The Clerkenwell Tales Peter Ackroyd (nice books to read TXT) 📖

with a long ribbon to the base of her close-stool and, taking up her crozier, proceeded down the stone stairway to the refectory. Before confronting Sister Clarice she wished to ensure that the others were quiet. She found them finishing their beef and bread. Sister Bona, the sub-chantress, was reading aloud from the Vitis Mystica, and was expounding the five wits of hearing, sight, smelling, feeling and chewing. When Agnes entered she stopped, and the others rose at the table.

The nuns of course observed the rule of silence, and employed their hands in sign language to receive salt or beer; to ask for salt, for example, it was necessary to put the right thumb over the left thumb. Agnes suspected, however, that there had been a slight murmur of words before her arrival, a little whisper of “sic” or “non” as Sister Bona had maintained her slow and steady reading of the treatise. If any nun had been caught she would have been compelled to eat in the convent cellar with the infirm and the feeble-minded but, under the gaze of Dame Agnes, each one preserved her decorum. The prioress passed through, acknowledging their reverence with the smallest bow of the head, but she could not resist a sidelong glance at Sister Beryl who was smiling broadly at her. It was no sin to smile, especially since the holy scriptures had taught that we would all be merry in heaven, but Beryl’s expression angered Agnes; it was the anger of a child left out of the game.

Sister Idonea walked softly behind and, as they left through the side door of the refectory, she slipped upon the cobbles. “You should not walk wet-shod.” Agnes could hardly keep her countenance and resist laughing. “The stones are treacherous.”

They walked across the cloister to the painted chamber, a small room beside the chapter-house which was used by the treasuress as her office.

Sister Clarice was standing in a corner, her hands folded across her chest.

“Where be the gay robes and the soft sheets and the little monkey playing with a ring?” The prioress said nothing. “Agnes, you will conceive of a holy man and give birth to the fifth evangelist.” Clarice was only eighteen years, but already her voice was possessed of an implacable authority.

Agnes could feel herself trembling. “Listen, cocatrice, I will send you to do penance among the lepers of St. Giles.”

“And I shall teach them the words of Jesus the flower-maker.”

“Not so. You are the devil’s story-teller.”

“Is it the devil who tells me of the king? Is it the devil who prophesies his undoing?”

“Ave Genetrix! Mother of lies!”

It had all begun with a dream, or a vision. Clarice had fallen into a fever three months before and, while confined to bed, had confided to the infirmaress that she had seen a demon in the shape of a deformed and very ancient manikin going around the dormitory and touching each of the nun’s beds. He had then turned and said to Clarice, “Take careful note of each place, little sister, for they shall not be without a visit from me.” In another dream, or vision, Clarice had fallen upon the demon and beaten him with her fists; he laughed and sprang out of her grasp, saying, “Yesterday I disturbed your sister the chantress much more, but she did not hit me.” On hearing of this strange interview, the chantress herself had become very indignant and demanded that Agnes rebuke Clarice before the whole community in the chapter-house.

Instead Agnes had invited the young nun to her chamber. “You know,” she began, “that there are three forms of dream. There is that of somnium coeleste or heavenly influence. Your wind does not blow from that corner.”

Clarice laughed out loud. “Purge me with rhubarb, ma dame.”

“Then there is the dream which springs from somnium naturale and your bodily humours. The third comes from somnium animale or dejection of spirits. Can you tell me, Clarice, which of these is yours?” The nun shook her head. “Do you know that your brain is filled with owls and apes?” Clarice still said nothing. “Do you dream of King Richard?”

“Yes. I dream of the damned.”

Agnes ignored her dangerous answer. “A dream is sometimes called a meeting. What is it, then, that comes to you?”

“I am sister to the day and night. I am sister to the woods. They come to me.”

“You are babbling like a child.”

“Why, then, I should go to a dark place beneath the nunnery.”

Dame Agnes walked across the chamber to her and slapped her face. Her monkey began to cry and chatter, and suddenly she felt an overwhelming need to sleep. “I pray that God gives me wisdom enough to reach true judgement. Now go.”

That night Sister Clarice rose from her bed and wept, as if she were being berated by some unseen power. Resisting as much as she could, she seemed to be pushed from the dormitory and into the choir of the church. She lay down in one of the stalls, and began to speak in a low voice. Many of the nuns had now gathered in alarm, among them the infirmaress and the sub-prioress who repeated her words to Dame Agnes the next morning. “He shall awake the waster with water. Before five years are fulfilled such famine will arise through floods and foul weather that fruit shall fail. And so he has warned me. When you see the sun amiss, and two monks’ heads, and a maid has the mastery, and multiply by eight. Then death will draw on and Davy the ditcher will die of despair.” The plague or “death” had come only nine years before, and Clarice’s prophecy was sufficiently alarming to send two nuns into a fit of weeping. The rest looked on, horrified, as Clarice trussed up her habit and in open view placed her hand within her queynte crying, “The first house of Sunday belongs to the sun, and the second to Venus.” Then she fell into a