Authors: Alice Borchardt
SAD, SO SAD. THE NAKED PAIN IN THE WORDLESS voice was so terrible it jolted Regeane out of sleep. She woke thinking Elfgifa. She knew Elfgifa had been bedded down in the dormitory room with the orphans in the nuns’ care. Had she perhaps been awakened by some nightmare and was she even now crying for the comfort of Regeane’s arms?
Regeane turned on the cot and stared into the darkness open-eyed. The room was illuminated now only by starlight glowing through the window slit. The candle had burned down. The flame extinguished in a cascade of hard wax.
But the wolf knew the hour as she knew the hours of the passing day by the changing slant of the moving sun and the night by scent and sound, the position of the wheeling stars. She matched them against the template engraved since before the beginning of time on her mind and heart. It was close to dawn, that darkest hour when even the four winds seem to feel the weight of night and a breathless hush precedes the coming
of dawn. The room was freezing and Regeane could see the cloud of mist created by her breath on the air.
She listened and found that even the wolf’s ears heard nothing.
Only a dream
, she thought.
I had a nightmare of my own
.
In the profound darkness and silence something sighed.
No
, Regeane thought, remembering the face in the mirror.
No
. But she knew however much she wanted to deny it, the dead called to her from beyond the world.
Another sigh—this one louder followed by low laughter, brittle and cruel that seemed to mock her fear. And shadows began to gather themselves and grow darker near the table and the mirror.
It’s coming
, she thought in terror,
coming to visit me
. Suddenly, the air around her grew colder. The shadows were an ugly phosphorescent mist. Mist the color of a corpse candle.
She gasped, choked, and tried not to breathe as an almost intolerable stench of decay pervaded the room. Regeane threw the covers aside and leaped to her feet.
The cold was more than cold, a freezing shock wave that seemed to chill her to the bone and then she remembered she couldn’t run. She was locked in with the thing. She retreated toward the door. The awful stench nearly gagging her. She would scream, she decided. Hammer on the wooden panels. Surely someone would come.
At the thought, another sort of terror overcame her. What would the good ladies think of her? But the thing was taking shape now and what she could see a ghastly blasphemy of the human form.
Regeane shoved her shoulders and back against the door. She found she was afraid to turn her back on it, afraid she would throw herself against the bolts and bars in vain and in a few seconds she would feel a hand on her shoulder. She would turn, she knew—she would turn and look into the face of God alone knew what horror.
No, it was better to confront it, no matter what grisly shape it might assume.
The thing was almost solid. She heard it move. It squelched and plopped as it took a step. It seemed wet, coated with rivulets
of decay, like a piece of rotten meat. All at once she realized the step it took was away from her. It was backing away, fleeing.
The sudden breath of perfume was almost as dizzying as the stench had been. Ascent, sharp, yet sweet and fresh like crushed wild mint, subtly mixed with something even sweeter. The heady fragrance of an orchard blooming in the sunlight or a meadow at springtime when in the cool morning the grass is wet with dew.
The very air around Regeane had changed and it seemed as laden with promise as when God first touched the rich, fertile earth with His hand and called forth life.
She was suddenly aware that she could see the room clearly. Light was streaming in under the door and around the frame.
Someone
, Regeane thought incoherently,
someone in the hall with a torch or lantern
. But that couldn’t be. No torch or lantern she’d ever seen shed such a fierce white light. A light so bright she could see the whole room in the glow of the few rays stealing in around and under the heavy door.
The ugly thing was only a shadow now. It gave another cry laden with loneliness and loss as it faded and fled away into nothingness.
The room grew cold and dark around Regeane again. But she realized the cold was only that of a winter morning and the dark only the empty night.
Regeane stumbled toward the bed, shivering, her teeth chattering, and dove under the covers. The other world was reaching out for her now. She was sure she couldn’t sleep and not sure if she would ever sleep again. But when she next opened her eyes, the sun was sending a shaft of transparent yellow light through the window slit. And the room was full of the low cooing of doves welcoming the morning.
EMILIA SENT UP BREAD, CHEESE, RATHER WELL-WATERED wine, and wild strawberry and fig preserves. The bread was fresh baked, the preserves so honey-sweet Regeane ate every bit and scraped the dish. Folded on the table Regeane found a soft linen shift and a robe of fine, brown woolen.
Washing water arrived in a ewer carried by a nun wearing the same soft shade of brown robe as that on the table.
She was a woman of severe mien with an eye that glittered like an eagle’s. Despite a webwork of wrinkles, her face held the same threatening bird of prey profile that dominated the monuments of the past scattered through the city.
She fixed Regeane’s silk shift and satiny pepulous with a stern, disapproving eye. “I am Barbara,” she told Regeane, “and despite the name, I am Roman born and bred. I am the cook and you are assigned to the kitchen. Wash and dress. I’m already behind in my work. I will expect you there promptly. Please hurry.” She stalked out.
Regeane hurried. She was given an apron by Sister Barbara and set to placing a joint of meat over a fire pit just outside the door.
Most of Regeane’s life had been spent locked up or on her mother’s endless pilgrimages. Her meals had been taken in wayside taverns and religious hostels. She knew very little about cooking.
The meat began to char. At the first hint of a stink, Barbara arrived like a thunderbolt. She directed a look at Regeane that nearly struck her dead on the spot and then she moved the spit up six notches higher on the rack.
“Don’t you know anything?” she asked witheringly.
Regeane protested with the utmost meekness. “But so high up, it won’t cook?”
“You mean it won’t burn,” Barbara snapped. “Meat needs must cook slowly. The hot smoke seals the outside. The inside bastes itself in its own juices. And don’t question me further. I am,” she said grandly, “the greatest cook in Rome. Perhaps the best in the entire world.
“I myself have studied the Frankish culinary arts. The few rude, but delicious innovations of the Saxons and the masterful tradition of our own Roman Apicitis. I need herbs. Now! I will want sage, basil, thyme, and rosemary to stuff the pork roast for supper. You will fetch me a sufficiency at once!”
Barbara clapped her hands. “Hurry. There is not a moment to be lost. This is the best time of day to pick them, after the dew has dried and before they lose their savor to the sun.”
Regeane had no idea what a sufficiency was. She managed to get a basil plant and a sage plant up by the roots and she was seriously threatening a rosemary bush when Barbara arrived at her elbow like a striking hawk.
This time, the resulting blast of fury backed Regeane up several paces, clutching the unfortunate plants in her hand. But her feelings must have shown on her face because Sister Barbara broke off in midsentence and peered at her with interest.
“What?” she said. “No tears? Usually I have them in tears by now or red-faced with anger. Not looking at me with mild irritation and even,” she peered at Regeane’s face, “perhaps contempt. I can see you have some spirit.”
Regeane was angry. She could feel the flush of it burning in her cheeks, but then she consulted the wolf and found the creature amused. The images that arose in her dark companion’s mind were those of a mother bird cleverly feigning a broken wing to draw a predator away from her nest or a toad squirting and creating a stink, puffing himself up, warts sticking out all over his body, trying to convince the owner of a pair of jaws with long teeth that he was both ferocious and inedible. In a word, a bluff.
“I can see,” Barbara said, “that you are an utter neophyte and must be instructed.”
In a few moments she had the herb plants back in the ground, soil tamped down around their roots.
“Do you think they’ll grow again?” Regeane asked anxiously.
“Bah … who knows?” Barbara said with a flip of her hand. “I think so. They are not very far from their wild relatives that flourish in the open places on the Campagna or on hillsides overlooking the sea. If they don’t, I have many more.”
She did have many more, all growing in brick-sided, raised beds between neatly swept flagstone walks.
Each type of culinary wonder was confined in its own special cubicle. The plants seemed to stand at attention in the morning sun and Regeane could see from the occasional bald patch of soil between them that no weed dared raise its head in this well-ordered place.
Barbara shot a glance at the meat roasting slowly over the fire near the kitchen door, then she led Regeane to a rude seat under an arbor near a wall where they could both sit and enjoy the beauty and delicate fragrances of the morning garden.
“Behold,” Barbara said, gesturing at the kitchen and the garden behind it. “Behold my kingdom. I am mistress here and absolute monarch of all I survey. And if you allow yourself to be instructed by me, you, too, will lord it over your own kingdom one day even if it is only a walled garden.”
Two trees guarded the small arbor, bending over the iron trellis. Regeane reached out a tentative hand toward one of the leaves.
“Go on, child,” Barbara said. “Pluck one and savor its fragrance.”
Regeane did. “Bay,” she said. It reminded the wolf of the night she seemed inexorably driven toward the ghostly temple, high above the sea.
“Yes,” Barbara said, drawing Regeane out of memory. “The bush that provides us with crowns for our conquerors and savory pot roasts.”
Regeane laughed. “And which one do you prefer?”
“Why, the pot roasts of course, but not for the reason you think. Not because I’m a cook.”
“Why then?” she asked.
“Because conquerors come and go, but the pot roast endures forever.”
“Surely not,” Regeane said. “It’s eaten at the next meal.”
“Quite the contrary. Great Caesar himself delighted in the flavor of meat cooked with mushrooms and wine, and a thousand years from now men and women will make pilgrimages to a place where they can eat a meal prepared in the same way.
“No, my dear, it is the conqueror who is ephemeral and the pot roast which is eternal. That is why Christ in his wisdom made His greatest sacrament a simple meal. Because the need is not simply for nourishing, but good food binds all mankind into one. Together they sit down three times a day to share the riches of the earth and the fruits of their toil with one another.
“The pope may eat his from a silver dish with cardinals at his side, and the laborer sits on a stone with a piece of bread and a single jug of coarse wine in the company of a few friends, but they both give thanks to God for the same thing. And who knows?” Her eyes twinkled. “The laborer may enjoy his bread and wine more than the pope his ample repast. ‘Tis said appetite is the best sauce. In any case, Emilia has chosen me to be your instructor in this greatest and most ancient of all arts.”
Regeane stared at a patch of dill pensively. The umbeliforous heads were almost ripe and ready to drop their hard, brown seeds. “I’m not sure how long I’ll have to learn what you can teach me. I’m to be married soon.”
“Yes,” Barbara said, “so I hear, to some wealthy mountain lord. No doubt a drunken ruffian who goes to bed every night in his boots.”
Regeane first sighed deeply, but found herself smiling and then laughing outright. “Not you, too?”
“So Emilia told you her story, did she?” Barbara said.
“Yes, the last night when we returned from the Lateran.”
“I hope you got the short version,” Barbara mused. “Sometimes she embellishes it describing how he first turned pale, then gray, followed by blue, then …” Barbara threw up her hands. “Black!” she exclaimed. “How he clutched at his throat.” She clutched at her throat dramatically. “How he arched his back.” She arched her back.
“Oh, stop!” Regeane cried. She was holding her sides and
tears were running down her cheeks. “Stop. It’s not funny. The poor man died!”
“Very so, he did,” Barbara said, easing her body back on her seat. “God rest his soul. Though if even half the things Emilia says about him are true, I doubt if he did. Find rest, that is.”
She patted Regeane lightly on the knee. “Never mind, my dear. What else can you expect when you come among a group of women who have retired from the world. We … most of us have our reasons. Besides, don’t you think it’s as well to be prepared for the worst? In this world our hopes for the best are so often disappointed.” She smiled kindly at Regeane.
But Regeane looked sadly past her at a sundial standing amidst a patch of calendula in the center of the garden. Each flower was a small sunburst, a frolicking ground for bees as they went their ever busy way among the newly opened blossoms and the sundial cast its long morning shadow on its stone mounting.
Hope for the best
, Regeane wondered.
What is the best she could hope for? Someone so brutal and dangerous that she could meet him in the darkness with a clear conscience? If her conscience could ever be clean after such a sin
.
But Barbara took her hand. “Oh, come now, don’t let my idle speculation cast a shadow for such a bright morning as this. Besides, if he is as I have said, no doubt you can disarm him with your beauty and grace. And as for cooking, I should say if he is wealthy, what you’ll need to do is learn to manage the cook. I can teach you how to do that in a word.”
“In a word?” Regeane asked.
“Yes,” Barbara said, “and the word is flattery. Taste the man’s food and if he seems at least halfway competent to you, lay it on with a trowel. For if cooking is the greatest and most ancient of all arts, it is also the most unappreciated and praise is rarer than gold and more precious than rubies to even its most humble practitioners.