I hear Agnes’s volume rise as we go: “This crisis demands a strong hand. God has ordained this for our benefit. We must deny ourselves every comfort—give no sleep to our eyes, no slumber to our eyelids. Submit ourselves to penance, night and day, until the pestilence is vanquished. If anyone is truly committed to a cure, she will be at prayer!”
“I’m bringing you to the infirmary, Mother,” Joan whispers to the prioress. We help her take a few halting steps, but pain shudders through her body.
“No. It will arouse panic. The pallet is already laid in my study. I will be fine; it’s merely a spasm.”
Joan looks at me dubiously. “Go,” she acquiesces. “Bring Mother there. I’ll get my things and come examine her.”
As we make our way across the cloister to her study, the prioress grabs me tightly. “Edyth,” she whispers, “find Alice.”
* * *
—
I search in the infirmary, the medicine garden, even the chapel. In the priory church, I light a candle at the feet of the Virgin and pray for help, and as I kneel, I see, behind my eyes, silvery curls melting into the statue—a wailing cry.
“Amen.” I cross myself hastily and follow the sound coming from the ambulatory. Past the altar, down the passage—I cannot believe the sight.
Where the chapel of Saint Christopher had been now stands a hastily erected wall. It doesn’t reach the ceiling but is too high to climb. The kneeler and candle lean against the hodgepodge of architectural salvage. The bell tolls five minutes until terce.
The enclosure of Alice Palmer has already taken place.
“Alice?” I call, horrified. “Are you in there?”
I hear only whimpering.
There’s a small opening in the wall, right at the floor. I lie on the ground and peer in: Alice sits in the corner of the empty niche with her knees pulled up. Her long, ash-blond hair is disheveled and knotted. She’s in her linen shift with a blanket around her shoulders. Her mouth is swollen and bruised. The only thing with her in the enclosure is a chamber pot.
Her words are barely intelligible: “Edyth…she drugged me…the whole bottle…”
“Agnes did this to you?”
“And the Dragon,” she mumbles.
The bell rings again as nuns enter the church from the large front doors, chanting—
Peccantem me quotidie, et non poenitentem
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Daily sinning, and not repenting
The fear of death terrifies me.
I recognize that prayer. It’s the office for the dead.
People say this office for anchorites. They’re saying it for Alice.
Agnes carries a tall candle of expensive beeswax as she leads two lines of sisters up the nave. Strangely, each of the sisters carries a bedroll. They really are planning to stay here, night and day, day and night.
Father Johannes begins the Mass. I scramble into the niche next to Alice’s enclosure and stare out at the ceremony, tears falling from anger and frustration. The whole scene is surrounded and shot through with vermillion sparks.
Joan pulls Agnes toward the ambulatory, trying to contain her fury. I can barely make out the words she whispers to the sub-prioress:
“Don’t do this. Don’t do this, you wicked woman. This isn’t how we do things.”
Agnes ignores her. The priest administers the rites and serves communion.
“I’m going to get you out of there, Alice,” I whisper into the window once the ceremony is under way. “I’ll sort it, I promise you—I’m not leaving you.”
No gate, no door; only that small window near the floor officially connects Alice to the world of the living.
* * *
—
So that’s why the Anti-Pri needed Mason to bring the stone. The length to which Agnes went to silence Alice—she and Felisia must have thrown that wall up themselves, between night offices, when no one would have noticed the side chapel in the dim light. Mason was right—I’m safer in the chapel, with a door I can bar against her. But tonight, I don’t want Alice to be alone.
I sneak to my cell, grab only a blanket to avoid arousing suspicion and tuck myself back into the niche next to Alice’s enclosure, passing in and out of anxious sleep. I dream of being sealed in stone walls. I dream of drowning, of being buried alive. I’m woken at daybreak, sweating and startled, by the loudness of the Sound, that thin green vibration that’s always in the corner of my vision. Nothing else crowds it out or suppresses it—there’s no red ping of hammers, nor shimmering gray silk of birdsong. What’s missing?
That’s it—no bells have rung. I’ve woken with the sun, and not with the sound of a bell. There could only be two possibilities.
Either no one else is dying…
Or everyone is.
And the churches have given up ringing the bells.
Days pass, and there are no bells of any kind now. No funeral bells, no prayer bells. No weddings, or town meetings, or Masses. All becomes howling prayer, punctuated by the prophesying of the Dragon, the disgusting cooing of the Anti-Pri, and the hopeless wailing of Alice Palmer.
— 31 —
Never have I seen so much rain, and this is England.
Instead of walking in their usual twos or threes, half of the sisters circle the cloister perimeter alone, like spiritless husks, between refectory, dormitory and church.
The other half are dead.
If it’s possible, Alice’s enclosure last week has made my world even smaller. I no longer have free rein of the whole grounds, but I’m limited to a tiny circuit: scriptorium-infirmary-chapel-church. The stream of sick pilgrims hasn’t slowed, despite the arduous task of a fevered person getting up the hill on impassable, muddy roads.
I know they need help in the infirmary, but I hide away in the scriptorium. There’s solace up here, above the misery only a few yards from this tower. It’s quieter and more somber without Brother Timothy to lift the atmosphere, but Muriel, Anne, Bridgit and I have a harmonious rhythm that works.
Joan finds me up here at my desk, painting drop capitals in red and azurite.
“The rain’s abating,” she says, taking off her wet linen veil, the dark rings around her eyes showing her exhaustion. I feel guilty that I’ve avoided going to help her. “Edyth, I need you to go to town. Here’s a list. Go see the druggist for the herbs and oils, and the jeweler for these stones—if they’re still there. One of my patients told me the stores are being abandoned, and I can not run out of these things. I don’t care if you have to steal them—God will forgive you for my sake.”