Authors: Priscilla Royal
Sister Beatrice s grandmother had come from Aquitaine as a lady in waiting to the equally famous and infamous Eleanor, wife of Henry II, and was known to suffer neither the ignorant nor fools gladly. As strong-willed and independent as her queen, she had no tolerance for intelligent women who pretended to be stupid and had taught her equally strong-minded daughters to use and be proud of their good wits. Thus, unlike most women of their class, they were taught to read and write not only in French and English but in Latin and Greek as well.
And little Beatrice had learned the same from her mother, who also ensured that her daughter was comfortable with arithmetic. These skills served Beatrice well during her marriage. While her husband was away at war, she ran the estate with competence and kept good accounts. Thus she was able to turn profitable lands over to her eldest son after her husband was killed, and happily take the veil at Amesbury, dedicating the rest of her life to the training of young girls.
It was true that Beatrice secretly hoped her niece would one day become Abbess of the entire Order of Fontevraud, a position that would assure great honor to the Wynethorpe family and secure places in Heaven for its more profane members. Such a worldly ambition she kept hidden in the deepest recess of her heart, and any such hope took second place to her love for her niece and concern for her happiness. Had marriage and children meant contentment for Eleanor, Sister Beatrice would have sent her back to the world, albeit shedding tears later in the privacy of her chamber. Meanwhile, before the child had to make her choice between the cloister and the hearth, Beatrice made sure little Eleanor learned and practiced the skills necessary to lead
others and to manage priory assets in a profitable way. In a world
of mortal men, wealth would always be the key to power, no matter whether the community be secular or religious.
Beatrice need not have worried about losing her niece to the world. For Eleanor, happiness was the cloister, and when Baron Adam wanted to take his child back to Wynethorpe Castle and a good dynastic marriage, Beatrice had stood up on her behalf like a mother lion protecting her cub. After long arguments, Beatrice and Adam did come to a reasonable compromise: the girl would be sent back to the world for one year to test her vocation. After that year, Eleanor chose to return to her aunt's welcoming arms at Amesbury and take her final vows. What Sister Beatrice understood and her brother did not was that the world and Wynethorpe Castle to Eleanor meant the sound of her mother's screaming and the memory of her death from childbirth. The convent, on the other hand, was a home filled only with love and peace.
Although she had rejected a marriage that would have gained her father both allies and land, Eleanor was not insensitive to the concept of familial duty. Indeed, she had wept bitterly in her aunt's arms at the thought of leaving Amesbury when she was told of her appointment to head Tyndal Priory, then quickly washed the evidence of grief from her face, stood with dignity before the king's messenger, and accepted the position with proper expressions of gratitude and modest joy. She knew full well the honor it had brought to her family, and she was determined to be adequate to the task.
Eleanor stopped by a bed of Madonna lilies commingled with Apothecary's roses, both grown in honor of the Virgin Mary, and happily breathed in their heady fragrance. This part of the priory gardens bordered on the plot containing plants used by the hospital for potions and other remedies.
A small woman, Eleanor had to stand on her toes and stretch to look over the lilies at the raised beds of healthy medicinal herbs, some still glistening with drops of morning dew. Sister
Anne's ability to coax plants from the dank earth was impressive.
As opposed, Eleanor thought with bitter amusement, to Sister Matilda's abuse of innocent vegetables.
She reached out, gently touched a silky white petal of the Madonna lily where it was lightly marked with gold from the stamens, and pulled her thoughts away from Amesbury and back to her problems at Tyndal.
She knew the priory was having financial difficulties. Prioress Joan of Amesbury had told her so before Eleanor left for her new home. Until she could study the problem in adequate depth and make more far-reaching plans to regain solvency, one of her first undertakings had to be a review of the assignments of tasks within the priory to make sure that Tyndal at least was
run as efficiently as possible. So far, Eleanor had been amazed at
Prioress Felicia's reasoning behind matching nun to occupation. The former prioress's decisions appeared arbitrary and without merit, at least on the surface. Talent for the task did not seem to have weighed with the old prioress, Eleanor thought, as she reviewed the responsibilities assigned to the Sisters Christina, Edith and Matilda, in particular.
She had to be careful not to change things quickly, and not to change anything without understanding why the previous decision had been made. Prioress Felicia had been revered. Eleanor was not. However efficient changes might be, she knew they had to be done slowly and with diplomatic skill. Any changes made without full agreement of the community would be undermined
out of sheer resentment, and Eleanor was painfully aware of both
her inexperience and youth compared to her predecessor. She would and must show due respect to the former prioress.
It was regrettable that she could not turn to Prior Theobald for advice and insights. He had been in charge of the monks and lay brothers at Tyndal for many years and would have been a logical mentor for her. However, after Sister Beatrice had consulted with one of her vast number of knowledgeable contacts, she had warned Eleanor against him. The prior, it seemed, was a man uncomfortable with detail, one who avoided the effort of well-considered decisions and left the day-to-day work to others. Thus he rarely knew what was happening amongst those he supposedly oversaw. Instead, her aunt had advised her to seek out Brother Rupert, a man known to be quiet but competent and who had worked closely with the former prioress.
At their initial meeting, Eleanor had gained some valuable insights into the priory overall, but she needed to question Brother Rupert in detail about much. The good brother had still not appeared, a perplexing failure that filled her with a growing concern. She closed her eyes against the tender beauty of the gardens and turned back to her quarters. She must find him without further delay.
As Eleanor walked back along the pathway between stream and gardens to the narrow passageway leading into the vine-covered trellised arches and flower-lined paths of the cloister garth, she tucked her hands into her sleeves for warmth against the sea breeze and bowed her head. Mentally, she started a list of the most pressing questions she had for the monk.
As she emerged from the walkway, however, something caught her eye. Eleanor stopped in shock. Near the fountain, a very tall nun knelt in the grass. Half-lying on the ground in front of her was a man in monk's garb. With one arm she embraced his shoulders, holding him close to her body. Her chin rested on the top of his head and she caressed his neck with great tenderness. Eleanor could not see the man's face.
“Sister!
Sister Anne gently lowered the man to the ground and rose. As the woman turned to face her, Eleanor noted the dark streaks on the arms of her habit, the stains of grass and damp earth about her knees, and the tears streaming down the cheeks of the habitually sad nun.
"My lady," Sister Anne said, her voice shaking, "Brother Rupert is dead."
Chapter Five
Giles rode away. Thomas stood in the dark shadow of the priory walls; his hand raised to ring the gate bell; his back turned
from the road. He knew there would be no backward glance from
the rider, only a swirl of dust kicked up by the horses' hooves.
Brother Thomas, as he now must call himself, pressed a hand against his chest. Pains of longing and grief stabbed equally and unmercifully at him. Both the lack and the loss of loved ones were all too familiar to him, yet he had never been able to inure himself to either.
Thomas was a by-blow. His servant mother had died of some fever soon after his birth. His father, an earl, had taken him up, tossed him into the arms of a wet nurse, fed and clothed him with some decency, and then mostly forgot about the boy as he habitually dismissed all his offspring, whatever their legitimacy. In both war and bed, the earl was a man of passionate action. Consequences merited a more limited interest.
The earl's presence in Thomas' life was just frequent enough, however, that the boy could neither forget nor ignore him, and he longed for his father's rare attention and even more infrequent praise. Thus the lad searched out the men most favored in the earl's circle and began to study how they spoke, stood, and gestured, so that he too might catch his father's eye and approval. This may have started as a boy's desperate attempt at attention, but Thomas soon developed a talent for shadowing older men, eavesdropping on their bragging tales, and watching them do the things men do when they do not know they are being watched. And with the precocious intelligence of a parentless child, he quickly figured out the significance of what he overheard when secrets were whispered.
One day, the boy begged an audience with his father and imparted something of such import into his ear that the earl developed a true, albeit belated fondness for him. As a reward for warning him of the malicious plot being brewed, the earl gave Thomas a thump of genuine affection and sent him off to cathedral school.
Thomas might have preferred more direct forms of affection and, from the beginning, made it clear he had little taste for the Church. At his father's insistence, however, he did take minor orders. The earl told him with well-intentioned candor that Thomas' birth precluded inheriting either title or lands and that taking such orders would give the boy a fine future with men in high places who would value his talents. Indeed, as he began his sometimes less than strictly clerical duties for some of the more ambitious men of the Church, Thomas learned to enjoy assisting in the earthly power games played by his priestly masters.
Sharing this love of intrigue had been his boyhood friend, Giles, who was also sent to cathedral school as the proper place for a younger, and in this case legitimate, son of one of the earl's barons. Giles was more than just a childhood friend. They had been brothers in toddler mischief, adolescent buffoonery, and finally the more serious sports of wining and wenching.
Then one bright spring morning, after a night of sharing the lush favors of a serving maid from a pilgrims' inn near Saint Edward the Confessor's shrine at Westminster, Thomas was awakened from a sweet but unremembered dream by church bells ringing out with their particular joy. He looked at Giles' naked body next to him and had begun to caress him with an inexplicably tender longing. Indeed, never before had Thomas felt so unreservedly happy nor had he ever been able to show love so freely.
Giles later claimed he knew nothing of what had happened before the maid began to scream and a horrified pilgrim ran to fetch the archdeacon's chief clerk, but Thomas knew better. He remembered how ardently Giles had returned his kisses and fondling, how Giles had begged his friend to thrust his sex into him. And as he began to do so, Thomas felt an almost holy joy.
Yet the man who dragged him from Giles had screamed "Sodomite!" and the dungeon where Thomas had soon found himself was a cold, foul, and brutal hell.
One of his jailers raped him, all had taunted him, but two took especial joy in loudly recounting tales of how Giles had spent his days since, tearing at his garments and howling like a wolf. He had been locked away in his father's castle tower until he begged his father to take him to the chapel. Arriving at the door, Giles had ripped away his remaining rags and plunged naked into a bed of stinging nettles. The priest had exorcised
Satan from the young man's writhing body, after which Giles had
fallen into a deep sleep and, when he awoke, claimed ignorance of all that had transpired in bed with Thomas.
Now cleansed of evil, Giles had walked barefooted to a nearby
shrine in penance and in gratitude. Shortly thereafter, he was married to an old and wealthy widow of his father's choosing. Thomas' jailers recounted this last news in especially ribald detail just outside his prison door. The onetime rape he might have endured, swearing to castrate the man in good time. The tauntings were only words even his dulled wits could match, but these jailers could not have chosen a better torture than this tale to bring him to his knees, whimpering like a beaten dog, in grief for his friend.
Why Thomas hadn't been burned at the stake was still a mys
tery to him. Perhaps it was his father's doing. Perhaps it was some
bishop who had benefited from his murmured advice. Whatever, he had wanted to die by the time he was finally wrenched from his prison bed of rotten straw, rat feces, and his own filth. The brightness of forgotten sunlight had seared his eyes, and the encrusted chains had rubbed his bloody ankles to a point beyond pain. He would have begged for death, had he not lost his voice in a world where darkness made a mockery of human speech.