The Anchoress of Shere, page 13
The bishop’s man translated into English, “Summarise your indictment against Sir Richard.”
Christine had been told to be as brief as possible, and not to speak further unless the judges asked her to say more, which was not likely, they said.
So far Christine had not looked at Sir Richard, whom she had always remembered in his fine linen and purple tunic. Above all she recalled his jewelled dagger. This day he was dressed in a simple black robe, with no adornments. His feet were chained together, his face was dirty, and his beard bedraggled. He had aged ten years in the two since last she saw him. Although her enclosure had honed her hatred, the period of intense devotions permitted some pity to enter her soul.
She recited the lines the bishop had instructed. “I swear to God and King that I verily speak unto ye this day.” She spoke quietly and nervously. “I am Christine of Shere, the daughter of William, also of Shere. I confirm the times the deposition states regarding Sir Richard’s offences against my person and against my sister Margaret, now deceased. I confirm that Sir Richard…” She stopped staring at the floor and looked into her tormentor’s face. The words died in her mouth.
The bishop’s lawyer poked her with his finger. “Proceed,” he said.
Christine continued: “He did…he did violate my chastity, by cruel force, and with no volition on my part. I had been betrothed to Simon, a tailor of Shere. In shame thereafter I did confess and was sworn by holy vows as an anchoress of St. James’s church. There was I bound by my vows for life until-I beg the holy Mother Church for forgiveness-I did break these vows. I did this to aid my sister who had been made victim of Sir Richard’s cruel lust for the months she had worked as scullery maid in Vachery Manor, the seat of Sir Richard. She was chaste until she was by Sir Richard employed. He and his son did by brute force violate my sister, and then she was with child-from their seed. She died in childbirth, and is now buried these three weeks past in Peaslake.”
She stopped and coughed a little as the bishop’s lawyer glared at her. “My father, William of Shere, did protest to Sir Richard,” she went on, hesitantly, “but was dismissed from his presence with threats. My father has no debts to his lord, and has honoured all the tallages and obligations. Sir Richard has brought shame on our house, humble though it be. He has scorned our local customs as well as laws of king and Mother Church.”
She spoke quietly and nervously, but she had delivered all that she had rehearsed. Nor had she lied, although she accepted that the bishop’s lawyers could tutor her in words more befitting the court.
The judge did not question her, but spoke in French to the bishop’s lawyer, saying, “You will translate this statement, taken in Latin, by our scribe, and this Christine of Shere will sign that it is a true account of her words sworn in this Court of Pleas.”
The bishop’s lawyer caught the sleeve of Christine’s robe to indicate that she must leave. As she turned, she looked back at Sir Richard. She expected to see the fire of anger in his eyes, but instead they were dull; like his face, they showed no emotion. She wondered whether torture had broken his spirit.
The abbess took her back to the convent in her carriage. She did not at first converse with Christine, who knew not to speak unless addressed by her superior. Christine felt a cold emptiness in her heart. There was no joy, but she had had her moment of justice.
Eventually the Abbess Euphemia spoke, and with tenderness: “Christine, you acted bravely and well. The bishop has granted you to stay with us until the trial is complete. You may be taken before a bishop’s court to be examined, to restore your vows if you are shriven well and are truly penitent. The bishop, I trust, will look with kindness on you. The King’s Assizes, I know, will restore the lands belonging to the Church. And you have acted to the bishop’s will.”
Christine stayed five more days in the convent, until the King’s Bench found Sir Richard guilty of all the charges. Although the king had not returned to the despotic ways of his father, the issue of Church land was dear to his benefactor, the Pope. It had been seven years since a knight had been thus dispossessed, for the king had need of noble support, not least for the wars in France and Scotland. For reasons of state, however, Sir Richard was stripped of all his chivalric rights. Knights were executed by beheading, but he was to be treated as a commoner.
On the appointed day, Christine was allowed to leave the abbey to join the common throng. The abbess insisted that Christine attend his hanging in the square, and she did not argue against the order.
As the abbess led Christine the short distance to the centre of the town, the townspeople respectfully stood back to let them pass. In the square, the crowd carried an effigy of Sir Richard on a pole, then burned it, and danced and sang round the flames.
After an hour or so of peasant revelries, Christine saw Sir Richard’s broken body dragged by four horses through the cobbled streets of Guldenford. Battered and bloodied, he was hauled, scarcely conscious, to the steps of the single gallows, ten feet high. The people hissed and booed at him, while the mob nearest him spat. Gobbets of spittle streaked his face and robe, decorated with his coat of arms, but reversed so that they would never again be worn by any courtly family. Upon his head they placed a crown of nettles.
Two hooded men dragged Sir Richard up the wooden steps and thrust his head roughly into the dangling noose. The once proud lord showed no emotion; he seemed beyond caring or, perhaps, beyond any further earthly pain.
The sheriff, after reading out a short proclamation in Latin and English, concluded: “Such be the fate of all who dare rebel against the king.”
The crowd roared back, “The king. The king. Death to all rebels against the king.”
Sir Richard, looking up at the grey, overcast skies, tried to speak. Although the crowd ceased their tumult all that Christine heard was, “I deny all these unjust accusations and I curse ye all…”
He was silenced by the shouts of the crowd, and stones were pelted at his broken body. Soldiers tried to push the mob back as the sheriff gave the order to hoist him up.
Christine saw his bowed body straighten and jerk up into the air until, in the utter silence of the throng, she heard a sharp choking sound at which the crowd broke into loud laughter. His body dangled and twitched for many minutes before it grew still and they let him drop.
To all this Christine forced herself to bear personal witness, but she closed her eyes as the sheriff himself lowered Sir Richard from the gallows; deliberately allowing a tiny ember of life to remain within his body. The two hooded men threw the blue-faced victim on to a small bench and tied him down. After his robe was cut off with a large meat cleaver, the sheriff took the cleaver and slashed downwards through the dying man’s stomach. He drew out the intestines and threw them on to a brazier. Still alive, Sir Richard, hearing and smelling the sizzling of his own innards, let out a groan like a dying ox.
The crowd did not shout for mercy, but the sheriff ordered one of the hooded men to wield the axe. After two strokes, Sir Richard’s head tumbled on to the platform. As the blood spouted from the neck, the crowd raised their voices. A peasant cried out, “Justice! Justice!”
The hooded men took turns to quarter the body with the axe as the crowd cheered at every cut. The four quarters of his body were swarmed over by the crowd. With knives they scratched on his skin, and chanted verses from the Holy Scriptures denouncing arrogance and evil. Some of the more drunken members of the mob, particularly the women, started to sing and dance again. At this the abbess led her charge away.
In her convent cell, Christine was too overcome to offer more than perfunctory prayers, but she did finally manage to sleep. She dreamed of floating down a river of blood until her little boat reached an island. The boat steered itself to the shore, where she was greeted by her sister, dressed all in the finest white linen. She stretched out both arms to embrace the dead girl…
That was all she could remember the next morning, yet she felt that Margaret was thanking her for defending her memory and their family’s honour.
After Matins, the abbess instructed Christine to return to her father’s house. She thanked the abbess and took leave of the convent, but asked to be allowed to depart from the garden door via Castle Arch and through the “gates” or passageways of the town. She did not want to pass again through the square, explaining that she had witnessed too much suffering and pain, even if it was to an evildoer.
Yet as she walked alone through the great east gate of the town, she saw Sir Richard’s head impaled on a pike above the wooden arch. Shuddering at the sight of his bloated face, she hurried past, knowing that his disembodied features would haunt her nightmares.
She had endured enough of man’s inhumanity to man, and relished the tranquillity of the countryside after the foetid smells of the town, but at a crossroads a mile or so along the road, near the leper hospital, she beheld another cruel sight: a naked man buried head first, up to his waist. With caution she moved towards the strange apparition and touched his ankle, still warm. Transfixed by further horror, she did not notice an old leper woman watching her.
The woman, swathed in filthy rags, hailed Christine.
“What be this, mistress? Why bury a man like this?” Christine asked.
The woman, cackling, replied, “The judges made this so. The villeins were dealt with first before the king’s men smote down Sir Richard.”
Christine said gently, “Sir Richard’s crimes are known to me, but what of this malfeasant here, naked in the sight of God and man?”
“I be sorry to offend a lady in holy orders,” said the old woman, “but he be killed for his sodomy. Sometimes they hang ’em, sometimes they bury ’em so, to fit their crime. Have you no eyes afore today? ’Tis not uncommon in this town.”
“I live a long way from here, in Shere.”
The old woman looked confused. “Don’t know all ’em villages roundabouts. But upon the holy tears of Christ, you be crying too. Did you know this man, assumin’-beggin’ your forgiveness-that you can recognise his lower parts?”
Christine looked shocked. “No, I know him not. I cry for all the hurt and pain in this land. So many die by the hands of men, when there be pestilence enough from nature. I pray for His coming to cleanse this land.”
“Amen,” said the old woman, as she shuffled off with the help of her stick.
The long walk home did not daunt Christine, now strong with exercise, food and sated vengeance-but a vengeance that seemed empty with her Margaret lost from this world.
Duval spent three long evenings editing the section describing Christine’s months of freedom. His time was not entirely his own: he had to spend two days in Guildford on church duties, which included another fractious interview with the bishop, still fervent about new American methods of modernising the two thousand years of tradition which graced the Church of Rome. Between the distractions in Guildford and his writing, Duval was not finding the time he wanted to spend with Marda.
He imagined her huddled in her cell. Of course he wanted her to feel comfortable, but it would only work if she did things his way. The other girls had been stubborn. They would not listen.
Especially Denise. Duval had not opened Denise’s door for over four years, his mark of respect for the dead.
He remembered a buxom, strong girl, all kicking and screaming; lots of temper tantrums, including one that had caused him an injury. In the end he had left her to her own devices for a few days, but then, somehow, he hadn’t felt like confronting her red face, bulging eyes, the endless shrieking. A few days had become a few weeks, and finally his conscience and curiosity impelled him into one brief visit to her cell. Thereafter, he had cut Denise out of his mind. Such a difficult girl.
He had left her to God. He did not kill her; she had simply died.
In his more contemplative moments, he sometimes likened his actions to the glorious Inquisition. It had never killed; the priests handed over their victims to the secular arm of the state, and it was they who burned heretics at the stake. When the sinners were handed over to secular authorities, the Church issued a prayer which, while asking that there be no shedding of blood, also had the effect of signifying by what manner of death the wrongdoer should glorify God. The Church thus absolved itself from all responsibility.
Nevertheless, seeing Denise’s skeleton had shocked him. Afterwards, he had scrubbed his whole body for over an hour. A scintilla of remorse entered his heart.
If Duval had been a psychiatrist, and sane enough to analyse himself, he might have admitted that his own obsessive cleanliness was part of the denial of his actions, a way of relegating misdeeds to the lower levels of his subconscious; that even he, a murderer, disliked seeing corpses was perhaps also a subliminal defensive reaction to his own innate destructiveness.
Duval, in his conscious persona as a priest, could certainly understand why Marda was upset by the sight of Denise, but if the shock led her into the path of obedience it would have been worth it. It would save her life, maybe her soul, and make God and His servant happy.
No, he had done it for Marda’s own good. He didn’t want to mollycoddle the girl. He would keep his distance to give her time to settle down and, anyway, he was quite busy with his other work in Guildford.
But he always returned to the primary impulse of his life, the recreation of a spiritually successful anchoress in the modern world. To the outside secular world, Duval might seem a failure, a mere second-rate priest, an Oxbridge scholar who had wasted his potential. But his hidden devotional work, his search for the divine channel to the ultimate energy that suffused the planet, would be worth-if such baubles mattered-a thousand Nobel laureates.
Psychologically, this was a holy transformation of impotence into the experience of omnipotence. Through his work, Duval strove to become the master of his spiritual life, and hence the highest quality of spiritual life had to be nurtured in his chosen ones. He wanted to control, not destroy, and while that meant the issuing of punishments and threats of punishment, he was demanding spiritual surrender, not bodily annihilation. He craved power over his novices’ inner lives.
He occasionally admitted to himself that he was stimulated by their helplessness, but the guests who failed him had been weak in mind and body-they had given up and chosen death. So he would try to distance himself, a little, from the cellar for a while, but he didn’t want to become too forgetful. He would feed Marda, and when she was ready he could start his work on her.
On the fifth day after Marda’s arrival, Duval decided to begin her induction course. He walked down the corridor, opened the grille, and through it spoke to her quietly, trying his best to be comforting. After all, he had some experience: he was a Catholic priest.
“Marda, how are you?” he said, his voice full of concern.
Marda cringed in the corner; she now equated the light with her tormentor.
“Are you cowering from me, or from the light? Is it too bright for you? I thought that perhaps you would have had enough of the darkness down here. Who is more foolish, I wonder, the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid of the light? Ah, but I came to comfort you, not to philosophise…Really, how are you? I do care, you know.”
Marda said nothing. Duval simply stared at his captive. After a minute or so, he tried again: “I am sorry that opening up Denise’s room upset you.” Duval continued ruefully, “It upset me, too. I hadn’t opened it for a very long time.”
Nausea rose in Marda’s throat. “Did you leave her there to die?” she said, her voice breaking. “How long was she here for?”
“She was my guest for some six months,” Duval explained calmly. “A very difficult guest from whom I removed food privileges because she wouldn’t do as she was told. It was exasperating.”
Marda stared at him in horror. “You mean you starved her to death?”
Duval shook his head. “That’s not what I said. I think she chose death and starved herself, in effect. Just before her spirit left her I cleaned her body and performed the last rites. That was the least I could do.”
Her mind raced with the implications of his words. “You mean…you really are a priest?”
“Yes.” He smiled, and the play of light on the contours of his face made him seem even more disturbed.
“But how can a priest do this to young girls?”
“Do what?” Duval looked genuinely bewildered.
Marda was learning to be cautious. She searched for the right words. “Well, accommodate young…guests…in a cellar.”
“I have a mission,” he replied proudly. “Both in my church and in this sacred cellar.”
Again Marda chose her words carefully. “May I ask how many girls have been your…your guests?”
“You are my sixth guest.”
“Are all the others still here?”
“Yes.”
“And they are all…dead?” Marda held her breath.
“Yes,” said Duval regretfully. “They all failed me. Failed themselves really.”
Again Duval smiled with his whole face but emanated no warmth. “But you, Marda, you will live because you will not fail me. I know you won’t fail me. Let us forget about death and think about life. What can we do to make your life more comfortable?” he asked conversationally.
Marda thought carefully before replying. “Couldn’t I live in a room upstairs?”
Duval furrowed his brow in thought. “That would be quite impossible now for a novice. Perhaps later, when I can trust you, yes.”
“Trust me how?”
“Trust that you will learn what I shall try to teach you. That you will not try to run away before we have finished.”
“Finished what?” Marda had no idea what he was talking about.
“I am required to teach you about God,” said the priest earnestly. “I am obliged to teach you about the life of an anchoress. An anchoress is a woman devoted entirely to God. Later I shall tell you of Christine, about whom I have been writing, and how a woman can achieve everything through a contemplative life. I believe the modern approximation is…” he paused, searching for words to which she might relate, “to teach you to tune in, turn on and drop out. Dr. Timothy Leary, I believe. Have you heard of him?”
