[Sequoia] Read online

  Clopton half-glanced over his shoulder. “She speaks English, yes?” He had heard only a few barely comprehensible words from her own lips himself.

  “Perhaps. But her tongue is not at one with yours.”

  “And she is able to speak freely?”

  “Freely, yes. Willingly... not so much. She is...” Margarita thought hard for the right words, “...far away.”

  “What else have you learned of her?”

  There was a pause before she spoke. “Many of the Sisters are afeared to be near her. She has an odd way which surrounds her... and her hair... well, it does change in its hues.”

  “Her hair?” William asked.

  “Black as a raven when she arrived but as the days pass, especially those with the rains, it does turn ruddy. The roots which sprout are bright red in colour. And...”

  There was something in Margarita’s tone. Something unspoken and something which William sensed might hold a key. He stopped dead in his tracks, as though ordered by a superior, and turned ninety degrees to face his escort. “And...?”

  Margarita swallowed. “She has a mark...”

  In the flickering of nearby candles, a soft breeze choosing to sneak through the building, he narrowed his eyes. “What kind of mark?”

  Margarita looked worried. “An... unholy mark,” she said as though confessing a secret. Though much older and wiser than the others in the convent, there was no shortage of fear evident in her own voice. “She carries it about her... breast.” Without touching, she indicated the private area beneath the coarse material of her own garments. “Some of the maidens suspect...” she pulled a dismissive face, “...that she may even have the devil in her.”

  “And you..?”

  She paused before she spoke. Just long enough. “We are all God’s children, Mr. Clopton. All of us.” She seemed unconvinced.

  Clopton shrugged and offered a short “Huh,” as though this fresh news might actually serve to explain some unknown quandary, then turned and continued his swift pace. A few moments later, Margarita sighed and gave scuffled chase. As they turned the final corner, still pained and increasingly breathless, she gathered her pace yet further to ask him a question.

  “Why is it so important that you speak with her now?”

  “She knows things,” Clopton replied matter-of-factly.

  Margarita looked shocked, confused and intrigued in equal measure. She ushered him toward the open door of a spartan room whose loose plaster walls ran rich with cracks and whose floor was an uneven mass of rough stone blocks.

  “What... what kind of things,” she asked. Softly, so that the occupant of the room might not hear her prying.

  Clopton smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Things that ‘God’s children’ should not really be so placed to know,” he said, arching a single eyebrow.

  He stepped inside.

  * * * * *

  At the eastern side of the convent, the orange of evening was slowly creeping around the colour wheel toward shades of blue and in the rapidly dimming gloom of an otherwise unlit room, the ragged creature Clopton had addressed remained motionless, seated awkwardly on a coarse straw mattress.

  On first awakening fully from her unknown ordeal, her refusal to accept help from the Sisters, short of a bed and the pitifully small amounts of food she would actually make an attempt to eat, meant that she now looked painfully weak. That was many weeks ago but the situation, and the girl, had changed little. Her black hair, once cut neat into a bob such as the Orléans Maid herself might have worn, had indeed taken on more reddish tones, most visibly within its roots. It had also grown matted and dull against her already pale complexion, only a few shades shy of ashen. Her eyes did their best to retreat into her face as the bones below fought hard to escape a sallow skin which hung like thick, grubby curtains down her cheeks. The once-cream ill-fitting dress she had been loaned by the Sisters was now tattered, blackening and stained in constantly expanding yellowed patches below the arms. Her tight forehead bore the still-healing scars of many deep cuts and in her right hand, also crossed with a fine web of reddening scars, she clasped something so tightly that it turned the folds of her ragged fingers salt-white. What little he could see held the appearance of a string of wooden beads.

  It was clear that at some point recently the Sisters had mopped around the girl's ragged feet but the rest of the room was only lightly touched and the fetor of warm sweat hung like a curtain in the air. It carried at its heart a second scent, one that Clopton had been privy to many times throughout the troubles which now ravaged his home. It was a scent of fear, a stench which coursed through the blood and sweat which the body tried in vain to expel through the many pores which had opened wide in readiness.

  “How did you know..?” He asked eventually.

  Despite his question, the girl and the room remained resolutely silent, her expression carved from the stone of what were clearly dark and troubled thoughts. Her right foot bounced awkwardly on her heel.

  He tried again, changing tack and dipping his head. “Do you remember me?”

  Still nothing. Outside, the evening wind was gentle for the season, yet its passage through the soft leaves of the few trees in view was still the loudest sound to occupy the room.

  "No..?"

  The leaves seemed to get louder.

  He sighed, though it carried no criticism. “We were making route to Spain on business of the King. Negotiations regarding the Santa Clara, recently released from Southampton.” He waved his hand dismissively as though such explanations, whilst perhaps necessary, were also equally trivial. “We happened upon you wandering the fields. You were quite bloodied, and extremely confused. In quite a terrible state. I stopped the horses and bid you good day, do you recall? You looked at me, for just a moment, but then you... simply... looked to the heavens and collapsed. Do you not remember this?”

  She looked up, but her expression still held nothing; her eyes as vacant as Rattler Tom’s in the days after his prize bullock had chosen to plant a flick-hoof quite squarely into the old man’s face. Her pupils looked as though they had been stolen and replaced with long dark tunnels whose promise of light moved ever more distant the more one tried to reach it.

  “The Sisters are gracious to us on our missions. They act as one of many hostelries on our route and in return we deliver them provisions. They have experience not only in medicine, but also in the treatment of...” he chose his words carefully, “...less visible agues. For this reason I felt that you...” again, he called on as much of his renowned diplomacy as he could muster, “...that you might benefit from their help.”

  Still the girl said nothing, yet all the while the dark eyes looked straight into him, idly following every step he took as he began to pace the room. It was as though she was trying to work out who he might be. Perhaps even who she might be.

  “When we roused you in the cart, your words were few and any sense you might have hoped to make was nowhere to be found. So, I volunteered to sit with you this last few miles.” He smiled. “My guards' eyes need always be elsewhere, especially in these parts.”

  In the far corner of the room he found a gnarled and dusty chair of the most basic design, the darkened wood showing signs of great age, and turned it noisily so that he might sit and face her.

  “On the journey with you I was offered a rare gift - time to my thoughts - and I used some of that time to pray, out loud. For many things. Many people. The times we inhabit are tumultuous, I am sure you will agree. Some believe quite stringently that Armageddon itself has fallen upon us. And yet, as I spoke, you did not. Not another word. You just stared toward the heavens. Until, that is, I mentioned Pierrepont...”

  Still the girl said nothing, although this time he felt he might have detected the merest widening of her eyes. “You recall? I prayed for my good friend, Robert Pierrepont? He was a man of sound virtue and strong heart and I prayed that he might successfully defend Gainsborough against Parliament. I prayed for his safe return t
o the sanctity of his family.” He moved his head closer to her and narrowed his eyes. “And you said...”

  Silence fell, and lasted too long. When it broke it was not Clopton who wielded the hammer, however. Not this time.

  “Pierrepont shall fall against friendly cannon.”

  As she repeated her own words, the girl’s voice was harsh, wracked and distant, as though it had been little used for some considerable time. Her accent was strange; neither that of the many parishes which occupied England’s diverse counties nor that of the foreigners such as Margarita who had taken on England’s tongue. It seemed as though it might stem from some unknown land which lay somewhere in between.

  Clopton stood and paced the room a second time. “Fall against friendly cannon? See? I did not even begin to know what that might mean. It made no sense to me. Then, weeks later, whilst I dined and shared good humour with no less than King Philip himself, I received word from England that Robert had, unfortunately, perished...” His head sank. “He had been held prisoner by the Roundheads and was being transported down-water to Hull. On that journey, he had suffered a misfortune and been killed by an onslaught of Royalist cannon who did attack the boat, knowing not that he was aboard. My friend perished at the hands of his own troops and by his own weapons.”

  The girl looked to the floor and spoke in a slow, deliberate monotone. “No fire burns conscience so bright as friendly fire.”

  This dark voice she used held the same air as the harbingers of doom who saw fit to visit Clopton’s parish more often in recent months than he would have preferred. Barely a week passed without another evangelical arrival, piously casting threats of Armageddon and judgment to the more malleable who found time to stand aghast and listen.

  He took a seat once more, looking directly into the girl’s eyes, though still no tangible recognition was offered back toward him. “I know not what that means,” he continued, “but what I do know is that you delivered those words to me on 15th of July this very year and, if word delivered to me is correct, then my dear friend did not perish until the 25th of that same month. So tell me... how could you possibly have known such things? Things that had yet to pass..?”

  She looked up, though not to him.

  At him, perhaps. Around him. Through him.

  “Are you a seer?” he asked, inquisitively. “A woman of strange vision?” Again, she did not reply, so his tone turned swiftly toward suspicion and he echoed both the words and the tone of his host. “Or... might you have the devil in you?”

  Still she remained silent, instead raising her left hand and starting to bite with some agitation at dirty, ragged fingernails. He could see that the hand was subtly quivering; like a fly fresh-caught in a web.

  He nodded his head upward. “Sister Margarita tells me that you have his mark upon you. Show it to me.”

  He could see a trickle of fear begin to course across her face. It found source in the dark pools of her eyes but how soon it spread. Within seconds her cracked lips were quivering like her hand and her breathing, whilst soft, was subtly becoming more rasping and erratic. Still she did not look his way. She seemed more afraid to do so than ever now.

  “I care not to see you unclothed,” he said, his voice lowered and smoothed. “Truly I do not, but I do need to see that mark. Please... will you show it to me?”

  There was another long pause, filled only with the increasingly-present silence. Slowly, reluctantly, and without ever looking his way, the girl began to undo the uppermost buttons on the dress as though commanded from within in a mesmeriser’s trance. Her breaths grew steadily deeper with every clasp removed. Eventually, enough of the buttons were undone and she slowly pulled back the fabric to expose the top of her left breast. The irony was that, under normal circumstances, it would be he that needed to avert his gaze, but on this occasion, it was she who did. Her flesh still repairing itself from the tears, it seemed she could not even bear to look at herself.

  Clopton could see, sitting directly in front of the region of the heart, a slightly raised shape in the form of a small crucifix. It measured around a thumb and a half in size from top to bottom. The flesh which ran across its face was torn and flaky and some had recently formed into scabs. The sides formed a harsh white outline as the skin was stretched thin to accommodate the unnatural presence within. It would have been the perfect symbol of a most pious believer to walk the land had it not been for one minor detail...

  The cross was upside down.

  A blasphemy, such as the Devil himself might do.

  “Explain this..?”

  She said nothing.

  His tone turned firm and his words slow and considered. “Explain to me how you came to carry - about your person - such a vile and maleficious marking.”

  She let slip the fabric and it fell back toward her breast as she began to rock back and forth on the bed. Time passed. Slowly.

  “I wore the Lord around my neck. A gift on beaded chain,” she said, eventually. To no-one. Gently, she opened her hand to stare at the rosary-like chain of beads she had been clutching tight. “Three o’clock. All alight.” Clopton's face looked blank. “The Lord became... one with me.” She was now visibly shaking with fear. “He was burned to me.” She paused, wincing. “Now... He is inside me. Eternal. I am at one with him.” She continued to rock back and forth, her right foot now bouncing again in agitation. “He is my shepherd. I shall not want. I shall not want...”

  “You wore a cross around your neck because... you are a godly creature?”

  “I shall not want. I shall not want. I. Shall. Not. Want.” She repeated the line over and over through clenched teeth, all the while nodding gently to herself. He had no idea if she had understood the question at all, let alone if her nodding was forming any kind of answer to it.

  As she continued to repeat the phrase, over and over, her voice becoming ever more disparaging and distasteful of the words, he turned and looked out through the dusty uneven glass of a six panel window, across the rapidly darkening pastures to the gnarled black shapes of the mountains which rose beyond. He thought back to when this girl was discovered by him and his men, weaving her way through the tall grass, half naked with skin burned and bleeding, her face swollen and her blackened clothes as torn as her spirit. He thought of her laid in the cart, drifting in and out of this world. And he thought of the words that had meant nothing to him as they had entered his ears. Words that had come to make sense as the world around him continued to fall apart. As he pondered what this might all come to mean for his wider world, a thought began to flower in his mind. Small at first, but how quickly it grew. Knowledge, so it was said, was power and here this wretched waif seemed to hold knowledge not just of things past or present, but also of things that had yet to be.

  She might prove to be a powerful weapon indeed.

  As a peaceful, studious man born of a good heart - or so most who surrounded him might say - Clopton desired no weapons to attack, but he was rapidly beginning to realise that against such a Puritan onslaught as was infecting his shire, he would do well to acquire the weapons with which he might defend...

  “Sister Margarita tells me that you have nowhere to go.” He smiled a wry smile and removed the muddied glove from his right hand so that he might smooth mud from his long dark beard. She did not reply, so he continued. “I, on the other hand, do. My protectors and I set forth at sunrise.” He turned to face her once more. “In that place I have need for a good maid and I can see from the calluses on your hands that honest toil has been a friend to you in days past.” His tone turned somewhat dismissive. “I had loosely promised the position to a girl in the village, but I fear that in her heart she is... well, not so godly. Worse, I fear she is taking a shine to me. Or more likely my standing. So... perhaps such a position might be of interest to you..?”

  The soft repetition she had delivered throughout his delivery came to an end, but no reply was offered to fill the void.

  He sighed. “Or perhaps you would ra
ther I help you find your home... wherever that home might be?” Somewhere hidden between the English and the foreign, he mused.

  Her head remained steady but her eyes started to fill; small pools that caught the last strains of light. It looked as though they held a faint glint of hope at his words until she blinked the tears away and the hope was gone. “No going home,” she said softly, her voice breaking. The tears returned, strong enough now to run swiftly down her cheek and leave pale, faltering lines as they cut through the thin sheen of dirt. “Home is where our heart resides and my heart…” she sighed, “…does not live here. My home will not find me.”

  “Because of what happened to you?”

  Blinking away more tears, she nodded.

  He nodded back; knowing without really understanding. Then, without warning, he rose to his feet and headed back toward the door as though leaving. He stopped at the last possible moment and turned slowly back, his face showing deep concern.

  “This place is a sanctuary,” he said softly. “Somewhere one rests when carrying a burden. It is not a home. For my part I believe that a home - a true home - is where you find your future. Not where your future finds you.”

  The girl did not catch his gaze, but he had grown used to that. Instead, she looked down to the floor, sullen tears gathering around her chin until they gained volume enough to fall and join the others. The pace increased and soon they were casting themselves like sinners at her feet, darkening the stone in small patches which caught the blue glow of the world outside and shone it back toward him like the beginnings of a topaz path.

  Topaz, he mused. Thought by the physicians to heal physical and mental disorders and to prevent death.

  Though she did not choose to see it, the smile which Clopton now threw toward her held genuine warmth and compassion. “What did they call you in your home?” he asked.