I. The Enclosure
The bishop’s gilded crosier shot into the air like the fist of God. It came down with a thump on cold stone, alongside his mud-splattered boots. John Stratford, Bishop of Winchester, shuffled as he completed the final blessing of the girl’s enclosure.
“Nomine patre, filii et spiritus sancti,” he intoned.
The bells of St. James’s church accompanied the dying echoes of the hallowed words as nature itself seemed to applaud the occasion. The beaten earth of the nave offered up a sudden surge of dampness and the early morning sunlight paid court to the eastern window, proudly haloing the rich, if crude, stained-glass impression of the patron saint. Even St. James himself nodded his assent, as three villagers later confirmed on oath.
The final stone was placed and mortared into the northern wall of the chancel. All the months of instruction and years of devotion had at last converged in this final proof of God’s grace. Christine had spent most of her eighteen years in the open air, working in the fields, but now she would see the world through two small holes. For the rest of her natural life the girl would live behind the stones. And it could be a long life, because she had been told that anchoresses in other shires of England had survived for thirty years or more.
To dwell in the small medieval church was now her destiny. Gone was her previous life, a busy world of light and shade compared with her new inner life in her enclosure, utterly dark, except for two slim shafts of light. The squint and quatrefoil were cut on each side of an extended protrusion in the wall, like the bow of a ship. The squint permitted a sacred view of the altar while the carved clover of the quatrefoil enabled her to participate in the communion. These tiny stone windows would be the focus of her existence, the means of her immersion in total contemplation. She knew that a curtain, decorated with a raised golden cross, had been lifted temporarily to let her share this holy ceremony. Through the quatrefoil, to her right, she saw Father Peter, the priest of the parish of Shere. Pressing her face against the exterior wall, she sensed that she had caught his eye, and he smiled a little through his formal mask of piety, as kindness and weakness danced together in his small brown eyes. Her eyes had been closed in prayer, so had his, but just for a second, in the brief visual exchange, they had celebrated a little of the earthly friendship, that of student and teacher, which had fortified their spiritual endeavours.
As the bishop completed the mass, Christine recited the words she had been taught, the words of St. Gregory: “In order to attain the Citadel of Contemplation you must begin by exercising yourself in the field of labour.” She realised clearly that she had not yet cast off all the physical world for, when the chantry priest had reached the top note of the Magnificat, she thought-very fleetingly-of her favourite secular song, “Summer is a- coming in,” which she had sung so often to her sister Margaret. She suffered a pang of doubt-but she had a lifetime to exile such baubles of her past. She would be enraptured by heavenly choirs, and her old songs would be like the croaking in the marshes of toads and frogs.
Through the quatrefoil she watched the bishop lead a cowled procession from the altar along the nave of the church, incense cloying the atmosphere. Despite her sense of spiritual elation, she was angry with herself that she should feel frustrated by a column which partially obscured the last view of her family. Behind Father Peter, the girl could just see her mother, tired and fearful. Her father, William the Carpenter, stood absolutely still, betraying no emotion.
The external curtain was dropped and her cell became completely black.
She knelt to begin her initial twenty-eight hours of fasting and constant devotions. Except for a few sips of water, she prayed dutifully throughout all the canonical hours, from Terce to the following Sext. Christine had prepared herself, fully she believed, but she still felt the stiffness in her legs when she stood up after her hours of kneeling at prayer. She was also suddenly aware of the cold. Faintness began to creep over her, and she sat back on her rough stone bench.
She remained sitting to regain her strength, which she tested by rising after a few minutes. The cell was just large enough to allow her to stand fully upright to explore her new domain. As she traced the walls with her hands, she cut her right forearm on the rough masonry, although the hurt was something she would train herself to ignore. She put her left hand over the gash and felt blood with her fingertips, raising them to her mouth to taste the blood now dedicated to her Saviour.
“Bear in your heart the words of Christ, sprinkled with His blood,” she quoted from the prayer.
And, without thinking, she ran her bloodied hand over her head. Once she had worn her blond hair down to her waist, but now it was cropped close to the scalp as part of her preliminary penance. She had been proud of her hair, though that pride had been banished.
Despite her vocation, Christine was still the practical daughter of a practical father, the best craftsman for many miles around, so she wanted to establish the precise details of her stone universe. Four feet from the bench, on the opposite outer wall, stood a heavy wooden trapdoor, opened only from the outside but inset with a small sliding iron grille, which she had licence to open and close. During her preparation she had been instructed how the parish priest, in silence, would bring her each week a large pitcher of water and bless it in front of her. She could drink sparingly and keep a little to wash herself. Every day, after Matins, her family would be allowed to donate food, sufficient for that day, and occasionally furnish her with a fresh robe. They would also take out and empty her night-soil bucket.
Some weeks before, the bishop had loaned her a treasured copy of the Gospels. She could barely read the first line in the dim light, but the book had twelve gaudy illuminations of the saints, pictures to nourish her soul. When the curtain was lifted and she held the book to the shafts of daylight coming through her grille, she could see the words and pictures plainly. Except for her robe, her sandals, her bedding and her rosary, she had no other worldly goods in the cell, but that pleased her: she needed few earthly artefacts, for before her lay the immeasurable bounty of serving Jesus Christ. God loved prayers, she reminded herself, and these prayers would ascend to heaven, be stored in a treasury and later returned to her as part of her immortal glory. Her Heavenly Father would not only make her solitude bearable. Birth and death were solitary, so were thought and growth, and spiritual reward. Her single purpose now was to experience a foretaste of eternal sweetness, the mystical union with God, the crown of life on earth.
It was the eleventh of August in the year of our Lord 1329. On the seventeenth of September, the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, she would receive an extra woollen blanket for the winter cold. Christine was assured that God would protect His anchoress.
***
The telephone rang. The hands paused at the keyboard and reached for the phone. A wrong number. Cursing this intrusion of modern life, Father Michael Duval mumbled to himself about the casual caller who disturbed Coleridge when he was writing the story of Kubla Khan. The poet, he recalled, never returned to his unfinished masterpiece.
“I will finish mine,” he muttered defiantly. Stroking the sides of his old typewriter like a prize cat, Duval looked up at the plain wooden crucifix above his sparse, immaculately tidy desk. Focusing on the nine-inch Christ, he spoke to it as he did a hundred times a day: “I can do it; I can prove that God can still act through mankind.”
His first task was to complete his
The priest returned to his work, his love. From deep within the almost suppressed memory of his childhood, he recalled, despite himself, the anguished look on his sister’s face when their father ordered her, after a trivial misdemeanour, to “remove yourself to the broom cupboard until you are ready to rejoin civilised society.” Duval imagined his sister trembling in the darkness. Involuntarily shaking his head to remove the unwelcome flash of memory, Duval pulled the page out of the typewriter, rolled it into a ball, and threw it very precisely into a wicker basket beside his desk.
He ran both his strong hands through his abundant greying hair, and then placed them on the desk, flat and palm down, as if in Muslim prayer. He stared at the inch of bone and flesh missing from his right index finger. That had been a wound in the service of his mission, but he had also been a little too careless, too confident in
