Authors: Alice Borchardt
“Only flatter him and he will draw on all his skills to please you and your husband. As to that other thing of which men are so fond, pay close attention to Lucilla and faithfully follow her precepts and I’m sure you’ll be rewarded with deep devotion. After all, a lout like him must be delighted to be offered a
woman of the royal house. And if he wants to keep a whole skin, he’ll cherish you. You might point out gently to him—oh, so very gently—that if he doesn’t, the Frankish king might take it as a personal insult. I’m sure he wouldn’t want that.” Barbara smiled a perfectly sweet, ingenuous smile.
Regeane turned and stared apprehensively at Sister Barbara for a second. “Lucilla?” she asked. “How do you know about Lucilla?”
“By now, my dear, everyone knows about Lucilla. Have no fear. Lucilla’s not a connection that will damage your reputation. Lucilla has many friendships among the women of this city. Among the powerful as well as the humble and weak. She is greatly esteemed, sometimes I think in places where even she doesn’t realize it.”
“The pope has forbidden her to visit me,” Regeane said.
“So I heard,” Barbara said, producing shears from her pocket. “How Emilia does talk.” She put the shears in Regeane’s hand. “Now, go fetch me those herbs I asked for and take your time. Meet my friends, the beautiful, harmless things growing here. Because by learning them and their proper uses one can turn even simple peasant fare into a delight that would charm princes and kings. And don’t be afraid to cut anything, for nothing noxious or evil grows in my garden.”
Regeane took the shears and wandered out. Barbara’s herbs and flowers enchanted Regeane and the wolf, also. The shadow on the sundial was much shorter when she returned to the kitchen and found Barbara up to her elbows in bread dough.
Regeane set the herbs on a chopping block and turned her attention to a task about which she felt full confidence—scrubbing pots and pans.
The kitchen was airy and pleasant. She tackled the pots with a will as Barbara finished forming the bread into loaves and began chopping herbs with a two-handed curved knife while she began Regeane’s initiation into the culinary arts.
“Basil,” she said, lifting a sprig to her nose. “The regular kind and also cinnamon and clove. I hope you noticed the difference.”
“I did,” Regeane answered. “I’m sorry if I got too much. I hope they won’t go to waste.”
“Not at all,” Barbara said, laying some aside. “The cinnamon
and clove will do nicely to spice the baked apples I plan for lunch. Here,” she said, stripping the leaves from another stem. “Clary sage, an interesting choice, my dear. Long-stemmed thyme. Ah, you know something at least: a bit of rue, the merest tinge of bitterness, corrects the sweetness of a wine sauce. Rosemary, ever indispensable to the cook, and I will add a touch of garlic and the bread crumbs and we have our stuffing. This evening you may taste and see if any of your choices went awry.”
Regeane was immediately alarmed. “You’re going to trust in my choices?”
“Not entirely,” Barbara said wielding the knife with what Regeane recognized as a highly skilled rocking motion. “But as I told you, cooking is an art and even a beginner must be allowed some experimentation if he or she is ever to reach full potential. And when you are finished with the pots, my dear, you may give the floor a good scrubbing,” Barbara said grandly.
“Thank you,” Regeane murmured quietly.
Regeane scrubbed while Barbara held forth on the flesh of every member of the animal kingdom of which Regeane had ever heard and several the more conservative Franks didn’t think of as food, i.e., snails and songbirds, and when she was finished with these, she moved on to descriptions of less animate life, beginning with fruits and nuts and working down at last to the lowly cabbage. Wherein she paused, not for breath, but to inform Regeane it was time to rake out the bread oven.
“I set the fire myself,” she said, “when I came down at dawn and it will be burned to cinders by now, and the stones will be hot and ready to puff the dough to golden fullness.” She handed Regeane a bucket and a long-handled rake. “Now, be careful. The door is hot and the stones, too. Don’t get too close. I’ll open the door for you.”
Barbara was holding the oven door open and Regeane was raking like mad, trying to get the still live coals into the bucket before the stone oven cooled when Emilia entered the kitchen.
“Barbara, just what in the world do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re working,” Barbara snapped. “What does it look like we’re doing? You told me to teach her to cook.”
“Teach her to cook, yes,” Emilia cried in horror. “Not turn
her into a scullion. She is a royal lady. I meant for you to let her gather a few herbs, perhaps peel a turnip or two.”
Barbara slammed the oven door. Regeane was only just able to jerk the rake clear in time to prevent its being broken in half.
“What!” Barbara shouted. “You object to my teaching her that cooking is work?” She drew herself up proudly. “I … I, the daughter of one of the first families in Rome. I don’t scruple to get my hands dirty in the service of our community. Why should she?”
Emilia threw up her hands. “Barbara, people talk …”
“How well I know,” Barbara said grimly.
“No matter. No matter at all,” Emilia said. “I’m aware I’m not blameless, but what if her royal kin should get wind of her cleaning out ovens? And what else have you had her doing this morning?”
“She gathered a few herbs.”
Emilia nodded approvingly.
“Cleaned the pots and scrubbed the floor.”
“Scrubbed the floor!” Emilia moaned. First, she clutched at her chest, then pressed the back of her hand to her brow. Then she snatched Regeane by the arm and towed her out of the kitchen, barely allowing her time to drop the bucket and rake.
They were off down the hall, Emilia pulling Regeane behind her, muttering to herself. “What will His Holiness think?”
“I don’t—” Regeane began, but Emilia cut her off.
“What will the king think?”
“Please—” Regeane said.
“What,” Emilia almost shouted, “will Lucilla think?”
They turned at the end of the short corridor to the kitchen and started up the stair.
Regeane snatched at the newel post, locked her elbow firmly around it, and brought them both to a halt.
“Eh, what?” Emilia said.
“Please, Emilia,” Regeane implored. “Please let me wash my hands and face.”
“Hands and face?” Emilia asked as if she’d temporarily forgotten the meaning of the two words. “Oh, yes. Definitely the hands and face. Definitely.”
“Thank you,” Regeane said, “and I wouldn’t worry too much about my royal kin. I don’t know any of them.”
“But don’t you see?” Emilia answered in some distress. “Whether you know them or not is unimportant. They are bound to know you, and that’s what matters. Come, we’ll see how Sister Angelica likes you. She teaches a more ladylike skill—embroidery.”
“Oh, dear,” Regeane said.
SISTER ANGELICA DIDN’T LIKE REGEANE AT ALL. She made that plain from the outset. Obviously used to training the younger and more nimble-fingered daughters of the poor, she found an older noblewoman a definite embarrassment.
She gave Regeane a glance lightly glazed over with ice and lost no time in assessing her needlework skills. Those were, as far as Angelica was concerned, nil—confined to weaving, mending, and patching. In other words, the activities required of a girl of shabby, genteel birth who wanted to keep her back decently covered. The skills with gold and silver thread required by fancywork had always been beyond Regeane’s means.
So she was set to doing a simple cross-stitch in one end of a plain linen altar cloth.
Regeane was submissive, but perfectly disgusted. She much preferred scrubbing the kitchen floor in Barbara’s company. She, at least, treated Regeane as a willing pupil and, in some ways, an equal, whereas Sister Angelica tried, with some success, to pretend she didn’t exist at all.
So Regeane sat quietly at the table with the rest, her head bowed quietly over the cross-stitch, and endured. She soon discovered there was much to endure.
Sister Angelica announced to her, as if making an important discovery, that idle hands and idle minds were the devil’s workshop, and no talking among her pupils was allowed. Instead of chatting among themselves, they listened to readings intended for their edification and entertainment. Today, she told Regeane, it consisted of an account of the persecutions of Diocletian.
At first, Regeane only half listened. But then the very ordinariness of the people she was hearing about drew her. They
were not in the least like the magnificent and often tragic characters she found in the histories she sometimes read. But rather the humble, who are never of much note in the great march of human affairs.
They were servants, slaves, artisans, small shopkeepers, and the occasional poor priest or prelate—shadowy figures moving quietly among their flocks preaching courage by their example.
And their only sin was that they had the misfortune to cross an imperium so bloated with conceit that it could find no more fitting object to worship than itself, a self personified by the goddess, Roma.
Not to worship at this shrine of naked power was, to the imperial government, a dreadful crime deserving the cruelest punishments. Their deaths were horrible and depicted in meticulous detail.
As the stories continued on and on, Regeane found her imagination begin to clothe the actors with life.
When men were spoken of, Regeane saw Hadrian, a man willing to sacrifice himself rather than commit what he considered an evil act or Antonius who, even lost in the darkness of his crippling disease, had found the courage to be kind to her when they first met.
When women walked into the gruesome spotlight of torture and death she saw Lucilla, proud and ruthless, but also kind and courageous. Or her mother, bringing her crushed heart to a God she believed she’d failed and whose love she felt she didn’t deserve.
The children, though, were the worst because they brought Elfgifa to mind. The child’s Saxon pride and her impudent innocence.
The story of one mother, who fought with her child and taking the little hand in hers forced the lifesaving sacrifice, tore at her heart. Surely she herself would burn incense to a thousand gods rather than see Elfgifa perish.
Adherence to principle was well and good and Regeane could understand it. But a mother’s love, so deeply rooted in the fabric of life, was a force that could transcend even the power of law and the state and made nothing of principle.
As Regeane’s needle flew back and forth through the cloth,
she began to feel at first depressed, and then weighed down by the inevitability of the stories. She had not known there were so many imaginative and cruel ways to deprive human beings of life. The stubborn resistance of the Christians must sometimes have brought out the worst in their executioners.
Regeane began to feel that if she had to listen to another account of branding, flogging, roasting alive, or flaying, she would leap to her feet, throw the altar cloth at Sister Angelica, and storm out of the room when a solution to her problem presented itself.
During a cheerful description of molten lead being poured into someone’s open wounds, a shaken Regeane missed the cloth and slashed her palm with the needle.
The cut wasn’t deep, but it hurt and bled copiously. Regeane dropped the needle and cloth into her lap and clutched at her wrist. The blood ran between her fingers and dripped on the linen in her lap.
Sister Angelica had hysterics. She had them with great determination and skill.
Abbess Emilia arrived. She clucked, tished, and tut-tutted, applied cold compresses and aromatics … not to the still bleeding Regeane, but to Sister Angelica.
A few minutes later, Regeane found herself back in the kitchen with Sister Barbara. She washed the cut on Regeane’s hand with wine.
“Nothing,” she said. “A mere trifle. It will heal in a few days. Tell me, my dear, what did it? Patient Grizelda, the sufferings of the holy church under the Emperor Nero, or the persecution of Diocletian?”
“Diocletian,” Regeane said.
“Ah, well,” Barbara answered, “you were spared the worst.”
“I can’t imagine anything worse,” Regeane said.
“I can,” Barbara said. “Patient Grizelda. I find the worthy woman’s sufferings both boring and infuriating. Sister Cecelia, a rather learned woman you have yet to meet, tells me the tale was written as a moral lesson to young girls that they might learn to respect and obey their husbands. But I firmly believe Angelica has it read as an inducement to virtue and new vocations.
“Given weekly doses of patient Grizelda, even the less impressionable of her pupils emerge, if not confirmed man-haters, at least cherishing a firmly rooted distrust and fear of the whole sex. This she feels makes it easier for them to forgo the more transient delights of the world and,” she added piously, “fix their eyes on the eternal lover.” Barbara promptly belied the piety of this statement by laughing uproariously.
“It isn’t funny.” Still caught up in the story, tears started in Regeane’s eyes. “It was terrible and all the poor people wanted to do was live in peace and practice their religion … and I don’t see how you can laugh.”
Barbara’s face sobered and she reached out one hard, calloused hand and touched Regeane’s cheek. “Oh, my dear, how young you are. Sometimes I forget my years and the distance that separates me from children like you.
“I laugh, my dear, because time has given me a besetting sin called perspective. The dead are dead, and nothing we can do will help them. Besides, one hopes they will have forgotten the griefs of the dust in eternal bliss. And because I know many of God’s people saved their lives, and no doubt their families also, by committing apostasy, which makes me feel better. It shouldn’t, but it does.”
Barbara patted Regeane’s cheek gently and gave her a smile so infectious that Regeane found herself smiling back in unabashed delight.
“There now,” Barbara said, “that’s better.” Then she stepped back and daubed at Regeane’s cut with the wine-soaked cloth. “See,” she said. “It’s stopped bleeding.”