’s death and resurrection. We are all forgiven everything.’
A sudden inspiration possessed him. ‘I too have been at fault,’ he said. ‘Because we are forbidden to teach the child, it does not mean we are forbidden to bless her. Bring her to chapel after terce.’
The cell in which Palinor was confined had no window. It was deep in the cellarage of whatever building it was, and the floor was puddled with water, which ran down the bare stone of the walls. There was filthy straw on the floor, only the foulest water to drink, and no bucket or any other kind of privy. After a day and a half, however, Joffre and Dolca, who had walked the distance from the Saracen’s House, arrived and brought a little comfort: clean straw, good bread, a bottle of wine, a shirt, and the cardinal’s copy of Civitate Dei, retrieved from the pavement below the hammock.
After three days Fra Murta suddenly appeared, standing outside the massive bars which closed off the opening of the cell, and said, ‘Admit that once you believed in God like everyone else and that from that belief you are an impious renegade, an apostate and a traitor to the truth.’
‘No,’ said Palinor.
‘Very well,’ said Fra Murta and disappeared with brisk steps.
Next came a blacksmith, who fitted a great neck-iron to Palinor – two jailers held him down while it was done – and to the neck-iron a heavy chain of shackles, padlocked to a bracket in the wall.
After that Fra Murta came every two days or so and asked the same question – ‘Admit that you once knew God like everyone else and that you are a renegade, an impious traitor . . .’ Palinor refused to admit it, and later the blacksmith came and removed a shackle from the chain. The bracket in the wall was low down, and soon Palinor could not stand upright. Meanwhile, the jailer often denied admittance to Dolca and Joffre, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days together, while the prisoner went hungry and thirsty, and his filth fouled the unchanged straw on which he crouched. By and by, Fra Murta had Civitate Dei removed, on the grounds that it was blasphemous for a heretic to read the words of a father of the Church; then he forbade tapers, on the grounds that one who would not see the light of God deserved no other light.
Joffre found a room above a stable for himself and Dolca. They counted out the money that Rafal had paid them when he hired them – very little of it was spent. It would sustain the two of them and Palinor, they reckoned, for some weeks if it was carefully hoarded and doled out. They kept their heads down, not wanting to attract any attention, afraid at first even to bribe the jailer, in case Fra Murta had them driven away for good, dreading the day when they would have to apply to Rafal for more money.
Joffre did ask Dolca, hesitantly, if she would like to take a few coins and go – look for work in a place of safety somewhere . . .
‘And leave him?’ she asked, her voice becoming shrill at once. ‘You go if that’s what you want. But I won’t!’
‘Anyone would absolve us from duty to a heretic. But it’s the last thing I want,’ said Joffre. ‘I needed to know what you thought.’
‘Thank God you did not mean it,’ said Dolca. ‘It would be the end between us if you did, after what he taught us.’
‘My dear, my dear,’ he said to her, ‘you do realize, don’t you, that a heretic does not fear hell? That he has led us into sin?’
‘Look at me, Joffre,’ she said. ‘Meet my eyes and tell me that you repent, and desire to do it no more.’
He could not. So they stayed, tending their master whenever they were allowed to. Palinor had given Joffre a task which he performed every day, every day going to the wharves and shipyards. At night the two slept clasped together close, lying face to face, aching for the lack of another warm body between them or behind them.
Doggedly, repeatedly, Palinor said, ‘No.’
Josefa and Amara were playing in the meadow, making garlands of flowers. It was a cool and dewy day of a kind that Grandinsula sometimes had in early autumn, when a second flush of wild flowers seized the chance to bloom before winter. Sor Agnete, coming up through the fields to fetch them, was struck by the sight – two grown girls, romping like children. Josefa was laughing, and Amara was pelting her with flowers. The game must have grown out of an attempt to teach Amara numbers, for Sor Agnete heard her saying, ‘One, two, three, five, eight . . .’ as she threw the wilting blooms, and Josefa’s ‘No, no’ was accompanied by ‘Three, four’. Sor Agnete was a little mollified by this, since before she heard it she had been wondering how Sant Clara had managed to let Josefa run wild, to let her so lack dignity. Well, she had borne the brunt of the struggle with Amara, after all.
Sor Agnete came up to her, panting slightly from the scramble up the terraced fields. Josefa was covered with bits of leaf and petal; her hems were wet with dew, her head-dress askew. No matter; it was Amara Sor Agnete had come for, and as though Amara had known it was a special day, she had crowned her dark head with flowers.
‘Come, Amara; we have something to show you,’ Sor Agnete said.
They made a funny little procession down the path, with Sor Agnete leading and Amara in between, saying, ‘One, three, four, two, five . . .’ to herself as they went.
Terce was over, but the sisterhood had lingered in the chapel to see Amara blessed. Pare Aldonza stood waiting for her before the altar. She seemed at first unwilling to enter and came through the dark doors only when Josefa took her hand and led her. Then she looked around her. At first she was drawn to a painting of St Jerome, which hung just inside the door on the southern wall. She stared at it for a long time and ignored Josefa’s nudging and Sor Agnete’s softly repeated, ‘Come.’ The saint was praying, and the wild creatures of his desert hermitage were shown lying at his feet or crouching nearby. A lion, a serpent, a wolf . . .
‘Come, Amara,’ called the abbess, and they succeeded in diverting her and leading her up the aisle. Pare Aldonza smiled at her and raised his hand to make the sign of the cross over her; she raised her eyes to follow his gesture, and her features suddenly twisted into their wolfish form; she rolled her eyes back in her head, shrank away from him, and uttered a long piercing whimper. Then, breaking away from Sor Agnete and Josefa, who each tried to hold her, she fled, taking to all fours before she was half way to the door.
Josefa ran after her, and Sor Agnete after Josefa, and the sisterhood after both of them. Amara stood in the sun in the middle of the cloister garden, facing them, and said, ‘Bad place. I not go back in.’
‘It is not a bad place, Amara; it is a holy place,’ said Pare Aldonza. ‘But no-one will make you go back there till you ask it. I will bless you here, under the open sky.’ He raised his hand again. He made the sign of the cross, and she followed the movement of his hand quite calmly.
‘Dominus vobiscum. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,’ he said. He told her that every one of the sisters prayed for her every day.
‘Pray?’ she parroted.
‘They ask for good things, for you, child.’
‘Meat?’ she asked.
‘And other good things. That all your needs may be met.’
‘Kind,’ she said gravely. ‘They kind.’
Sor Agnete looked on, deeply troubled. Amara had not played that wolfish trick for many weeks, months. Something had upset her. And now she stood demurely, evincing knowledge that prayers said for her meant kindness, though she did not know what prayer was. Her mind was neither light nor dark now, but dappled, like the sun in a deep forest . . . but what had upset her? Sor Agnete returned to the chapel alone. She stood where Amara had stood. The child had been watching the priest’s hand; Sor Agnete raised her eyes, reconstructing . . . Above the altar, behind where Pare Aldonza had been standing, hung the great crucifix. It was a masterpiece, painted long ago and given to Sant Clara by a wealthy merchant who had wished to marry the foundress, the Blessed Alicssande. When she had taken vows and retreated to this lonely place, he had found the most precious thing he could to give to her.
The figure of Christ was painted on the wooden cross, on a golden ground. He was wearing a loin-cloth of many folds, painted in darts of deep blue. His hanging body had a Byzantine twist to it, and his leaning head was surrounded by a blazing halo. Daggers of light shone out of the wound in his side. His flesh was painted in that gold-green colour used by eastern icon-makers. A little green border of putrescence outlined every painted orifice, every weal and wound, and the great nails in his hands and feet stood out of brimming pits of crimson blood.
Sor Agnete had prayed in front of this crucifix many times a day every day of her life for twenty years; but now she realized for the first time, sinking in dismay, that if you did not know it was an image of love, if you did not know it portended God’s infinite compassion, his mercy for mankind, if you did not know of the resurrection and the life, what you would see, enshrined at the heart of Sant Clara, above the altar, in the holy sanctuary, would be an image of a man viciously tortured and horribly done to death.