The Heretic's Apprentice (32 page)

He was unfolding layer after layer as he spoke. The outermost, scorched and frayed into holes, had already been discarded, but Jevan had given his treasure every possible protection, and by the time the last folds were stripped away the box lay before them immaculate, untouched by fire or water, the ornate key still in the lock. The ivory lozenge stared up at them with immense Byzantine eyes from beneath the great round forehead that might have been drawn with compasses, before the rich hair was carved, and the beard, and the lines of age and thought. The coiling vines gleamed, refracting light from polished edges. Now at last they all hesitated to turn the key and open the lid.

It was Anselm who at length set hands to it and opened it. From both sides they leaned to gaze. Fortunata and Elave drew close, and Cadfael made room for them. Who had a better right?

The lid rose on the binding of purple dyed vellum, bordered with a rich tracery of leaves, flowers and tendrils in gold, and bearing in the centre, in a delicate framework of gold, a fellow to the ivory on the box. The same venerable face and majestic brow, the same compelling eyes gazing upon eternity, but this one was carved on a smaller scale, not a head but a half-length, and held a little harp in his hands.

With reverent care Anselm tilted the box, and supported the book on his palm as he slid it out on to the table.

‘Not a saint,' he said, ‘except that they often showed him with a halo. This is King David, and surely what we have here is a psalter.'

The purple vellum of the binding was stretched over thin boards, and the first gathering of the book, and the last, when Anselm opened it, were also of gold on purple. The rest of the leaves were of very fine, smooth finish and almost pure white. There was a frontispiece painting of the psalmist playing and singing, enthroned like an emperor, and surrounded by musicians earthly and heavenly. The vibrant colours sprang ringing from the page, as brilliantly as the sounds the royal minstrel was plucking from his strings. Here was no powerful, massive Byzantine block colouring, classic and monumental, but sinuous, delicate, graceful shapes, as pliant and ethereal as the pattern of vines that surrounded the picture. Everything rippled and twined, and was elegantly elongated. Opposite, on a skin side smooth as silk, the title page was lined out in golden uncials. But on the following leaf, which was the dedication page, the penmanship changed to a neat, fluent, round hand.

‘This is not eastern,' said the bishop, leaning to look more closely.

‘No. It is Irish minuscule, the insular script.' Anselm's voice grew more reverent and awed as he turned page after page, into the ivory whiteness of the main part of the book, where the script had abandoned gold for a rich blue-black, and the numerals and initials flowered in exquisite colours, laced and bordered with all manner of meadow flowers, climbing roses, little herbers no bigger than a thumbnail, where birds sang in branches hardly thicker than a hair, and shy animals leaned out from the cover of blossoming bushes. Tiny, perfect women sat reading on turfed seats under bowers of eglantine. Golden fountains played into ivory basins, swans sailed on crystal rivers, minute ships ventured oceans the size of a tear.

In the last gathering of the book the leaves reassumed their imperial purple, the final exultant psalms were again inscribed in gold, and the psalter ended with a painted page in which an empyrean of hovering angels, a paradise of haloed saints, and a transfigured earth of redeemed souls all together obeyed the psalmist, and praised God in the firmament of his power, with every instrument of music known to man. And all the quivering wings, all the haloes, all the trumpets and psalteries and harps, the stringed instruments and organs, the timbrels and the loud cymbals were of burnished gold, and the denizens of heaven and paradise and earth alike were as sinuous and ethereal as the tendrils of rose and honeysuckle and vine that intertwined with them, and the sky above them as blue as the irises and periwinkles under their feet, until the tips of the angels' wings melted into a zenith all blinding gold, in which the ultimate mystery vanished from sight.

‘This is a wonder!' said the bishop. ‘Never have I seen such work. This is beyond price. Where can such a thing have been produced? Where was there art the match of this?'

Anselm turned back to the dedication page, and read aloud slowly from the golden Latin:

Made at the wish of Otto, King and Emperor, for the marriage of his beloved son, Otto, Prince of the Roman Empire, to the most Noble and Gracious Theofanu, Princess of Byzantium, this book is the gift of His Most Christian Grace to the Princess. Diarmaid, monk of Saint Gall, wrote and painted it.

‘Irish script and an Irish name,' said the abbot. ‘Gallus himself was Irish, and many of his race followed him there.'

‘Including one,' said the bishop, ‘who created this most precious and marvellous thing. But the box, surely, was made for it later, and by another Irish artist. Perhaps the same hand that made the ivory on the binding also made the second one for the casket. Perhaps she brought such an artist to the west in her train. It is a marriage of two cultures indeed, like the marriage it celebrated.'

‘They were in Saint Gall,' said Anselm, scholar and historian, regarding with love but without greed the most beautiful and rare book he was ever likely to see. ‘The same year the prince married they were there, son and father both. It is recorded in the chronicle. The young man was seventeen, and knew how to value manuscripts. He took several away with him from the library. Not all of them were ever returned. Is it any wonder that a man who loved books, once having set eyes on this, should covet it to the edge of madness?'

Cadfael, silent and apart, took his eyes from the pure, clear colours laid on, almost two hundred years since, by a steady hand and a loving mind, to watch Fortunata's face. She stood with Elave close and watchful at her shoulder, and Cadfael knew that the boy had her by the hand still in the shelter of their bodies, as fast as ever Jevan had held her by the arm when she was the only frail barrier he had against betrayal and ruin. She gazed and gazed at the beautiful thing William had sent her as dowry, and her eyes were hooded and her lips set in a pale, still face.

No fault of Diarmaid, the Irish monk of Saint Gall, who had poured his loveliest art into a gift of love, or at least a gift for marriage, the loftiest of the age, a mating of empires! No fault of his that this exquisite thing had brought about two deaths, and bereaved as well as endowed the bride to whom it was sent. Was it any wonder that such a perfect thing could corrupt a hitherto blameless lover of books to covet, steal and kill?

Fortunata looked up at last, and found the bishop's eyes upon her, across the table and its radiant burden.

‘My child,' he said, ‘you have here a most precious gift. If it pleases you to sell it, it will provide you with a rich dowry indeed, but take good advice before you part with it, and keep it safe. Abbot Radulfus here would surely hold it in trust for you, if you wish it, and see that you are properly counselled when you come to deal with a buyer. Though I must tell you that in truth it would be impossible to put a price on it fit for what is priceless.'

‘My lord,' said Fortunata, ‘I know what I want to do with it. I cannot keep it. It is beautiful, and I shall always remember it and be glad that I've seen it. But as long as it remains with me I shall find it a bitter reminder, and it will seem to me somehow spoiled and wronged. Nothing ugly should ever have touched it. I would rather that it should go with you. In your church treasury it will be pure again, and blessed.'

‘I understand your revulsion,' said the bishop gently, ‘after all that has happened, and I feel the justice of your grief for a thing of beauty and grace misused. But if that is truly what you wish, then you must accept what the library of my see can pay you for the book, though I must tell you I have not its worth to spend.'

‘No!' Fortunata shook her head decidedly. ‘Money has been paid for it once, money must not be paid for it again. If it has no price, no price must be given for it, but I may give it, and suffer no loss.'

Roger de Clinton, himself a man of decision, recognised as strong a resolution confronting him and, moreover, respected and approved it. But in conscience he reminded her considerately: ‘The pilgrim who brought it half across the world, and sent it to you as a dowry, he also has a right to have his wishes honoured. And his wish was that this gift should be yours – no one's else.'

She acknowledged it with an inclination of her head, very seriously. ‘But having given it, and made it mine, he would have held that it was mine, to give again if I pleased, and would never have grudged it. Especially,' said Fortunata firmly, ‘to you and the Church.'

‘But also he wished his gift to be used to ensure you a good marriage and a happy life,' said the bishop.

She looked back at him steadily and earnestly, with Elave's hand in hers, and Elave's face at her shoulder matching the look. ‘That it has already done,' said Fortunata. ‘The best of what he sent me I am keeping.'

*

By mid-afternoon they were all gone. Bishop de Clinton and his deacon, Serlo, were on their way back to Coventry, where one of Roger's predecessors in office had transferred the chief seat of his diocese, though it was still more often referred to as Lichfield than as Coventry, and both churches considered themselves as having cathedral status. Elave and Fortunata had returned together to the distracted household by Saint Alkmund's church, where now the body of the slayer lay on the same trestle bier in the same outhouse where his victim had lain, and Girard, who had buried Aldwin, must now prepare to bury Jevan. The great holes torn in the fabric of a close-knit household would gradually close and heal, but it would take time. Doubtless the women would pray just as earnestly for both the slayer and the slain.

With the bishop, carefully and reverently packed in his saddle-roll, went Princess Theofanu's psalter. How it had ever made its way back to the east, to some small monastery beyond Edessa, no one would ever know, and some day, perhaps two hundred years on, someone would marvel how it had travelled from Edessa to the library of Coventry, and that would also remain a mystery. Books are more durable than their authors, but at least the Irish monk Diarmaid had secured his own immortality.

Even the guest-hall was almost empty. The festival was over, and those who had lingered for a few days more were now finishing whatever business they had in Shrewsbury, and packing up to leave. The midsummer lull between Saint Winifred's translation and Saint Peter's fair provided convenient time for harvesting the abbey cornfields, beyond the vegetable gardens of the Gaye, where ears were already whitening towards ripeness. The seasons kept their even pace. Only men came and went, acted and refrained, untimely.

Brother Winfrid, content in his labours, was clipping the overgrown hedge of box, and whistling as he worked. Cadfael and Hugh sat silent and reflective on the bench against the north wall of the herb-garden, grown a little somnolent in the sun, and the lovely languor that comes after stress has spent itself. The colours of the roses in the distant beds became the colours of Diarmaid's rippling borders, and the white butterfly on the dim blue flower of fennel was changed into a little ship on an ocean no bigger than a pearl.

‘I must go,' said Hugh for the third time, but made no move to go.

‘I hope,' said Cadfael at last, stirring with a sigh, ‘we have heard the last of the word heresy. If we must have episcopal visitations, may they all turn out as well. With another man it might have ended in anathema.' And he asked thoughtfully: ‘Was she foolish to part with it? I have it in my eyes still. Almost I can imagine a man coveting it to death, his own or another's. The very colours could burn into the heart.'

‘No,' said Hugh, ‘she was not foolish, but very wise. How could she have ever have sold it? Who could pay for such a thing, short of kings? No, in enriching the diocese she enriches herself.'

‘For that matter,' said Cadfael, after a long, contented silence, ‘he did pay her a fair price for it. He gave Elave back to her, free and approved. I wouldn't say but she may have got the better of the bargain, after all.'

Turn the page to continue reading from the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael

Saint Peter's fair of that year, 1143, was one week past, and they were settling down again into the ordinary routine of a dry and favourable August, with the corn harvest already being carted into the barns, when Brother Matthew the cellarer first brought into chapter the matter of business he had been discussing for some days during the Fair with the prior of the Augustinian priory of Saint John the Evangelist, at Haughmond, about four miles to the north-east of Shrewsbury. Haughmond was a FitzAlan foundation, and FitzAlan was out of favour and dispossessed since he had held Shrewsbury castle against King Stephen, though rumour said he was back in England again from his refuge in France, and safe with the Empress's forces in Bristol. But many of his tenants locally had continued loyal to the king, and retained their lands, and Haughmond flourished in their patronage and gifts, a highly respectable neighbour with whom business could be done to mutual advantage at times. This, according to Brother Matthew, was one of the times.