“I shall write tonight. I can feel my words flowing,” he confided to the crucifix.
Christine knelt and thanked God for His mercy and His sign of the stigmata. She knew He would understand her leaving and He would condone the breaking of her vows by granting her a holy indulgence. Her bleeding hands were the perfect symbol of the Christian passion, absolute proof; no writhing and howling like Mistress de Kempis.
In her frenzy, Christine had managed to remove two of the stones that stood aligned with the bolts. Parts of her fingers had been worn almost to the bone, and deep gouges despoiled her arms.
To Christine, her own endeavours were God’s miracles; her head was spinning, her senses dulled and vision blurred by pain. On the sixth day after she believed God had granted her the visible signs, she managed to make enough room for her thin wrist to move the bolts.
She kicked the trapdoor open with almost the last of her strength, climbed through it, and stepped blinking into direct light for the first time in two years. The breeze embraced her cheeks as she staggered through the churchyard on legs that had not taken more than one or two paces at a time in almost two years.
Christine recalled and felt overwhelmed by the story of Christ walking on the water, when His lightness of being had overcome gravity. She was following His holy steps, although she did not glide across the ground. In a misty twilight, she limped slowly and painfully to her father’s house, where William opened the door to her weak knock. He could not speak, but Christine smiled on her father; he had visibly aged even more in these past weeks.
“Father. Look on these hands-God has blessed me with the stigmata. These holes are my Heavenly permission. He has told me I can leave the wall. I must be free to do His will outside this cell. His will shall be done.”
William stared in stupefaction at his daughter’s hands, seeing wounds from clawing at stone but no stigmata. He tenderly gave his arm to Christine to help her balance as he sat her down on a bench.
Helene ran to the girl, and grasped her tightly. “God be thanked, you needed to be free from that wall or you would have died.”
They fed her, and bandaged her hands. Neither Helene nor William could tell their beloved first-born that torn hands did not a miracle make, that proof of the stigmata required more than bloodshed and fever.
Duval fingered the knob on the end of the typewriter carriage, and rubbed the stump of his severed digit with his thumb while scrutinising his notes for a few minutes. He was drying up. Taking out a small riding crop from his desk drawer, he struck the top of his thigh as hard as he could. He punished himself thus five more times before returning to his work.
Little is known about the period that Christine spent away from her cell…
He stopped typing, angry with himself.
“Of course little is known. Most of this is the revelation I embrace when Christine speaks to me.” He almost spat the words at his crucifix.
“Christine,” he said aloud, “where are you? I have harvested another woman for you.”
He could not feel the presence of the anchoress. “You are not in my head,” he moaned. “Do you want me to visit you now?”
Duval left his study and checked in the kitchen to ensure that the trapdoor leading down into the cellar was bolted. Putting on his raincoat, he grabbed the lead and whistled for Bobby.
It was a short trudge in the rain down to St. James’s. He instinctively did not want to be inside a church at that moment, so he walked around to the northern section and, leaning against the outside wall of the cell, he waited. After ten minutes he seemed to feel a force emanate from the cold, wet wall. Now he understood what Christine had endured, and what he had to write.
Within fifteen minutes, Bobby was curled up in front of the stove and Duval’s fingers were dancing on the typewriter.
In the initial tumult of her reunion with her family, little was said about the alleged stigmata. The next day, at dawn, Christine set out for the journey to Peaslake, accompanied by her father. She asked her mother to tell Father Peter that she would seek out the bishop and explain her flight from the cell. If she could, she would renew her vows. But she had to see her sister, even if the price was excommunication.
Although exhausted emotionally by her recent trials, Christine-hooded to avoid any neighbours’ stares-walked at first with relative ease. Every part of creation seemed to be bursting with life: she heard every bird-call, saw every leaf, and every tree proclaimed a miracle. The whole world was welcoming her and for a while the seriousness of her mission was transcended by God’s bounteous earth. The sweet, rich smell of cow dung teased like jasmine, every sense was exaggerated beyond measure. But soon she grew tired, not of the green wetness, but because her body was not accustomed to walking, so her father made her stop every half-mile to rest.
William said very little, his thoughts consumed by his many burdens. During the third rest, sitting on a fallen oak tree, he finally asked, “Will the bishop allow your penance and return-even if that be your desire? Besides,” he went on, “our family is in lowly esteem with Sir Richard. It may be that we all shall be banished by lord and bishop. Perhaps your mother and your brother should have journeyed with us, and then all flee together from Peaslake? While there, we are within the grasp of bishop and lord.”
Christine felt none of his uncertainty. “Father, we must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. I will seek out the dean and bishop, as is my promise, and throw myself upon their wisdom and their mercy. The dean will advise about the injustice done by Sir Richard. Our lord bishop is no friend of Vachery Manor, either. This is known.”
“I doubt not your piety, my daughter, but a village girl, two long years enclosed, may not judge too well the politicking of Church and nobility.” He touched her cheek, drawn and pale with fasting. “But we must be on. ’Tis many a long stride to Peaslake, especially with your weak limbs. Or I may have to carry thee like a new-born lamb.”
At the end of a bitter-sweet day of fatigue and yet reinvigorated senses, Christine and her father arrived in the hamlet of Peaslake, where William’s cousin lived in a row of three wooden houses rather grandly misnamed Queen’s Cottages. One end of the cottages was adorned with a massive dung heap, and the other with a haystack. A pig rushed from the middle house, where Margaret was staying.
Adam, William’s first cousin, greeted them at the door, hospitable despite his surprise.
“Welcome to my home, cousin,” he said. “Good it is to see you. What be it? A year or more? And who be with you in the hood?” Adam started. “Heavens above, it be your Christine. Special leave from bishop then to see your Margaret?”
Christine just nodded as she stooped to enter the dank main room.
Adam’s wife bustled with formalities and offered mead while the children and chickens were shooed out of the room, which was illuminated by a solitary rush light. On a rough straw palliasse Margaret lay sick, but she managed a smile for her closest kin.
Christine hugged her sister as silent tears merged into tiny rivulets chasing down their cheeks. Christine, reluctant to move from the embrace, eventually kneeled beside her sister and, making the sign of the Cross, said a prayer for the sick. The whole room fell quiet as the anchoress prayed.
Finally, Margaret broke the silence: “I be sick in my body, Chrissie, but you need not forsake your holy vows to visit me. Were I well, I would have come to your cell. Has a privilege been granted by the bishop?”
Christine shook her head. “Of bishops and lords will we parley anon, but first tell me what ails thee. Father said your confinement was not a goodly one.”
“Two months or so I think will be my term,” she said grimacing, “but the pains are on me now. The village midwife says it may be nigh, albeit before it be full-grow’d inside.”
She winced as she said this and put both her hands on her extended belly.
