A Vision of Light Read online

  “You are in the house of no ordinary woman,” the old woman said, “for I have a rare knowledge of herbs, cures, and charms, and my reputation for difficult cures and safe delivery in most dangerous cases is widely known. Why, even great ladies have sent for me in—”

  A midwife! I suddenly remembered my own child and felt frantically for the swelling in my belly.

  “The baby is dead,” she said, eyeing me acutely. “I think it was probably already dead in your belly when we found you, but of course, I couldn’t be certain. It couldn’t live through the fever. That does happen, you know, and then the child is born later, all shriveled up.”

  “All shriveled? It was a monster, then. I knew it would be a monster.” I started to cry.

  “Oh, not a monster at all, I wouldn’t say,” she said, and patted my shoulder. “I baptized it ‘Child-of-God’ as the head was being born, just in case it was alive. There’s no priest around anymore to tell me I was wrong in that. But it was a nice little girl, perfectly formed but very tiny—all still and white.”

  How strange that I could remember nothing. I tried to put my mind back to what had happened, but I could see nothing when I closed my eyes except a sheet of flames.

  “A girl, a perfect girl?” I repeated, in a sort of daze. The old woman took my hand.

  “I wrapped her in her shroud and buried her here, beneath the apple tree. You may see where, when you are well.”

  I imagined my little girl, all white like an angel with a sleeping face. Of course she couldn’t live. A little girl couldn’t live in that bad man’s house.

  “Thank you for baptizing her,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m glad she had a name. She’s happier in heaven.” Then I blew my nose.

  “You needn’t thank me,” answered the old woman. “That’s part of any good midwife’s job. I will not let any baby that I deliver die unbaptized.”

  But of course, you never forget a lost child, though everyone says it’s not important. As I grew stronger, and at last could come out into the autumn sun, I would sit beneath the apple tree and spin, or card wool, or clean beans, and imagine my little girl—how she would have been, the color of her hair, how her smile would look, or her fat feet when she started to walk. But she was a child of God—I’ve baptized many like her since then. Maybe angels teach them to walk.

  MARGARET LOOKED UP SUDDENLY at Brother Gregory, and he lifted his pen from the page. Her face was very agitated. Her hands, clasped beneath the Byzantine gold cross she habitually wore, showed white at the knuckles.

  “Do you think so, Brother Gregory? Do lost babies grow when they go to heaven? Does someone teach them and hold them? Or do they stay the same size, wetting their swaddling clothes forever and ever?”

  Brother Gregory was appalled. This foolish woman was a wellspring of superstition. Spiritual beings, of course, do not wet, and the kind of mind that could even entertain such a supposition was capable of any idiocy.

  “Do you know, I still dream about my lost girl, even now, sometimes? I pray for her on holy days and light a candle before the statue of Our Lady for her. You don’t think that is foolish, do you?” Margaret appealed to Brother Gregory’s opinion as a cleric.

  “It is never foolish to pray for the blessed dead, Dame Margaret,” answered Brother Gregory gravely, changing the subject as he sharpened his quill and closing his inkhorn so that the ink might not dry during this interlude. Now that he thought it over, it was perhaps not certain that babies might not go to purgatory until they stopped wetting. Besides, God’s ways are very mysterious, and too much speculation can lead to heresy. That reminded him of a more serious problem. He frowned at Margaret.

  “Who was this old woman? Was she a witch? Did you learn unholy arts from her?” Brother Gregory liked to keep a close track of these things. One cannot be too careful.

  “Oh, goodness, Brother Gregory, no one could be further from a witch. She was an honest Christian widow. Her husband had been a forester, and she earned her living by her skill at midwifery and knowledge of herbs. She loved Our Lady with all her heart, and I never knew her to sell a poison, or love charms, or to cast spells on the unborn. She was always charitable in her love for all creatures, even those without souls.” Margaret looked pious, and paused. One always had to be careful not to alienate men of religion, even the shabby sort. It was nearly impossible to tell what they would tolerate sometimes, and what would send them flying off into a high dudgeon. And each one was a little different.

  “But I must continue with my story, for then everything will be clear.” Margaret looked pensively at the ceiling, as if by rolling her eyes upward, she would again see the shadows of those long-forgotten scenes. Brother Gregory shifted uncomfortably and readied his inkhorn again.

  WHEN OLD MOTHER HILDE (for that was her name) found me, she had taken me for some lady, for as I have said, my husband liked to show off his money by overdressing me. So she had found me wearing a shift of fine white linen, a gown and surcoat beautifully embroidered, and a great blue woolen traveling cloak as soft as a newborn baby’s hand. But how strange they looked on me now! For I had grown so thin that they hung upon me as if they belonged to another woman. They were a smoky color, as well, for Mother Hilde had hung them over the fire for several days to drive the pestilence from them.

  During this time Mother Hilde was constantly mourning and grieving for her two grown sons, the last of her five living children, who had been the mainstay of her long widowhood. When they had been called away on labor service, they never returned alive, for the pestilence had struck them down far from home. “And who even knows where they are buried, my boys, or if any prayers were said over them!” she would cry, wringing her hands. Now nobody was left to her but the poor changeling, the child of her old age, and even his smiling and clumsy stroking could not stop her fits of weeping, when they were hard upon her.

  But as I started to say, old Hilde was overjoyed to find that the person her dream had sent was not a lady, but a woman who was as curious and observant as herself, one who was not too proud to work with her hands. Of course, I couldn’t resist boasting a little bit.

  “And not only, before I wed, did I spin the finest thread in the village, and bake the lightest loaf, and brew ale second only in quality to my mother’s, but I know dozens of good stories and ballads—better than most jongleurs, they all said.”

  “Oh, really?” she answered with a little smile. “How many verses of the ‘Geste of Robyn Hoode’ can you sing?”

  “Why, over sixty good verses, more than anybody else in Ashbury!”

  “Foolish girls cannot yet outrun their elders,” she cackled happily, “for I know over a hundred. Do you know ‘Reynard the Fox,’ and the ‘Tale of the Three Robbers’?”

  “I know ‘Reynard’ three different ways,” I sniffed.

  “And ‘Patient Griselda,’ too, I’ll wager,” she said, as if she were laughing at me.

  “I don’t like ‘Patient Griselda,’ not a bit,” I replied with a sour look.

  “I didn’t think you would,” she chuckled. “I don’t care much for her myself.”

  BROTHER GREGORY LOOKED UP from his writing and interrupted.

  “‘Patient Griselda’ is a very instructive moral tale. Girls today would be much improved if they thought of the lesson taught by Patient Griselda more often.”

  Margaret was tremendously annoyed. Her memory was in full flow, and being interrupted by the hateful Patient Griselda was just the sort of thing Brother Gregory would do.

  “I suppose you amuse yourself by reciting moral tales to sinful women,” she said, her eyes sparking dangerously.

  “I refuse to let trash take up space in my mind,” replied Brother Gregory with a look of prim disapproval. “When I recite, I recite psalms for the improvement of my soul.” Sausages, thought Brother Gregory. You’ve led me astray. I’m all bespattered with the grubby contents of this preposterous woman’s mind. He sighed. Sausages. Hmmm. Not so bad for supper tonight. Th
en he caught himself musing favorably on the sin of Gluttony and shuddered. Now he’d have to fast. But Margaret did not seem to have been sufficiently cast down by Brother Gregory’s denunciation. A sly look of pleasure had crossed her face.

  “Brother Gregory, you have just admitted that ‘Patient Griselda’ is trash,” she said. Brother Gregory started. He’d been caught off guard. How demeaning. Margaret couldn’t resist pursuing her advantage. “It seems to me that a woman who remains obedient to her husband even though she thinks he has murdered all her children is not being patient, she’s being a fool and a coward.”

  Brother Gregory glared fiercely at her while he thought. If she’d been a man, there might be something to what she’d said. But he was certainly not going to let any woman, especially this horrible woman, win any argument with him. He looked down his nose and said in a calm, superior tone, “Women are less capable of judging abstract qualities than men; therefore the only proper course for a woman is to defer to men’s judgment in these matters. Aristotle has stated the matter definitively when he tells us that the only virtue of which a woman is capable is obedience.” That would do it; Aristotle is a shattering Authority. Margaret turned her face into her embroidery, doubtless devastated. He couldn’t see the look on her face.

  “This Aristotle, he was a man, wasn’t he?” Brother Gregory missed the careful, ironic tone in Margaret’s voice.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Yes, of course,” answered Margaret, her face still averted. She had learned the hard way to stifle laughter.

  “You’re done for today?” he asked hopefully.

  “No, I’ve more,” she answered. Brother Gregory sighed and began again.

  MOTHER HILDE HAD THE idea that God, whom she considered to love irony better than all other forms of humor, had saved her from the pestilence because of her poverty, as a form of cosmic joke.

  “Just think of it, Margaret,” she said. “This pestilence is so deadly that even the glance transfers the illness. The air about a sick person is poisoned; their house and their goods as well. When the headache is felt, the fever is soon to follow. Before the day is done, the black spots and great swellings have appeared, and the person sinks into the grave.

  “But in my poor cottage, so far removed from the village, who carries bad air to old Mother Hilde? What vain, chattering wife wished to glance at Hilde, who is too poor to notice until the labor pains are hard on? They ran to church to pray and so shared the bad air. Then those who could fled with their goods, to take the evil to the rest of the realm. Those who stay shut themselves in their houses and perish, burying each other one by one: the mother her children, the husband his wife. Then the priest dies and the gravedigger flees—the bodies lie rotting in their own houses now. Who in all this muddle brings food or a blessing to old Hilde? No one! She is forgotten. Forgotten by all but God. And He says, ‘The forgotten will be the remembered; the poor will be exalted above the rich; old Hilde will live because she was not worthy of notice.’ That is God’s way. He upsets everything and loves to annoy the vain most of all. God’s eye sees everything, Margaret! So here we are now, possibly the last people alive in the whole world. The pestilence spreads and destroys, and poor old Hilde, who cannot read or write, is left alive to be the only chronicler. God, I think, sees all things as a joke. Not our kind of joke, but His kind.”

  Listening to Mother Hilde it all made a kind of sense. But God a joker? Her idea didn’t give me the least comfort. Oh, good Lord Jesus, I prayed, preserve me from this joking of God. Grief and trouble were all bad enough. But joking? It seemed altogether unfair, to me.

  “HILDE IS A HERETIC.” Brother Gregory drew back his pen with distaste. Margaret looked at him keenly.

  “I think not,” she said in quiet but firm voice. “Besides,” she added, “you break into the most important part.”

  “Truly so?” answered Brother Gregory, raising one eyebrow skeptically. “All parts seem about the same to me.”

  “They are not. One part must come before another, for that last part to be understood in the right way. We must see the whole to understand the important parts.”

  “Exactly, Madame Philosopher,” replied Brother Gregory. “So let us continue.”

  WHEN I COULD WALK about, I helped Hilde gather and store nuts and fruit, for it was the fall harvest season, even though there was no human but us to reap and gather. But it was a sad sight to see no rows of men and women moving across the grain fields with scythes, and the plentiful harvest lying wasted. Crows cawed and bees buzzed, and sometimes we could hear wild dogs barking. But there were no shouts and hails, no herdsman’s whistle. Nothing but silence and heat. In the gold strips of the grain fields irregular patterns were chewed out, where some cow or horse had got loose and wandered about masterless. Other beasts had died of starvation or pestilence in their pens, and the stink of them was blown to us when the wind was right.

  “Mother Hilde,” I said one day, “I need to build my strength by walking a little farther each day. Today I’d like to go as far as the village and see if there’s anything still alive.”

  “Suit yourself, but you’ll find nothing there. Be careful not to go in any houses, though—they’re all poisoned inside.” Then, thinking better of it, she added, “At the end of the lane by the common there is a house with a very fine pear tree in front of it. I have been brooding about those sweet wardens for several days now. I’ve always wanted to try them, and now they’re just going wasted. If you must go by there, then see if there are any good ones still on the tree, and bring me some.” And so, for the sake of Hilde’s pears and a walk alone to think, I set off at noon to see what I could see.

  Although we seemed far from the village, there by the shade of the forest, we were not in fact so far at all. My weak legs, perhaps, made it seem far. But the real distance between Mother Hilde’s little house and the better houses of the village was the distance between a widow’s poverty and the prosperous families—I suppose if one could measure the distance between dives and Lazarus, it must be a thousand spiritual miles or more. So I walked this small thousand miles thinking to myself. I was careful to skirt the bloated, fly-covered corpse of an ox in the road, and as I approached the lane by the coveted pear tree, I could hear the rustle of lizards at the doorsteps of the houses. It was a peculiarity of this dreadful pestilence that it attacked even little creatures in their burrows, sending them to the surface to die. I saw several by the road, curled up and desiccated as if even the wild beasts had hesitated to feast on them.

  The pear tree lay not too close to the cottage of which Hilde had spoken, so I gathered a dozen or more into my apron without fear of the deadly poison within the house. Up and down the lane the empty houses were death haunted. Here was an open door, banging loose in the breeze. There, by the road, a child’s leather ball. The ale stake hung forlornly over the open tavern door. At the house beyond it there were the signs of hasty packing, with a broken jug spilled in the roadway when the family took headlong flight.

  As my feet trudged by themselves in the dust, my mind was brooding. The contrast between the shining day and the desolation of all things human frightened me. Did God desire to destroy the human race for their sins? What sins were so great here that everything that breathed must perish miserably? Or perhaps God did not do this. Perhaps He had left the world, and this was the work of the Devil. But the Devil can’t make a beautiful day or bend the boughs of the apple trees with unpicked fruit. Surely not. Then obviously I wasn’t clever enough to understand it all. Where was the person who could explain it to me? Then I thought that maybe it is as the priests say, that everything is written down in the holy books. How very sad, I thought, for I could never find the book that hid the secret. And if I could find it, I could not read it. Why must the secret be hidden from people like me forever? I wasn’t even angry at the unfairness of it anymore. I was beyond all feeling. I looked up as a shadow crossed my path. The church tower loomed before me. Without reall
y noticing it I had walked the highroad to the churchyard.

  Perhaps the secret is in there, I thought vaguely. But then I drew back with sudden horror and nearly fled. For inside the gate, in front of the church door, the graveyard lay in a state of ghastly disarray. As the pestilence had advanced, the graves had been dug shallower and several bodies put in each one. These last were so near the surface that they had been dug up by animals, and dreadful mangled limbs and strips of rotting graveclothes appeared among the dusty mounds. The smell of decay was in the air.

  I crossed myself and shuddered, and not only for my soul. Among the graves prowled wild dogs, one with what was clearly a human bone in his mouth. here, in a corner, was a child’s mangled skull, with a patch of long hair still attached to it, that had been dropped by another. A scrawny black-and-white cur bared his yellow teeth at my advance and fled, and with his flight the others retreated to the shadows beyond the gravestones, where I could feel their eyes measuring me.

  Why did I go on? Even now I really don’t know. I think I had to, because it was fated. It was a bit like entering death itself. And Father Ambrose always said that it is only through death that we are reborn to eternal life. So that must be the reason. The heavy church door was unlocked, and it swung open slowly with a push from my free hand. It was only a poor parish church, not grand like the magnificent abbey church of St. Matthew’s. On the walls were painted the Fall of Man, the Flood, and the Crucifixion, in once bright colors now darkened with the smoke of many candles. Above the altar was depicted the Last Judgment, with the blessed souls, clad in white, rising on the right, while on the left the damned were being cast naked into a fiery pit filled with demons. The great crucifix was still in place, and the altar cloths, but the candles were burned flat, great puddles of cold, congealed wax around them. I wondered if the priest, alone with death, had been about to say Mass when he was stricken. Or perhaps he was careless, and just ran off? I must ask Mother Hilde what happened to him, I thought distractedly. The silent faces of the wooden saints said nothing.