“This is the conversa Edyth le Sherman,” says Agnes. “Edyth, this is the scriptorium, where the priory produces very precious books. Do not touch anything, or disturb those at work. Remember that they also are at prayer.”
“Ora et labora,” someone else mutters. Felisia reaches out to touch a stack of pages on a shelf. Agnes slaps her hand away.
There are mostly women here, but a man, too—the wizened old monk I traveled with in the cart. Each desk has a side table with inks, jars of quills and a globe-shaped flask of water on a metal stand. There are bowls and seashell halves full of different-colored paint, corked jars of various liquids. Light streams in from the windows, aided by candles, and I even glimpse occasional glints of gold jumping off the pages.
“This is Muriel,” says Agnes, leading me to the desk of a tall nun with a sharp nose. “She specializes in fine line work. See what she’s working on here?” I hesitate, but Agnes urges me over. I lean forward until I can see all the detail clearly. The rich clothes of the painted figures hang in neat, sharp folds. The lines are web-thin. I think of my own drawings, so clumsy in comparison, and blush.
“Anne next,” Agnes diverts me. “She came to us from York Minster. She doesn’t paint, but she’s the best scribe we have here. Just look at the control, each letter so perfectly vertical. I am always awed by you, Anne. What do you think, Edyth?”
“It’s perfect” is all I can say. But how could I possibly express the sensations coming at me, through me, from everywhere? This room is full of artists.
“I’m experimenting with a bastarda of Anglicana and Textualis,” the scribe says incomprehensibly. I can only give a polite nod.
The old monk is last. “I’m Brother Timothy,” he says with a jocular, grandfatherly smile. “I’m pleased to meet you in more…comfortable circumstances, Edyth.”
“Timothy is a fixture here,” says the sub-prioress.
“He’s been here since God was a boy,” calls a thick Scottish voice from another room. Everyone laughs, except Agnes.
“Brother Timothy was a young monk here when this priory was a double monastery, men and women living together,” Agnes resumes. “Joan the Physician has also been here since that time, and so have I. It’s not as common now as it once was.”
“I am working on a botanical for Joan, as a matter of fact,” says Timothy. “I hear she will be assisted by a promising young sister named…ah…Palmer? A friend of yours?”
“Yes, Brother Timothy! That’s Alice.” My attention is drawn, however, to one empty desk by the window. “Who sits here?”
“Well, now…,” says Anne. “We don’t really…”
“That was mine,” says Agnes curtly, ending the conversation. “A long time ago. Thank you all. I know you will help Edyth to be precise in her training.”
The sub-prioress ushers me into a side room. We go through two doors, with a muslin sheet hung between them. I sneeze in the intensely dusty air. A rainbow shines in the shaft of sunlight, made of colored particles, not light. Without this veil between rooms, the dust would cover all of the pristine parchments the scribes are laboring over.
A long, rough table occupies most of the room, scattered completely with bowls of different sizes. On the right-hand wall is a bureau full of small, labeled drawers: Azurite. Minium. Lapis. Arabica.
A woman is working there, her linen veil tied up and tucked under. She’s not wearing a nun’s habit, but a deep madder-red gown with a linen apron over it. Her sleeves are rolled past the elbow, her hands rainbows like the dust.
“Edyth,” says Agnes, “this is Bridgit.”
The woman turns and her eyes glint at me. “You’re very welcome here, Edyth,” she says in her brogue. “We’re like a wee family up here, away from all the noise and fray.”
“You will apprentice to Bridgit,” Agnes instructs me. “She is a conversa, like you.”
Agnes pulls Felisia’s hand out of a bowl of colored powder, and the girl sticks her finger in her mouth, pigment spilling on her chin. Without another word, Agnes grabs her hand and exits the double doors with her assistant.
Bridgit shakes her head and beckons me over to the bureau.
“They’re all in Latin,” she says. “Do you read?”
“A little…,” I say sheepishly. “I’m learning.”
“Sound this out, then.” Bridgit points to a drawer.
“Terre Verte, Prason.”
“Good, child. Open that one and see what you find.”
It’s nothing special, just a drawer full of brown, dust-covered rocks. Bridgit takes a small stone mortar and pestle down from a shelf and wipes them off with her apron. “Bring one here. I’m going to show you something.”
I put the little egg-shaped rock into the bowl. Down Bridgit’s pestle strikes, and the stone cracks in half. Inside is not the earthy color, but a bright olive green, and the taste of the oil that would have come from such a fruit floods over my tongue.
“What do you think of that?” asks Bridgit.
“That was inside the stone?”
“The earth yields its treasures if you know where to dig,” says the woman. “These you find in the river, just a mile downstream.”
A flood of awe rushes through me. Who could have guessed? The whole time I lived in Hartley Cross, I had wanted colors for my drawings, and they had probably been right under my feet.
Bridgit seems eager to have a protégé. She leans closer to me with a sparkle in her eye. “Now, the painters don’t use this only for drab, green things. If their red is too bright, they’ll tone it down with this. I’ve even seen them laying this underneath the color of flesh. Whoever heard of green flesh, eh? But it works.”
“This is what they paint with in there?” I marvel. “Rocks?”
“Yes, Edyth. Watch.” She pounds the rock into smaller and smaller bits. “Then you grind the pieces against the sides of the mortar. Do you see?” She dips her fingertip in the bowl and rubs the pigment between her fingers. Then she pounds again for a long time—it might be ten minutes. But at last, the powder is so fine, it no longer resembles sand crushed from a stone, but costly flour.
“How do you get it to…um…stick?” I ask.
“To the parchment? Good question. With a binder. That’s next.” She reaches into a basket full of eggs. She separates an egg into two bowls, yolk and white, picks up the yolk by its invisible membrane and breaks it into another bowl.