The Sempster's Tale (3 page)

But though achingly aware of how near the bed was and how long since they had lain there together, Anne also saw how quickly daylight was slipping from the room, and she stepped back from him, saying while she tried to steady her voice and check her lust to have him, “I have something for you.”

He reached to draw her back to him, murmuring, “I hope so.”

She laughed and slipped away from him toward the table. Laughing, too, he followed her. They were neither of them heedless with greed, having found before this what pleasure there was in putting off their final pleasure, how the ache of longing refined into ever-deepening passion over supper and wine and talk. But suddenly, too late, worried at what she had done, Anne hesitated, her hand hovering over the cloth still covering the two loaves of waiting bread. Daved, curious, reached past her and lifted the cloth. His stillness then and his silence made her look up at him, afraid she had done it wrongly. Or should not have done it at all. And she said quickly, “It’s challah bread. Or I meant it to be. I made it for you. Two loaves, the way you told me about it. I remembered what you told me, and today is a Friday, and I thought…”

She faded to a stop as his gaze shifted from the bread to her, and she saw he was not angry as he said gently, “Just challah. Challah is challah, complete in itself. No more need to call it ‘challah bread’ than there is to call you ‘Anne woman.’ Though woman you most surely are.” He put his hands on her waist and drew her back against him, adding— and now she heard the sadness under his voice, “The candles, too. You remembered them.” He looked aside to where she had left a basin of clear water, a cup, and a clean towel sitting on the chest beside the door. “And that. Anne, my love, it isn’t safe. If someone should see…”

‘No one will see,“ Anne said, aching for his sadness. She had done all this to make him happy, not sad. ”Even if someone did see, they wouldn’t understand. No one here knows any more what it means. They can’t.“

‘They do not know, no,“ Daved agreed. ”Because Jews were banished from England four lifetimes ago.“ And if it were found out that he was here and a Jew, he would answer for it with his life.

That Anne knew his secret and might well share his fate were they found out was measure of the love and trust between them, and she started to turn toward him, to reassure him and herself that here in her chamber where no one else would come they were safe; but he was looking past her to the fading light at the window that told the sun was slipped below London’s housetops; and on sudden laughter he cast aside any worry over danger and said, “The candles have to be lighted before the sun sets. If we’re not to waste your effort, we must do it now.”

Anne immediately brought the lighted candlestub from the tray and made to hand it to him, but he shook his head, saying, “It’s for the woman of the house to do.”

Except for the one time he had told her, before they became lovers, that he was a Jew, he had said very little about his life. He sometimes told her bits and pieces, of his travels and his merchant-work—stories gathered and brought to her half as gift and half in reparation, she thought, for telling her so little else about himself. She did not even know where he lived, only that it was not France and seemed to be somewhere farther off than Flanders or Holland.

Because there was no use, she simply tried never to think of his… home. Even the word came hard to her.

His home, where he could drop pretense of being Christian. Where he had a wife. Where he might even have children. She didn’t know. He had never told her more, until his last night with her here, when they were lying in each other’s arms after love, taking pleasure simply in being near each other and knowing he would soon leave both her and England. Then he had talked about his… Shabbat. And she had lain quiet in his arms and listened. It was what he missed most in the months he spent seeming to be a Christian merchant, he said; and hearing the longing in his voice, Anne had drawn from him with soft questions everything she could about it, even to how to make challah. Her thought had been that if Shabbat was so dear to him that it was what he remembered most when he was away from… home, then she would give him Shabbat here, too—make it part of their memories together. It wasn’t Christian, but nothing about it had seemed something that would damn her soul for doing it. And after all it was something Christ must have done all of his life, so how
could
there be ill in it?

Or so she had told herself until now—until this moment when, with candle in hand to light the Shabbat candles in their silver holders, she stopped and looked up at Daved beside her, hoping he would see only her uncertainty, not her fear.

‘You light them,“ he said encouragingly. ”Then I’ll say the blessing over them, since you cannot.“

Her trust in him had brought her to this, and she would go on trusting him. She lit the candles, and Daved stretched out his arms, drew his hands over the flames and toward himself three times, then covered his face with his hands and began,
“Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam
…”

Anne shuddered. His voice was gone strange on the sounds that must be words but were like no words she had ever heard. They were a strangeness she had not known was in him.

He finished, lowered his hands, smiled at her, and was simply Daved again. “Now it’s begun,” he said, his voice his own. “And now I sing…”

Anne stiffened, afraid of hearing more of those sounds coming from him.

Daved saw and asked gently, “Or I do not?”

She had meant this as a gift to him. If she failed to trust him… so much of what was between them depended on their trust of one another; and she smiled at him and whispered, “Go on.”

Afterward she would be beyond bounds glad her trust had been stronger than her fear then. He faced the candles again, began to sing, his voice so soft it barely carried beyond the table, and while she listened her fear went from her. The words and even their sound were still strange—“…
Bo’achem le-shalom malackei ha-shalom malachei elyon…”
—but there was beauty in them, and when Daved put out a hand to her, she took it, and he went on singing while the evening’s soft summer shadows deepened around them, and she found herself wishing she could sing with him, there was such peace and longing in whatever the words were.

He finished and looked at her. In the increasingly shadowed room, there was now only the candlelight by which to see each other, with Daved’s face half in shadow, half in warm candle-glow as he said quietly, “The song asks for God to bless this home with peace and, more deeply, that we find peace within ourselves, both on this Shabbat and afterwards.
Shalom aleichem.
May peace be upon you.”

Faintly, trying to say it rightly, Anne echoed,
“Shalom aleichem.
My love.”

He touched her cheek with his fingertips, and all her longing to have him returned in a rush. But he drew back a step and said, “The next part is to you, my
eishet chayil
—my woman of valor.”

Anne moved her head in a slight nod, willing for him to go on, but he already was, still holding her hands, still gazing at her as he sang,
“Eishet chayil mi yimtza ve-rachok
…”

Chapter 2

The thick sunlight of the midsummer’s early afternoon poured warmly into the square garth enclosed by the paved cloister walk and crowded buildings of St. Helen’s nunnery, leaving the roofed cloister walk pleasantly in warm shadow, with the quiet of Sunday rest between the day’s longer Offices of prayer lying over everything. If Dame Frevisse was displeased with it all—and she was—she knew the fault lay in herself, not in St. Helen’s. Used as she was to her own St. Frideswide’s priory set small among the fields of northern Oxfordshire, the change of place should—if nothing else—have pleasurably diverted her because St. Helen’s was neither small nor in the countryside but in London, with all London’s busyness of people and churches spread around the priory’s own gathering of church, chapter house, hall, refectory, library, dormitory, kitchen, workrooms, parlors, and the prioress’ private rooms, with the cloister walk and its garth in their midst, a high-walled garden at the back and, toward the street, the foreyard, guesthall, and the wide double gateway opening to broad, busy Bishopsgate Street running down toward London bridge and the Thames. And if that very busyness and crowding were what she disliked, here was the peace of the cloister walk, familiar to her from every nunnery she had ever been in, from her childhood times as a sometimes boarder in French nunneries to all her years in St. Frideswide’s.

No matter if a nunnery were large or small, rich or poor, a nun’s life was lived around the cloister walk. She passed along it to the church for the Offices and to all her other duties elsewhere inside the nunnery, sometimes worked there and often took her recreation, as Frevisse was now, walking around it. The very familiarity should have been a comfort to her but it was not, and for once she would have welcomed the chance to distract herself in talk with someone else; but while the Benedictine Rule of silence had grown slack in nunneries since she had become a nun, here the nuns still kept to silence on Sundays at least, denying her even the diversion of talk. Nor could she sit still and read as usually she would have gladly done and as other nuns were doing, including Dame Juliana who had accompanied her here from St. Frideswide’s.

Seated in the shade on the low wall between walk and garth with a book of saints’ lives open on her lap, she was probably more dozing over it than anything, Frevisse thought sharply, not in the humour for charitable thoughts toward anyone, however blameless. In truth just now she was ready to blame everyone, including herself, for everything; nor did knowing that was unjust and made no sense change her humour in the slightest. Which only served to irk her the worse as she continued to walk, her pace measured, her hands tucked quietly into the opposite sleeves of her black Benedictine gown, her head a little bowed, around the walk and around and around again, wishing she could settle, knowing it would be better not only for herself but for the seeming that she was come to London for only the plain reason given to everyone, including Dame Juliana.

The plain reason but a false one.

For the world and all to know, she was here on the matter of funeral vestments her cousin Lady Alice meant to give to St. Frideswide’s in memory of Lady Alice’s late husband, to go with provision of special prayers for his soul. That Lady Alice’s late husband had been the powerful duke of Suffolk and murdered not two months ago on his way into exile made the gift less ordinary than it might have been but still straightforward enough: Frevisse was to meet with the vestment-maker to agree on the patterns to be embroidered and the cloth to be used and then confirm the commission on Lady Alice’s behalf. Prevented as Lady Alice was by her present mourning from making the London journey herself, it was reasonable she had asked Frevisse be allowed to go in her stead, a measure of her favor and trust toward her cousin, with no reason for anyone to think the business over vestments hid another matter altogether.

But it did, and it was that other matter that had Frevisse restlessly pacing, angry to be here, as inwardly a-seethe as England presently was outwardly. With Suffolk’s years of misgovernment for the king and this past year’s headlong losses in the French war—with most of the late King Henry V’s great conquests in France now gone—there was such a continuing rumble of angers and rebellions that this was no time to be traveling, which Lady Alice had acknowledged in her letter to St. Frideswide’s prioress Domina Elisabeth when telling her of the intended gift and requesting Frevisse’s part in it as well as promising the use of her own rowed barge so that Frevisse and her escort could travel by river rather than road from Oxford to London.

Domina Elisabeth, more than willing to oblige so wealthy a patron as Lady Alice, had agreed without apparent second thought. Frevisse, under a nun’s vow of obedience, had had no choice but to accept and obey. She had been uneasy, though. She and Alice had not last parted pleased with each other, that Alice should be asking this of her now; and her unease had only increased at finding the barge stripped of any sign it belonged to the duke or duchess of Suffolk. From bow to stern the Suffolk colors of blue and gold were painted over to a plain brown, and the canvas tilt no longer bore the ducal heraldic arms.

Worse had come when the barge’s master had taken secret chance to give her a sealed letter, saying with a wary look around them, “My lady ordered it was for only you to know of.”

Frevisse had slipped the folded and sealed paper into her sleeve with a sinking certainty she was not going to like whatever it said. She had learned to be wary of Alice’s secrets, and her wariness had not lessened when she finally had chance to read the letter, such as it was. The two sentences told her nearly nothing: “When my agent in London meets you about the vestments, he will have another matter for you that none else must know of. However much I have lost your friendship of late, I pray you, in mercy, to aid me in this.” That was all; and just as the wax seal had been plain, there was no signed name to betray who had written it.