The Clerkenwell Tales, Peter Ackroyd [sight word readers txt] 📗

where she was standing, they found several nuns lying on the stone floor with their arms outstretched in the shape of the cross; around them was a circle of little wooden and stone images of the Virgin, with a burning candle between each of them. These nuns were intoning, in low voices, the antiphon “Media vita in morte sumus”; the chantress had thought that they were singing “Revelabunt celi iniquitatem ludi,” which was used notoriously as a spell. That was why she had screamed. One nun then rose to her feet, and flung a candle at her curious and terrified sisters; another bit the rushes three times in sign of a curse. It was feared that the entire convent might become possessed, and the prioress ordered that all the offending nuns should be locked in the cellars.

It was on the morning following this unhappy episode that Dame Agnes de Mordaunt had entered the painted chamber with Sister Idonea and had described Clarice as the mother of lies.

“You have caused great grievance here,” she continued. “As if swine had been running among us.”

Clarice looked intently at Agnes’ breasts. “A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow’s nose.”

The prioress restrained her impulse to beat the girl about the head. “You slide in your words, Clarice. You slip.”

“No. I am on stony ground.”

“Then pray for deliverance, daughter.”

Whereupon Clarice fell upon her knees. “I pray to Mary, Holy Mother of God, that the five wounds of Her only begotten Son may appear again.”

Agnes looked at her with distaste. She suspected that there was much subtle craft in the young nun’s demeanour, but she could not prove it.

“They will appear in the five wounds of the city when it will be lifted into bliss.”

“You speak from a dark place.”

“There will be five fires and five deaths in London.” Clarice, still upon her knees, then began to sing.

“And when she came to St. Mary’s aisle

Where nuns were wont to pray,

The vespers were sung, the shrine was gone,

And the nuns had passed away.”2

At the earnest entreaty of Dame Agnes the Bishop of London, Robert Braybroke, summoned Clarice to his palace in Aldermanbury. Robert was a cleric who had grown rich upon benefices, a robust and high-coloured man who had a reputation for sudden fits of violent anger. He kept the nun waiting in a small stone chamber beside the great hall where, after an hour, she was brought into his presence. He was dipping his fingers into a bowl of rose water. “Here is the little nun who begets large words. Oh, ma dame, il faut initier le peuple aux mystères de Dieu. Is that your song? Leave us.” The two canons who had brought her quickly left the room. They stood close to the door, in the corridor outside, but they could not hear what was being said – only, at one point, the sound of laughter.

Robert Braybroke had his hand upon her neck when they emerged from this interview. “The wise child waits,” he said to her.

“The wise child knows its own father,” she replied.

“Remember, Clarice, I am your father now.”

Chapter Two

The Friar’s Tale

On a stormy morning, one week after Sister Clarice’s interview with Robert Braybroke, Bishop of London, two figures might have been seen pacing the cloister of St. Bartholomew the Great, the priory church of Smithfield. They were engaged in earnest conversation, and moved quickly from pillar to pillar. One was dressed in the black hood and cloak of an Austin friar; the other wore a loose-fitting garment of patched leather, around which were tied an awl and handsaw as tokens of his trade. There was a third following them, a younger man who walked with his head bowed. An observer might have been puzzled by the fact that he was close behind them, but that they seemed to ignore him. His name was Hamo Fulberd.

Hamo was listening intently to them.

“We must act,” the friar said.

“Why be hasty in this hot fare?” the carpenter replied. “The nun does our work for us.”

“True. She inflames the city.” The friar was silent for a moment. “The incense out of the fire is sweet. But you must act, Marrow. You know what you must do.”

The huge rain wrapped itself around the cloister, and there was a sudden thunder-light in the dark sky. Hamo instinctively looked towards the vaulted roof of the passage, its ribs and arches holding back the power of the stone. In the moist air it smelled of forgotten time, rancid and indignant at its deposition. To the boy it seemed that the friar and the carpenter were imprisoned by stone, enshrined by stone – that endless ages of stone lay above their heads, and that they could only find their way beneath it in subdued voices and with tired gestures. They were crouched beneath the stone, but they might have been kneeling in adoration.3 The stone rose up, defying the rain and wind, sealing with an act of blessedness the earth and sky. What did it matter what they said? I do not wish to look upon grass or upon flowers, Hamo said to himself, I only wish to look upon stone. It is my home. I wish to become stone. If they choose to mock me, or to laugh at me, I will turn my stone face towards them.

“I have told you, Marrow, all the matter concerning the five circles of deliverance.” As he spoke the friar, William Exmewe, uncovered his head; his red hair, now tonsured, had once been rich and abundant. “Five ways, and five times in each way.”

“Turnagain Lane.”

“In the city of God. Five senses. Five wounds.”

They walked for a while in silence along the sides of the court; there was a conduit at its centre, from which all the water of the priory came, and an image of St. Chrysostom stood upon its metal cover in perpetual blessing.

“There are five letters in the name