The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (55 page)

“Ah, Madame la Duchesse was right. This is lovely work,” said the abbess. She was seated at the great desk in her plain, whitewashed cabinet. Marguerite d’Alençon’s letter was open in front of her, and she was looking through what remained of my sketches and little paintings. Nuns came in and out on errands, and also the head of her gardening staff, who was a man, and the nuns’ confessor, who was an old priest with so little gray hair left that he didn’t need a tonsure. Nan and I sat together, waiting to see what else she’d say. “It is a great enterprise, a convent of this size. I am sorry I have not been able to give your story uninterrupted attention. Ah! What is this angel? He is the loveliest thing you have brought.”

“Madame, that is the angel Hadriel.”

“Hadriel? I have heard of Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, and Michael, but never a Hadriel.”

“He appeared to me in a dream once. I drew him as I saw him.”

“You are fortunate, to be able to draw out your dreams. Did he give you a message?” She sounded very professional. I guess abbesses know a lot about people with visions and dreams.

“Well, actually, he did, but I never understood what he meant. So I just drew his picture and kept on as I was.” The abbess smiled.

“Usually people amend their lives when they are given such a dream. Just what was it he said?”

“He said if I could catch the rainbow with my hands, I could keep it. But I’ve never done it because it’s obviously impossible, and all it’s done is rain ever since I came here into France except for when it’s snowing, and I’ve never even seen one bit of rainbow. It was all just nonsense. But nice nonsense, I guess. Maybe if I’d been a better person, I might have been granted a dream I could understand.”

“Oh, what a strange message! What did you do after that?”

“Well, my husband was killed, and so I made my living painting.”

“Hmmm,”
said the abbess, as she tapped one finger on her desk and looked into the air. “I’m thinking of your interpretation. It’s not easy. I will ask for guidance. Visions and dreams, they always have meaning. You are meant to do something, and obviously you haven’t done it, or you wouldn’t be in all this trouble. Well, I am asking Sister Claire here to show you and your companion two beds in our dormitory. Are you good at gilding? We have manuscript illuminators and copyists here in great plenty, but Sister Agatha, who did our gilding, passed on not so long ago, leaving the regilding of the altarpiece only half done.”

The next few days were very peaceful and regular. There were prayers and singing every two hours which is soothing to the mind and makes a person forget evil pale green eyes shining insanely in the dark and also shapeless black things that eat people, at least for a little while. The birds had to live in the kitchen because the rules said no animals even though everyone was hiding cats and little dogs just about everywhere and besides it was warmer there. Nan was so very worried about me, and also so prying, that at last I cried and cried and told her about Crouch’s end due to the horrible black things from hell that he summoned up.

Nan promised to keep it a secret, but then it worked on her mind so much that she had to tell the abbess all about the great wickedness of the lord who pursued me and how he studied evil arts to work his wicked way and had black things from hell for his servants, all in strictest secrecy. Then she took to helping in the laundry because she said it would take all the washing in the world to wash out the very thought of those black things, and soon she was remembering that she saw them herself, just as she so often saw the Devil and other menacing Signs that proved the end of the world was coming. After that, everybody was asking her about the fiery black devils that were sent by a wicked practitioner of sorcery all because I wouldn’t give him my virtue. And of course Nan told them all in strictest secrecy, and they were very scandalized but I was so happy to have my Nan back again that I just couldn’t resent her for telling my secret over and over and being so happy making a sensation among all those holy ladies.

As for me, there were many things to mend such as a very pretty little Madonna who had gotten rained on by accident from a leak in the ceiling and also some old pictures of abbesses that were not well done and the paint had come off. I think they must have kept them in some cellar where the damp got them, they looked that bad. I also worked on those miniatures for the duchess, and so you see hiding was really very pleasant except for the worry that bad people would come, because I was very tired of bad people altogether. I decided that if I were an old woman, this would be the best way to spend my time, but just now I was too young, because the thought of Robert Ashton was always in my mind and that showed I did not have the makings of a nun.

The afternoon had brought out the sun, where it sparkled on the frosty branches and frozen puddles in the road, but still, men’s and horses’ breath showed like steam. Across the rolling, frozen landscape, two riders on little, winter-coated horses made their way, leading behind them a packhorse with a packsaddle only half laden. Robert Ashton and his man, heavily bundled against the cold, paused at the crossroad. Two narrow tracks, rutted, pawed up, half-frozen mud, crossed the winter-bare fields and seemed to meander nowhere. Which one was right? Beyond the crossroad, a track led to an ice-choked stream, and a little village of shapeless thatched huts, smoke escaping from their roof peaks.

“Down there,” said Ashton. “They’ll know the way.” A barefoot, sooty-faced woman answered their knock.

“The convent?” she said. “It’s easy. Follow the road to the north, the one marked with fresh hoofprints. There’s a dozen armed men ahead of you, and if you hurry, you can catch up. It’s no good travelin’ alone like you are, these days.” She watched as the two men glanced at each other in alarm. “If you be wantin’ to avoid them, take the other road,” she said.

“Did they say who they were?” asked Robert Ashton.

“Soldiers from the Connétable de Bourbon. But
they
paid me,” she said. Ashton leaned over in the saddle and pressed a couple of sous into her hand.

“How far is it from here?”

“Oh, three or four hours’ ride—that is, if your horse don’t slip on this ice and break a leg.” The riders returned to the road and, despite the risk of ice, pushed their horses to a trot.

“Pilgrims, eh?” said the captain. “Why pilgrims in this season?”

“A vow to my mother on her deathbed,” said Robert Ashton. “I’ve never seen the place. Almost got lost looking for it. I hope they’ve a good guesthouse. I don’t want to ride on in this cold.”

“You’d best ride back with us, when we’ve made the arrest. There are robbers on this road, even in this season.”

“An arrest?” Ashton made his voice sound merely curious.

“A criminal. A murderess, who has taken sanctuary. Who’d believe it, eh? Women are getting as bad as men these days.”

“It’s the times,” said Ashton, shaking his head sympathetically. Ahead of them, on a low rise of ground, were the convent buildings, plain whitewashed stone, almost barnlike in their simplicity, huddled together around a church with a tall, unornamented steeple. At a distance from the other buildings, but still inside the abbey walls, could be seen the pointed, slate roof of the kitchen building, smoke boiling from its chimneys. The great gates were barred from within. While his men waited, the captain rode to the gate and shouted. There was no answer. With a gauntleted hand, he lifted the iron knocker and battered it against the door. Still no answer. After he had repeated the process several times, a little wooden shutter behind a tiny grille beside the gate opened, and half a woman’s face appeared.

“We are from the Connétable de Bourbon, with orders for an arrest. Is one Suzanne Dolet, a painter, hiding within?”

“We have here a woman who claims the right of sanctuary. You must wait forty days before Suzanne Dolet must leave.” A murmur of threats came from the armed soldiers, with coarse suggestions of what they might do if crossed.

“What is this nonsense?” replied the captain to the face in the grille. “Let us in now. You are ordered to do so.”

“It is not our custom to admit armed men to our holy precincts,” said the face, firmly.

“You had best consider changing that custom, or we shall set fire to the gate and enter anyway.”

“Let me consult with the abbess,” said the face, and the little shutter banged shut. While the horses stamped and moved about in the cold, the armed men waited, the captain cursing all the while. Ashton’s mind was teeming with ideas. If he could only get in ahead of them…

But his hopes were dashed when the face reappeared at the grille.

“Monsieur Captain,” a different half-face said, “we would be delighted to open our gates immediately to you, but we must warn you that there is plague inside our community.” The captain shuddered and several of the soldiers crossed themselves. But still the captain persisted.

“Where is Suzanne Dolet?”

“Alas, Monsieur Captain, she is one of several who have received the last rites. They are lying in our poor little infirmary, awaiting the inevitable meeting with the eternal.”

“I cannot leave on your word alone. How do I know you are not deceiving me?”

“There is no doubt that by morning she will be dead. Do not disturb the dying, monsieur. Even your orders do not require that you risk infecting yourself. In the morning, those who have perished will be laid before the high altar for the funeral service. Come then, satisfy your eyes for the sake of your master and your orders, and leave before you risk death. That is our abbess’s suggestion. She says also that she regrets not offering you the hospitality of our guesthouse, but under the circumstances, you might prefer billeting your troops in the village below the abbey.”

Ashton hid his face from the others as they turned away from the gate. Dying! After all this, after all his plans, his ingenuity. And he was not even there to say a word of comfort to her, to hear her last breath, to breathe the infection and die with her. What bitterness, what evil was in the world. God Himself was evil, to taunt a man so by showing him love and then snatching it away. What was the good of anything? The plague. Evil, monstrous disease. He could not even touch her corpse. He thought of her, looking at the little birds in the bird market, evicting the glue pot from its place of honor in her fireplace to make him dinner, of her little, short-fingered hands moving with precise delicacy over one of her tiny paintings. Then, in spite of himself, he thought of her rollicking, vulgar Eves. There was no other such woman in the world, he thought. I found her, through a miracle, and now I have lost her.

I was hard at work on that Madonna under the rain leak when there was a great sound of scurrying sandals and the abbess came in all hurrying, followed by several of her nuns.

“There are armed men at the gate, Maîtresse Suzanne, armed men who have come for you. They say they will not go without you. Our gates are not strong enough to keep them out. If I hide you here, they threaten to tear the convent apart. I have no choice but to give you up.”

“Give me up? Who are these men, that they can defy the king’s own sister?”

“Soldiers of the Connétable de Bourbon, the greatest warlord in France. They claim they have orders for your arrest. I have no desire to let them in, and I would obey the dear duchess in all things, but I dare not keep them out any longer.”

“My arrest? But I’ve done nothing.”

“You know that, I know that, but we must let the judges decide.”

“But…but, tell them to wait.”

“I have done that already. They say they will wait until the crack of dawn, and not so much as a mouse will get out of here. I fear that they are planning to break sanctuary. God knows what will happen once they are inside. You must give yourself up. I would keep you if I could, but they know you are here, and I have no choice.” There is nothing like mortal fear to speed the mind. Mine was working very desperately, trying to escape those wicked soldiers outside.

“Wait, tell them I am deathly ill.”

“What good will that do?”