Sister Christina. Her voice was clear, as if she had been awake for quite a time. She didn’t sit up; she lay on her back, on her pallet against the opposite wall. I could just make out her profile in the gray dimness. The night was beginning to lighten; it would be dawn within the hour.
“Pig?” I asked.
“They’re killing it for my father to eat today.”
There was one more scream and then nothing. I lay there, rigid, breathless, waiting for more, but it never came. They must have slit the pig’s throat.
25
I sat in the chapter house, between Brother Edmund and Sister Winifred, my vihuela in my lap, and waited for Lord and Lady Chester to arrive. It was midafternoon. For reasons I didn’t dare ask, the requiem banquet was set to begin hours later than our usual dinnertime of eleven in the morning. Perhaps it was to accommodate a request of our neighbors’. Or perhaps it was to allow enough time for the cooking of the dishes. All morning the smells of roasting meats traveled the passageways, so strong you could not escape them. There was pork, of course; the young pig slaughtered that morning turned on a spit in the kitchen fire, terror seared into its dead eyes. But there was more on the menu: venison, roast beef, lark, rabbit, and capon. All were foreign to our priory, to our senses. When I passed Sister Rachel in the south passageway off the cloister, she pressed a cloth to her nose, her eyes brimming with fury. She pulled the cloth away to spit the word “Defilement,” and then clamped it back down on her nose and mouth.
Now Sister Rachel sat in the same room as the rest of the nuns, her sallow face a shield of resentment. Every space was taken on the stone benches that lined three of the four walls. Sister Christina waited among them, not at the head table. Whether that was at her own request or because of a novice’s low ranking, no one said. She clenched her hands in her lap, a stance of hers that I recognized: it meant she’d turned within herself to pray.
I sat apart, with my fellow musicians, on a narrow stool. Cool air streamed in through the cracks in the mullioned windows behind my head. We’d been placed off to the side of the long head table. I was closest to it, with Brother Edmund in the center and Sister Winifred on his other side.
Only two people sat at the head table: Prioress Joan and Brother Richard. They were far apart, with two empty chairs between them. Brother Philip was not present. At the first Mass of the day for All Souls he’d said a few impassioned things about purgatory. But then he’d pleaded indisposition for the banquet. He was the only who dared.
The appointed time for Lord Chester’s arrival came . . . and went. The minutes crawled by.
Gregory, the porter, rushed in, bowing, and whispered something in Prioress Joan’s ear. Whatever she learned displeased her. She shook her head and whispered something back. The porter scurried out. Brother Richard shot a look at Brother Edmund and then, the ghost of a smile on his lips, raised his goblet of wine for another long sip.
It was possible Lord Chester would not come, even though the feast had been arranged specifically for him. Some gentry lived by whim. It was nothing to them to overturn the plans of those they considered unimportant. All the preparations and expense? Worthy of a shrug. The only reason that I expected Lord and Lady Chester to materialize was not for the prioress’s or the nuns’ sake but for that of their daughter. She was their only living child. Even in times of fear and greed and dissolution, the ties of family exerted their pull.
No one spoke; we all waited, filled with our own unhappy thoughts. I hated sitting here, waiting to perform music for a spoiled lord, while the Westerly children remained missing. I was also wasting valuable time that could be spent searching for the Athelstan crown. How much had my father’s health suffered since I left the Tower? I twitched in my seat as the question tormented me.
My stool’s position afforded me a close view of our prioress. She didn’t touch her goblet or pick from the plates of radishes and salt set before her. Her jaw was tight, and her eyes were wary. She had determined that this requiem banquet