The Chalice (3 page)

I’d been concentrating so closely that I didn’t hear my mother until she stood right next to me. “Ah, the founder of the Benedictines,” she said. She pointed at the branches that stretched across the border of each page. “The olive branch is so lovely; it’s the symbol of their order.”

My finger froze on the page. I realized that for the first time since last May, when I submitted myself to the profligate court
of Henry VIII, I felt true curiosity. Was it the violent force of the wind—had it ripped the lassitude from me? Or had I been awakened by this spare, humble priory and the dazzling beauty of this, its precious object?

The door opened. A woman strode into the room. She was younger than the first nun—close in age to my mother. Her face was sharply sculpted, with high cheekbones.

“I am the prioress, Sister Philippa Jonys.”

My mother leaped forward and seized the prioress’s hand to kiss it and go down on one knee. It was not only theatricality: I knew that in Spain, deep obeisance was paid to the heads of holy houses. But the prioress’s eyes widened at the sight of my prostrate mother.

Pulling her hand free, the prioress said, “I regret to hear of your mishap. We are a Benedictine house, sworn to hospitality, and will offer you a place of rest until you are ready to resume your journey.”

My mother sputtered, “But we are here to see Sister Elizabeth Barton. It was arranged. I corresponded with Doctor Bocking while still at Stafford Castle.”

I stared at my mother in surprise. My impression had been that the trip to Saint Sepulchre was spontaneous, arranged in Canterbury or London at the earliest. I began to comprehend that the healing waters served as an excuse to get us here. Coming to Saint Sepulchre, without servants to observe us, was her purpose.

“I have not been informed of this visitation, and nothing occurs here without my approval,” the prioress said.

Most would be intimidated by such a rebuff. Not Lady Isabella Stafford.

“Doctor Bocking, the monk who I understand is the spiritual advisor of Sister Elizabeth, wrote to me granting permission,” my mother said. “I would have brought his letter as proof, but I did not expect that the wife of Sir Richard Stafford—and
a lady-in-waiting to the queen of England—could be disbelieved.”

The prioress clutched the leather belt that clinched her habit. “This is a priory, not the court of the king. Sister Elizabeth is a member of our community. We have six nuns at Saint Sepulchre.
Six
. There is much work to be done, earthly responsibilities as well as spiritual. These visits rob Sister Elizabeth of her health. ‘Will this harvest be better?’ ‘Will I marry again?’ She cannot spend all of her time with such pleadings.”

“I am not here to inquire about harvests,” snapped my mother.

“Then why are you here?”

With a glance at me, my mother said, “My daughter has not been well for some time. If I knew what course to take—what her future might hold—”

“Mama, no,” I interrupted, horrified. “We were ordered by Cousin Henry never to solicit prophecy, after the Duke of Buckingham’s—”

“Be silent,” scolded my mother. “This is not of the same import.”

There was a tap on the door, and Sister Anne reappeared.

“Sister Elizabeth said she will see the girl named Joanna now,” the elderly nun murmured.

“Did you tell her of these guests?” demanded the prioress.

Sister Anne shook her head. The prioress and nun stared at each other. A peculiar emotion throbbed in the air.

My mother did not notice it. “Please, without further delay, show us the way to Sister Elizabeth,” she said, triumphant.

Sister Anne bowed her head. “Forgive me, Lady Stafford, but Sister Elizabeth said she will see the girl Joanna alone. And that she must come of her own free will and unconstrained.”

“But I don’t want to see her at all,” I protested.

My mother took me by the shoulders. Her face was flushed; I feared she was close to tears. “Oh, you must, Juana,” she said. “
Por favor
. Ask her what is to be done. Sister Elizabeth has a
gift, a vision. Only she can guide us. I can’t cope with this anymore all alone.
I can’t
.”

I had not realized how much my spiritual affliction troubled my mother. Her suffering filled me with remorse. I would go to this strange young nun. The visit should be brief; I intended to ask few questions.

The prioress and Sister Anne spoke together, in hushed tones, for another minute. Then the prioress beckoned for me alone to follow.

She led me down the passageway, through the front entranceway, and down another dim corridor. Following her, I thought of how the elegance of her movements contrasted with the ladies I’d grown up with. Hers was certainly not movement calculated to draw admiration. It was grace that derived from simplicity and economy of movement.

I also tried to plan how I could speak to Sister Elizabeth Barton without disobeying the command of Lord Henry Stafford, my cousin and head of the family. It had been the prophecy of a friar, much distorted, that was the basis for arresting my uncle, the Duke of Buckingham. During the trial, he was charged with seeking to learn the future—how long would Henry VIII live and would he produce sons—so that the duke could plot to seize the throne. Afterward, my cautious cousin, his son, said repeatedly that none of the family could ever have anything to do with prophecy. My father agreed—he harbored a personal distaste for seers, witches, and necromancers. It was one of the many ways in which he differed from my mother.

The prioress rapped on a door, gently. She hesitated, her eyebrows furrowing, and then she opened it and we stepped inside.

This room was tiny, as small as a servant’s. A lone figure sat in the middle of the floor, slumped over, her back to us. There was no window. Two candles that burned on either side of the door provided the only light.

“Sister Elizabeth, will you attend Vespers later?” asked the prioress.

The figure nodded but did not turn around. The prioress said to me, “I shall be back shortly,” and gestured for me to step forward.

I edged inside. The prioress closed the door.

Sister Elizabeth Barton wore the same black habit as the others. She didn’t turn around. I felt awkward. Unwanted. The minutes crept by.

“It’s a wind that brings no rain,” said a young voice.

“Indeed, Sister,” I said, relieved that she spoke. “There wasn’t any rain.” But a second later I wondered how she knew anything about the elements without a window in the room. Another nun must have told her, I concluded. Just as someone told her my name—the monk Doctor Bocking, perhaps. I did not believe that she possessed the powers my mother spoke of. Although devout, I held closer to the spirit of my pragmatic father in such matters.

White hands reached out and Sister Elizabeth turned herself around, slowly, sitting on the floor. This nun was but a girl, and so frail looking. She had a long face, with a sloping chin.

As she gazed up at me, sadness filled her eyes.

“I did not know you would be so young,” she whispered.

“I am seventeen,” I said. “You look to be the same age.”

“I am twenty-two,” she said, and continued: “You have intelligence, piety, strength, and beauty. And noble blood. All the things I lack.” There was no envy. It was as if she mulled a list of goods to be purchased at market.

Ignoring her assessment of me, which I found embarrassing, I asked, “How can you say you lack piety when you are a sister of Christ?”

“God chose me,” she said. “I was a servant, of no importance in the world. He chose me to speak the truth. I have no choice. I must submit to His will. For you it is different. You have a true spiritual calling.”

Sister Elizabeth Barton was confused. “I am not a nun,” I said.

She frowned, as if she were responding to someone else’s voice. She slowly rose to her feet. She was spare and small, at least three inches shorter than me.

“Yes, the two cardinals are coming,” she said. “It will be within the month. They will pass through on the way to London. I will have to try to speak to them. I must find the courage to go before all the highest and most powerful men in the land.”

My mother had said nothing of Sister Elizabeth leaving Saint Sepulchre to go before the powerful. “Why would you do that?” I asked.

“To stop them,” she said.

I was torn. A part of me was curious, but another, larger, part was growing uneasy. There was nothing malevolent about this fragile nun, yet her words made me uncomfortable.

At last the curious part won. “Whom must you stop, Sister?” I asked. “The cardinals?”

She shook her head and took two steps toward me. “You know, Joanna.”

“No, Sister Elizabeth, I don’t.”

“Your mother wants to know your future—should she marry you off in the country to someone who will take you with meager dowry, or try to return you to the court of the king? Your true vocation leaps in her face, but she cannot see. Poor woman. She has no notion of what she has set in motion by bringing you to me.”

How could the Holy Maid of Kent know so much of my family? Yet I said, nervously, “Sister, I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Her lower lip trembled. “When the cow doth ride the bull, then priest beware thy skull,” she said.

My stomach clenched. At last, I had heard a prophecy.

“Those are not my words,” Sister Elizabeth continued. “They come from the lips of Mother Shipton. Do you know of her?”

I shook my head.

“Born in a cave in Yorkshire,” she said, her words coming fast. “A girl without a father—a bastard of the north. Hated and scorned by all. Not just for deformity of face but for the power of her words. Crone, they call her. Witch. It is so wretched to know the truth, Joanna. To see things no one else can see. To have to try to stop evil before it is too late.”

“What sort of evil?” The instant I asked the question, I regretted it.

Again the nun’s lower lip trembled. Her eyes gleamed with tears.

“The Boleyns,” she said.

I stumbled back and hit the stone wall, hard. I felt behind me for the door. I hadn’t heard the prioress lock it. I would find a way out of this room. I must.

“Oh, you’re so frightened, forgive me,” she wailed, tears spattering her face. “I don’t want this fate for you. I know that you’ve already been touched by the evil. I will try my hardest, Joanna. I don’t want you to be the one.”

“The one?” I repeated, still feeling for the door.

Sister Elizabeth stretched her arms wide, her palms facing the ceiling. “You are the one who will come after,” she said.

The gravity of her words, coupled with the way she spread her hands, chilled me to the marrow.

Sister Elizabeth opened her mouth, as if to say something else, and then shut it. Her face turned bright red. But in a flash, the red drained away, leaving her skin ashen. I looked at the candles. How could a person change color in such a manner? But the candles burned steadily.

“Are you unwell, Sister?” I said. “Shall I seek help?”

She shook her head, violently, but not to say no to me. Her head, her arms, her legs—every part of her shook. Her tongue bobbed in and out of her mouth. After less than a minute of this, her knees gave way and she collapsed.

“It hurts,” she moaned, writhing on her back. “It hurts.”

“I will get you help,” I said.

“No, no, no,” she said, her voice a hoarse stammer. “Joanna Stafford . . . hear me. I . . . beg . . . you.”

Fighting down my terror, I knelt on the floor beside her. A trail of white foam eased out of her gaping mouth. She thrashed and coughed; I thought she would lose consciousness. But she didn’t.

“I see abbeys crumbling to dust,” she said. The choking and thrashing ended. Incredibly, the voice of Sister Elizabeth Barton boomed strong and clear. “I see the blood of monks spilled across the land. Books are destroyed. Statues toppled. Relics defiled. I see the greatest men of the kingdom with heads struck off. The common folk will hang, even the children. Friars will starve. Queens will die.”

Rocking back and forth, I moaned, “No, no, no. This can’t be.”

“You are the one who will come after,” she said, her voice stronger still. “I am the first of three seers. If I fail, you must go before the second and then the third, to receive the full prophesy and learn what you must do. But only of your own free will. After the third has prophesied, nothing can stop it, Joanna Stafford.
Nothing
.”

“But I can’t,” I cried. “I can’t do anything. I’m no one—and I’m too afraid.”

In a voice so loud it echoed in her cell, Sister Elizabeth said, “When the raven climbs the rope, the dog must soar like the hawk. When the raven climbs the rope, the dog must soar like the hawk.”

The door flew open. The prioress and Sister Anne hurried to the fallen nun, kneeling beside her. Sister Elizabeth Barton said just two words more, before the prioress pried open her jaw and Sister Anne pushed in a rag. She turned her head, to find me with her fierce eyes, and then she spoke.

“The chalice . . .”

O
n a dismal Tuesday night, ten years after that visit to the seer and two months before the desperate mission to Canterbury, I lay sleepless in my bed. I mourned the past and worried for the future, but without any conception of what was to come. The events of the following day would set me once more on the path to prophecy that Sister Elizabeth Barton warned of long ago. But as I stared at the ceiling, there was only one thing predictable: the depth of the next day’s mud.

The rain began hard on midnight, hours after I crept into bed. It was a fine bed: a mattress placed on a board, propped up on four short wooden legs. By any measure, it was more comfortable than my old bed at Dartford Priory, a straw-stuffed pallet laid on the stone floor of the novice dormitory. We slept in stretches there: After Vespers we rested for a few hours, then awoke to the bells calling us to Matins, at midnight. After that
observance, we’d return to our dormitories, to sleep until the pealing of the bells announced Lauds.