The Chalice by Nancy Bilyeau Read Free Book Online

dried up. I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come from the mouth of the dragon.” John turned this way and that, as if he were surrounded by rapt followers. “Behold, here is that false prophet.”
    Brother Edmund, who learned months ago that it did no good to reason with John, said, “Sister Joanna, promise me to wait—do not go to the Building Office without me.”
    “John never lays hands on any of us, I don’t fear him,” I said.
    “It’s not John we should fear,” Brother Edmund said. “Sister Joanna, I must get to the infirmary.”
    He smiled at me a last time and hurried down the street, bound for the patients who needed him.
    John staggered after him, pulling on his beard. He shouted: “Brothers and Sisters, this man conjures up the spirits of the devils with his working of miracles. Do not follow him to the place the Hebrews call Armageddon!”
    I turned away from John’s madness and crossed the street,toward home. I regretted the lack of enthusiasm for my tapestry enterprise from Brother Edmund, Sister Winifred and the other nuns. They feared it was too fraught with risks. It was no small venture, I knew that. Tapestry looms and silken threads were extremely costly. But there was no other way to begin—I must make an initial investment to create my first tapestry. The proceeds from its sale would buy the materials for the second one.
    However, my pension and Sister Winifred’s were very small: one hundred shillings a year. Novices received the least. And so I had purchased the wooden loom with my personal funds: the small inheritance from my father and the proceeds from the sale of his London house, along with part of my first year’s pension.
    “But that was all the money you had—what are you to live on if this should fail?” Sister Winifred had pleaded. “And what do any of us know of running such an enterprise? Have you ever heard of a woman who sold tapestries by herself?”
    I’d dismissed her concerns then, as I did now. My enterprise would not fail. Back home, while explaining to Sister Beatrice what happened at church, it hit me with savage force. From now on, I would not be able to worship God in the way that was most meaningful to me.
    Sitting in the kitchen, my sadness flipped into fury. I had to do something.
    “I’m going to the Building Office to secure my loom,” I announced.
    “Did not Brother Edmund bid you wait for him?”
    “Yes, that’s true, but . . .” I floundered for justification, and then burst out with, “He is not my real brother, not my father, and not my husband. He is a valued friend, but his concerns are unwarranted.”
    My words of defiance drew a sidelong smile from Sister Beatrice. I realized how unprecedented this must be, my flouting of the wishes of Brother Edmund. We shared a bond thatwas impossible to explain to others, forged during our frantic struggle to save the priory. There had been one night, in a traveler’s inn in the town of Amesbury, when we shared a room, that certain longings stirred. Brother Edmund left the room in the middle of the night rather than succumb to sin, while I dreamed a dream that disturbed me still. It was a night neither one of us ever spoke about, of course.
    I said to Sister Beatrice, “It’s stopped raining, so we must take a walk in any case, for Arthur’s sake.”
    The Building Office was up the High Street that led to the wide road stretching from London to the coast of Kent. We stopped along the way to allow Arthur to jump in puddles. I needed to calm him before we reached the Building Office. I did my best to ignore the head shaking of the townsfolk. Many did not like such boisterousness.
    When we reached the top of the street, I knocked on the new, shiny door. The Building Office sprang up but six months ago. Important purchases of all kinds were routed through here, but its chief purpose was to facilitate the largest endeavor seen in Dartford for at least a century: the construction of a manor