She turned to me and I put my arms about her. She winced with pain. Her big rather flaccid body trembled.
“I’ve told,” she babbled. “I’ve told what ought never to be told. I’ve done something terrible. I wonder Satan himself don’t come down for me.”
“Begin at the beginning,” commanded Kate. “Tell us everything. You’re just babbling nonsense.”
“Yes, it’ll help you to talk, Kezzie,” I said. “I doubt it’s as bad as you think.”
“It’s terrible, Mistress Damask, I’m doomed. The gates of hell be yawning….”
“Don’t start that again,” Kate said impatiently. “Now what happened? That man sent for you and you went willingly. In fact you could scarcely wait to get there. We know that.”
“Oh, it were before that, Mistress Kate. It were long before that. It was when I found the gate in the wall. That’s when it all began.”
The gate in the wall! Kate and I exchanged glances.
“It were covered by the ivy and none would guess there was a gate there, but I found it…and I went through. I walked into sacred ground. I should have known I was damned from then.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Kate sharply. “There shouldn’t have been a gate and then you wouldn’t have found it. You couldn’t be blamed for opening and walking through. That was natural.”
“But it didn’t stop there, Mistress. I saw him there…and he’d thrown off his monk’s robe and he didn’t seem the same without it—a man, nothing more. He was tending the herbs and plucking some and he was a fine man, that much was clear. I watched him and then I called to him and when he saw me he was that startled. He bade me begone quickly. He said after he thought I was some vision sent by the devil to tempt him, which in a way I was. The devil tempted us both.”
“Go on,” said Kate excitedly, and a glimmer of understanding came to me, for I had a hazy notion as to where all this was leading.
I could picture it so clearly. Brother Ambrose working there and Keziah tempting him with that blatant sensuality which was inherent and would prove her ruin.
“I watched him working and I told him it was a pity all that fine manhood going to waste and all he could say was ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ But I was wicked and I knew it was only a matter of waiting. I went away but I came back and I could see that he was expecting me and I couldn’t think of any other man but him and I knew how it was with him. So we lay in the long grass and we did what was only natural for most men but him being a monk made it all the more exciting like for me. For him too, I reckon. And I went back and he wouldn’t come that time because he was busy in his cell itching in his hair shirt or kneeling before the cross asking for purification or something like that. So he used to tell me, but I didn’t listen. I always knew he’d come back and that he wanted to be there as much as I did. And so it was. But then I was with child. I know it had happened to others before me but this was different. This was with child by a monk.”
“It’s not the first time that’s happened to you, I’ll swear,” said Kate, her eyes gleaming with excitement.
“That was the first time—though it’s happened since, and I’ve rid myself of my burdens with my old Granny’s help. If it hadn’t been the first time I might have acted different. But there I was with child…by a monk…I was frightened. So I said nothing…nothing to him, nothing to nobody, and then it was six months and beginning to show so I went to my old Granny in the woods. She was a wise woman. She’d know what to do. ‘You’ve left it too late, Kez!’ she said. ‘You should have come three months since. It would be dangerous now. You’ll have to have the child.’ So I told her all and that it was a monk’s seed that had made my baby and she laughed then, she laughed so long and loud that she made me feel better. ‘Go back to the house,’ she said, ‘and wear your biggest petticoats. Tell them that your aunt in Black Heath is ill and calling for you. You’re going to her for a spell.’ So I did as she said and I set out with a few things in my saddlebags and I was to travel with a party that my Granny was arranging. But I stayed with Granny and she kept me in her cottage so that no one knew because she had this idea of what we should do when the child was born. She sent for Ambrose and he came to her cottage—though he were living enclosed and that were breaking his vows—and the child was to be born about Christmastime. He didn’t want to do it but my Granny had wonderful powers. He thought she was the Devil in petticoats for he believed by now that he sold his soul to the Devil. She tempted him. ‘It’s your own child,’ she said. ‘The seed of your loins. You’ll want to see it sometimes, watch over it.’ When the boy child was born—it being Christmas, this plan came to my Granny. She sat by the fire rocking herself and talking to the cat. The child was to go into the crib, so they’d think it was a Holy Child. My Granny said they’d bring him up in the Abbey and perhaps he’d be Abbot one day. They made an educated gentleman of him which would be different from his being a serving wench’s bastard. So we planned it and on that Christmas Eve I carried my baby through the secret door and Ambrose took him and laid him in the crib….”
Kate and I were astounded. We could not believe this. Bruno—the Holy Child, whose coming had been a miracle which had changed St. Bruno’s from a struggling to a prosperous Abbey, the son of a monk and a serving girl! Yet although we cried out against this fantastic story we believed that it was true.
“You wicked creature,” cried Kate. “All this time you have been deceiving us…and the world.”
I thought she was going to strike Keziah. She was so angry; and I knew that she could not bear to think of the change in Bruno’s status. She had jeered at the Holy Child but she had wanted him to be set apart from the rest of us.
Keziah began to sob. “But I’m not deceiving now,” she said. “And this is the most wicked thing of all. Now the whole world knows.”
“Keziah,” I cried, “you have told that…man!”
She rocked herself to and fro in her misery. “Mistress, I could not help it. He sent for me to go to the inn—the Abbey Inn. I was taken to a room there and he ordered me to strip and lie down on the bed. So I did and waited for him because I thought….”
“We know what you thought, you harlot,” cried Kate.
“But it wasn’t,” said Keziah. “He came and he bent over me and he fondled me rough like and said, ‘You’re not a young harlot anymore, Keziah, but there’s a lot of the harlot still left in you, eh?’ And I laughed and I thought it was a sort of love play and then he took a rope and tied me by the ankles to the bedposts. I struggled a bit but not so much.”
“You thought it was going to be some new kind of what do you call it…love play?” said Kate.
“I thought that, Mistress…right till I saw the whip. Then I screamed and he hit me across the face and said, ‘None of that noise, you slut.’
“I asked him what he wanted of me more than he’d had and more than he could take as he wished for I had nothing more to give. ‘Oh, but you have, Keziah,’ he said. ‘You’ve got something I want and you’re going to give it too if I have to kill you to get it.’ I was frightened, Mistress, too frightened to cry for he looked like a fiend there bending over me, gloating as a man might when he looks on a naked woman but a gloating I hadn’t seen before. Then he said, ‘You’ve had something to do with the monks. You’re not going to tell me a woman like you hasn’t done a little frolicking behind the gray walls. You’d have had your fill of grooms and stablemen and gardeners and any travelers that came this way. You’d want a little change, wouldn’t you?’ Then with my sin heavy on me I began to tremble and he saw it and that made him laugh the more. ‘You’re going to tell me, Keziah?’ he said. ‘You’re going to tell me all about this tumbling on the altar and in the holy chapels.’ I cried out, ‘It weren’t there. It weren’t there. We weren’t as sinful as that.’ And he said, ‘Where were you sinful then, Keziah?’ I shut my mouth tight and I wouldn’t speak. Then he brought the whip down across me, Mistress. I screamed and he said, ‘Scream all you like, Keziah. They’re used to screams in this place and they daren’t complain. That was a taste, a starter.’ I could feel the blood warm on my thighs. He bent over me then and caressed me, in his rough way. He took my ear between his teeth and bit it. He said: ‘Keziah, if you don’t talk I’ll make your body so that no man will ever want to lie with you again. I’ll make your face so scarred men will shudder when they look at you. You’ll want them just the same but they’ll not want you. You won’t find it so easy to give that I’m-willing-and-ready-sir look you gave me in the lane when we first met.’ And I was trembling and I said to myself: I must not tell. I must not tell. And I said nothing and he bent over me and he said, ‘Just once more to remind you how you enjoy it, eh?’ And then he was on me in that fierce sort of way that was almost more pain than pleasure. Oh, Mistress, what have I done?”