Katherine (67 page)

Katherine had waited long outside the shrine for her turn - though most pilgrims went through in groups, those who wished might worship alone - but before she finally knelt by the dazzling image a priest in white chasuble came up to her to ask what offering she would make to the Queen of Heaven.

She opened her scrip and taking out the Duke's betrothal ring held it up, whispering, "This, Father."

He took the ring, glanced sharply at the gold and sapphire. "It will be acceptable to Our Gracious Lady, my daughter."

He drew aside while Katherine kissed the statue's golden beringed foot, staring up through clouds of blue incense at the smooth painted wooden face beneath a diamond crown.

In the moments that she knelt there, Katherine prayed with the pent-up violence she had not dared to feel before, she prayed in desperation, she supplicated, she commanded. "Give me back my child! Show me the way to forgiveness. Lady, Lady, you who are all-merciful, tell me how Hugh's murder may be forgiven. Tell me where is my child!"

And there was no answer. The white and red painted face, the round upward-staring eyes remained as before, bland, wooden, indifferent.

Still she knelt, until the priest touched her on the shoulder. "There are many waiting to come in here, daughter."

She gave him so frantic and despairing a look that he said, "Come, come, would you gaze on the precious relic? It works more miracles than any other in Christendom!"

She bowed her head, and he waited, glancing at her scrip. "I've but a few pence left, Father," she said in a strangled voice. "And this - -" She held out four silver pennies and the tarnished silver brooch the Queen had given her at Windsor.

"Ah?" said the priest in a flatter tone. "Well, since you have already donated - -" He took the pennies, and ignored the tawdry brooch. He unlocked a small diamond-studded door beneath the Virgin's feet, exposing a crystal vial mounted in the centre of a gold and ivory crucifix. The vial seemed to contain a whitish powder.

Katherine gazed at the vial. It was said that when the Virgin was inclined to answer a pilgrim's prayer, the Holy Milk would leap and quiver within the crystal. She strained her eyes until they blurred with pain, her body pounded, but there was no sign from the relic.

The priest closed the reliquary and locked it, he hurried to the exit door on the other side of the shrine; held it wide open for Katherine to leave.

She went out along another covered way and through a gate into the brilliant sunshine of the street. Something pricked her hand and she looked down at the Queen's brooch which she still clasped.
"Foi vainquera"
was the motto on that brooch - a lie. Faith had conquered nothing. Our Lady had neither heard nor answered. There were no miracles. Her hand dropped slack. The brooch fell into the filth of the gutter.

A man passing behind Katherine on the street saw the brooch drop, picked it up and lumbered after her, as she wandered blindly along the outside of the abbey walls.

"Good pilgrim dame," said the man, "you dropped this nouche."

"Let it be," she said in a muffled voice, not turning. "I do not want it."

The man looked up into her dead-still face, then peered closer and read the tiny letters. Because he had suffered very greatly himself, and because his heart was filled with tenderness, he guessed something of what must have happened to this widowed penitent at the shrine. He put the brooch in his pouch and followed Katherine at a distance. People crossed themselves as he walked by them, but some reached out and touched him for luck. He was a hunchback.

Katherine walked until she came to the market square where there were benches along the garden hedge of the Black Lion Tavern, which was jammed with pilgrims who had already visited the shrine, and were now celebrating. Serving-maids ran out from the tavern with strong ale and meat pasties. The party of London merchants, each now wearing the Walsingham medal, were clustered at a table by the hedge, talking at the top of their voices.

Katherine's throat was parched with thirst, her stomach gnawed. To gain favour from the Miraculous Lady of Walsingham, nothing at all had passed her lips since vespers yesterday. I shall have to beg for my bread now, she thought. She looked at the food the Londoners were guzzling, and was sickened. Pain throbbed in her sore mouth, in her head. Black swimming weakness crushed her. She slumped down on a bench and shut her eyes.

The man with the humped back paused by the market cross some way off, and watched Katherine with compassion.

The voices behind the hedge rose higher. They were shouting London gossip in answer to eager questions from provincial pilgrims. They were recounting with relish the horrors of the revolt in London two months ago, while a Norfolk man insisted that they had had a worse time of it up here than any Londoner could know.

"But 'tis over now for good, that's certain," cried the grocer called Andrew, "since John Ball was caught at Coventry."

"Ay," agreed a self-important voice, "and I was there. With my own two eyes I saw it when the King's men gelded him and gutted him, and he watched his own guts burn - afterwards they quartered him so cannily, he took a rare long time a-dying."

There was laughter until Andrew cried, "Stale news,
that
is, my friend - but have ye heard the latest of the Duke o' Lancaster?"

Katherine started and opened her eyes. She clenched her hands on the rim of the bench. "John o' Gaunt's renounced his paramour, that's what! Shipped her off to France, or some say to one of his northern dungeons. The King commanded it."

"Nay - but - -" said a woman giggling. " Tis well known he was tired of her anyway and has found someone else, the wicked lecher."

"He'll not dare flaunt his
new
harlot then, for a Benedictine told me the Duke made public confession of his sins, called his leman witch and whore, then crawled on hands and knees pleading with his poor Duchess to forgive him when they met up in Yorkshire."

Katherine rose from the bench and began to run. The hunchback hurried after her.

She ran north from the town towards the sea and along the banks of the river Stiffkey, until it widened at one place into a mill pond. Here on the grassy bank by a willow tree she stopped. The mill wheel turned sluggishly, as the falling waters pushed on it splashing downward, flowing towards the sea. Katherine advanced to the brink of the pond. She gazed down into the dark brown depths where long grasses bent in the rushing water. She clasped her hands against her breasts and stood swaying on the brink.

She felt a grip on her arm, a deep gentle voice said, "No, my sister. That is not the way."

Katherine turned her head and her wild dilated eyes stared down into the calm tender brown ones of the hunchback. "Jesu, let me be!" she cried on a choking sob. "Leave me alone."

His grip tightened on her arm. "You cry on Jesus' name?" he said softly. "But you do not know what He has promised. He said
not
that we should not be tempested, nor travailed nor afflicted, but He promised,
Thou shalt not be overcome!"

A little wind rustled through the willow fronds, mingling with the sound of the river water as it splashed against the turning mill wheel. She stared at him, while a quiver ran down her back. She did not see him clearly, his brown eyes were part of the beckoning dark depths of the pond. "That was not said for me," she whispered. "God and His Mother have cast me out!"

"Not so. It is not so," he smiled at her. "Since He has said,
I shall keep you securely.
You're as dearworthy a child of His as anyone."

Katherine's gaze cleared and she recoiled. Now she saw what manner of man it was who was speaking to her. A hideous little man with a hump, whose head was twisted deep into his shoulders. A man with a great purple bulbous nose, scarred by pits, and a fringe of fire-red wisps around a tonsure. She crossed herself, while terror cut her breath. An evil demon - summoned by her from the hell depths of that deep beckoning water. "What are you?" she gasped.

He sighed a little, for he was well used to this, and patiently answered. "I am a simple parson from Norwich, my poor child, and called Father Clement."

Her terror faded. His voice was resonant as a church bell, and his unswerving look met hers with sustaining strength. He wore a much darned but cleanly priest's robe, a crucifix hung from his girdle.

She stepped uncertainly back from the pond, and began to shiver.

"I'll warrant," he said calmly, "you've not eaten in a long time." He opened his pouch, took out slices of buttered barley bread, and a slab of cheese done up in a clean white napkin. "Sit down there," he pointed to a flat stone by a golden clump of wild mustard. "The mustard will flavour the food." He chuckled. "Ah, I make foolish jokes that nobody laughs at but the Lady Julian."

Katherine stared at him dumbly; after a moment, she sat down and took the food.

He saw her wince as she tried to eat and brought her water from the pond in which to soften the bread. He briskly cut the cheese into tiny slivers. While she slowly ate, he pulled a willow whistle from his pouch and with it imitated so perfectly the twitterings of starlings that three of them landed at his feet and twittered answers.

Katherine's physical weakness passed as her stomach filled, but despair rushed back. She folded the white napkin and handed it to Father Clement. "Thank you," she said tonelessly.

"What will you do now?" he asked, putting the napkin and whistle in his pouch. From the bulbous-nosed, pitted face his eyes looked at her with an expression she had seen in no man's eyes before. Love without desire, a kind of gentle merriment.

"I don't know-" she said. "There's nothing for me - nay - -" she whispered, flushing as she saw his question, "I'll not go near - the pond again. But there was no answer for me here at Walsingham, no miracle was wrought." She went on speaking because something in him compelled her to, and it was like speaking to herself. "My fearful sins are yet unshriven - my love - he that
was
my love now despises me, and my child - -"

Father Clement held his peace. He cocked his massive head against his humped shoulders and waited.

"The cloisters," Katherine said after a while. "There's nothing else. A lifetime of prayer may yet avail to blunt His vengeance. I'll go to Sheppey, to the convent of my childhood. I've given them many gifts through the years. They will take me as a novice."

Father Clement nodded. It was much as he had guessed. "Before you enter this convent," he said, "come with me to the Lady Julian. Speak with her awhile."

"And who is the Lady Julian?"

"A blessed anchoress of Norwich."

"Why should I speak with her?"

"Because, through God's love, I think that she will help you - as she has many - as she once did me."

"God is made of wrath, not love," said Katherine dully. "But since you wish it, I will go. It matters naught what I do."

At dusk of the next day when Katherine and the humpbacked parson, Father Clement, rode into Norwich on his mule, Katherine had learned a little about the Lady Julian, though she listened without hope or interest.

Of Julian's early life in the world the priest said nothing, though he knew of the pains and sorrows that had beset it. But he told Katherine of the fearful illness that had come to Julian when she was thirty, and how that when she had been dying in great torment, God had vouchsafed to her a vision in sixteen separate revelations. These "showings" had healed her illness and so filled her with mystic joy and fervour to help others with their message that she had received permission to dedicate her life to this. She had become an anchoress in a cell attached to the small parish church of St. Julian, where folk in need might come to her.

She had been enclosed now for eight years, nor had ever left her cell.

" 'Tis dismal," murmured Katherine, "yet by misery perhaps she best shares the misery of others." "Not dismal at all!" cried Father Clement, with his deep chuckle. "Julian is a most happy saint. God has made a pleasaunce in her soul. No one so ready to laugh as Dame Julian."

Katherine was puzzled, and distrustful. She had never heard of a saint who laughed, nor a recluse who did not dolefully agonise over the sins of the world. It seemed too that though Dame Julian followed the rules prescribed for anchorites, yet these allowed her to receive visitors at times, and that Father Clement had seen her often, when he wrote down her memories of her visions, and the further teachings that came to her through the spirit.

Visions, Katherine thought bitterly. Of what help could it be to listen to some woman's visions? The bleak empty years like a winter sea stretched out their limitless miles before Katherine, and she had no will to live through them. Though the frenzied impulse by the mill pond had passed.

She could not put upon her children the shameful horror of a mother who died by her own act, yet the small Beauforts would never have known. And it were better if everyone thought her dead. The Beauforts then would be less embarrassment to their father. Hawise would care for them, the great castle staffs would care for them, and the Duke, notwithstanding that he had reviled the mother, would provide for them. Tom Swynford was a nearly grown lad and safe-berthed with the young Lord Henry. There was but one child who needed her - and Blanchette was gone.

I will hide me away, thought Katherine, at Sheppey - until I die. Nor would it be long. She felt death near in the increasing pains her body suffered, in the blurring of her sight, and the dragging weakness.

Sometime before they rode through Norwich to the hillside above the river Wensum where Father Clement's little church stood, the priest had fallen into silence. He felt how grievous was the illness of body and soul that afflicted Katherine, and he knew that she was no longer accessible to him.

Guided by Father Clement, Katherine reluctantly entered the dark churchyard behind the flint church. The sky was overcast and an evening drizzle had set in. On the south side beyond the round Saxon church tower, she dimly saw the boxlike outline of the anchorage which clung to the church wall. Breast-high on its churchyard side there was a window, closed by a wooden shutter. The priest tapped on the shutter and called in his bell-toned voice, "Dame Julian, here is someone who has need."

At once the shutter opened. "Welcoom, who'er it be that seeks me."

Father Clement gently pushed Katherine towards the window, which was obscured by a thin black cloth. "Speak to her," he said.

Katherine had no wish to speak. It seemed to her that this was a crowning humiliation, that she should be standing in a tiny unfamiliar churchyard with a hunchback and commanded to reveal her suffering, to ask for help, from some unseen woman whose voice was homely and prosaic as Dame Emma's, and who spoke moreover with a thick East Anglian burr.

"My name is Katherine," she said. Through her weary pain resentment flashed. "There's nothing else to say."

"Coom closer, Kawtherine," The voice behind the curtain was soothing as to a child. "Gi' me your hand." A corner of the black cloth lifted; faintly white in the darkness a hand was held out. Unwillingly Katherine obeyed. At the instant of contact with a firm warm clasp, she was conscience of fragrance. A subtle perfume such as she had never smelled, like herbs, flowers, incense, spices, yet not quite like these. While the hand held hers, she smelled this fragrance and felt a warm tingle in her arm. Then her hand was loosed and the curtain dropped.

"Kawtherine," said the voice, "you are ill. Before you coom to me again, you must rest and drink fresh bullock's blood, tonight, at once - and for days - -"

"By the rood, lady!" Katherine cried angrily, "I've tasted no flesh food in months. 'Tis part of my penance."

"Did our moost Dearworthy Lord Jesus gi' you the penance, Kawtherine?" There was a hint of a smile in the voice, and Katherine's confused resentment increased. Everyone knew that the sinful flesh which had betrayed her must be mortified.

Suddenly the voice changed its tone, became lower, humble and yet imbued with power. Katherine was not conscious of the provincial accent as Julian said, "It was shown to me that Christ ministers to us His gifts of grace, our soul with our body, and our body with our soul, either of them taking help with the other. God has no disdain to
serve
the body."

For a startled moment Katherine felt a touch of awe. "That is strange to me, lady," she said to the black curtain. "I cannot believe that the foul body is of any worth to God."

"And shall not try tonight," said the voice gently. "Father Clement?"

The priest, who had drawn away, came up to the window. Julian spoke to him at some length.

Katherine was given a chamber reserved for travellers in the rectory across the alley from the church. She was put to bed and cared for by Father Clement's old servant, a bright-eyed woman of sixty, who adored him.

They brought Katherine fresh blood from the slaughterhouse, and a bullock's liver, which they chopped up raw and blended into a mortrewe with egg, they fed her boiled dandelion greens, minced so that she need not chew. They made her eat. Katherine for the first day thought this was a worse penance than any she had undergone, but she was too weak to protest or even to wonder that Dame Julian had said she should not be bled, that it was not sensible to put in blood at one place and take it away from another.

Father Clement twinkled as he told Katherine this, and she smiled feebly, wondering how it was that a man so hideous and deformed always seemed happy. He laboured tirelessly for his parish, yet was always unhurried. He never scolded, or questioned, or exhorted. There was a sunniness about him that shone through all his clean shabby little rectory.

In four days Katherine had gained strength, her pains were less, the bluish sores on her legs had ceased oozing. She began to worry about the expense that she was giving Father Clement, but he laughed at her, saying with truth that the odd things Lady Julian had prescribed for her to eat were to be had for the asking at the shambles, while the greens came from his own garden.

"Never did I think that I should he destitute as I am now," Katherine said on a long sigh. Yet it had become a dream - the glamour and the lavish bounty of all those past years. A guilty dream.

The priest looked at her softly. "Destitute? Perhaps 'tis that you've always been. For our soul may never have rest in things that are beneath itself."

"Ah, see-" she cried bitterly. "Now at last you speak like a priest. 'Tis what Brother William would have said - God keep him - that was killed because of me - he, and others."

The priest seemed not to notice. "The Lady Julian waits for you," he said quietly. "She believes you well enough to come to her today."

Katherine had thought much about the anchoress during these days of recovery, and been astonished to find a longing to speak with her again. She went back that afternoon to the little churchyard and knocked at the cell window. The voice through the black cloth told her to come in at the door which had been unlocked.

Katherine entered Julian's cell nervously, puzzled, curious. It was but six paces long and wide, and curtained down the middle with fine blue wool. There were two windows, the "parloir" window to the churchyard, and above a wooden prie-dieu a narrow slitted window that opened into the church. Through this, Julian could see the altar and take part in the Mass. There was a small fireplace, a table and two wooden chairs on the warm brick floor. The bumpy flint walls had been painted white.

A moment after Katherine shut the door, Julian came around the blue curtain. A plain little woman, neither fat nor thin, with greying hair beneath a. white coif. She wore a soft unbleached linen gown. A woman nearing forty and so ordinary that one might see a hundred like her in any market-square, except that, as she took Katherine's hand and smiled, the cell filled with the undefinable fragrance, and at the touch of the square blunt fingers Katherine felt a strange sensation, as though there had been an iron fetter around her chest that now shattered, to let her breathe a light golden air.

"So you are the Katherine Father Clement brought," said Julian, in her comfortable slow voice. She sat down in one chair and motioned Katherine to the other. "The pains're better? Can you chew? 'Twould be a shame to lose those pretty teeth, and tell me-" She asked several frank physical questions, which Katherine answered with faint amusement and disappointment. She had come for the spiritual guidance that Father Clement seemed so certain of, and Lady Julian talked of laxatives. Yet there was still the strange sense of freedom.

"This sickness that you have," said Julian, "I too had once, when I had fasted overmuch. And was in great trouble and pain, so near death that my confessor stood over me." She glanced towards the crucifix that was mounted on her prie-dieu, and said simply, "God in His marvellous courtesy did save me."

"By the visions," said Katherine, sighing. "Father Clement told me of them."

"It's very hard to love God," said Katharine below her breath, "when He does not love us."

"Oh Katherine, Katherine - -" Lady Julian smiled, shaking her head. "Love is our Lord's whole
meaning.
It was shown me full surely that ere God made us He loved us, and when we were made, we loved Him."

It was not Julian's words, which Katherine barely heard, that brought an odd half-frightened thrill. Like the first time Katherine had climbed to the top of the minster tower at Sheppey and seen the island stretching out for miles to other villages and blue water in the distance, a landscape she had not dreamed of.

She stared unbelieving at the homely broad face beneath the greying hair and wimple, for suddenly it looked beautiful, made of shining mist.

"Lady," whispered Katherine, "it must be these visions were vouchsafed to you because you knew naught of sin - not sins like mine - lady, what would
you
know of - of adultery - of murder - -"

Julian rose quickly and placed her hand on Katherine's shoulder. At the touch, a soft rose flame enveloped her, and she could not go on.

"I have known all manner of sin," said Julian quietly. "Sin is the sharpest scourge. And verily as sin is unclean, so verily it is a disease or monstrous thing against nature. Yet listen to what I was shown in the thirteenth vision." She moved away from Katherine. Her voice took on the low chanting note of power.

"I had been thinking of
my
sins, I was in great sorrow. Then I saw Him. He turned on me His face of lovely pity and He said:
It is truth that sin is cause of all this pain: sin is behovable - none the less all shall be well, and all shall be well, you shall see yourself that all manner of thing shall be well.
These words were said to me tenderly, showing no kind of blame. And then He said,
Accuse not thyself overdone much, deeming that thy tribulation and thy woe is all thy fault: for I will not that thou be heavy or sorrowful indiscreetly.
Then I understood that it was great disobedience to blame or wonder on God for my sin, since He blamed me not for it.

"And with these words, I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in heaven; where we shall truly see the cause
why
He suffered sin to come. For He made me see that from failure of love on our part,
therefore
is all our travail, and naught else."

Julian looked at Katherine and smiled. "Do you understand?"

"Nay, lady," said Katherine slowly, "I cannot believe there could be so much comfort." Julian sat down and spoke again, simply and quietly.

When Katherine left Julian's cell that day, she did not know how long she had stayed, nor clearly remember the things that had been told her, but for the time she had ceased to question. As she walked out into the little churchyard, it seemed lit with beauty. She stood bemused in a corner by a dark yew tree and saw meaning, blissful meaning in everything her eye rested on: the blue floweret of the speedwell, the moss on a gravestone, an ant that laboured to push a crumb through the grass - all these were radiant, as though she looked at them through a crystal.

She picked up a black flint pebble that seemed to glow with light like a diamond, while some of Lady Julian's words came back to her. "In this same time, our Lord showed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving. A little thing like a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and I thought what may this be? And it was answered:
It lasteth and ever shall, for that God loveth it."

During that moment that she held the pebble, Katherine understood this, and why Julian had said, "After this I saw God-in a point, by which sight I saw that He is in all things, be it never so little. Nothing is done by hap or adventure - if it be hap or chance in the sight of man, our blindness is the cause."