Mathilde 01 - The Cup of Ghosts (2 page)

I closed my eyes then opened them, gazing round Father Guardian’s austere chamber, its limewashed walls, the floor bone-hard and dusty. Only the candles and a small chafing dish sprinkled with incense fended off the cold and the foul stench of death. I studied the corpse’s white, pointed face, the eyes half closed, the lips slightly parted. Father Guardian had prayed for me, he’d told me that. Even as he leaned over the chalice to murmur the words of consecration or took the bread to turn it into Christ’s blessed body, he always prayed the same petition: that one day I would kneel before him, make my confession and my peace with God, and so prepare my soul for its long journey to join the rest.

‘Mathilde.’ Father Prior would clasp my hands between his cold, thin fingers and nip the skin gently, those watery brown eyes staring at me compassionately. ‘I feel it, Mathilde, your soul is heavy with sin. Your mind, memories and dreams are haunted, they reek of sour evil.’

Shrewd and cunning was Father Guardian. One of the few men I’ve met who could read a person’s soul. Of course, I demurred. I told him that I would keep my secrets and argue my case before God’s tribunal like any malefactor would before the King’s Bench in Westminster Hall. Father Guardian would only sigh and let my hand go.

Last summer, around the Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist, I began to reflect. I felt as if I had a belly brimming with soured wine. I wanted to vomit, to purge, to clean the evil from my soul, so I went and talked to her, Isabella, Queen of England, where she lies beneath her chest tomb just to the right of the high altar in Grey Friars. Ah, yes, that was where she asked to be buried, not in a shroud but in her wedding dress, even though she was well past her sixtieth year. As she died, coughing up her life blood, Isabella asked for my hand, begging me with her eyes.

‘Mathilde,
ma doucette
!’

Her cheeks were sunken, her hair was grey, yet I could still glimpse the lustrous beauty of former days.

‘Bury me,’ she whispered, ‘in my wedding dress, my husband’s heart clasped between my hands but next to Mortimer, like a bride beside her lover! Promise me.’

I kept my promise. I begged to see her eagle-eyed son, Edward the Great Conqueror, Lord of England, Ireland, Scotland and France and any other lands he can seize. I crouched on my knees before him in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey. I whispered out his mother’s last wish. The king, of course, cursed me, beat me about the shoulders, though at last he agreed. He ordered his sheriffs, marshals, bailiffs and beadles to clear the highway along Mile End, round past the Tower, so his mother’s corpse could be processed in great honour and pomp, with trumpet, fife and drum, amidst gusts of fragrant incense, to be buried, after solemn requiem mass, beneath the flagstones of Grey Friars.

Later, months after his mother’s death, the king sent his stonemasons and carpenters to erect a beautiful chest tomb for his ‘beloved mother’. You can view it, with its crouching golden leopards and silver fleur-de-lis, its crowns and coronets, its pious inscriptions, all the macabre beauty of the grave. Edward did this as an act of reparation. Isabella had never forgiven him, not for what he’d done to her ‘Gentle Mortimer’, and that was what brought me to Grey Friars. I came to look after her tomb. The king ordered me here screaming, his foam-flecked lips curling like those of a snarling dog.

‘You were with her in life,’ he shouted. ‘Stay with her in death.’

I joined the Poor Men of St Francis, the Grey Friars, accepting the Bishop of London’s licence to be an anchorite in a cell in their grounds. Only Father Guardian knew from the start why I was really there. I was given menial tasks, the lowest of the low. On one matter, however, Father Guardian would brook no opposition.

‘If Sister Mathilde wishes to pray by the old queen’s tomb,’ he declared at a chapter meeting, ‘then she must be allowed to pray.’

I did so every day, round about three o’clock in the afternoon, when the church was empty and the good brothers never assembled to sing God’s praises. I’d crouch like a dog and press my cheek against the cold stone, running my hand over the carved sculpting. In my mind I went back to some lush garden or splendid chamber with lozenge-shaped floor tiles, decorated cloths on the wall, a fire roaring under the mantled hearth, and everywhere the cloying perfume of my mistress. I spoke to her dead as I did to her alive. She used to call me her Lady of Hell. I was the keeper of her dark secrets.

Anyway, I digress. Last summer I went to her tomb on the eve of the Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist. I recall gazing at a painting on the wall of the Good Thief at Golgotha, his bloody, tattered corpse hanging from the cross, his face twisted in agony, turning to speak to the Saviour, to beg for salvation. Beneath the cross stood the tormentors of Christ with the faces of apes and monkeys, an appropriate scene. I often felt like that Good Thief, but there again, sometimes I allow self-pity to consume me as fire does dry kindling.

On that summer afternoon I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the painting, those ape-like faces, the grimacing monkey mouths, the hanging body laced with blood.

‘I’ve seen so many corpses,’ I whispered. I cannot seal the door to the past. The distraction sprang out of the dark heart of a nightmare, a memory of Hereford, and Despenser hanging from the seventy-foot-high gallows; Isabella and Mortimer watching his final torments, eating and drinking, toasting each other with their looted goblets. Despenser’s corpse dangling like a doll, feet kicking the air; the executioner scaling the ladder to drag the half-dead man down to slit his stomach and rip off his testicles. Blood lapping out like water from a split cask as Despenser’s screams rang across the market square.

‘So much,’ I whispered. ‘So much.’ Then I heard her voice, as she used to talk, standing behind me, whispering as if we were lovers.

‘Cleanse yourself, Mathilde! Have your sins shriven, know some peace.’

I told Father Guardian this. He just laughed. He claimed the dead were too busy to bother with us. I should look into my own soul. He was talking to me near a fountain, its water splashing up. For some reason I lost my temper, the first time for years, certainly since coming to Grey Friars. I acted like a prisoner locked in a dark dungeon, throwing herself against the door, beating at the iron grille, desperate to get out. I sprang to my feet, striding up and down. Father Guardian grew perplexed.

‘What’s the matter, Mathilde?’

I crouched at his feet, grasping his bony knee, and stared fiercely at him, a look he’d never seen before. He’d forgotten I was once a player in Fortune’s Great Game. I have seen hot blood spurt! I have fought all my life in the press of the court or against furtive, silent assassins. He sketched a cross above my head.

‘What is the matter, Mathilde?’

‘What is the matter, Father Guardian?’ I replied hoarsely. ‘I shall tell you about her life, I shall confess my sins.’

Those old eyes brightened. I half rose and, pressing my lips against his ear, began my confession. The faint colour in that old face quickly drained; he drew away, gazing at me horrorstruck.

‘I would have to see the bishop,’ he murmured. ‘Such sins!’

‘Such sins, Father Guardian?’ I retorted. ‘What does scripture say? “If your sins be red like scarlet, I shall wash them white as wool”? Well, Father Guardian, my sins are many, of the deepest scarlet, like the sky on a summer’s evening or the red banners of war. I am steeped in villainy, Father Guardian. I am the Lady of Hell. I lived in the shadow of Isabella “La Belle”, the Jezebel, the She-Wolf, the Virago Ferrea.’

‘You must prepare yourself to receive the sacrament, examine your conscience,’ he retorted. ‘Be honest with yourself so you will be honest with God.’

By then I had recovered. I realised what I had said: that old man, on a cold stone seat near a fountain, had learnt more in those few precious moments than Edward, the king, would ever learn. Oh, others have tried. I have been offered bribes, lands, manors, even the marriage of some young man, a royal ward. I have always refused. I have met and loved the great love of my life. Moreover, I took an oath of secrecy to Isabella but, on reflection, I believe that oath has now been lifted; I am released from my obligation. On that day near the fountain I shuffled my sandalled feet and apologised for my temper. I promised Father Guardian how, as soon as Advent began, I would kneel in the shriving pew and confess all my sins. I joked how it would take a long time. Father Guardian glanced at me warily, shaking his head.

‘Sister Mathilde, honesty is short and brief. Confess who you are rather than what you did.’

During the subsequent weeks I often reflected on his words. The more I searched my soul, the more I realised he had not spoken the full truth. To understand what I have done, to realise who I truly was, or who I am, I would have to describe who Isabella was: the princess from some romance of Arthur who arrived in England at the age of thirteen to marry Edward of Caernarvon and unite England and France in an alliance of peace which would stretch to eternity. Oh, the folly of princes! Father Guardian allowed me the use of the scriptorium and the library. I began to write in a cipher, which could only be translated by me, a legacy from my days as a healer. The weeks turned into months. Summer went, autumn arrived in gorgeous profusion. The paths and gardens of Grey Friars became carpeted with leaves which gleamed like copper before the rains fell and turned them into a dirty mush which I had to clear, stack, dry and burn. I promised Father Guardian that once Advent came and the church was cleaned in preparation for the coming of the Christ Child, I would make my confession.

However, the Lord Satan had not forgotten me. On the Feast of St Luke, suddenly like a thief in the night, death caught Father Guardian. He was found in his bed, sprawled slightly to one side, mouth gaping, eyes hard, his soul long gone to God. I asked Father Bruno, the keeper of the scriptorium, a gentle, scholarly man with a stooped back and a face like that of a puzzled sparrow, if I could pay my own final respects. He agreed, so I knelt before Father Guardian’s corpse. I crossed myself and gabbled a prayer I’d learnt as a child, then closed my eyes. I made a promise, a vow to Father Guardian: I would still make my confession, but not to some priest I didn’t know, or one of the brothers, who would only recoil in horror. Father Guardian could sit on the other side of life’s veil and hear me out.

On that occasion, after watching his corpse, I rose and noticed a scrap of parchment lying on the writing carrel where Father Guardian used to sit and meditate over some book of hours. I listened intently. The lay brothers on guard outside were gossiping amongst themselves. I crossed swiftly to the desk and picked up the parchment. I immediately recognised Boethius, an extract from his
Consolation of Philosophy
: ‘My very strength, Fortune declares, this is my unchanging sport. I turn my wheel which spins the circle. I delight to make the lowest turn to the top, the highest to the bottom. Carry me to the top if you want but, on this condition, that you think it’s no unfairness, to sink when the rule of the game demands it.’ I smiled. Father Guardian had left this message just for me. I have been on Fortune’s fickle wheel, at bottom, top and around again. I have known the glories of victory and the bitter ashes of defeat.

Now Father Guardian had always been good to me, giving me pennies or a silver piece. I had carefully hidden these away. A serving boy I trusted, for a bribe, went to the scribblers and parchment sellers in Cheapside. He brought back rolls of vellum, ink, sharpened quills, a pumice stone, and sand to dry the ink, everything a clerk of the chancery or scribe in a muniment room would need. I will keep my vow in the dark hours of the night. I will buy more candles and light them to write my story and that of Isabella, who controlled the Wheel of Fortune and sent it spinning so that kings and princes, lords and ladies, the mighty and the great crashed to earth whilst others were lifted high in exaltation. I will write about the other great love of my life, the study of physic. Father Guardian knew of my art and skill, but I refused to practise it even though he showed me the friary library. I have done with study. I have read the books, be it those of Islam such as Haly Abbas’
Complete Book of the Medical Art
, those of the ancients such as Dioscorides’
Herbarium
. Galen’s
Therapeutics
, Caelius’
De Medicina
, or the texts from Salerno and Montpellier. I can mix moss and stale milk to create a powder which can scour and heal the filthiest wound. I can tell you if a man has taken his own life, died from a rebellion of the humours or suffered a death other than his natural end. Oh yes, murder in all its guises! Like the first I studied – Sir Hugh Pourte, sprawled in a courtyard, his skull cracked like a walnut with the blood and brains spilling out. The first time I went through that dark door to the House of Mysterious Death. Yes, I’ll begin there, but first, how did I arrive there?

So many years ago! So many lifetimes! Yet no one can contradict me. No one can stop me hurrying down the ill-lit passage of time to those autumn days of October 1307 when I sheltered in Paris, enjoying the sweet life of youth, my heart brimming with ambition to be a physician. I’d hoped for that. I’d prayed for it. I’d spent every waking hour thinking about it, ever since I had left the village of Bretigny to work for my uncle in Paris, where I had proven myself to be the most ardent scholar, avid for the horn book. I could write all my letters correctly, use the calculus, and had learnt the Norman French of the court. I became most skilled in learning. My mother’s only child, she lavished on me all the love and care she used to lavish on her husband. My father had been an apothecary from a family of healers. Ever since I was knee-high to a buttercup, he talked to me about his art, be it in the fields and woods, where he would instruct me in the use of herbs, or in that dark treasure chamber of our own little house with its manuscripts and leech books, its jars and coffers crammed with healing potions and deadly black powders. Learning? I took to learning as a bird would to the wing. My father died; my mother could do little for me. She would often gaze at me sad-eyed.