Historical Setting: Monkwearmouth, 794 C.E.
The young woman slipped out of the chains and she could have leapt from the tower to her certain death, but apparently, she chose to run toward the river. I’m following the tracks in the snow.
The rising sun flushes the sky behind me in the fresh light of a solstice morning and here, the brittle winter envelops the hedges along the river in ice. She is on the riverbank barefooted, in nothing but a linen under dress as nuns wear, now, with rust stains from chains. She isn’t raging with the demon just now. She’s standing quietly on the riverbank. I put my cloak around her and ask her name.
“Them nuns at that church say I’m Mary but I’m no Mary. Then it would be Jesus, dead.”
She tells me as bluntly as it can be said. And that is all that matters.
I say, “It is the season when Rachel is weeping for her children.”
“Who is Rachel?”
“It is the part in the Christmas story when God is grieving with all of the mothers who have lost their sons. Are you the grieving mother?”
She looks away and doesn’t answer.
I ask, “What name do others know you by?”
“I’m called Girl.”
“Who calls you that?”
“Mister.”
“Who is ‘Mister’?”
“You don’t even know? Everyone knows. He lives in the castle.”
“I’ve just come down from Lindisfarne. So I am unfamiliar with Jarrow. Can you show me this?”
“‘Course not! I can’t go back there. He put me out and his baby died.”
“The nuns said they remembered you when you gave birth to your son a year ago.”
“Mister kept it, said it was his. He only just let me be the nurse for the year of its swaddles. Then he put me out. In my pretends I could wait there at the edge of the wood for all the years to pass ’til the pretty young prince from the castle come down for the hunt. I’d be waiting there to see him pass by and I’d know that prince were mine. Even without a word ‘tween us he’d know his momma.
“But now Mister come by with the baby, cold, stiff, wound in my old rags, and Mister ordered me to fix the baby with my milk. ‘Said I cursed it so it only screamed and never ate ’til death stopped the noise. Cold and icy white was all that was left of that baby. Mister didn’t say another word. He just left the baby off and went back up the castle way.”
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 