Book Five

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.

As in all convents in England, membership was open only to noblewomen. Middle-class women had little hope of being allowed to join, and peasant women had no chance at all. Winifred would have liked to open the sisterhood to middle-class women of means and vocation, and perhaps even to the occasional worthy peasant girl. But those were the rules and she could not change them. St. Amelia’s was also equipped to take resident schoolgirls—daughters of wealthy barons—there to learn embroidery, etiquette, and, those with liberal-minded fathers, to read and write Latin and work basic sums so that they could someday capably run a household. St. Amelia’s also used to house widows with money and no place to go and women seeking sanctuary from abusive husbands or fathers who could afford to stay there—a feminine haven, free of men and male dominance.

They had once been a thriving community of nearly sixty souls. Now there were only eleven, including Mother Winifred herself. The rest were seven veiled sisters, two elderly noblewomen who had been there for too many years to move to the new convent, and Andrew the elderly caretaker, raised at the convent from infancy when he had been left at the gate in a basket.

It was because of the new convent ten miles away, built five years ago and housing a relic far more important than the bones of a saint, that St. Amelia’s was dying. The other convent was attracting the novices, lady guests, schoolgirls in search of instruction, pilgrims, and travelers, all filling the rooms and money coffers of the Convent of the True Cross. Winifred tried not to think of the empty writing desks in her scriptorium, the inkwells long since gone dry, and the remaining sisters who toiled over the illuminations and who, like herself, were growing old. The priory of St. Amelia had lost pupils and novices to the Convent of the True Cross because there had been reports of miraculous healings over there: wives getting pregnant, barons coming into fortunes. The abbot had told Winifred that it had been a long time since St. Amelia had performed a miracle. But Winifred thought Amelia performed miracles every day—just look at the illuminations!

Nonetheless, the pilgrims had stopped coming. How could one compete with the True Cross? Pilgrims rarely visited both shrines—when one treks many miles for a blessing or a cure, one will choose a splinter from the tree of Christ’s suffering over the bones of a woman—and so St. Amelia’s was bypassed more and more each year.

And finally, who could compete with youth and wealth? Winifred was in her fifties with no family left. When her rich and politically connected brother had still been alive, her place was secure. But he was dead now, her sisters and brothers-in-law all dead, her family penniless and just about gone. The new convent, however, was supported by the new prioress’s father, Oswald of Mercia, who was very rich and very generous. And of course, it had the full support of the abbey.

Portminster Abbey, set high on a hill overlooking the small town of Portminster and the River Fenn, had its origins in a Roman garrison established in 84 C.E. on the east coast of England that had grown into a port town aptly named Portus, famous for its protected harbor and trade in eels, an industry that continued into Winifred’s day. In the fourth century, the remains of St. Amelia had been brought from Rome to Portminster by Christians seeking refuge from persecution by Emperor Diocletian. A group of hermit monks, living in a monasterium outside of Portus, embraced the fugitive saint and gave her refuge. Over the centuries Anglo-Saxon influence corrupted the word “monasterium” to “mynster,” and when a newly built church went up, it was given the name Portus Mynster. In the year 822, Danes pillaged and burned Portminster, but the remains of St. Amelia were once again rescued and hidden away in a small community of holy sisters who lived in a priory that hugged the end of a forgotten Roman road.

A century later, when Benedictine monks arrived and built an abbey at Portminster, there was debate over what to do with the bones of St. Amelia. Finally, it was decided they should be allowed to remain at the modest priory because by then a reputation had already been established about the miracles the blessed saint performed, drawing pilgrims and visitors from far and wide. Patron saint of chest ailments, Amelia was said to cure everything from pneumonia to heart failure—some even went so far as to declare that the blessed saint cured other afflictions of the heart, namely lovesickness. As a result, the priory had grown in fame and wealth. At the same time Portminster Abbey, which was eight miles away and governed the priory, had gained a stunning reputation of its own for producing exquisite illuminated manuscripts.

As the nuns sang the religious chant for terce Winifred’s eyes strayed to the altar where the small reliquary containing St. Amelia’s bones stood. She pictured her imagined altarpiece behind it: a triptych of three wooden panels with gilt edging, each four arms’ lengths tall, three arms’ lengths wide. In the first she would depict Amelia’s conversion to Christianity; in the second her missions to the sick and poor; and lastly, Amelia clasping her bosom as she commanded her heart to stop in her breast before the Roman soldiers could force her to denounce her faith.

Winifred’s eyes moved up to the dusty scaffolding that embraced the ceiling above the altar. The struts and braces had been erected five years earlier, when the abbot had promised roof repairs. However, with the opening of the new convent, and all of Oswald’s money pouring in that direction, the abbot had seen this repair project as a waste and it was called off. But the workmen had left the wooden scaffolding, and to Winifred its presence was almost a mockery.

As the sisters lifted their voices in the “Salve Regina,” Winifred glimpsed a shadow on the other side of the screen meant to separate civilians from the nuns. It was Andrew. “The abbot’s at the end of the path,” he said quietly, his eyes round with worry.

“Thank you, Andrew,” she murmured. “Go and admit him through the gate.”

Leaving the sisters at their song, Winifred hurried across the cloister to the kitchen where a gray-haired woman in a plain gown was stirring porridge over a fire. She was Dame Mildred, who had come to the convent twenty-five years earlier upon the death of her husband. As none of her children had survived to adulthood, and her own relations were dead and buried, she had adopted the community of nuns as her family. When her fortune ran out and she could no longer pay for her keep, she happily took up duties as cook, and had long since forgotten that she had once been a knight’s lady. “We shall need ale for the abbot,” Winifred said. “And something to eat.”

“Dear me, why has he come? It is too soon!”

Although Dame Mildred had been given an order to fetch ale, she left her station and followed Winifred to the visitor’s gate where they both anxiously watched the abbot’s approach.

“Reverend Mother!” Mildred said in sudden joy. “Look! Father Abbot brings a brace of pheasants!” Her face fell. “No, ’tis but one pheasant. There are eleven of us, hardly enough to go around, and if the bishop should decide to sup with us…”

“Do not worry. We shall manage.”

Mother Winifred watched the abbot’s progress as he rode his fine horse down the garden path. She could tell by his posture that her fears had been justified. The abbot carried more than holy books in his rucksack. He also carried bad news.

 

“God’s blessings upon you, Mother Prioress,” he called out as he dismounted his fine horse.

“And upon you, Father Abbot.” Mother Winifred eyed the paltry pheasant, thinking that there would be no generous supper tonight, while at the same time the abbot discreetly sniffed the air but detected no enticing cooking aromas. He remembered a day when he could look forward to Winifred’s famous blankmanger, which she personally made from chicken paste blended with boiled rice, almond milk, sugar, and anise. She used to cook delicious fish dumplings and fritters that made one’s eyes water. And her plum tarts…He sighed at the memories. Sadly, those days were gone. Now, if he stayed to dine, he could expect stale bread, thin soup, wilted cabbage, and beans that would make him fart into next week.

Together they entered the chapter house with stomachs growling.

As they walked they spoke of the weather and other inconsequential things, “roundabout topics,” as the prioress thought of them, for she knew the abbot well enough to know when he was putting off distasteful news, and while they talked Winifred’s keen eye did not miss the fact that the abbot was wearing new robes. His cloak, though black, fairly dazzled in the sun, as did the shiny spot on his scalp where his hair had been shaved for a tonsure. She also noticed that his girth had expanded since she last saw him, a mere two weeks ago.

But foremost on her mind was the purpose of this unexpected visit, the subject he was avoiding. He needn’t bother, she already knew what the bad news was: there would be no repairs to the roof again this year. She and her sisters were to suffer another winter of buckets and pans and soaked beds.

Perhaps she could turn this dismal visit to her advantage. Delivering such disappointing news, the abbot could hardly follow it up with a refusal of her request to paint the altarpiece. She would appeal to whatever grain of charity dwelled in his heart.

Winifred believed in the Bible to the letter, but with room for interpretation. While she believed that God had created men first, she didn’t believe he had created them smarter. Nonetheless, she had taken vows of obedience and so obey the abbot she would—within reason. If he could not give her a new roof, then he must acquiesce on the subject of the altarpiece. She deserved that much consideration. At nearly sixty Winifred was one of the oldest women she knew. She was in fact older than most men she knew—older certainly than Father Abbot—and she thought that this alone entitled her to special privilege.

As they entered the chapter house, a drafty hall furnished with straight backed chairs and dominated by an enormous sooty fireplace, Winifred asked the abbot if he had brought willow bark tea. “It is not the first time I have made this request, Father Abbot.”

As he lowered his bulk into the one comfortable chair, the abbot wondered if Winifred wore her wimple too tight or if her face was naturally pinched like that. Then he caught a glimpse of her hands and could tell by the blue-black stains that she had spent the morning gathering woad leaves. The shrubby broad-leafed herb, which contained the raw material of a blue dyestuff, was an excellent substitute for the imported Indian indigo that went into the nuns’ pigments but which was rare and expensive.

“You must not think of your comfort, Mother Winifred,” he chastised gently.

Her lips firmed into a hard line. “I was thinking of Sister Agatha’s arthritis. The pain is so bad she can hardly hold a paintbrush. If my sisters cannot paint…” she said, leaving the threat to hang in the air.

“Very well. I shall send willow bark tea as soon as I return to the abbey.”

“And meat. My sisters need to eat. They need their strength to work,” she said significantly.

He scowled. He knew what she was up to. Winifred had a way of holding her illuminations hostage in exchange for creature comforts. But he was in no bargaining position. Demand for the illuminations was growing, although he took great care not to let Winifred know this.

It would be incorrect to say that Abbot Edman hated women. He simply saw no purpose to them and wondered why God, in His infinite wisdom, had chosen to create such an adversarial means for reproducing His children. For Edman was convinced that men and women would never, into eternity, learn to get along. If it were not for women, Adam would have stayed in Eden and all men would be living in Paradise right now. Unfortunately, England was no paradise and this convent fell under his purview as abbot of Portminster and so it was his duty to pay regular visits. But he never lingered, getting the business over with and departing as quickly as politeness allowed.

As he tried to relax in this thoroughly feminine atmosphere—why did women have such a frivolous passion for flowers?—he thought of the brothers in his order who had difficulty holding to their vow of celibacy. Edman was celibate, although as a priest it was not required of him. Most priests were married, which was beyond his comprehension, and more amazing was the incident back in 964 when Bishop Ethelwold gave the married priests at Winchester Cathedral the choice of keeping their wives or their jobs, and to a man they chose their wives. Celibacy had never been a problem for Edman because he had never had any desire to enter into a carnal state with a female, and it was completely beyond his comprehension why any man of reason would want to. Born into poverty with only the vaguest memories of his mother and orphaned early upon the death of his fisherman father, Edman had survived in the port town by wit and cunning, and allowing himself to be used as a work animal by farm women and fishwives. He had received more undeserved clouts to his head than he could count, which taught him that there was no compassion or tenderness in any woman alive. It was only the kindness of a local priest, who taught him to read and write, that had rescued Edman from a life of humiliation and grinding desperation. He entered the holy orders and with ambition, a quick mind, and the ability to make the right friends, had climbed the clerical ladder until he now headed an illustrious abbey and a prosperous order of Benedictine scribes.

Thus he chafed at these obligatory visits to St. Amelia’s priory. Certainly it could be carried out by an underling, and he had in fact once sent one of his subordinates to the convent to pick up an illuminated manuscript. Mother Winifred had been so affronted that she had said the manuscript wasn’t finished and as much as insinuated that it would not be until the abbot himself came to collect it. The creature had a strange way of being obedient and defiant at the same time. But on some issues Edman stood firm—her request to paint an altarpiece, for instance—and on this she acquiesced to his orders. Thank God, for the abbot could not spare the time she would spend on St. Amelia when her arts were needed to fill the growing demand for illuminations.

Still, despite his distaste for visiting the convent, he had to concede that places like this served a useful purpose. Many an unwanted female was sent away to a convent to live out her life respectably, in safety and without being troublesome to their menfolk. And of course there were the creatures who preferred the company of their own kind, women who bridled at having to obey men, women who thought themselves the equal or superior to men, women who had the strange notion that they could think for themselves. Convents therefore served the purposes of both men and women alike. The abbot just wished the creatures weren’t so fanatical about cleanliness. The smell of honest sweat never hurt anyone, but Winifred and her coterie always reeked, like all highborn ladies, of sweet lavender and tansy, which they strew on their mattresses to keep fleas away.

“How was your visit to Canterbury, Father Abbot?” Mother Winifred asked, not at all interested and hoping his response would not be too long winded. She could tell by his bulging rucksack that he had brought more work for her sisters, which meant she must get to the business of preparing fresh pigments.

Edman thought so hard that he squinted. At Canterbury Cathedral he had witnessed a strange sight. Something called a play in which men dressed in costume and acted out a story. It had been held as part of the Easter services and was a new invention by the priests there. When a monk dressed as the Devil came onto the stage, the congregation had erupted in fear and fury and had nearly killed the poor man when they rushed at him. The argument went that such enactments would help people learn Bible stories more easily, but the abbot had reservations. If people could simply watch a story, then would they stop listening to sermons? Would educated men stop reading the Bible? Perhaps this “play” thing would not catch on. He certainly had no intention of putting on such enactments in his abbey.

He wondered if the plays were a sign of the changing times. Although, there was a day, just twenty-two years ago, when the Church had thought times were going to change so drastically as to literally herald the end of the world.

What a disappointment the millennium had turned out to be. All the buildup and hysteria, the feasts and orgies, people flocking to the abbot for confession, the suicides and doomsayers, everyone thinking Jesus was coming back and the world was about to end. And the endless debates! Do we count a thousand years from the birth of Christ, or from his death? Did the millennium mark the second coming of Christ, or the beginning of Satan’s reign? Was the Muslims’ destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem a sign? But that event had occurred in 1009. Could nine years later still be the millennium? Abbot Edman, at the time a young clergyman, had joined the Peace of God movement in an effort to curb the rampaging of feudal lords. Of course, Judgment Day fever had had its benefits. A wealthy baron in the county had given all his lands and wealth to Portminster Abbey and headed off to spend millennium eve in the Vatican dressed in sackcloth and ashes. And then, the morning of January first of the year 1000—nothing. Just another cold morning with the usual aches and pains and flatulence.

“My journey went well, God be thanked,” he finally said, hoping these inanities weren’t leading up to her request to paint the blasted altarpiece again—such a tiresome subject. No matter how many times he told her that it was out of the question. Didn’t she know that to go against an abbot’s will was to go against God’s?

Of course she knew it, which was why she never disobeyed. The woman was a model of Christian compliance, although she did use the occasion of confession to sneak her little rebellions in. “I am guilty of the sin of hunger,” she would murmur through the screen in the confessional, “and wish Father Abbot would provide more food for my sisters and myself.” He would ignore the gibe and order three Our Fathers for the sin of gluttony.

But the abbot’s annoyance was tempered with pity. Poor Winifred. As soon as word had spread about the new convent and its generous amenities, there had been an embarrassing exodus of nuns, lady guests, and pupils from St. Amelia’s. But how could it be otherwise? Winifred was hardly known for her bountiful table. She was parsimonious with wood and coal, and didn’t allow pets. The lady guests often complained to him of lacking conditions. And now they were comfortably housed in the new place where fires kept out the cold and the supper table groaned with meat and wine. Poor Winifred was left here in these drafty rooms with a meager, loyal following. Were it not for their continued production of fabulous illuminations, he would have closed down this old place long ago.

Dame Mildred had baked honeyed oatcakes, a much needed healthful treat for the sisters. But because the pantry was low on both oats and honey, she had made precisely eleven walnut-size cakes, one for each of the sisters and one for Andrew, the caretaker. Since she could not allow Mother Prioress the embarrassment of not offering something to the abbot, she brought the plate out, thinking that she would sacrifice her own oat cake that the abbot might know their hospitality. To her shock, and to Mother Winifred’s, the Abbot scooped up three of the cakes at once and popped them into his mouth. They watched his jaw and cheeks work away at the precious oats and honey, and when he gave a great swallow, reached for three more. The cakes were gone in no time and Mother Winifred was filled with outrage.

As Father Edman washed down the rather tasteless cakes with a cup of weak ale, he did not miss the glance exchanged between the two women. He ignored it. The abbot made no apologies for his appetite, for he believed that God wanted his servants to be well fed. How could he expect to make converts to Christianity if he were a scarecrow himself? Would not the pagan say, “How good can your Christ be if he lets his children starve?” And Abbot Edman was serious in his evangelizing, for although England had all the outward markings of Christendom, the Abbot was only too aware that many folk still worshipped trees and stone circles. Ancient superstitions and heathen ways lay beneath a very thin surface of pretended piety and so the fight for men’s souls was a never-ending battle. He saw himself as Christ’s warrior, and everyone knew that soldiers must eat.

Wiping his fingers on his habit, he got down to the business at hand and reached into his carrying bag for the new pages that needed capital letters. He had also brought a book for Winifred to illuminate—it was yet another sign of the changing times that people other than the clergy were starting to show an interest in books. “The patron wishes to have his picture on the front page, dressed in armor and seated atop his horse with shield and jousting staff. He wishes his lady to be illustrated at the beginning of one of the psalms.”

Winifred nodded. This was a common request. She usually chose Psalm 101 for a gentleman’s lady. In Latin it began with the letter “D,” which lent just the right shape and room for a human figure. Plus the opening phrase, translated into English, was, “I will sing of your love,” which the ladies always liked.

Although a variety of books was currently being illuminated in England and Europe, from Gospels and liturgical books to works from the Old Testament and the collections of ancient authors copied from Carolingian copyists, Father Edman’s regional specialty was psalters—psalm books—decorated with biblical scenes and of a quality found nowhere else in England, thanks to Winifred. The decoration was executed in a lively style, with human figures in animated postures and wearing fluttering draperies. Since Winifred had been schooled as a girl by an artist trained in the Winchester style of illumination, her artwork was manifested in rich blue and green coloring, sumptuous borders of leaf ornamentation and animals, but she had also added her own trademark style in the spiral patterns, interlacing, knotwork, and intertwined animals reminiscent of Celtic metalwork.

Competition among the book-producing centers was fierce, each rival abbey or cathedral wanting its books to be the most popular among kings and nobles. But illumination manufacture was slow, with most cathedrals and monasteries producing only two books a year. It was one of Edman’s predecessors who had hit upon the idea of putting the nuns of St. Amelia’s to work, for with their smaller hands, keener eyesight, and gift for detail, they could labor over capital letters while the monks churned out the main text. Pride had kept that former abbot from revealing that the artwork was done by women and so everyone thought it was the monks of Portminster Abbey who produced such miraculous artwork and at such phenomenal speeds. “They work at the speed of God,” the abbot liked to say.

But now there was a problem: no new novices were coming to St. Amelia’s and the original artist-nuns were dying off. It was the bishop who had come up with a solution. And a reasonable and brilliant solution it was, Edman thought, but he knew Winifred would not see it that way.

He had to move carefully next, for he had no idea how she was going to react to what he had to say. There was that rebellious streak in her to be minded. If he did not handle her with care, all could be lost. And the abbot was an ambitious man. To govern an abbey was a measure of success, to be sure, but he felt destined for greater things. A new cathedral was being built at Portminster, which meant a bishop would be installed there. Father Edman intended to be that bishop. But much of his success depended upon Winifred’s continued production of illuminations.

While the abbot had been devouring cakes meant to feed eleven, Winifred sent for the completed manuscripts to be brought to the Chapter House. Edman now examined them. As always, the colors were breathtaking and alive. He could swear that if you touched the red you would feel a pulse, that if you sniffed the yellow you would smell buttercups. The abbot found it a strange irony that Winifred herself should be so dour and colorless while her creations were breathtakingly vibrant.

He did not praise the work—he never did, and Winifred never expected it. But she saw the admiration nonetheless in his eyes and felt a moment of pride. Therefore she thought this would be a good time to bring up her request once more to paint an altarpiece.

He patiently listened to her explanation—“I wish to give St. Amelia something in return for all she has given me”—but he already intended to turn her down. Edman couldn’t afford to have Winifred take on a project that would take months—precious time stolen from teaching young nuns how to do illuminations.

He cleared his throat and tried to sound as if he had given her request serious thought. “I am sure St. Amelia feels you have done enough in her service all these years, Mother Prioress.”

“Then why can I not stop thinking about the altarpiece? It is in my mind day and night.”

“Perhaps you need to pray on it,” he suggested.

“I have done, and the only response I seem to get is more thoughts about the altarpiece. I even dream of it now. I feel the hand of God directing me.”

He pursed his lips. This was dangerous thinking, that a woman take her orders directly from God. What if all women got this notion? Then wives would not obey husbands, daughters would not obey fathers and society would be thrown into chaos.

“As it turns out, Mother Prioress, St. Amelia’s will not have any use for an altarpiece.”

Her nearly nonexistent eyebrows arched. “How so?”

“I am afraid,” he cleared his throat again, nervously this time, “that St. Amelia’s is to be closed down.”

She stared at him. Silence descended over the chapter house. Through heavy doors came the sound of whispering footsteps. Finally she said, “What do you mean?”

He stiffened his spine. “I mean, Mother Winifred, that these old buildings are beyond redemption and a waste of good money to attempt repairs. I have conferred with the Bishop and he agrees that you and your sisters should be relocated to the Convent of the True Cross and this place closed up.”

“But our work—the illuminations.”

“That will carry on, of course. And you will teach your skills to a younger generation of nuns that they can continue the tradition.”

She went numb. Of all the possible bad news she had anticipated, this had not even brushed her mind. “And what of St. Amelia?”

“She will be given her own chapel in the new cathedral at Portminster.”

 

The hour was late, the chapel stood empty and silent, except for a lone figure illuminated by the flickering of a single candle. Winifred, on her knees.

She had never known such despair. The day that had started out with so much color and promise was now as bleak as an English winter. To be moved from the only home she knew! To have to start, at this late stage in her life, to teach a lifetime of skills and knowledge to young girls. To have to tell her own dear, elderly sisters that they were to be relocated to unfamiliar lodgings where they were going to have to adjust, after years of familiar routine, to new ways and customs. How could such a thing have come to pass? Did not decades of servitude count for anything?

But the worst, oh the worst, was to be separated from her blessed saint.

For most of her life Winifred had prayed daily to St. Amelia. She never started or ended a day without a dialogue with Amelia. Winifred had never traveled far from the priory because she didn’t like to go far from her saint. It was Amelia who gave her wisdom and strength. Amelia was more than a woman who had died a thousand years ago, she was the mother Winifred had barely known, the daughter she never had, the sisters she had buried in the church graveyard. And now, as she sat alone in the chapel amid flickering candlelight and silent stone walls, Winifred was being forced to say good-bye. She felt as if she sat at the brink of a great, terrifying abyss.

“Father Abbot,” she had managed to say when she recovered from hearing the shocking news, “I have lived here for over four decades. I know no other home. Here was where blessed St. Amelia gifted me with my talent for painting. How can I leave? If I am separated from St. Amelia I shall lose my gift.”

“Nonsense,” the abbot had said. “Your gift comes from God. And you can still visit St. Amelia at the cathedral now and then.”

Visit St. Amelia now and then. I shall perish…

Now her heart was torn in conflict. From infancy she had been taught to obey father, husband, priest, church. But there were times in her life when she had felt she possessed better sense and could make better decisions than others. Take the midnight of the millennium for example: Father Edman’s predecessor had ordered her and her sisters to go to Portminster Abbey to pray, and to be safe. But Winifred had felt strongly that they were safer with St. Amelia and so she had disobeyed the abbot. As it happened, hysteria had broken out at the abbey on New Year’s Eve, there was a riot and people had been seriously injured because the abbot had not handled it well. His own panic over the impending millennium had merely inflamed the already impressionable people. Yet, because of Winifred’s willful disobedience, her sisters and lady guests had been spared.

But what was she to do in this case? The issues were less clearly defined. She lifted her eyes to the reliquary on the altar, glowing dully in the candlelight. The burden of governing and caring for sixty nuns, lady guests and pupils, plus overseeing daily the physical and spiritual needs of flocks of pilgrims had not been half as great as the responsibility she now faced for her diminished family of eleven.

Winifred experienced a moment of bitter recrimination: it wasn’t really about closing down an antiquated place, she thought, because with a bit of money and a bit of fixing up, St. Amelia’s could be self-sufficient again. It was about women outgrowing their usefulness, for what the abbot wanted was for Winifred to start teaching the younger sisters how to paint illuminations. “Let Agnes and Edith rest their weary hands and enjoy their final days in peace. Let younger hands take on the burden of work,” he had said. And she had argued that her sisters loved their labors and that to take them away would be to rob these women of their reason for breathing. But the abbot had refused to listen.

It made Winifred feel ancient and decayed, a useless discard, like a broken sewing needle. Age counted for nothing; youth was all. And like a rotten pile of leaves must be swept aside to allow for new, green growth to bud up from the ground, so must she and her aged sisters be swept aside.

For the first time in decades, Winifred was on the verge of despair. This sweet, humble priory had survived three centuries of storms, floods, fires, and even Viking raids. Now it was being toppled by a splinter of wood!

Suddenly fearful that her thoughts were sacrilegious—for it was no ordinary sliver of wood the new convent housed!—Winifred clasped her hands together and cried, “O blessed Amelia, I have never asked you for anything.” It was true. While people came to the saint for favors and cures and answers to wishes, Mother Winifred, the saint’s caretaker for forty years, had only ever offered prayers of thanks. But now she had a request, and it wasn’t a material one, she wasn’t seeking relief from physical pain or asking for love advice or a husband—what Winifred begged for now was guidance. “Tell me what to do.”

Forty years of self-control finally gave way. “Please help me!” she cried and did something she had never done before, she threw herself upon the altar and clasped the silver reliquary to her bosom.

Realizing in horror what she had done—the reliquary was only ever touched with a feather duster—she quickly righted herself from the altar, mumbling apologies and making the sign of the cross, and in so doing caught her foot on the hem of her habit. Suddenly sent off balance, she grabbed for a handhold, clutching at the altar cloth without meaning to and, in falling, brought everything down with her—flowers, candlesticks, reliquary, and all.

She hit the stone steps with a painful shock, did a half roll, banging her head so that she was knocked momentarily out of her senses. When her head cleared a minute later, Winifred found herself supine on the altar steps, her glazed eyes staring at the scaffolding overhead, a sharp pain in her skull. When she tried to move, she found her right arm pinned under a weight.

The reliquary. Which had broken open.

And the saint’s bones lay exposed for the first time in nearly a thousand years.

Winifred shot to her feet and whispered, “Mother of God!” as she stared in horror at the defiled relics.

Her heart thumped wildly as she tried to think what she must do. Had desecration taken place? Was there a special ritual for the replacement of saint’s bones? The abbot. She must let Father Abbot know at once.

And then something stopped her. Checking her impulse to run from the chapel, Mother Winifred slowly lowered herself to her knees and gazed in wonder at the delicate objects strewn on the steps. Like seashells, they were, or tiny rocks found in a stream—fragile and vulnerable, a fingerbone here, a slender armbone there. To her amazement, the skeleton, for the most part, was complete, although all ajumble now, and crumbling to dust. The skull was still connected to the neck, the neck to the collarbones. The ribs had collapsed long ago, and the pelvis was in a hundred pieces. But it was the neck that now drew Winifred’s attention, for there was something about the bones there…

She bent closer and squinted in the dim light of the chapel. At the base of the skull where the first two vertebrae joined…

Her eyes widened. Scrambling to her feet, she seized the lit candle and brought it down to the bones. She held her breath as she watched how the flickering flame danced on the pale bones and caught the tiniest, strangest glint within them.

She frowned. Bones weren’t supposed to sparkle.

She brought the candle closer and bent nearer, narrowing her eyes, focusing, delving into the crack between the two vertebrae. A draft whispered through the chapel, making the flame dance, causing the glimmer to happen again. It was like the spark one sees when striking a flint, she thought.

What was it?

An eerie feeling crept over her as she knelt alone in the silent chapel with the thousand-year-old bones. Winifred suddenly had the strongest notion that she was no longer alone. She looked around and saw that the chapel was empty. No one, no thing, lurked there. Yet the hair beneath the back of her wimple stirred as if to stand on end; her neck crawled as if someone breathed upon it.

Someone was there.

And then she knew. All in an instant, in the most astonishing mental clarity she had ever experienced in her life: it was St. Amelia, wakened from her long sleep by the disturbing of her bones.

“Please forgive me,” Winifred whispered tremulously as she tried to think how to gather up the pieces and replace them to the reliquary. It would have to be done as religiously and reverently as possible—and without anyone knowing. This much she knew for certain: that the bones had been meant for her alone to see, and no one else. It was a sign. St. Amelia was trying to tell her something.

When the candle flame flickered again and once more caused a spark within the neck bones, Winifred reached out a trembling hand and, with outstretched forefinger, gingerly touched the dry, chalky spine. The vertebrae fell apart, so old and desiccated they were. And as they fell away, like the halves of a walnut, they exposed an object of such astonishing wonder that Winifred, with a cry, fell backward and landed on her buttocks.

For imbedded in Saint Amelia’s neckbones was the most beautiful blue stone Winifred had ever seen.

 

She kept it with her, secretively, hidden in a deep pocket of her habit. The blue crystal from St. Amelia’s throat. She told no one about it, after restoring the bones to the reliquary and the reliquary to the altar, for she needed to ponder the mystery she had uncovered. Why was the crystal there? How it had gotten lodged in the saint’s neck bones? And was it a sign from St. Amelia? But what else could it be? The bones had been sealed in their reliquary for centuries, for a thousand years for all Winifred knew, why should they have chosen that moment to reveal themselves? The answer was obvious: after the abbot left, she had been filled with such utter despair that she could have believed the sun would never rise again. And then Amelia had spoken through the blue crystal.

But what was the message? Did it have to do with the move to the new convent? If so, was Amelia telling her to go, or to stay? Nothing had ever weighed so heavily upon Winifred’s mind and heart as this new turn of events. The women in her charge were depending on her to make the right decision.

And they were all so helpless! There was poor Dame Odelyn, elderly and lame, waiting by the well for someone to come along and draw water for her. Odelyn had come to St. Amelia’s long ago when a Viking raid had wiped out her entire family. Heirloom jewelry, hidden in the well behind the manor house, had bought her a permanent residency at the convent. But ever since that day when she had had to climb down to retrieve the treasure hidden there by her father, barely able to make the descent for she had just crept out of her hiding place and seen the butchered corpses of parents and siblings, Odelyn had been terrified of wells. And then there was Sister Edith who was so forgetful that she had to be escorted out to the necessarium every night because she always lost her way. And Agatha whose arthritis was sometimes so bad she needed assistance in eating. The list was endless. How could Winifred tell these women that they were to be uprooted from the only life they knew, from all that was comforting and familiar, to be thrown into strange and unfamiliar surroundings?

In searching for the answer to her conundrum, she focused on the blue crystal. She became obsessed with its colors and tried to recreate them when she mixed pigments. Holding the semitransparent stone up to light she saw explosions of cyan, ribbons of sky blue and cornflower, lakes of sapphire, ponds of aquamarine. But the color kept changing. She looked at it in sunlight and candlelight, during a storm and at sunset, and she saw azure, turquoise, marine blue, ultramarine, lapis, navy, indigo, teal. Winifred was fascinated by the color and composition of the crystal. The stone was not entirely transparent for there was a clouding in the heart, a gathering of particles that sparkled when the sun caught them just right. Whitish silver, taking a different shape depending upon which angle one observed it. She suspended the crystal on a fine thread and let it twirl slowly in the sunlight. The soul-substance seemed to move and change. It was mesmerizing. As Winifred stared, she almost believed she saw the phantom of a woman there, beckoning…

She would have liked to capture it on parchment but that would take a miracle, for where on earth was she going to find such blues, such light and transparency, such liquid hues?

“You did not touch your breakfast,” Dame Mildred said with great concern after the sisters had left the rectory for the scriptorium. It was unlike frugal Mother Winifred not to clean her plate; she had not even drunk her morning tonic. Winifred believed in the age-old health practice of chasing winter out of one’s blood by drinking a concoction of seven spring herbs. Ever since her days as a young novice she had annually revitalized her body by drinking a tea made from burdock root, violet leaves, stinging nettles, mustard leaves, dandelion leaves, daylily shoots, and wild onion. Foul tasting but so invigorating. “You’ve been out of sorts since the abbot’s visit.”

Dame Mildred had always reminded Winifred of the small lap dogs that ladies preferred, the kind that could be carried in a sleeve and that peered out with big, liquid eyes. Winifred suspected that nothing eluded Mildred’s notice, especially as her domain was so central to the convent. Sisters came to her with their ailments and woes, asking for liniments, tonics, cures, and bracing nourishment. Dame Mildred was a tiny woman, but sharper for all her size than the cumbersome abbot. “Was his news so upsetting?” she pressed.

“We are not to have our new roof this year,” Winifred finally said. It wasn’t the entire truth, but it wasn’t a lie either. She hadn’t told her sisters the bad news yet, wanting to pray on it. She had bought a little time by telling the abbot that her nuns would not be able to work on the latest manuscripts if they knew about the impending transfer to the new convent, and so he had given her two month’s grace period, after that time the move must take place. In the meantime, Winifred pondered the miracle and mystery of the blue crystal, and tried to discover its message.

Leaving Dame Mildred with a skeptical look on her face, Winifred went to the scriptorium where the sisters were already at work, silent and reverent, creating biblical scenes of such glorious color and vibrancy that they would be the talk of England. The pigments were the secret of creating remarkable illuminations. What good, after all, was the artist’s skill when inferior paints were used? But now they were low on supplies, and what was there was of poor quality. Winifred had tried to wrest some coins from the abbot for the purchase of new supplies, and he had refused her request, knowing that she would work miracles with what little they had, as she had always done in the past.

Winifred thought now of the new ring she had not failed to notice on the abbot’s hand. A gift from a patron of the abbey, no doubt. The value of that one piece of jewelry could have kept her nuns in the best quality pigments for a year, perhaps she could have even purchased malachite from which to create breathtaking greens. But she and her sisters must be satisfied with obtaining greens from buckthorn and mulberry, and if really pressed, from the berries of honeysuckle and nightshade leaves. Probably they were going to have to resort to the juice of iris flowers, which was a delicate process and took patience and skill. The dark blue flowers did not appear to be a likely source of green for the purplish color that was first squeezed out was not promising. But as soon as it was combined with alum a clear and beautiful green appeared. The secret, Winifred knew, was to remove all the pollen.

Was it fair that the abbot, with his beautiful ring, should force her sisters to go through so much extra work?

And clearly they were going to have to make their yellows from apple-tree bark this year. If only she could afford saffron. Saffron was the indispensable element for imitating gold. A pinch of dry saffron in a dish, covered with egg white and allowed to infuse, produced a beautifully transparent strong yellow. Winifred liked to use this glassy saffron to strong effect for ornamental pen flourishings around colored initials, for goldlike frameworks of illuminated panels in books, and for golden glazes and touches in lines of writing in red and black.

But they had no saffron, and the abbot had a beautiful ruby ring!

She nearly cried out with frustration and despair. The abbot expected her to make silk from sows’ ears, and now she was to teach all that she knew to young nuns! Not just how to draw or paint or make pigments, but how to purchase the ingredients and keep from being swindled. Did the abbot not see that during this learning process the students were going to turn out very poor illuminations? Could he not anticipate that the reputation of his books was going to suffer until the skill of the novices had reached the level of excellence of the very sisters he was determined to put out to pasture? His lack of foresight infuriated her. Typical of most men, she thought sourly, the abbot thought only of today. Leave tomorrow for the women to worry about.

“Mother Winifred!” Dame Mildred’s voice rang out. She came hurrying into the scriptorium, her sandals making slapping sounds on the paving stones. “The gypsy peddler is here! Mr. Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar!”

Winifred’s joy was instantaneous. “Praise God!” she cried. Surely this was another sign from God: just when they are at their lowest in supplies, the Almighty brings the pigment-seller to their door!

“God’s blessings, Mr. Jaffar!” she called out as she hurried down the path with her black veils billowing around her.

“And to you, dear lady!” he called back, sweeping his hat from his head and bending with an elegant bow.

A man of foreign origin with an olive complexion and close-cropped silver beard, the peddler always greeted the prioress in a way that made her think of courts and kings. He wore a long robe embroidered with stars and moons; his cap was padded and edged in fringe. He was tall and stately, and though she guessed he must be near sixty, he held his back straight and shoulders square. His old horse drew a most curious wagon, painted with celestial symbols, zodiacal signs, comets, rainbows, unicorns, and large, all-seeing eyes. The peddler was known far and wide as a purveyor of dreams and magic, stardust and hope. People liked the way his name, Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar, rolled from their lips; children followed his wagon, chanting his name, bringing wives out of their cottages. In reality he was Simon the Levite, and he was a Jew. He told everyone he was from “far off Araby” but had in fact been born in Seville, Spain. To his customers he was a gypsy Christian, but beneath his long robe he wore a tasseled shawl and at night when he was alone he solemnly recited “Hear O Israel.” Simon did not hide his identity because of local prejudice (persecution of the Jews would not blossom fully in Europe for another three hundred years, when the Black Death had to be blamed on someone), but because he had found he enjoyed playing the exotic persona and the notoriety that went with it. He liked selling mystery and illusion; he delighted in seeing children’s faces light up over his prestidigitation and magic, for Simon was himself youthful at heart. He had come to the isle of Britain by accident on a ship bound for Bruges that had been blown off course. When he discovered that he was different—at home he was simply one of many like himself, but here he was unique—he decided to stay, for there was profit in uniqueness. He lived a solitary life, making an annual circuit from London to Hadrian’s Wall and back, and looked forward to the day when he could retire in his own small cottage and put old Seska, his faithful companion of fifteen years, out to pasture.

Mr. Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar had but one weakness that on more than one occasion had nearly been his undoing: he loved women. Be they young or old, fat or thin, slow or quick, he found joy and wondrous mystery in every female he met. He sometimes wondered if this was because he had been one of eight brothers. Females were God’s gift to men, he avowed, despite what the Torah said about Lilith and Adam’s unfortunate dalliance with her. He loved the softness and smell of them, their mercurial moods, how they could sometimes be weaker than a man, sometimes stronger. Their ferocious instinct of motherhood. Their flirtatious smiles. Their long hair—oh, their long hair. Although Simon was getting on in years, he was not so old that he did not still appreciate a firm thigh, a full bosom, and a warm heart. He never forced or compromised a woman; she came willingly or he would have none of it. But women everywhere were intrigued by foreignness and reasoned in their blessed hearts that a man who had come from so far must know more about the art of love than the local pickings. And the thing was: he did.

He traveled alone and was rarely accosted, for even brigands respected the healer and themselves sometimes needed the fool, or the fortune-teller. Although people could not read, symbols painted on the sides of his wagon advertised his skills as an alchemist, fortune-teller, dentist, magician. He sold and traded everything—buttons, pins, thimbles, and thread, potions and ointments, bottles and spoons—with one exception: he did not deal in relics and religious goods. For Simon the Levite belonged to that rarest of breeds: he was an honest peddler. Therefore he left the selling of saints’ hair and teeth and bone to charlatans and priests and sometimes thought there was no difference between the two. He also harbored his own private opinion of the splinter of the True Cross that was housed in the new convent up the road, for he had encountered other such splinters in his travels across Spain and France, and had heard tell of others throughout Europe and in the Holy Land, and decided that the mental calculations of any idiot would reveal that all so-called splinters of the True Cross laid end to end would reach the moon.

He recalled the madness that had gripped England twenty-two years ago when something called the millennium was supposed to have occurred. It puzzled Simon for there was no thousand-year mark according to the calendar of the Jews, nor to the calendar of their racial brethren the Muslims, who reckoned their years from the time of Muhammad. Had that meant only a third of the world was to come to an end while the rest went on as before? It turned out to be a moot question for the significant midnight came and went without incident, and now priests were declaring it was the next millennium, a thousand years hence in the impossible-to-imagine year 2000, that Jesus and his angels were to descend.

As Simon traveled the English countryside, he was many things to many people, but whenever he stopped by the priory of St. Amelia near the river Fenn he was himself. He admired the prioress and knew that she saw through his sham and recognized and respected his wisdom and learning. And so off came the fringed hat, away went his wand and mystical gestures. But he kept the wizard’s robe on because he thought it lent him dignity.

It had been a year since he last came this way and the reduction in the nuns’ circumstances alarmed him: the tumbledown walls, the fields gone to seed, the absence of geese or hens, weeds growing over a path that had once been trampled smooth by the feet of pilgrims. He had known the new convent was growing in popularity, but he had not thought the nearby abbey would abandon these women so. Surely the fat abbot could see that these devout sisters needed food on their table and ale in their cups.

When Winifred saw the white-toothed smile in the olive face, she realized she was very happy to see Mr. Jaffar. Winifred was very unworldly, having been born twenty miles from the priory and never in her life having traveled farther than that. She knew a rudimentary Latin and had read the Bible, but that was the extent of her reading. Winifred and her sisters knew nothing of the rest of the world, only what they heard from pilgrims and travelers. And since both had stopped coming to St. Amelia’s, the visits of Mr. Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar were so much more precious, for the itinerant tinker brought news and gossip.

He was a strange man, almost repellent in his foreignness, yet possessing a curiously compelling personality. Had she allowed herself such worldly thoughts, she would have noted that he was very handsome. While Winifred suspected he was not a Christian, she knew he had the highest respect for God. And he had a way sometimes of saying things that lit small candles in her mind. Mr. Jaffar was unlike the other peddlers who came this way. Those men were filthy and thieving and unrefined, whereas Mr. Jaffar was clean and graceful, with a foreign charm. More than anything, he was trustworthy.

In the past, other merchants of pigment materials had swindled her. Inexpensive azurite was easy to pass off as costly lapis lazuli. To tell them apart with certainty the stones had to be heated red hot: azurite turned black, lapis remained unchanged. Azurite was purchased as a powder, and there were swindlers who put sand into the ground pigment to increase the weight for sale and it was the ruin of the color. Likewise, dishonest dealers would put all the best blue at the top of the bag and the poorer quality at the bottom. Not so Mr. Jaffar who now opened a box on the side of his wagon and displayed such richness of paint materials that she eyed them as if they were platters at a feast.

“The good Lord has brought you at a most propitious time, Mr. Jaffar, for my sisters and I are in need of fresh supplies. We are desperate for yellows.”

To her delight he produced gallstones.

Winifred reached into a deep pocket and brought out the water-filled glass globe she used to magnify her work. Mr. Jaffar had once tried to sell her a new invention from Amsterdam—polished glass called a lens—but she had turned it down as being much too expensive. As Winifred examined the gallstones through the globe, Simon thought: herein lay the woman’s true gift, for Winifred was more than just talented at drawing and painting, she possessed the most uncanny sense of color. Beneath her nimble fingers and keen eyes the most prosaic of elements became the most glorious hues in all of God’s creation. Take the pigment known as sap green, a substitute for verdigris, which was rare and expensive. Sap green was made from the juice of the ripened buckthorn berries mixed with alum and allowed to thicken by evaporation. The result was an olive color, transparent and rich. Although other monasteries had mastered the color, Winifred’s skill lay in creating durability. Normally, sap green did not last long, which was evident in poor quality manuscripts made only decades ago. Mother Winifred, however, knew the secret of thickening the juice just right, and then keeping it in bladders as a dense syrup rather than allowing it to dry. When used thus on a manuscript, the color was not only beautiful to the eye, but durable.

While she took her time looking over the powders and minerals, the raw materials that would create living animals on a page, Simon watched her closely and thought she looked different today. There were shadows on her face, disturbing currents in her eyes. He had always thought the prioress a placid creature, if a bit dour and humorless. He had never thought her capable of being disquieted.

She carefully chose her purchases, then she said, “I have not the money at the moment. I trust you will be in the neighborhood for a few days as is your custom?”

He stroked his impeccably clipped mustache and thought somberly. It was apparent to Simon that the Prioress could not possibly afford the items she had chosen. How was she to pay? Nonetheless, he would not embarrass her by raising the question—Simon knew only too well the importance of keeping one’s pride. If only she would see her way to parting with one or two of her illuminated books. Men in London had inquired of him if he could lay hand to Portminster manuscripts. One illuminated book from Winifred and she could have all the pigments she needed. But he knew she would not part with one, for she believed the books belonged to the abbot. “Very well, dear lady, we shall conclude our transaction three days hence.” He wondered now if he would be invited in for ale and possibly a cake, and mistakenly took her hesitation to mean she was thinking the same thing. Instead, to his surprise, she asked him if he, being an alchemist, could comment on a rather strange object that had come into her possession.

Expecting a tooth from a saint or a clover with four leaves, Simon was stunned when she handed him a blue crystal that was as deep and blue as the Mediterranean Sea. He sucked in his breath and whispered an oath in his native tongue, then he brought the crystal up to his keen eye and examined it closely.

Simon could barely speak, the stone was so beautiful. In an age when it was considered ruinous to cut a gemstone, for it was said to destroy the stone’s magic, gems of such clear transparency rarely existed. Simon had seen only a few—he had once even seen a cut diamond and could scarcely believe that such a cloudy piece of crystal could harbor such brilliance within. Yet this stone appeared to be uncut, for it was smooth and vaguely egg-shaped, just slightly larger than a robin’s egg, but of a more spectacular blue. Could it be aquamarine? He had once seen an emerald from Cleopatra’s mines. That, too, had been cut and dazzled the eye with brilliance. But no, this was not as green nor as pure at heart as that emerald had been.

Though he could not identify the stone, he sensed that it possessed great value. “I know a man in London,” he said, “a dealer in gems.”

Winifred had heard of London. Most people possessed scant knowledge of the world beyond five miles in either direction from where they lived; few were even aware of other countries, and their only familiarity with foreigners was to know that the Vikings who had once been the scourge of England were devils from beyond the sea. But Winifred knew that London was a town to the south, a prosperous trade center where the king lived.

Mr. Jaffar added, “London is the perfect place to sell such a gem.”

“Sell!”

“Why yes,” he said, handing it back to her. “Is that not what you were asking of me?”

“To sell Amelia’s stone?” she said, as if he had just asked her to hack off her arm. And then common sense took over. “Is it so valuable then?”

“My dear Mother Prioress, I could fetch you a fortune for this stone. Its uniqueness alone would bring a ransom in gold.”

Her eyes widened and her practical brain suddenly buzzed with new thoughts and plans. With a ransom in gold she could repair the roof, reinforce walls, provide new beds, and then perhaps plant some crops and purchase a few goats, hire some local lads to help out, make St. Amelia’s self-sufficient again, attract new novices and lady guests with their donations and patronage of their families. All in an instant, in the dazzling blue flash of a crystal, Winifred saw a bright new future for St. Amelia’s.

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!”

Winifred felt her bones freeze. To use pigments that had been mixed by someone else? “But I always purchase my raw materials from Mr. Jaffar,” she said in a tone that sounded almost pleading.

“We have nothing to do with him,” Rosamund said with undisguised contempt. “He offended my father. That blackguard is not permitted to set foot on our property, and it extends all the way to the main road.”

Winifred felt the floor tilt beneath her. The edges of the room grew dim. She was near faint with the shock of what had just transpired. To no longer be prioress, to no longer have control over the manufacture of pigments that was her very reason for being. And now: never to see Mr. Jaffar again!

As Rosamund escorted her guest on a tour of the new convent, cheerily pointing out all the wonderful amenities and luxuries, Winifred barely heard a word. She stumbled with the gait of a woman who had suddenly aged by two decades. Her head spun with grief and disappointment and shock.

But as she was taken from room to room, through a cloistered garden and down flagstone paths, her shock turned to awareness, until gradually her eyes were opened at last and she was asking herself: how could she have even thought that she and her sisters would never move here?

It was another world, a wonderful world. Each guest room had its own necessarium—a little closet built off the outer wall with a pipe carrying the waste to a trench below. Such luxury, not to have to trudge through all weather when nature called! There were special amenities found only in the homes of wealthy nobles: candles marked to tell time, lanterns of transparent ox horn, the freshly swept floors covered with sweet-smelling rushes. And luxuries: in the yard behind the kitchen, hired servants were boiling sheets, cloths and undergarments in a wooden trough containing a solution of wood ashes and caustic soda. Boys working in the vegetable gardens, women feeding flocks of fat hens and geese. An old man hired to fashion bars of sweet-smelling soap.

The kitchen was five times the size of that at St. Amelia’s and its fully stocked pantry and buttery, for all of being five years old, still smelled of fresh wood and whitewash. Winifred’s eyes bulged at the sight of the noon meal laid out: a whole ham, slabs of rare beef, crusty bread, barrels of ale and wine. When Rosamund put a generous plate in front of her, Winifred said she had eaten fully before leaving St. Amelia’s, but so as not to offend, she would carry this meal back in a cloth and save it for later. In truth, it would be divided among the others, who had not tasted jam in a very long time.

She was then taken to the grand chapel where the pilgrims—knights and paupers, lords and clergy, the sick and the lame—all waited in line to pray before the magnificent shrine of the True Cross. This church had something her own little chapel did not have: a stained-glass window. And so much gold! So many candles, all white and straight. All for the reverence of a piece of wood, whereas the bones of a real woman, a woman who suffered martyrdom for her faith, were housed in a homely place where the candles were squat and smoked badly. Winifred did not feel bitter toward this contrast, only sadness, and suddenly wanted to gather St. Amelia into her arms and whisper, “This might be grander but you are loved more.”

Finally: this place had an infirmary, which St. Amelia’s did not. Eight beds and a nursing sister who specialized in ailments. Winifred’s eyes bulged at the sight of the medicine cupboard: the potions and lotions, ointments and salves, pills and powders. Several vials of curative eyewash. Remedies for arthritis. Rose-hip tonic for kidney troubles.

Marveling at the generous stock of medicines, and thinking of the private necessarium that Sister Edith would have, right off her own room so she did not need a nightly escort, and the young man in the outer yard who was ever ready to draw water from the well, thus putting fear of wells out of Dame Odelyn’s mind…

Winifred sighed. There was no denying it. This would be a haven for her elderly sisters. They would be well fed, taken care of. Never mind that they would no longer have duties. Peace and comfort mattered more.

She had been invited to stay the night, in the guest quarters where the mattresses were filled with eider down, but Winifred was eager to get back to her own home before dark. Thanking Mother Rosamund for the tour and hospitality, Winifred hurried from the chapter house as quickly as decorum allowed. After she passed through the main gates and followed the path back to the main lane, she paused beneath a leafy beech tree and, alone in the shadows, retrieved the blue crystal from her pocket.

As it lay in her hand, catching sunlight that filtered through the branches overhead, Winifred realized that the crystal had not been a sign after all. There was no message from Amelia, no significance to the stone’s discovery. It had been an accident, nothing more. Winifred knew now that she and her sisters must come here and live out their lives in this place. She would strive to do her best teaching the art of illumination to the novices, but she knew that the excellence that had once gone into her labors would not be there, for already she felt the creative spark fading. The gift St. Amelia had bestowed upon her many years ago had run its course. From now on, Winifred would be an ordinary illuminator; she would teach ordinary girls to execute ordinary paintings. And she would set aside once and for all her foolish dream of creating a splendid altarpiece for St. Amelia.

Mr. Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar returned after three days as promised. And Winifred had the money she owed him, for she had sold their one last item of worth, a handsome unicorn tapestry that had hung in the chapter house—what need was there for it now that St. Amelia’s was to be closed?

He said he was sorry to hear that she was losing her home, and said he would pray for their happiness and success in the new place. And then he did a surprising thing: he gave her a gift, something he could have clearly sold at a good price, a chunk of costly Spanish cinnabar. He placed it now freely in the prioress’s dye-stained, work-roughened hands.

Winifred looked at the offering speechlessly. The red stone, crushed, would make excellent vermilion paint, which they were badly in need of. “Thank you, Mr. Jaffar,” she said in all humility.

He further shocked her by taking her hand and holding it between his. Winifred had not felt human touch in forty years, and certainly not a man’s! And in that instant the strangest moment occurred: Winifred felt the warm skin beneath her fingers and for the first time in her life saw a member of the opposite sex not as a father or a brother, a merchant or a priest, but as a man. She looked into Simon’s dark lively eyes and she felt something unfamiliar move within her breast.

And then she saw a vision, a function of the Celtic sight that had once led her to lost spoons and meat pies, but this time it was something lost in the past: all in a flash she saw herself meeting this same man on the day before she first visited St. Amelia’s over forty years ago. But now he is an itinerant young man carrying juggling balls and a box of magic tricks. Their eyes meet as they pass in the lane, and then they are gone. But later, in the chapel at St. Amelia’s, instead of going exploring, fourteen-year-old Winifred thinks instead of the handsome young man she met on the road. She does not wander through the convent and happen upon the scriptorium, but instead returns home with her mother and sisters, to travel the next day to the market fair in town, where she encounters the young man a second time. On this occasion they speak, and the magic between them is instantaneous. He speaks with a thick accent and his clothes are foreign. He says he comes from Spain and wishes to travel the country and bring dreams and joy to folk. He promises to come back someday and so Winifred waits for him. Five years pass before she sees him again, and there he is at the gate of their manor, with a brand new wagon and horse, and he is asking her to go with him. They will travel the world together, he tells her, and have many children and many adventures. So Winifred runs off with the stranger and never looks back.

She blinked and caught her breath and looked into Mr. Jaffar’s dark eyes. And she realized she had just been given a glimpse of what might have been.

“Where do you go from here?” she asked suddenly.

The question surprised him. “To the abbey, Mother Prioress. I sell medicines to the monks there.”

“Go inland,” she said. “Travel first to Mayfield.”

“But Mayfield is far out of my way, another two days’ journey. And then to make my way back—”

“Please,” she said urgently.

“Can you tell me why?”

“I have a presentiment. A feeling. You must turn inland from here, travel through Bryer Wood.”

He considered her words. “I shall discuss it with Seska, Mother Prioress,” he said, referring to his horse. “If she agrees, we shall make the detour.” Then he climbed onto his wagon, took up the reins and waved good-bye for the very last time.

 

“Where is Sister Agnes? It is time for us to leave.”

Dame Mildred came into the chapter house with the last of her packed goods—ancient pots and pans, a broken rolling pin, useless items that had sentimental value, which she could not bear to leave behind, even though Winifred had informed her she would no longer be doing any cooking. “Agnes is in the graveyard,” Mildred said, breathing heavily from the exertion. She had refused to leave even a spoon; her entire kitchen had been picked clean and packed into sacks. The man who was to transfer the sisters to the new convent was going to need more than one wagon. It was ironic: although the sisters had taken vows of poverty, the requirement to get into a convent was a payment in money and goods, to be held for common use. And so although Winifred and her ladies were themselves poor, they nonetheless had the accumulated effects of generations of women going with them.

Winifred was not surprised to hear that Agnes was in the convent graveyard. She had visited it every Sunday for sixty years. Now she must say good-bye to it.

The prioress found the elderly nun kneeling at a tiny grave that was shaded by an elm tree that had recently been stricken with leaf blight. She was brushing away dead leaves with her arthritic fingers. And she was weeping.

Winifred knelt beside her, crossed herself and closed her eyes in prayer. The miniature coffin beneath them contained the corpse of a baby that had lived only a few hours. Sixty-one years ago, during a Norse raid on Portminster, Agnes and her cousins had been caught at the river by a gang of Vikings. While the other girls had managed to escape, Agnes had been seized and raped. When she turned up pregnant a few weeks later, she had been brought to the convent of St. Amelia’s and ordered to stay there for, in her father’s eyes, she had dishonored the family. The nuns had taken her in, but her child had not lived long. After he was buried here in the convent cemetery, Agnes stayed and never saw her family again. She took holy orders and learned to paint illuminations, and spent every Sunday for the rest of her life pouring love into a grave that was marked simply, “John—d. 962 Anno Domini.”

She squinted up at the bare branches and wondered why God would inflict the tree with the blight just now, for its leaves were raining onto the little grave and within hours it could be completely covered. Once the sisters left, there would be no one to keep the grave clear of blighted leaves. “Soon my wee Johnny will be covered up and forgotten.” There was already a pile near the grave that Andrew had intended to burn later. Except that Andrew wouldn’t be here; he was moving to the new convent with them.

Winifred helped the elder nun to her feet. “Andrew says the new convent is very large,” Agnes said.

“It is, Sister Agnes, but it is also nice and new. And”—she peered up at the blighted maple tree through her own tears—“all the trees are healthy and green.”

“I shall never find my way around it.”

Winifred had heard the same fear expressed by the other nuns. She herself dreaded having to learn her way through that maze of corridors and courtyards and buildings.

“And I shall never paint again,” Agnes said, drying her eyes.

“It is time for you to rest. You have spent your life in the service of God.”

“Retirement is for old horses,” Agnes said petulantly. “Am I so useless? I can still see. I can still hold a pen. What shall I do with myself? And who will look after my wee Johnny here?”

“Come along,” Winifred said gently. “It is time for us to go.”

They gathered in the chapter house, which was dominated by an enormous fireplace that had been installed two hundred years earlier by a mother prioress who had been particularly sensitive to the cold; her wealthy brother had paid for the ostentatious hearth that was much too large for the room, but had failed to provide the constant wood and coal it required, and so the fireplace had fallen into disuse. Carved into the massive mantelpiece were the words of Christ by which Winifred and her sisters tried to live: “Mandatum novum do vobis: ut diligatis invicem”—“A new law I give you, that you shall love one another.”

Dame Mildred was bemoaning leaving her giant stewpot behind. It hadn’t been used in years because of the diminished population of the convent. “It’s a good pot,” she fretted. “It fed us through many a hard winter. We shouldn’t leave it behind.”

“It’s too big, Sister,” Mother Winifred said gently. “We cannot manage it ourselves. Perhaps later we can have some men come back and fetch it.”

Dame Mildred looked uncertain, her woeful glance cast back toward the kitchen as if she were leaving a child behind.

They were interrupted by shouts outside and the sound of horse’s hooves clattering in the yard. Andrew hurried in, white-faced and blathering something about an attack. As Winifred rushed to him, another man flew in, his face flushed from his hard ride. He wore the emblem of the abbey over chain mail, and he carried a halberd. “Begging pardon,” he said breathlessly. “Vikings have attacked and I’ve been sent to bring you and the ladies to the abbey for protection.”

“Vikings!” Winifred crossed herself and the others started wailing.

He told them in rapid order what had happened: the Norsemen had landed at Bryer’s Point and marched the short distance to the Convent of the True Cross. Reports were sketchy, but it was believed the entire complex had been ransacked and put to the torch. Of the pilgrims and sisters he had scant knowledge, only that Mother Rosamund had managed to escape and make it to the abbey to give the alarm.

“She said her nuns had run to the chapel for safety and there the devils had found them, all huddled together, and they had been slain where they were, like geese in a pen. And now I’ve been sent to fetch you and your ladies. Come quickly, we’ve no time.”

“But the abbey is some distance from here!” Winifred protested. “Mightn’t we encounter the Vikings along the way?”

“Well you certainly would not be safe here, Mother Prioress,” the man said impatiently. “Hurry! I will escort you. We’ll take the man’s wagon.” The man who had been hired to transfer them to the new convent.

While her sisters cried and milled about in a panic, Winifred tried to think. The invaders had not attacked the harbor town nor the abbey but had chosen an unprotected convent. What was to prevent them from turning in this direction and hope for a second easy kill? If so, then the soldier and his helpless charges would run smack into the invaders.

Every instinct told her that they were safer staying put. To meet the Vikings on the road was certain suicide, but to stay at St. Amelia’s gave Oswald’s soldiers time to give chase and perhaps rout the invaders in time.

Winifred felt the blue stone in her pocket and recalled how St. Amelia had faced her fate with courage, how she had not succumbed to the tortures of men. St. Amelia had done more than defy the orders of a mere abbot, she had rebelled against the authority of the emperor of Rome.

“No,” Winifred said suddenly. “We shall stay.”

The guardsman’s eyes bulged. “Are you mad? Now look, I’ve been given orders and I mean to carry them out. All of you, now, please, into the wagon.”

It was as if he hadn’t spoken. The elderly nuns and two ladies clustered around their prioress like chicks around a hen, saying, “What should we do?” Winifred recalled a report from many years ago, when she was a girl and the Vikings had attacked a village northward along the coast. There the villagers had gathered in the church and had huddled together. The Vikings had set fire to the building and all within had perished. Remembering also when she was very young and lived at home with her brothers and sisters, how they would all huddle together during a frightening storm. We must not huddle together, for that is what they will expect of us.

“Now listen to me, dear sisters. Remember how our blessed saint faced a trial worse than this, for it was her faith that was put to the test, as well as her flesh. But she found the courage to outwit her tormentors, and so shall we.”

“But, Mother Winifred,” said Dame Mildred in a tremulous voice. “How?”

“Each of you must find a hiding place for yourself, one that the invaders would not expect to find a lady in. Do not hide under a bed or in a clothes wardrobe as this is the first place the Danes will look.”

“Can we not all hide together?”

“No,” Winifred said firmly. “Above all, we must not hide together, not even in pairs.”

The soldier from the abbey spoke up. “Mother Prioress, it is the abbot’s direct or order—”

“I know what is best for my women. And you will stay, too.”

“I!” He put his hand to his chest in shock. “I must return to the abbey.”

“You will stay,” she commanded. “You will find a hiding place and there you will remain, silent and still, until I give the all-clear signal.”

“But I take my orders from—”

“Young sir, you are in my house, and I am the authority here. Do as I say, and do it swiftly.”

After a moment of ineffectual milling about, the women finally fled the chapter house, each running to the place they loved best, thinking this would protect them, or to that which they feared most, believing that a villain would fear it too, and so Dame Mildred ran to seek shelter in her beloved kitchen, Sister Agnes to her beloved Johnny’s grave, Dame Odelyn to her loathed well in the yard, and so on until the eleven members of St. Amelia’s priory vanished before the astonished eyes of the guardsman from the abbey, who was thinking it could not be done and that they were all going to be slaughtered like sheep.

But he underestimated Mother Winifred’s ingenuity. Her nuns, being smaller than Vikings, were able to squeeze into hiding places the invaders could not, like mice in wall cracks. And so Dame Mildred carefully swept away the cobwebs that had grown over the mouth of her enormous stewing pot, climbed in, and restrung the cobwebs over her head. Sister Gertrude, finding untapped strength and ingenuity, climbed up into the chimney of the enormous fireplace in the chapter house and clung like a frightened bat to the hinges of the flue. Sister Agatha ran to the dorter where she ripped open the seam of a mattress, pulled out some of the straw stuffing, threw it out the narrow window, then climbed inside the mattress and held the split seam closed with her fingertips. Dame Odelyn thought of lowering herself on the bucket down into the dreaded well, but then she realized that the bucket down inside the well might be a give-away, so she arduously climbed down, using the uneven stones of the well wall for handholds. Sister Agnes threw herself upon wee Johnny’s grave and then raked blighted leaves over herself and trembled under the pile. Sister Edith, who always had a hard time finding the necessarium, rushed straight to it and squeezed into the foul-smelling space between the seat and the wall.

It was not until she made sure that each was securely hidden, including Andrew and the man from the abbey, that Winifred finally climbed up into the scaffolding over the altar and secured herself there.

No sooner were they hidden than the Vikings arrived, bursting into the forecourt with fierce yells and cries of blood-lust. They barged into the chapter house and chapel, the dorters and refectories, kitchen and scriptorium like stampeding bulls. As Winifred had predicted, they searched relentlessly for the hidden sisters: in the confessional, behind the altar and tapestries, inside cupboards and storage chests, under beds. Dame Odelyn in the well, kept her face downcast and saw in the water below the reflection of a red-hair-haloed face look briefly in from above, but not seeing her for her dark blue gown blended into the deep shadows. In the kitchen, no man bothered to look into the giant cookpot with the threads of spider web across its mouth. Gertrude, in the mattress, heard heavy footfalls and held her breath. She heard the door being flung open; felt a pair of eyes scan the room; then heard the footsteps tramp on to the next room. Each terrified woman hunched in her special hiding place, heard or saw the villains barge through, ransacking and plundering, and shouting curses when no women were found.

Winifred, hiding in the scaffolding, clutched the blue stone as she watched with held breath the Viking leader tramp through the chapel, slowly looking around. He was the biggest man she had ever seen with muscles like melons and hair like fire. He seized Amelia’s silver reliquary and forced it open, dumping the bones out and scattering them with his feet. After a search under and behind the altar, in the confessional, in every nook or recess where a woman might hide, he tucked the box under his arm and stormed out.

Winifred did not relax her posture. Although every joint and muscle ached from her awkward position among the crossbeams, she kept as still as she could, praying that the invaders would make quick work of their destruction and leave. She felt sweat break out over her body. It trickled down her scalp and under her veil. Her hands grew damp. Suddenly, to her dismay, the blue crystal slid out of her wet fingers and hit the floor directly below.

She had to bite her tongue to keep from crying out, and she prayed with all her might that no more Danes came into the chapel. But to her horror the Viking leader came back, as though he had forgotten something or had sensed something amiss in there. She watched in terror as the tall blond giant in the horned helmet strode slowly down the central aisle and to the bottom of the altar. He gave a turn, and his foot kicked the crystal.

Winifred stifled a gasp.

The Dane looked down, retrieved the sparkling gem, then looked around, knowing it had not been there a moment ago. He turned his face upward and peered into the overhead shadows, the construction of planks and struts and supports. He stared for a long moment. Winifred saw a pair of keen blue eyes but she couldn’t tell if he could see her.

Suddenly his roving gaze stopped and his eyes met hers. She held her breath as she clung to the rotten wood and tried not to disturb the dust on the beams.

The moment stretched on, with the savage below staring up at the terrified nun.

And then in his foreign tongue he shouted an order to his men and Winifred saw, through the clerestory window, the others gathering up their plunder. When two men came in with torches, he barked orders at them and gestured for them to leave. When they ran out, he looked up again, and this time there was a flicker in his eyes, a slight lift of his mouth. Another person might have read the look as a salute to courage and ingenuity; Winifred saw it only as the power of St. Amelia at work.

She waited a long time before climbing down. Her bones protested as she finally unfolded herself from the cramped position, and she nearly lost her foothold as she made her way to the floor. Then she hurried up the narrow stairs to the top of the belltower and looked out. In the distance she heard the thunder of horses’ hooves—Oswald’s men riding after the fleeing invaders. And then the thunder faded and the afternoon was quiet and still.

She called the sisters from their hiding places, helping them to climb out of tight spaces they had only hours before slipped into with ease, and they all gathered in the chapel to pray. When they told of how they had escaped detection, each in her own peculiar place, and as Winifred thought of the scaffolding erected five years ago, when roof repairs were to have begun, how she had cursed it all this time and in the end it had saved her, and thinking of Odelyn’s dreaded well and the necessarium that had been the bane of Edith’s life, and the leaves that were going to obscure poor Johnny’s grave, she thought: the scaffold, the cook pot, the blighted elm, the well—items that had brought irritation and heartache, these were no accidents. They were miracles. There to save us had we but the courage to use them. Amelia’s courage.

Winifred thought of the blue stone that the Dane had picked up and she hoped that the grace of St. Amelia went with it and that it would somehow, someday bring light to the heart of the barbarian.

 

As the abbot rode down the lane on his fine horse, he thought how much more convenient the newer convent had been to the abbey. Unfortunately it had been utterly destroyed by the Vikings whereas St. Amelia’s, by some miracle, had been spared. And having been spared it was now the only convent in Portminster. Ironically, if both had been destroyed, rebuilding would have been done on the other site and St. Amelia’s let go to ruin.

When he took the turn-off he joined the stream of pilgrims heading for the priory. The splinter of the True Cross had been consumed in the fire at the other convent, so Amelia was once again the only relic in the area. The abbot knew a miracle had occurred here. Why hadn’t the Vikings burned this place down as well? Everyone said it was St. Amelia who had stopped them. But, thinking of the indomitable Mother Winifred, he wondered…

Changes had taken place since the miracle of the Danes. Wonderful cooking smells now came from the kitchen where a tasty stew was simmering in Dame Mildred’s enormous cookpot. Outside, a young man was at the well drawing water and handing the bucket to Dame Odelyn. Another youth was raking leaves off a little grave. There was industry everywhere, and new prosperity.

But the abbot wasn’t coming here today to congratulate the nuns of St. Amelia’s. He was here because he had heard disturbing news: Mother Winifred was not herself training the young novices in manuscript illumination but was leaving the task to the elderly nuns. And what was the prioress doing with her time? Painting that blasted altarpiece!

Well, he was going to put a stop to it once and for all. He would brook no more disobedience from that woman.

He expected Winifred to be at the gate to greet him as she always had in the past, but she wasn’t there. It was Sister Rosamund, now a resident of St. Amelia’s and demoted from mother prioress, although she did not seem to mind. She was the prioress’s assistant, and happily had her hands full seeing to the comforts of travelers, pupils, and lady guests, as well as supervising the renovation of buildings, the housing of goats, sheep, and hens, and seeing to it that the dinner table always groaned with food.

Rosamund cheerfully escorted the abbot to the new solar where Mother Winifred was seated at an easel, painting. He was about to speak up when he looked at the panel and was rendered speechless. And then he saw something even more dumbfounding: Mother Winifred was smiling!

He took a seat and remained quiet while she worked. Winifred had created an exquisite St. Amelia, radiant and humble, serving the poor, spreading the word of Christ. In the fourth panel of the new altarpiece, St. Amelia was holding a blue crystal, cupped in her hand, to her throat. The abbot could make no sense of it, but it was beautiful and compelling and it took his breath away.

When a novice brought him ale and he sipped it absently, Father Edman not only decided that he would let Winifred finish the altarpiece after all, he was already thinking of future paintings he was going to commission her to paint, and the patrons who were going to pay handsomely for them.

Interim

When the abbot had seen the magnificence of Winifred’s altarpiece, he had done a quick turnabout and claimed all credit for encouraging her, and then commissioned a triptych for his own church. He never made bishop, but died two years later when he choked on a fishbone during his third helping of Easter dinner.

Mother Winifred lived another thirty years, spending her days producing a prodigious number of breathtaking paintings, altarpieces, and miniatures—madonnas, crucifixions, and nativities—all identified as hers by the ubiquitous crystal, for artists did not sign works in those days.

Shortly after the Viking raid, Mr. Ibn-Abu-Aziz-Jaffar returned to St. Amelia’s for one last visit, to thank Mother Winifred for warning him against going to the abbey that day, as his decision to turn inland and journey instead to Mayfield had diverted him from the direct path of the Vikings, thus saving his life. Mother Winifred, forgetting the sight she had inherited from Celtic ancestors, gave all credit to St. Amelia, and invited the itinerant merchant to rest at the priory for as long as he liked. He decided to retire there, in a small cottage on the grounds with his faithful horse Seska living out her days in a paddock. Simon the Levite occasionally helped out around the convent, was popular among visitors and pilgrims, and continued to be Mother Winifred’s friend and adviser. They developed a ritual of meeting every afternoon for a quiet talk—Simon the Jew and Winifred the nun—until his death fourteen years later. Though he never converted to Christianity, she insisted her old friend be given last rites and be buried in hallowed ground.

As Mother Winifred continued to execute her paintings, her hand and eyesight finally fading with age, she sometimes paused in her work to think of the Viking who had picked up the blue stone, and wondered what he had done with St. Amelia’s power.

What had happened was this: when the Vikings returned to their ship, they found it ablaze and surrounded by Oswald of Mercia’s soldiers, who slaughtered the Danes to a man. Oswald himself took part in the pillaging of the bodies, and he found a curious blue stone, beautiful beyond belief. He had it mounted on a sword that later accompanied an ill-fated Crusader to Jerusalem where the stone was pried out of the hilt and carried to Baghdad as a gift to the caliph where it was fitted, for a while, into his favorite turban. In a moment of weakness, the caliph gave the crystal to a temple dancer who wore it in her navel as she danced for him and then fled during the night with her illicit lover. The crystal was carried in pockets and purses, knew masters and mistresses, was sold and bought and stolen again, until it was brought back across the English Channel by a soldier returning from the Crusades. Having been blinded in battle near Jerusalem and hoping to find a cure, he joined a group of pilgrims headed for Canterbury. They were set upon by brigands who sold their booty in the north. Here the crystal was set into the lid of a mother-of-pearl jewel box by a young man who hoped to win a young lady’s affection with such an extravagant gift. But when the young lady rejected her suitor’s marriage proposal, he took himself off to Europe where he vowed to kill himself once he had found a suitable spot. There he met a man from Assisi named Francis, who was founding a new brotherhood based on poverty, and on an impulse the dejected young man joined the order, giving away everything he owned, including the cursed jewel box.

The peasant who found the box in the Franciscans’ pile of charitable offerings pried the blue stone loose from the lid and bought a loaf of bread with it, and when the baker’s wife saw the captivating gem, she exchanged it for another novel invention, a glass mirror, believing that an object that showed her reflection was more precious than one that did not.

In 1349 the Black Death killed one third of the population of Europe, and in that time the blue crystal was blamed for seven deaths and six cures as it passed from deceased to survivor, from patient to doctor. Almost a hundred years later, when a young girl named Joan was burned at the stake in France for heresy, a man in the crowd that was watching was unaware that his pocket was being picked, the thief relieving him of two gold florins and a blue crystal.

In 1480 on a warm summer day, a crowd gathered in the hills near Florence to watch a twenty-eight-year-old artist-inventor demonstrate his newest creation, which he called a parachute. Witnesses merrily placed wagers on whether the young idiot would break his neck, but when Leonardo da Vinci landed without mishap on a grassy field, the blue crystal passed from the hands of a Medici prince to a traveling scholar who took the glittering gem back to Jerusalem as a gift for his beloved daughter, only to find she had died in childbirth during his absence. So bitter was he over her death that he hid the hated crystal away, for it reminded him of his only child, and there it lay, in a gold box, in a beautiful home on a hill overlooking the Dome of the Rock, awaiting its next owner, its next turn of fate.