To be accurate, she was working on a practice piece. She had prepared an old scrap of parchment, a decent-sized cutting left over from someone else’s earlier work, on which that same someone had tried out pigments and styles of lettering. Sister Phillipa was doing her very best work, the letters bold, stylish and even, the tiny painting — of a bramble, showing leaf, blossom, berry and prickle — delicate yet vivid. She knew she was on trial and, if she passed, that she might very well be granted the great honour of producing a herbal.
More than that she had not been told and did not dare to ask. It was not her place, a nun who had but six months ago taken her perpetual vows and was hence one of the youngest of the fully professed, to question anything that the great Abbess Helewise said. Or, in this case, did not say. What did it matter, anyway? The wonderful thing for Sister Phillipa was that, after so long — only three years, perhaps, but it felt like a lifetime! — she was once again engaged on the work she loved. And for which — yes, it was boastful, prideful, and she would have to confess and do penance but, despite all that, it was the truth! — she had a rare talent.
She had become aware of that talent at a young age. Perhaps been made aware of it expressed it better, for, isolated little girl that she had been, she had unthinkingly assumed that every small child drew and painted with the fluency given to her. It had been her father — gentle, learned, head-in-the-clouds Gwydo — who had lovingly pointed out the error: ‘You’re an artist, Philly, and no mistake. You’ve inherited what skills I possess, and to those you add something very special that belongs just to you.’
He had taught her everything he knew. With no wife — Phillipa’s mother had died of the dreaded childbed fever a month after giving birth to her only child — his little daughter had been the sole recipient of his love. They had lived close in their little hut, father and daughter, each content in the other and in the beauty of the work at which both were so talented. Artist and visionary, Gwydo had tried to put his daydreams and his nightmares into his pictures. When pigment and parchment proved too small a vessel to contain his soaring imagination, he had been known to fling his materials against the wall of the hut in a fury that temporarily blinded him. Phillipa feared only for him when the ill humour took him; aware of the depths of his love for her, she knew him to be incapable of hurting her and so never feared for herself.
With growing dread, Phillipa had watched as Gwydo’s health began to fail. A lifetime of poverty — his work was beautiful beyond compare, but what use was that if nobody knew of it and presented themselves with purses full of gold to buy it? — and of sitting hunched and cold over his work while his concave stomach burned and rolled with hunger had undermined him. When sickness came to the village, Gwydo nursed his feverish daughter with a tenderness that spoke deeply of his love for her. Succumbing himself just as she was returning, thanks to him, to strength and health, he had little in reserve with which to combat the disease.
He died two days later.
Phillipa, shocked, grieving, weeping and shaking, had nobody in the world to turn to. Gwydo had been her life and, so far as the future was concerned, she had vaguely imagined continuing to work alongside him and taking over when he could no longer work. Now he was gone, there was no money and nothing, other than her and Gwydo’s materials, to sell. Since nobody in the village had any use for those, it looked as if Phillipa would starve.
They told her to go to Hawkenlye. Still deep in her mourning, she obeyed. Initially the nuns received her only as a patient, skilfully drawing her lost mind back as they healed her weak, half-starved body. The impulse to become one of them, to enter the Hawkenlye community as a postulant, had grown on her but slowly, at first dismissed as an emotional response that grew out of her gratitude. But then, praying with the sisters, lapping up the love and the care that they daily offered to her, she started to think it might be more than that. She understood — or thought she did — that their limitless devotion, pouring from them, used up yet constantly replenished, had a source: it came from God. After six months she had made up her mind and she entered the community the following week.
Postulants and novices were not allowed to do work of a specialist nature; before there could be any question of that, they had to learn what it was to be a nun. Phillipa did her share of cleaning, pot-scrubbing, bandage-washing, laundry, herb gathering, weeding, vegetable scraping and cooking. She also prayed, more frequently and at greater length than ever before, and as she did so, learned to love the peace and the power of the Abbey church and the presence of the Lord within it.
She took the first of her vows after a year, her perpetual vows two years after that. Then, at the interview with Abbess Helewise which all of the newly professed must face, she was asked that astonishing question: ‘At what, Sister Phillipa, are you best? Where, would you say, do your talents lie?’
Closing her mouth, Phillipa had swallowed, taken a breath, decided to go for the truth and confessed. ‘I love to paint and to letter,’ she said. ‘I know it is immodest to say so, but my father was a great artist and taught me well.’ Then, folding her hands in her lap and dropping her eyes, she waited.
‘A painter,’ Abbess Helewise murmured. Then she added — or Phillipa thought she did — ‘How very refreshing.’
In retrospect, it must surely have been a mistake. The Abbess was just not the sort of person to make such a remark, expressing as it did relief, of a sort, to have someone with artistic talent present herself in the community. Art was not nearly as worthy as, say, being good at sponging the befouled bodies of the sick, or possessing the endless kindness needed to cope with the aged who wandered in their minds, or having the patience to teach grubby and snotty-nosed little urchins not to drink filthy water, pick their scabs and noses and belabour each other with sticks. No. Phillipa must have misheard.
She had returned to the duty on which she had then been engaged: helping one of the infirmary nurses scrub out a curtained recess in which a patient had lately died of a plague of pus-filled, bloody boils. She had put all thought of her conversation with the Abbess right to the back of her mind.
But then, a few weeks after Christmas, Abbess Helewise had sent for her. And, wonder of wonders, told her to produce a piece of work. A painting and some lettering. When Phillipa had hesitatingly asked, ‘What should I paint?’ the Abbess had replied, ‘Something that one might find within the pages of a herbal.’
So now, neither knowing nor caring why, that was precisely what Sister Phillipa was doing.
Sitting back, looking at her work and trying to see how it would look to another, she read what she had written.
Blossom of the bramble is beneficial for fresh wounds. Lay fresh blossom of same direct on to the injured flesh and the flowers will heal the hurt.
Dipping her brush into the madder pigment, she added a blush of pink to the white petal of her bramble blossom. Then, hearing in her head Gwydo’s oft-repeated reminder that a good artist knows when to leave well alone, she cleaned the brush and laid it down. I have done my best, she thought. Now it is up to the Abbess to make what use she wishes of my skills. If any, she added, superstitiously crossing her fingers against the unpleasant possibility that Abbess Helewise would make no use of her at all.
Sitting there in her chilly corner, a thought occurred to her. Slowly she uncrossed her fingers, muttering aloud a swift apology to God. Then she got up, carefully covered her work and made her way to the Abbey church. Some time spent on her knees was, she knew, a far more suitable way of asking for what she wanted than any amount of finger-crossing.