Shroud of Shadow (11 page)

“. . . and so we brought them. We had them ready, of course, since we expected him.” Agnes blushed. “I mean, you.” She blushed harder. “I mean, Your Excellency.”

Albrecht nodded. “Of course,” he said faintly.

Dame Agnes went on to explain that, after inspecting the documents, Siegfried had examined the nuns one by one. The usual form:
detecta, comperta,
a battery of clerks taking everything down on the fly, and a final summoning of the convent to the chapter house for injunctions.

As Albrecht already knew, there really had not been much to find out or to make judgments upon.
Omnia bene
, as usual. But although the bishop felt a certain satisfaction that the virtuous nuns had, by simply being themselves, thwarted Siegfried's plans—whatever they were—he was nonetheless dizzy with the thought that the Inquisitor of Furze had so blatantly pre-empted episcopal authority, and had, bald faced, gone ahead with a visitation and examination to which he had no right, official or unofficial.

But had not that sort of thing been going on for a long time? Furze was a poor city, and Albrecht, not so much interested in money as in hearts and souls, had insisted upon taking care of his cure on a personal level—talking with housewives, looking into shops, pressing an occasional coin even into the hands of the professional beggars who nightly shed their infirmities in the Miracle Quarter—running the business of the local curia simply, with a gentle hand and the good advice of Mattias. Siegfried's Inquisition, however, large enough to begin with, had grown substantially in the course of each of the twenty years of its existence, assuming more and more power and authority. It was a huge bureaucracy now, almost a shadow bishopric, with more clerks and notaries and secretaries and minor officials and informers and judges and beadles than Albrecht could ever imagine the use of.

A shadow bishopric. The thought was a chilling one. And now Siegfried, independent as he was of any control, sacred or secular, was even making his own visitations, as though he were Furze's bishop as well as its virtual master.

Albrecht decided not to discomfit Agnes any more. “Well,” he said when the abbess was finished with her tale, “this is fine. You know, Siegfried has not had time to give me his report. Why don't you just tell me what he found.”

“Well, Excellency, he didn't really find much. Or so we thought . . . before Your Excellency showed up. Then . . .” Agnes shifted in her chair. “Then—by Our Lady!—we could only surmise that he must have found something terrible.”

“My dear Dame Agnes! What could he possibly have found?”

Agnes's old eyes were stricken. There was, after all, a hideous potential inherent in any visit of an Inquisitor. “Heresy?”

Albrecht was angry. Heresy? In Shrinerock? The nerve of that Dominican!
Domini canes
, indeed! But the conversation had suddenly taken on a darker tone, almost black, and he put on his best look of surprise so as to disarm the abbess' fears. “Oh, dear, not to my knowledge. I'm sure he didn't find anything. I came myself to . . . to . . .”

Nothing came to mind. Agnes was looking at him, waiting, still frightened. The accusation of heresy was a terrible one, made worse by the fact that it could arise seemingly out of nothing: a chance remark, a wrong word, an incautious expression of thought . . .

Albrecht was suddenly wondering about Siegfried and the Inquisition. The Dominican had intruded into episcopal business, and that was bad enough; but now he was casting his inquisitorial nets much wider than was right. There was about as much chance of Shrinerock Abbey harboring heresy as there was of it taking in stray prostitutes.

Agnes was still waiting, and every moment that Albrecht hesitated obviously added to her fear.
I'm a very poor liar
, he thought.
No wonder I didn't fit in Rome.

“. . . to share a glass of wine with the most virtuous woman in Adria,” he said finally.

Agnes stared, then laughed. The darkness evaporated. “By Our Lady, Your Excellency is teasing us!”

“Not at all.” No, it was Albrecht who had been teased. By Siegfried, and in earnest. What was going on? Could he even ask about it? He was a bishop after all: surely that counted for something, even in the poorest diocese of Europe.

Oh, yes, he reminded himself, he could ask anything he wanted, but he would receive an answer only when the Inquisition felt like giving him one.

Albrecht forced a smile. “Tell me, though: did anything come up when Siegfried was here?”

“By Our Lady,” said Agnes, “there's not much that happens up here. We all have our little routines, and by God's grace life just goes on. The only scandal in the last twenty years was that one girl running off two summers ago.”

“That was . . .” Albrecht remembered the incident. He had sent out the sheriffs, sent out the beadles, made inquiries, but the girl had disappeared. “That was . . . Omelda, was it not?”

“You have a good memory, Your Excellency.”

Albrecht shrugged modestly. “It makes up for my bad leg.” He thumped the recalcitrant limb, chuckled. “Did she ever turn up?”

“No.” Agnes shook her head. “And we all still miss her. Such a sweet woman. A little too placid at times, but a good heart. What got into her, we just don't know. She just turned . . . restless.” And Agnes sang softly, her old, tranquil nun's voice belying her words:

“
Heu misella!

Nichel est deterius tali vita

Cum enim sim petulans et lasciva
.”

Albrecht blinked. Where on earth had someone like Agnes heard such a thing? But he reminded himself that Agnes was a woman as well as a nun. Doubtless, she had experienced her own temptation and doubt, and her understanding of both had brought compassion.

“It's just a guess,” she said. “We don't really know. Omelda was an oblate—her father brought her to us when she was three—and sometimes it's so hard to blame them for trying to run away. Even grown women mistakenly choose the veil . . . and spend the rest of their lives regretting a choice that can't be unmade. How can one even think to decide for someone else . . . and a child at that?”

Albrecht nodded. The abuse, though, was widespread. “She arrived well before you became abbess, though.”

“Indeed,” said Agnes. “We haven't taken oblates since before I was elected. Omelda was the last.” She shook her head sadly. “Her father was noble, and he had connections. He offered us money . . . though I daresay it was considerably less money than he would have spent on Omelda's dowry, which I think was the reason she wound up here. In any case, we needed what he offered. The roof had fallen in just then, the chapel and storehouse both needed repair, and poor Sister Thomasine didn't even have a kirtle to call her own! So we took her.”

Albrecht's curiosity had been aroused. “Who was her father?”

Agnes colored again. “I . . . ah . . . can't really say, Your Excellency. Secrecy was one of the terms of Omelda's being given over, a term to which I'm bound. But he was a . . .” She glanced at the window meaningfully. “. . . a local baron.”

Albrecht followed her eyes. After a moment, he rose, tottered for a moment because his knee decided to be difficult, but managed to reach the sill without mishap. Below, across a deep gulf of clear air, was Furze: tiny, distant, sparkling. Even from this far away Albrecht could see the fine city house of Baron David a'Freux. David had inherited it—along with the title and the city—from his father, and had been taxing the townsfolk as much as he could in order to add to it and furnish it in what he considered to be an adequately opulent manner.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I won't pry then. And as for Siegfried: I'm sure he won't . . . ah . . . pry either.”

“She was such a sweet thing,” said Agnes. “A good singer. She might have taken charge of the choir, had she stayed.” She fidgeted with her sleeves like a grandmother. “Oh, Your Excellency, apostasy is a terrible thing, but—by Our Lady!—I'd take Omelda back in a heartbeat. No penance, no humiliation . . . no kneeling before the convent gate for that one. I'd just take her back—we'd all take her back—and we'd go on from there.”

Albrecht was smiling into the open air. Yes, they could have Rome. “You are a holy woman, Dame Agnes.”

“Oh! Your Excellency!”

“And a merciful one.”

“Jesus was merciful,” said Agnes, as though the point were obvious. “How can any of us be otherwise?”

Albrecht nodded. “Indeed. I wonder.” He was still looking down at Furze, and his face turned somber of a sudden, for his gaze had fastened upon the House of God.

***

Her name was Sally. Sally Hennock. She worked the graveyard shift at the diner, and though it was early for most people—too early for anyone save the bespelled and the visionary to be interested in breakfast—it was late for Sally. But that was all right, because it was late for George, too.

At first they talked awkwardly about commonplaces. Who they were. Where they were from. Where they were going. George ate, listening more than he spoke, appreciating for the first time that listening, simply listening, could be a pleasure, that even the stupid and clumsy words of strangers could flow like music when they shared simple human concerns and sympathies. Sally, though, spoke as though no one had listened to her before. At first she attempted the illusion of work by filling salt and pepper shakers and wiping things that did not need wiping, but after a few minutes, her need overcame her, and she just leaned on the counter with slender arms, her small hands splayed out against the green Formica while she talked.

And so they told their stories in their own ways: through silence, through words. George was from Denver, was going . . . somewhere. Sally was from Montana, was going nowhere. Her ex-boyfriend had been a welder, a boomer who had brought her to this part of Utah because of the rising interest in oil shale. But the projects had died early on, the jobs and the money had never materialized, and Sally's lover had grown discouraged and restless. And then she had returned one evening to their small apartment . . .

George spoke for the first time in twenty minutes. “He'd taken everything, right?”

Sally nodded. “The cash, the checks, cleaned out the accounts . . . what there was in them.” She smiled clumsily, almost apologetically. “At least he left my stuff.”

“So you had to stay.”

That smile again, the one that bordered on nerdy, but which held also an echo of what had brought George to the mountains . . . and then through them. “No money and no car.” She straightened up, pushed back her dark hair with both hands. “I still don't have a car. Can't afford one.” Again, the smile. “I'm stuck.”

The world this morning (yes, there was the dawn light now, as pink and gold as a christening) was almost too new, almost too wonderful. George had driven all night by starlight and by moonlight, had stood enraptured by the mountains, had, bending to touch the earth, felt more than the earth. All of a sudden, veils had been torn away from existence, and he was seeing miracle and wonder in everything: mountains, dawn, desert . . . even in the spoon with which he stirred his coffee.

He looked up at Sally's soft face and saw the morning written there as clearly as in the sky. It was a spell. It was abnormal. It was strange, weird, fantastic . . . and George was going under quickly, because he wanted to go under. “You know,” was all he found to say, “you're absolutely beautiful.”

From another man the compliment would have been a come-on, an opening salvo in the battle to get her pants off and her lithe little body between the sheets. But bed was far from George's mind: he had said that Sally was beautiful because it was true. He could also have said with equal truth and sincerity that the drive that night had been beautiful, that the mountains had been beautiful, or that (Christ!) even the goddam fucking Oneida stainless steel teaspoon was beautiful. And Sally appeared to understand that, for she nodded after a moment. “Thanks,” she said. “So are you.”

“Have you . . .” A quick look around. But no, the diner was empty. No one would hear his madness. “Have you got any idea . . .” He dropped his voice, almost lost his nerve, but he said it. “Have you got any idea what's happening?”

There was a sudden flare of hope in her face, like sunrise, like spring.

“I mean, to us.”

Slowly, softly, her human clumsiness faltering suddenly and dropping like the rest of the veils, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I want more of it.”

She looked out the window. The desert was shimmering in the sunrise, and George saw that in that shimmer a sense of light that was building—he could think of no other way of putting it—from
within
, from within him, as though a subtle radiance were percolating through the unused corners of his mind.

“I remember days like this in Montana,” Sally was saying. “I'd get up in the morning, and everything would seem just right. And then Mom would drive me to school, and we'd pass the wheat fields.” She glanced at him. Was this some city boy who thought wheat was something one bought at the health food store? But George heard her thought—he did not realize until later how distinctly he had heard it—and he laughed, and so she went on. “Winter wheat. It'd just be coming up, just speckles of green. And that seemed just right, too. Like it was always right there, like you could . . .” She blushed. “Aw . . .”

“No. No, go on.”

She giggled, embarrassed and happy both. “This is crazy.”

George felt the same way. “I don't care. I like it. I want more of it.” He wrapped his hands about his coffee cup. “Tell me about the wheat.”

“It was . . .” She straightened, looked off as though she could see the wheat there, growing and growing and going on across the Montana plains, continuing even up past the Canadian border. “It was like if you got scared or worried, you could . . . like . . . wrap it around yourself like a shawl. Put it on like a coat. And then you'd be safe. Because the wheat was always there, and it always would be.” She was blushing furiously by now, but she was smiling, too. “Sometimes . . . sometimes I wanted to
be
the wheat. And just be there like that.” She shrugged, looked at the damp rag in her hand, gave the counter a swipe. “Then I got into school, and then high school, and I got crazy like a stupid kid.” Her face turned tragic, poignant. “I forgot about the wheat.”