The Chalice (50 page)

Nostredame’s eyes took on that faraway gleam as he said, “You’re wrong. There is hope indeed.”

M
ichel de Nostredame and I set out for Calais. It was true that the town was less than one hundred miles from Ghent. But it was now November. I was shocked when I emerged from the stone fortress of the Gravensteen to cold, gray skies. I had been confined for nearly three months.

The roads were muddy—close to impassable—all the way to Gravelines, the French coastal city. When we could, we hired a cart. But when the muck was too deep for horses, we walked past farmland and villages. At night we stayed in an inn if we could find one, or paid a farmer to lend us a room. We posed as brother and sister, just as I had with Edmund when we ventured forth on our quests. Nostredame did all of the talking; my English-accented French was rarely heard. For the first few days I looked over my shoulder, fearful of Jacquard’s following. But there was no sign of him. Either he died behind that locked door or he made his way to Antwerp.

At all of the inns I overheard talk of the Emperor Charles’s historic progression through France, accompanied by five thousand armed soldiers, the Duke of Alva and his high nobles, chamberlains, and cooks, and, yes, the Dominican friars of the Inquisition. It was widely agreed on that being a citizen of Ghent was a sorry prospect.

Nostredame never asked why I was determined to get to Calais as quickly as possible. The night we reached Gravelines, we stayed in a large inn with a tavern. The owner agreed to serve us fish soup before retiring. We ate in a lonely corner of the tavern, in exhausted but companionable silence, until I said, “I must reach the court of Henry the Eighth before it’s done.”

Nostredame regarded me over his steaming bowl of soup.

“Then you will seek to prevent the murder?” he asked. “How will you accomplish that?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Certainly it won’t be easy for me to present myself at court. But I feel certain that
this
is what I’m meant to do. I first started feeling it in my cell at the Gravensteen. Jacquard told me of their plans—if I did not agree to hold the chalice, there is a second person who will be put into motion, in England. It will be close to the wedding, and in the time, somehow, of a bear.”

Nostredame blew on his soup to cool it. I watched him for reaction to my disclosure but there was none. And then I knew why.

“You knew that this was what would happen,” I said, awed.

“Not precisely,” he said, and blew on his soup again. “It’s difficult to explain.”

“Why was I chosen?” I asked. “When was the prophecy born? Was it the day I saw Sister Elizabeth Barton?”

Nostredame shook his head. “The future is never immutable. But there are . . . points . . . that are set, that are known long ago. I can’t tell you how long.”

“What do I have to do with those points?” I asked, baffled.

“Everything,” he said simply.

I looked around to ensure no one could hear, and then I said, “I know that by preventing the poisoner from carrying out his act, I am clearing the way for the fourth wife to have a son by
the king, and that son will be an enemy to the true faith. That is a terrible burden, but the alternative—to clear the way for the emperor and the king of France to plunge a land into chaos and then carve it into pieces—is not right, either, Nostredame. I’ve been lost for months, for years, ever since I was forced to leave my priory. But now, I’ve found my clarity.”

I was overcome by this confession to the third seer; my eyes filled with tears.

The next morning there was a break in the dreary weather. I felt a surge of determination when we walked to the part of the town overlooking the blue-green sea, sparkling in the sun. High waves crashed against the shore. Peering down the beach, I could see a fleet of fishing boats working their catches.

England was across this channel—I would be home at last.

Nostredame, who had spoken at length to the innkeeper, said, “We have to hire a wagon across the causeway to reach the Pale and then the town of Calais. There is just one way there. It’s a risky journey. There is nothing on the causeway. No house, no man, nothing. It’s a long stretch of wild and desolate marshes—and should there be a gale and we be exposed to it unprotected, we die.”

“Very well,” I said, peering up at the clear sky. “But it doesn’t look as if a gale will hit later. ”

Nostredame gave me a meaningful look.

“Ah,” I said. “Of course. Yes—let us go at once.”

We secured a wagon, driven by toughened men with many lines on their faces and few words on their lips. By midday, the sun had vanished; within the hour the gale came. Nostredame and I huddled under a canopy that soon collapsed. We clutched each other, shivering in the icy, vicious wind.

“If I die on the Pale of Calais,” I cried to Nostredame, “can anyone else stop the chalice from being given?”

“No,” he said. “Yours is the only hand.”

The sky grew yet darker, and the gale more fierce.

I was colder than I’d ever been in my life—and in tremendous pain. Perhaps if I were to sleep, it would be God’s blessing.

Nostredame shook me: “No, stay with me,” he shouted. “Hear my voice.”

But a darkness enveloped me, and in the middle of it emerged Edmund’s face. I was seeing him just as he was when he came to the Howards’ manor house in Southwark. His hair was long and his shoes muddy. I didn’t hear Nostredame any longer. I heard only Edmund.

“I’ve come to take you home, Sister Joanna. I’ve come to take you home.”

“Edmund,” I moaned. “Help me.”

I fell into a sort of dream and he smiled at me, a little shyly, his brown eyes full of quiet wit, not the dull blankness when I saw him last. We were in Dartford, betrothed, and he had his book of poetry in his hands, marked with the page he planned to read from next.

Edmund,
I cried in my thoughts
, why did you leave me? You said you would never leave me in the chapel of Blackfriars, don’t you remember? But you did. You left me.

There was nothing for a while and then I wasn’t moving anymore. Voices sounded all around me, but strange ones:

“She’s ice—as cold as death.”

“We must fetch a physician at once, have you coin?”

Nostredame spoke then: “I’m a healer, I will take care of her.”

I
opened my eyes—it was dark, but there was no more rain beyond a fine drizzle. There were people in the streets of a city staring at me as I floated by. I looked up, and into Nostredame’s face. He was carrying me through Calais.

“Where are we going?” I croaked.

“To the place beyond the Pale,” he said.

I didn’t hear more, for the darkness claimed me again.

When I woke up what seemed like moments later, I lay in a bed next to a window. The sky was light gray; I heard seabirds calling to one another.

A pretty dark-haired girl stood up and clapped her hands. “She’s awake,” she cried in French, and ran out of the room.

Moments later, Nostredame appeared. “How do you feel?” he said, holding my wrists for a moment, then stretching back my eyelids.

“I believe I am all right,” I said. “Where are we?”

“With friends,” he said.

“How long have I been here?” I asked.

“Three days. You did come close to death on the Pale. Forgive me. I knew there would be a gale, but not such a terrible one.”

I sat up in the bed. I felt a little weak. “You said when we got to Calais that we would go beyond the Pale—I remember that,” I said. “What did you mean? How can we be beyond it?”

He said, “Joanna, this is a house of Jews. I went to the temple first and asked them for help.”

He waited for me to respond.

“I am grateful to them for their kindness, and wish to tell them so,” I said.

Later that day I came downstairs and met the entire Benoit family: A shopkeeper, his wife, and three daughters. The youngest was Rachel, and she had volunteered the most often to sit by my bed. “Is she ready to see it?” asked Rachel, very excited.

“What is there to see?” I asked.

“Something that has bearing on your journey to England,” said Nostredame. “Something good.”

“Then I want to see it,” I said immediately, overriding his protests that I might not be strong enough for the required walk. No one would tell me exactly what I’d see—Rachel wanted it to
be a surprise, a happy one, and though I was impatient to receive good news, I agreed to do it her way. She was a winning girl.

After proving my mettle by eating a large dinner, I set out with Nostredame and Rachel. The Benoit house lay outside the high walls of Calais, in a small settlement set aside for Jews. The guards watching over the gates to the city nodded as we passed, and we walked through the center of town. Finally I was in Calais, the famous port conquered by Edward III after a lengthy siege and now the sole remaining possession of the English Crown in the kingdom of France.

Rachel pointed at a large church with a soaring tower and said, “That’s the best way.”

I turned to Nostredame, puzzled.

He smiled and said, “The Church of Notre Dame gives the best view of the harbor from this part of town. Let’s see if we can get permission to climb the tower.”

When we reached the door, Rachel pushed me forward with an excited smile. “I wait outside,” she said. Nostredame and I walked through the entrance to the church.

The priest was agreeable to our request and slowly we climbed the steps to the top of the tower.

“Here’s a proper view,” he exclaimed. “Look!”

I joined him at the window. From this vantage point, we could see beyond the high harbor walls to the churning waters of the channel. There were a great number of ships anchored there. The smaller ones bobbed in the stiff winter breeze of Calais. There must have been twenty. Studying the flag of the largest galleon, I gasped. It was the flag of the House of Tudor.

“Those are English ships,” I cried.

“They are sent by the king of England to convey his new bride to Dover,” Nostredame said. “Anne of Cleves didn’t travel to Antwerp to make the crossing. She’s passing through the Low Countries to here, to Calais. The princess will be here very soon. You will go home with Anne of Cleves.”

O
ne week later, Anne of Cleves arrived in Calais amidst an entourage of more than two hundred German lords and ladies, maids, and servants. The gunners on the largest ships fired one hundred and fifty rounds to salute her; close to five hundred English soldiers wearing king’s livery lined the streets to cheer her. The young princess was lodged in a grand house called the Exchequer while I remained with the Benoits outside the Pale. We were not likely to cross paths.

But the ruinous winter storms of the channel make everyone equal. Anne of Cleves was forced to wait in the port town, day after day, until it was judged safe to sail. I waited, too. The day before the Germans reached Calais, I’d booked passage on one of the smaller English escort ships bound for Dover. I paid for it with all the francs left in my possession; I used a new set of forged documents to represent myself. My name was real this time; what was forged was a French councilor’s signature on the paper that said I had permission of the government to leave the country.

Nostredame supplied me with the document, advising me not to ask where it came from but to be assured that it would suffice. I thanked him for it, as I thanked him for everything he’d done for me since the Gravensteen.

“No,” he said. “It is you I shall always be grateful to—you
freed me from that prison cell when you did not need to, Mistress Joanna.”

I insisted that Nostredame leave me in Calais, with the Benoit family, who’d taken me in. “We’ve been here for weeks. I know we shall sail for Dover at some point—we have to,” I said. “You must go and continue with your own life.”

We went on a last walk together, along the shoreline of Calais. We strode past the shacks of herring fishermen just north of the sand dunes. No one else was out there—the winds of December were harsh. But I’d experienced worse.

Gazing out, I was suddenly struck with the realization that I was leaving the continent where, somewhere, Edmund wandered.

“Have you heard of the Black Forest?” I asked Nostredame.

“It is in a corner of Germany, a vast forest so dark and impenetrable it is called ‘black.’ ”

Taken aback, I said, “Why would anyone want to go there?”

“It is also a place of knowledge and legends and myths and mystical powers,” Nostredame said. “For those courageous enough to conquer their fears, it can be a forest of magic.”

We walked in silence for a while and then I turned to Nostredame. “
Why
was I chosen?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Reasons are the most difficult thing for me to see.”

I tried it another way. “But do you know why it happened to me this way? Why did I have to learn of the prophecy through two other seers and then you and always bit by bit—and of my own free will?”

Nostredame squinted into the wind. “There is something in you, an alchemy of human qualities, that will come into play when the moment arrives. That alchemy is not just the human nature you were born with, that God gave you. Each encounter with a seer changed you—brought you closer to the person you must be at the critical moment.”

“But what are those qualities?” I asked, distraught. “I fear it is my rage and recklessness, Nostredame, and not the more faithful spirit I’ve tried to build through service to God.”

“Faith is a quality I’ve struggled with myself, Joanna, and what I can tell you is—I have faith in you,” he said.

And so we bade each other farewell, the third seer and the subject of his fateful prophecy. “We shall meet again, but it won’t be for quite a long time,” he said with a smile, and left for the journey to his home village in the South of France.

That same day that Nostredame departed, I made a trip to the shop in the town of Calais. I needed new silk threads for my needlework project with the Benoit girls. To keep myself from fretting overmuch—and to try to make myself useful in the household—I’d started lessons in embroidery for the three girls.