The Canterbury Sisters (32 page)

“She didn’t say anything?”

“For once, no.”

We have come to an intersection, with a small park and a visitors’ welcome kiosk on the other side. I glance right and step into the street and Valerie has to grab my arm and pull me back. She has enough sense to glance to the left, to see the cars rumbling toward us. I made exactly the same bonehead move on my one morning in London, stepping off a curb and nearly getting hit by a cab coming from a direction I didn’t expect. I visit Europe often, but not England. They don’t have much wine here.

“I didn’t used to be afraid of the dark,” Valerie says, as if we had been discussing fear, which I guess in a way we were. “Not until I was diagnosed. Or actually rediagnosed. It was gone and then it came back . . . Now I sleep with a night-light. I have them all over the house at home and I bought one here, in a hardware store in London, before I met the other women in the George. So it would use the right current, you know, so it wouldn’t blow up like an American hair dryer. The dark is the only thing I’ve ever really feared. Look. There’s a city map beside the visitor kiosk. Tess gave me the address of our hotel for the night. Do you want to go there first and drop our bags?”

“First?”

“We’re going on to the Cathedral, aren’t we?”

“Just the two of us?” I say, as we drift toward the map.

“We don’t have to wait all day for the others. Tess called ahead. She’s arranged for us to be greeted at noon by a priest named Matthew. You’re okay with that, aren’t you? Being blessed by a man instead of a woman?”

I nod. It doesn’t matter a flip to me who or what blesses us, just so long as we’re blessed. Valerie runs her fingertip along the laminated map of the city, starting with the star that reads
YOU ARE HERE
and tracing it to the Cathedral, which sits in the dead center of Canterbury, like a castle in a board game.

“Wow,” she says. “The hotel really does look like it’s right on the grounds of the Cathedral. Tess said it was as close as you could get, but I thought . . . Look. We’ll be sleeping right here.”

I nod again. I’m a little thrown. I had thought we would spend the afternoon eating at some city restaurant that cooked its food in olive oil and garlic, shopping for souvenirs, maybe checking into the hotel for a shower and a nap. I didn’t expect to enter the Cathedral quite yet. Despite everything, it feels too soon. Premature. Like I’m not quite ready to let go of the last of Diana after all.

“What’s wrong?” Valerie says. “Are the boots hurting?” I shake my head and she frowns. “Are you dizzy again?”

“No,” I say, “but it wouldn’t hurt us to eat. Somewhere with olive oil and peppers and spice and things like that. And then, yeah, I’ll be ready for the Cathedral.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Why should I be nervous?”

Valerie turns away from the map. “Because this is what we’ve come for. All this time, all this way, all the weird shit that’s happened. This is what it’s been leading up to, isn’t it? Our appointment with God.”

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL is enormous. That much is obvious. That much is to be expected. It’s the first thing a visitor notices and I’d imagine it’s the last thing he forgets. Wall after wall of Gothic ornamentation, a crown of spires, a dozen places to enter or exit. But there is very little yard around it, not much of an approach. Once you are through the gates and on the grounds, it is right there upon you, looking down.

Despite the fact that we stopped on a side street for gyros and despite the fact that we dropped our bags off at the surprisingly large and modern lodge, Valerie and I are still early. We give our names to one of the elderly ladies working the group tour desk and she says she will call Matthew. We tell her not to worry, that we’re the ones who are off schedule, a remark that seems to confuse her.

“But you have walked, have you not, from London?” she asks. Apparently most tourists come in by bus or train and now, in this modern age, those rare pilgrims who arrive on foot enjoy an elevated status.

The woman consults her computer screen again. “And one of you is ill?”

Evidently she’s referring to me. Valerie steps away from the window, which looks just like the will-call booth at a theater, and I step up. “I’m fine now,” I say through the little hole in the glass, but Tess must have been very thorough when she called this morning with her instructions, for the woman is still staring at the computer screen, her lips moving slightly as she reads.

“Lovely thing you did, my dear,” she says, her small, red-rimmed eyes flicking up to me with respect. “Matthew will be here in a jiffy.”

A jiffy? It’s hard to imagine a priest doing anything in a jiffy, and Valerie and I both revert back into our daughter-of-an-interesting-mother routine, falling all over ourselves to assure this woman that we will wait, that we expect no special treatment, that the schedule of this priest should not be shuffled around to accommodate our unexpected early arrival. But this lady’s having none of it. She waves her hand to shush us and picks up a phone. The big retro kind, black and heavy. She talks to someone and when she puts it down she says, “Ten minutes.”

“Do you want your boots back?” Valerie says as we wait. We’ve sprawled on the grass, our heads resting on our backpacks. There’s no sense of religious formality here on the lip of lawn that circles the Cathedral, but rather the air of a picnic, with schoolkids and tourists lounging about.

“They suck, don’t they?”

“No,” she says. “They haven’t bothered me at all and I’ll take them back if you like when the tour is over. I just thought that if the priest is going to wipe the dust from our boots as part of the ceremony, it might be nice if, you know, if it’s our own dust that he’s wiping off our own boots.”

“When was the last time you were in a church?”

“My niece got baptized. You?”

“Diana’s memorial.”

And with that the shadow of Matthew falls across us. We both look up, squinting, but the sun behind him makes it impossible to see his face. All I can make out is the bright outline of a large man wearing a dress.

“It will be my honor to lead you through the Cathedral,” he says. “Intones” might be a better verb, for he has the voice of a movie priest—low and calm and certain—and God help me, that’s all it takes. I’m already tearing up, even as he extends two hands down to help pull us from the grass. He looks from me to Valerie, then back again. “Which one of you is ill?”

“We both are,” Valerie says. “In different ways, of course.”

He nods. “Of course.”

We follow him through an unassuming side door leading into a chapel, which is a good thing. I’m not sure I could handle seeing the entire expanse of the Cathedral at once. Better to sidle up on it, to come to the center incrementally, and Matthew says we will start our tour in the chapel where Becket was killed. It’s one small cell within the great body of Canterbury, an edifice that probably has a dozen such crannies. But this one, where the saint met his doom, is the most famous.

I know the story by heart and I suspect Valerie does too, but Matthew tells it to us anyway, guiding us from spot to spot within the chapel while he talks. Thomas Becket started his life not as a priest, but as the friend of Henry II, a notorious womanizer and rake. By all accounts, Becket matched the king thrust for thrust in their debaucheries and together the young men enjoyed all the perks of fame and wealth.

But as Henry progressed through his reign, he became frustrated by the fact that the Catholic church held as much power in England as did the monarchy. This was long before Henry VIII broke from the Catholic church and established the Church of England, before church and state were effectively merged, Matthew says. We have a bit of the background, do we not? He says this with uncertainty, for he knows we are Americans—which, after all, rhymes with “barbarians”—but both Valerie and I hasten to assure him we’re up on our English history, or at least on those fascinating Henrys. We’ve read Philippa Gregory; we’ve seen every episode of
The Tudors.

Matthew believes us and cranks his story into a higher gear. The point is that when Henry took the throne in 1154, he often felt that his power was eclipsed by that of the church, specifically the archbishop of Canterbury, who was practically a royal in his own realm. When the old archbishop finally died, Henry named his friend Thomas Becket to the post, thinking this was his chance to gain control over the church. “But things,” Matthew says gravely, “did not turn out as the king planned.”

Here in the darkened chapel I can see him better, and Matthew is quite a vision. He is wearing a white cassock, tied with a rope belt. He has a broad, honest face and he is younger than I would have guessed, probably no more than thirty, with deep-set blue eyes and straw-colored hair that is quite a bit longer than current fashion. His wife, he has already informed us, also works for the church, as do about three hundred other people. Her specialty is glass restoration and there is plenty here to keep her busy. The Cathedral is one of the major employers of the town, along with the universities. In other words, little in Canterbury has changed since the 1100s. Tourism is still the big business.

Valerie and I sit down on a pew and Matthew paces before us. Not nervously, but more in the manner of an actor or a professor. No, he says, nothing ever turns out quite like one expects, does it, not even if you’re the King of England. Because almost immediately after being named as archbishop, Thomas Becket pulled a Diana de Milan. He got religion. True religion, the most improbable and inconvenient kind. To the king’s great dismay, Becket took his role as archbishop seriously and in fact advocated for the church so enthusiastically that the two former friends were soon at odds. They may have once been lads together, drinking and carousing, riding shoulder-to-shoulder through the land that Henry ruled, but then Thomas repented. Changed, and no one likes it when their friends change. No one likes it when his friend grows up without him, precedes him down that thorny path to adulthood. The man who Henry had assumed would be an unquestioning patsy had turned into a powerful adversary and one day, in a fit of exasperation, the king muttered, “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”

Here’s the thing: he didn’t mean it. Despite their recent differences, Thomas Becket was still the king’s best friend and on some deep interior level, Henry even admired him. It was a momentary outburst.

But the irony and the tragedy is that the slightest outburst from a king can have immediate consequences. A couple of minor-league lords, eager to ingratiate themselves with their monarch, rode to Canterbury vowing to put the archbishop to death.

Becket knew they were coming. A man who rules a great church has spies of his own and besides, even if it hadn’t been this particular band of fools, others very much like them were certain to eventually attack. He had spoken out against the throne too many times and he must have known his day of reckoning would eventually arrive, even if he didn’t know precisely how or when fate would find him. And then one night, as Becket was at vespers, came a pounding at the door.

Matthew says the line just like that, “came a pounding,” a rather awkward and old-fashioned phrase he must have read somewhere, and then he nods solemnly toward the door where we entered. “We do a reenactment,” he says, “each year on the anniversary of the archbishop’s murder. Our little theatrical ends with that same pounding on the door and guests tell us that they find the moment quite dramatic.”

But not, I suppose, as dramatic as it would be if the church didn’t cut the scene there, but rather attempted to replicate the bloodbath that had followed the knock. For the monks of Canterbury tried to persuade Becket to bar the door and hide, but he said no, that the doors to a church must never be barred. And thus he stood a willing victim. The intruders rushed him as a group, slicing off the top of his head with their swords, and he died on the spot.

“King Henry was devastated,” Matthew tells us. “So the historians say, and I believe them. He had never intended for his comment, said in a moment of impatience, to be taken as a royal edict, and now his boyhood friend was dead.” Matthew pauses. He is like Tess, professionally doomed to tell the same stories day after day but, also like her, he has made an art of it, weaving in little beats and asides to the audience. In this case, his audience is only Valerie and I, but we are still getting the full-throttle performance.

“Can you imagine the horror of having that sort of power?” Matthew is saying. “The sort of power where a comment made against a friend could result in his actual murder? How many people might we have spoken dead with our words throughout the years? The king’s guilt was enormous and the canonization of Thomas Becket was the fastest in all of church history, the process beginning almost as he still lay bleeding in front of this altar.”

He now directs our attention toward the shrine of Becket, but after all this buildup, the altar itself is a rather humble affair, probably just like dozens more within the Cathedral. “The monks were busily wiping up the gore even as Becket lay dying,” Matthew says, “already certain they could sell any scrap of cloth that was dotted with the archbishop’s blood.”

“That’s sort of like what they did with Elvis Presley,” Valerie says. “His promoters would take the sheets that he slept on during his tours and cut them into little squares and sell them to his fans.”

Great. I like her better now, know her better now, but still . . . She has a knack for saying the most inappropriate and god-awful things in the world, always in that same cheerful tone of voice. But Matthew seems to be taking her seriously, as if Valerie were a fellow theologian, come from America on foot to discuss the mysteries of sainthood.

“Just so,” Matthew says. “Precisely. Becket was the medieval equivalent of your own Mr. Presley. Everything that touched him was rumored to have holy power.”

“My mother had a square of Elvis’s sheet, but she always told me she got it the honest way,” Valerie says.

“The honest way?” asks Matthew.

“She claimed she slept with him. Do the Brits say it like that? You know what I mean. Had carnal knowledge.”