The Crown A Novel

23


The next day we lost the sun.

It had been pleasant, this last October week. The afternoon sun warmed the gardens and grounds, caressed the red and orange leaves heaped everywhere. The sisters filled baskets with light-green quince fruit that had ripened in the cloister trees. Most mornings, the sour yet pleasing smell of bonfires drifted in through the windows.

But a cold, fierce wind came before dawn on All Hallows’ Eve. It brought sheets of rain that ripped the last loose leaves from the trees. On an ordinary day at the priory, I would be inside, oblivious of the tempest. But this morning I tucked my letter to Bishop Gardiner into my habit’s sleeve and, with muttered excuses, made my way to the barn. After making sure no one was watching, I trudged to the leper hospital on the northwest edge of priory property, just beyond a hill fringed with tall trees.

I had donned a cloak so my habit would not be soaked through. I could have pulled its hood over my head, but I scorned such protection. I wanted to feel the cold rain on my face. I longed for the wind to sting my eyes.

My mood was wretched. I had written and sealed my letter to the Bishop of Winchester, and it was lamentably short. I relayed that Prioress Elizabeth had died on the morning of my return and that her last communication had gone missing. A story told by our oldest nun suggested that a secret room might exist at Dartford and that, when he visited the priory in 1501, Prince Arthur may have gone to this room. I had no precise knowledge of its location, but the room must be in the front part of the priory, not the cloister. There could be hidden the Athelstan crown. “Suggested . . . may have . . . might . . . could.” I pictured a clerk handing him my letter, and the bishop breaking the seal, impatient for news, his face darkening with rage after he’d raced through my few sentences.

I reached the top of the hill and paused to take shelter under the trees. A red squirrel darted away from me, upset that I’d penetrated his dry domain within the bushes.

Just below, in a hollow, stood the leper hospital. It had been abandoned before I came to Dartford; I didn’t know when exactly. Twenty years ago? Fifty? One hundred? Half the roof had collapsed. I could see the brown field through a ragged gap in the back wall. Green ivy choked every yawning window; the vines had long ago crawled inside, eager to claim the rooms once denied them.

But what of the lepers, those poor despised souls? Had they gone to another hospital to be cared for, or were they driven to find corners of London to hide in, frightened and sick? There was no one to ask.

Looking down on the hospital, the tears on my cheeks mingled with the raindrops. Fifty years hence, some girl might look at an abandoned Dartford Priory and wonder: What happened to the nuns once sheltered there? Why did they leave their parents and forsake marriage and motherhood to live in such a place? There’d be no one to tell the girl who we were or what we believed in: humble service to Christ, support of one another, learning, and contemplation.

Halfway down the hill to the hospital, I stumbled and fell to my knees. Heavy rains had turned the countryside to mud. I recovered and walked a more careful path to the front archway. The door was long ago torn off its hinges—for firewood, no doubt. Carved in stone over the arch were the words LEPER HOSPITAL OF SAINT MARY MAGDALENE AND ST. LAUDUS. Below, in smaller words, was THE ORDER OF SAINT LAZARUS OF JERUSALEM. I knew a little of this order: a medical one created by the Knights Templar. The Crusades. My boy cousins loved playing crusaders at Stafford Castle. They’d storm down the wide halls, brandishing wooden swords and shouting, “God wills it!”

I quickly found the window described to me. I felt along its sides. Yes, a wide opening existed. I took out my letter, which I’d sealed with wax this very morning. I removed the loose panel, slipped it inside, and replaced the panel. This hiding place had been well researched and prepared. For the first time, I wondered who would come for my letter and convey it over the channel to Bishop Gardiner. Some local man paid well for his trouble?

I had no wish to linger in this forlorn place and left through the archway.

I’d climbed halfway up the hill when something made me turn around and read the words over the archway again: The Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem. The Crusades. And then I remembered.

Richard the Lionhearted. King of England, leader of the Third Crusade. The other man mentioned by Bishop Gardiner in the Tower. Do you know of Edward the Third’s son, the Black Prince? What of Richard the Lionhearted? Or our king’s dead brother, Prince Arthur?

Although he had lived two centuries earlier, I knew more of Richard’s life than of the Black Prince’s. I’d always been interested in the Crusades. Richard, the Coeur de Lion, who fought the Muslims with tremendous bravery. He was imprisoned by another king on his way home from Jerusalem, and freed himself to reclaim his throne from his treacherous brother John. I remembered he married but had no children before he died in his middle years in the South of France.

The South of France.

How odd. King Richard died in the same part of the world where the Black Prince first took ill with the sickness that would kill him.

My thoughts raced as I reached the trees again. This was not unlike working on one of Sister Helen’s tapestries. At first only she knew the meaning of the pattern; we wove where the cartoon bade us but didn’t know what world we created until certain things took shape: men and women, deities and beasts, forests and seas.

I was beginning to see an outline to Bishop Gardiner’s strange pattern. With more perseverance, I might yet learn the secret of the crown.

I moved just a few feet out of the shelter of the trees, back to the priory. Something caught my eye to the far right. I squinted in the rain.

This ridge continued for a ways, then widened to a more circular, flat hill, bare of trees. A woman walked away from me on the hill, dressed in a plain novice habit, her hood down around her shoulders, like mine. It was Sister Christina.

I made my way toward her, clinging to branches where I could. The scratchy bark hurt, but I had to keep from falling down the slippery hill.

“Sister Christina!” I shouted as soon as I emerged from the trees. She had stopped walking but didn’t turn to face me; the wind must be carrying my voice away. It blew harder and colder now, though the rain had lessened.

When I was almost upon her, I called her name again. This time she jumped in surprise. I saw her face was ravaged by tears, as mine must be.

“What troubles you?” I asked.

She shook her head. I didn’t pry; I shared her grief over the shadowed future of Dartford Priory. Her wide forehead crinkled with lines, as if she were an old woman. Her nose was red from the cold—or from weeping. Her slate-blue eyes looked tired.

Suddenly, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it, hard. “Oh, Sister Joanna, forgive me for my anger with you.”

“I deserve all of the censure that I have received,” I said. “But thank you, Sister Christina. I’ve missed your friendship.”

We embraced, and I laughed a little; we were both so wet and cold.

She looked at me thoughtfully. “You were willing to sacrifice everything—your place as a novice, even your life—to honor your cousin, who died because she rebelled against heresy. I now think that what you did was very brave.”

I couldn’t bear her praise, minutes after hiding my spy’s letter.

“No, no, no.” I shook my head. “It was wrong of me.”

With a sweeping gesture, she turned around on the hill. “Do you know this place?”

I shook my head.

Now she pointed down, just to the side of her right foot. A gray stone was embedded deep in the ground.

“There was a nunnery here, on the hill, centuries ago,” she told me. “This is the foundation. You can find most of it if you look hard; it forms a giant square. Walk it with me, please.”

I followed Sister Christina, my eyes fixed to the wet ground. I could make out the intermittent stones peeking below the grass, in too straight a line to be of nature.

“It’s said that King Edward selected this land for Dartford Priory because of the existence of an earlier nunnery,” she said. “But I doubt he knew what became of it.”

“Why . . . what happened?”

Her back to me, she said, “The sisters were members of the cult of Saint Juliana. Do you know it?”

“I know Juliana was a martyr.”

“She converted to Christianity and wished to live as a virgin, but her father was a pagan. He ordered her to marry a Roman like himself. They say the devil even appeared to try to persuade Juliana, but she stayed strong. She wouldn’t deny her faith, and she was killed for it. The Romans beheaded her.”

I shivered in the wind. I felt so exposed here, with Sister Christina. Below, at the priory, we could be visible. The prioress’s windows faced the hills. It was permitted to walk on priory property, as long as we did not leave the grounds. On such a day as this, though, a walk would prompt questions.

But Sister Christina seemed bent on telling me of this lost nunnery, and I found her tale intriguing.

“When was it built, this nunnery?” I asked.

“I don’t know when it was built, but it was destroyed in the eighth century.”

A century earlier than King Athelstan’s reign, I thought. Aloud, I asked, “Why was it destroyed?”

She whipped around, her faced fierce. “Norsemen, Sister Joanna. That was when they were at the height of their power. The Norsemen invaded here and there, killing Christians. They stole our goods and burned our farms. But their favorite sport was the violation of nuns.”

I flinched. “Sister Christina, that’s terrible. Don’t speak of it.”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard me.

“The sisters must have hoped that their nunnery was far enough from the coast and close enough to London to be safe, but it wasn’t. A party of Norsemen found this nunnery—it was very small, perhaps eight women. They tried to get inside, to rape the sisters.”

I put my hands in front of my eyes, as if to shield myself from a horror happening here, now.

“The nuns got word that the Norsemen were on their way. They bolted all the doors. That wouldn’t stop the men for long—they had axes. But do you know what the nuns did?”

“Sister Christina, I can’t hear this. I beg you. Any story of a woman being violated, I can’t—”

She grabbed me by my shoulders and shouted, “They burned themselves to death! When the fire died down, the door was hacked to bits, but all they found was burned flesh. The Norsemen were so angry, they destroyed the nunnery; every brick was scattered across the field.”

The rough gray sky spun around me, and my knees weakened. I knelt, gagging.

In a much different voice, Sister Christina said, “Oh, Sister Joanna, I didn’t mean to do this to you. Forgive me.”

She squatted down and patted my heaving back. “I didn’t think you would be so upset. You’ve been in prison, in the Tower of London. Interrogated. I thought that I could tell you of this, that you could bear the tale. People of the village of Dartford know it; it’s been carried down for centuries. I heard it before I came to the priory.”

She helped me back up to my feet. I took a deep breath. “I simply can’t hear stories like that, but you had no way of knowing it, Sister.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I can see that you would not have the same view as I on the deaths of the nuns.”

“I grieve for them. What other view could there be?”

“In their deaths, they shared in the suffering of Christ in a special, most holy, way,” said Sister Christina. “The flames were purifying; they were a form of”—she searched for the right words—“a form of divine ravishment. Do you see?”

“Not entirely,” I admitted.

Movement at the priory entrance cut short our conversation. The prioress, Sister Eleanor, and Sister Rachel walked out into the cold, wet courtyard without their black cloaks to protect them, carrying baskets.

“Look.” Sister Christina pointed at the priory lane emerging from the woods. A line of people approached. I recognized the man leading them. The poorest people of Dartford had come to receive alms from the priory, as they did twice a month. It was a tradition established generations ago. The head of our priory would make the distribution of food and coins on the other side of the gatehouse.

Unnoticed, Sister Christina and I made our way for the priory. Beholding the majestic entrance of Dartford was a comfort, after seeing the crumbled walls of the leper hospital and the fragments of the ancient nunnery.

So many times I’d hurried past them, but now I paused to examine the stone statues of the king on either side of the door. Someone had told me when I came to Dartford that they were two versions of King Edward the Third: one young and one old. The statue on the left was bearded and wore long robes. The figure on the right was clean-shaven and wore chain-mail, armor, and carried a sword.

I took a closer look at the stone warrior on the right. “Wait,” I said. “Before we go in, do you know the histories of these statues?”

“The old one is King Edward the Third; the young one is his son, the Black Prince. The prince died before the priory doors opened.”

I was taken aback. “You are quite familiar with the era.”

She shrugged. “I grew up in Dartford, remember? I came here for lessons as a child. I know everything about the priory.”

She pointed at the tableau of stone carvings over the entrance. “I prefer the story of the Virgin to that of the kings.”

I looked at the figures, all genuflecting before Jesus and Mary. The figure of Christ stretched His hands over her head as His mother bowed before him. Above her head, carved deep in the back of the stone wall, nearly covered by lilies, was the outline of a crown. I had never noticed it before. It hovered over the exact center of the pointed archway that welcomed all to Dartford Priory.

Sister Christina followed my startled gaze and beamed as she, too, studied the carvings.

“Sister Joanna, you love the coronation of the Virgin, as well? Isn’t it wonderful? Her son is crowning her as the queen of heaven.”