The Anchoress of Shere Read online

  The Anchoress of Shere

  Paul Moorcraft

  Paul Moorcraft

  The Anchoress of Shere

  “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully

  as when they do it from religious conviction.”

  Blaise Pascal, Pensees

  Prologue

  Shere, Surrey

  England

  1 January 2002

  It seemed at first mere eccentricity, as with all such things in England. Soon it became a murderous obsession that would span more than six hundred years, and inflict on its victims a terrible fate.

  The key to understanding the tragedy was an innocent visit to the village of Shere in the summer of 1967. The season was warm and gentle. The rains had caressed the Surrey woodlands, where the ash, oak and cherry flaunted their freedom in the fertile hollows.

  Marda Stewart stopped and impulsively plucked a stalk of honeysuckle, savouring its fragrance before tucking it behind her ear, perhaps because wearing flowers in your hair was considered fashionable. After an eight-mile hike she realised she was thirsty-until then she had been much too engrossed in her thoughts to consider food or drink. The energetic young woman marched along the last leg of the footpath etched in the sandstone escarpment, heading towards a seventeenth-century free house. She stood a little self-consciously in the bar, quickly drank a glass of white wine, and left the pub. Marda had not noticed, sitting in a corner seat, a powerfully built man, in his late forties, who had scrutinised her every movement.

  Heading back through the woods, Marda walked briskly; when she had hiked there regularly with her brother, their intense conversations necessitated taking a slower pace. Nowadays Mark was too busy affecting the role of fashionable subaltern in Her Majesty’s armed forces. He had left the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and his sister, far behind.

  So she was alone on her walk, and to her the woods were a retreat. True, in the deeper parts of the Hurtwood she would sometimes sense, or imagine she felt, a frisson of fear, but that afternoon the combination of sun, exertion and now wine made her light-headed. Humming the tune of “Turn, Turn, Turn,” she tried not to dwell on the last volcanic argument with Mark, or to decipher its origins. There was no real substance to their recent antagonism; it had sprung from a clash of moods, perhaps from some subtle shift in their temperaments, but its intangibility made it no less disturbing. Marda resolved to put the acrimony aside, willing herself to luxuriate in the last heat of the day. From the long sloping hill that spilled into the water-meadows of the Tillingbourne river, she surveyed the village which she tried to visit at least once a month in the summer.

  Shere was green and wet, brooding in antique loveliness. From its heart, the spire of St. James’s church peeped above the tree cover, forbidding and yet enticing at the same time. The church had been built of wood when the Normans undertook the laborious survey of their new lands; a hundred years after the Conquest, stone had replaced humble timber.

  Marda was instinctively drawn to this ancient shrine which hung back from the bustle of the village square and the worldliness of the small shops. Assuming an air of conscious modesty, she walked through the lych-gate and then paused to admire the intricate play of shadows and sunlight which stroked the stonework.

  Marda pressed her ear against the large oak door to confirm that she was not interrupting a service. Hearing no sound from the inside, she lifted the stiff latch, pushed the door open a few inches, and slipped inside.

  For a moment she trembled as the dankness assailed her nostrils and the cool air swept across her bare arms and legs. A handful of curious tourists were whispering their way along the aisle, but they ignored her. To the left of the entrance, framed in the door of the vestry, an elderly man nodded a restrained greeting. She assumed he was the verger. She was inclined to apologise to the man for her casual attire, but it was a hot summer, and if her clothing was not correct, at least her demeanour and intentions were.

  The elderly man did not miss her hesitation. He intuitively knew that, despite her T-shirt and shorts, the girl had deliberately chosen a place of worship. Despite himself, he observed the unmuscled athleticism of her body, particularly the strength of her lightly tanned legs, but her obvious sensuality also reminded him of his age, and of his position. With an audible sigh of regret, he returned to stacking the prayer books.

  Marda felt the man’s admiring gaze on her back as she walked carefully into the chancel, adorned by the twin apertures of a cell that once belonged to a fourteenth-century anchoress. She peered into the quatrefoil and the squint, even though she knew that the interior of the cell had been blocked for decades, maybe even centuries, but this timelessness helped her regain a better perspective on her own inner turmoil.

  She sat in the second pew, bowing her head slightly. Marda was not religious in the conventional sense. She would sometimes announce, “I am an atheist, thank God”; but the ensuing tinge of doubt suggested an altogether different kind of spiritual sensitivity.

  Marda considered herself modern, a child of the sexual emancipation of the sixties. Like her peers she had adopted the Pill as a symbol of the new libertarianism, but she had not dissipated this freedom in bouts of casual sex: she had chosen her two lovers with care, while ensuring a respectable distance of time between the relationships. Her mind spiralled back to the most recent lover in France. The emotions had been too intense, because she had loved him with her mind as much as her body. Perhaps that was too much to give to one man. With all the brittle wisdom of her twenty-three years, Marda appreciated that she was attractive to men, but she rarely allowed her friendliness to descend into blatant flirtation.

  And now her thoughts were focused again on her brother, a man who was, in this case, impervious to such devices. His anger had troubled her on the walk, and had brought her to the church in Shere. It was her anger too: she both loved and hated Mark. In their childhood, just eighteen months apart in age, they had never inflicted the customary sibling rivalry on each other. They had bonded in defiance of their parents’ polite distance. But recently, from nowhere, their amity had been ripped apart. Mark had apparently been transformed by military life. Yet Marda was prepared to concede that she, too, had changed. She wondered whether her recent relationship in France had affected her more than she had realised-perhaps some of her frustrations with the Frenchman had been transferred to her brother.

  She hoped that the tranquillity of the church would soothe her anger and hurt, that she would recall something of the near-telepathic rapport that she and her brother had once enjoyed. With an inner eye she perceived that this church could become part of the resolution. Fleeting visions impinged on her consciousness. In one tableau she pictured Mark attending her wedding, dressed in all his regimental finery. Maybe they would sing a hymn in French. She imagined Mark struggling his way through the words.

  A bud of a smile came over her face. In that moment she experienced an epiphany, although a full understanding of the revelation would take many years. Then and there Marda made a small vow to herself, and she said it aloud, albeit softly: “Some day-no, soon-I will live in Shere.” Vocalising the intention transformed the wish into a commitment. The next month she moved into Shere, adopting a tiny flat with high Gothic windows and a leafy view of the Tillingbourne.

  No one could know that this decision would savagely transform both her own life and that of the entire village.

  I. The Enclosure

  The year of our Lord 1329

  The bishop’s gilded crosier shot into the air like the fist of God. It came down with a thump on cold stone, alongside his mud-splattered boots. John Stratford, Bishop of Winchester, shuffled as he completed the final blessing of the girl’s enclosure. br />
  “Nomine patre, filii et spiritus sancti,” he intoned.

  The bells of St. James’s church accompanied the dying echoes of the hallowed words as nature itself seemed to applaud the occasion. The beaten earth of the nave offered up a sudden surge of dampness and the early morning sunlight paid court to the eastern window, proudly haloing the rich, if crude, stained-glass impression of the patron saint. Even St. James himself nodded his assent, as three villagers later confirmed on oath.

  The final stone was placed and mortared into the northern wall of the chancel. All the months of instruction and years of devotion had at last converged in this final proof of God’s grace. Christine had spent most of her eighteen years in the open air, working in the fields, but now she would see the world through two small holes. For the rest of her natural life the girl would live behind the stones. And it could be a long life, because she had been told that anchoresses in other shires of England had survived for thirty years or more.

  To dwell in the small medieval church was now her destiny. Gone was her previous life, a busy world of light and shade compared with her new inner life in her enclosure, utterly dark, except for two slim shafts of light. The squint and quatrefoil were cut on each side of an extended protrusion in the wall, like the bow of a ship. The squint permitted a sacred view of the altar while the carved clover of the quatrefoil enabled her to participate in the communion. These tiny stone windows would be the focus of her existence, the means of her immersion in total contemplation. She knew that a curtain, decorated with a raised golden cross, had been lifted temporarily to let her share this holy ceremony. Through the quatrefoil, to her right, she saw Father Peter, the priest of the parish of Shere. Pressing her face against the exterior wall, she sensed that she had caught his eye, and he smiled a little through his formal mask of piety, as kindness and weakness danced together in his small brown eyes. Her eyes had been closed in prayer, so had his, but just for a second, in the brief visual exchange, they had celebrated a little of the earthly friendship, that of student and teacher, which had fortified their spiritual endeavours.

  As the bishop completed the mass, Christine recited the words she had been taught, the words of St. Gregory: “In order to attain the Citadel of Contemplation you must begin by exercising yourself in the field of labour.” She realised clearly that she had not yet cast off all the physical world for, when the chantry priest had reached the top note of the Magnificat, she thought-very fleetingly-of her favourite secular song, “Summer is a-coming in,” which she had sung so often to her sister Margaret. She suffered a pang of doubt-but she had a lifetime to exile such baubles of her past. She would be enraptured by heavenly choirs, and her old songs would be like the croaking in the marshes of toads and frogs.

  Through the quatrefoil she watched the bishop lead a cowled procession from the altar along the nave of the church, incense cloying the atmosphere. Despite her sense of spiritual elation, she was angry with herself that she should feel frustrated by a column which partially obscured the last view of her family. Behind Father Peter, the girl could just see her mother, tired and fearful. Her father, William the Carpenter, stood absolutely still, betraying no emotion.

  The external curtain was dropped and her cell became completely black.

  She knelt to begin her initial twenty-eight hours of fasting and constant devotions. Except for a few sips of water, she prayed dutifully throughout all the canonical hours, from Terce to the following Sext. Christine had prepared herself, fully she believed, but she still felt the stiffness in her legs when she stood up after her hours of kneeling at prayer. She was also suddenly aware of the cold. Faintness began to creep over her, and she sat back on her rough stone bench.

  She remained sitting to regain her strength, which she tested by rising after a few minutes. The cell was just large enough to allow her to stand fully upright to explore her new domain. As she traced the walls with her hands, she cut her right forearm on the rough masonry, although the hurt was something she would train herself to ignore. She put her left hand over the gash and felt blood with her fingertips, raising them to her mouth to taste the blood now dedicated to her Saviour.

  “Bear in your heart the words of Christ, sprinkled with His blood,” she quoted from the prayer.

  And, without thinking, she ran her bloodied hand over her head. Once she had worn her blond hair down to her waist, but now it was cropped close to the scalp as part of her preliminary penance. She had been proud of her hair, though that pride had been banished.

  Despite her vocation, Christine was still the practical daughter of a practical father, the best craftsman for many miles around, so she wanted to establish the precise details of her stone universe. Four feet from the bench, on the opposite outer wall, stood a heavy wooden trapdoor, opened only from the outside but inset with a small sliding iron grille, which she had licence to open and close. During her preparation she had been instructed how the parish priest, in silence, would bring her each week a large pitcher of water and bless it in front of her. She could drink sparingly and keep a little to wash herself. Every day, after Matins, her family would be allowed to donate food, sufficient for that day, and occasionally furnish her with a fresh robe. They would also take out and empty her night-soil bucket.

  Some weeks before, the bishop had loaned her a treasured copy of the Gospels. She could barely read the first line in the dim light, but the book had twelve gaudy illuminations of the saints, pictures to nourish her soul. When the curtain was lifted and she held the book to the shafts of daylight coming through her grille, she could see the words and pictures plainly. Except for her robe, her sandals, her bedding and her rosary, she had no other worldly goods in the cell, but that pleased her: she needed few earthly artefacts, for before her lay the immeasurable bounty of serving Jesus Christ. God loved prayers, she reminded herself, and these prayers would ascend to heaven, be stored in a treasury and later returned to her as part of her immortal glory. Her Heavenly Father would not only make her solitude bearable. Birth and death were solitary, so were thought and growth, and spiritual reward. Her single purpose now was to experience a foretaste of eternal sweetness, the mystical union with God, the crown of life on earth.

  It was the eleventh of August in the year of our Lord 1329. On the seventeenth of September, the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, she would receive an extra woollen blanket for the winter cold. Christine was assured that God would protect His anchoress.

  ***

  The telephone rang. The hands paused at the keyboard and reached for the phone. A wrong number. Cursing this intrusion of modern life, Father Michael Duval mumbled to himself about the casual caller who disturbed Coleridge when he was writing the story of Kubla Khan. The poet, he recalled, never returned to his unfinished masterpiece.

  “I will finish mine,” he muttered defiantly. Stroking the sides of his old typewriter like a prize cat, Duval looked up at the plain wooden crucifix above his sparse, immaculately tidy desk. Focusing on the nine-inch Christ, he spoke to it as he did a hundred times a day: “I can do it; I can prove that God can still act through mankind.”

  His first task was to complete his interpretative history of Christine Carpenter, the Anchoress of Shere. God had told Father Duval that He would guide him. Duval’s quest was the pursuit of truth, not a mere collation of historical facts. His story would reveal the inner workings of God and, although he rejected the very idea of female priests, he knew God could speak to and through women, just as God whispered to him. All creation was a book which God had written and Duval’s own work would follow His literary precedent.

  The priest returned to his work, his love. From deep within the almost suppressed memory of his childhood, he recalled, despite himself, the anguished look on his sister’s face when their father ordered her, after a trivial misdemeanour, to “remove yourself to the broom cupboard until you are ready to rejoin civilised society.” Duval imagined his sister trembling in the darkness. Involuntarily shaking his head t
o remove the unwelcome flash of memory, Duval pulled the page out of the typewriter, rolled it into a ball, and threw it very precisely into a wicker basket beside his desk.

  He ran both his strong hands through his abundant greying hair, and then placed them on the desk, flat and palm down, as if in Muslim prayer. He stared at the inch of bone and flesh missing from his right index finger. That had been a wound in the service of his mission, but he had also been a little too careless, too confident in himself.

  Trying to expunge doubts about his own faith, despite bouts of absolute certainty, the priest’s mind swirled with conflicting thoughts. He went back to wrestling with the central issue of the biography of Christine Carpenter: to understand precisely why she opted for permanent entombment in the wall of the church. Was it a depth of asceticism-fanaticism-peculiar to the late Middle Ages? No. Duval calculated that it had to be a peculiarly personal decision. Such utter devotion to Christ could not be dismissed as a helpless sacrifice to the spirit of the age.

  He addressed his crucifix again: “Christine had to choose freely, because that is why God granted us free will. But why,” he asked himself, “did she choose as she did?”

  The priest as writer needed to invent a tormentor, an agency which would provide the motive for Christine’s entombment. He felt impelled to create the embodiment of evil, because he had become convinced that Christine’s purity required an antithesis. If she came to love Christ in heaven, who better to hate than her earthly lord-to cast him as the central villain of the tale?

  Duval had scrupulously investigated the nature of evil. History had taught him that great leaders could dispense with God, but never a satanic scapegoat; the mass movements of recent history-communism, fascism, and for that matter capitalism-could flourish without a belief in God, but not without a belief in a devil. And even for those who presumed to eschew all “isms,” nuclear destruction beckoned as a convenient symbol for all that was truly wicked. Evil was innate, the natural condition of man; what fascinated the priest was the really extraordinary facet of the human condition, the origin of goodness.