Where Saints Lie Sleeping: What The Saint Saw Not

The last bell of compline died into the stone of the eastern tower, its bronze tongue still quivering against the rope, and in the silence that followed Edda Vance counted to thirty before she lifted the lantern from beneath her cloak.

She had not brought it from the village. A novice named Sister Pelia had left it burning on the refectory step for someone who would never come back for it, and Edda had only had to borrow it for an hour. Just an hour. The wick gave off a thin smell of rendered tallow and something sharper beneath it, like scorched linen, and the flame threw her shadow long against the flagstones of the south cloister. Her shadow moved before she did, a tall pilgrim woman with a pilgrim's staff she had not carried in two days because the staff was for walking and she was no longer walking anywhere.

She set her teeth. The lock on the restricted wing was iron, old, the sort a passing monk might have oiled once a decade. It sat at the end of a passage so narrow her shoulders brushed both walls. Above her, the vaulting climbed into black. Below her, her boots found grit and the small brittle crumbs of candle wax that had fallen from someone's vigil and never been swept up. She held the lantern low and tipped the shutters open a finger's width. Light ran across the door, and the keyhole answered with its own small wet gleam.

Two picks. She had fashioned them herself from needle files the autumn her brother had stopped writing, and she had carried them since in a needle case sewn into the lining of her boot. Her fingers knew the shape of them. They came out cool, and the steel held the chill of the leather against her skin as she fitted the torsion wrench into the bottom of the keyhole and felt, for the first time in two years, the old familiar calm settle across her shoulders like a clean sheet of parchment. This, at least, she could do.

The pin tumbler turned grudgingly. It was a country lock, not a city lock, and it had the bad habits of country locks: a heavy driver pin that liked to set early and jam if she rushed. She did not rush. She breathed through her nose, slow, counting the strokes of her own pulse in the hinge of her jaw, and when the driver pin finally seated she let out a breath she had not realized she was holding and rotated the cylinder.

The door gave. Not with a groan, but with a small, polite exhalation of air that had been standing still for a long time. Beyond it, a second corridor stretched away into the dark, and the smell changed. Not the candle smoke and incense of the inhabited abbey. This was older. Damp plaster. Lime. And under that, the faint mineral tang of ink that had not been stirred in a season.

Edda stepped in and pulled the door to behind her without letting it latch. She would need to leave the way she had come, and quickly, before some sleepless brother with a weak bladder decided that the south cloister was the place to walk off his dinner.

She had been five days at the abbey. Five days as Aelis of Doncaster, a pilgrim come to venerate the hand of the sainted Mother Seraine, whose bones slept in a silver reliquary under the high altar of the chapel. Five days of standing in line with the other pilgrims, of kneeling on cold stone, of listening to Father Orin preach in that gentle, maddening voice about the duty of remembrance and the mercy of forgetting. Five days of watching the monks' habits sway past her in the cloisters, brown and undyed, each face a question she did not yet know how to ask. She had spoken to none of them more than she had needed to. She had smiled at the ones who smiled at her. She had let Sister Pelia press bread and cheese into her hands and accepted it with the proper gratitude of a humble guest. And every night, when the office was done and the brothers filed into the dormitory, she had lain on her straw mattress in the pilgrims' cell with her eyes open and her hands folded on her stomach, listening to the abbey settle around her like a creature drawing breath.

Her brother had been here. She knew it the way she knew the feel of her own picks in her fingers, by the shape of an absence. Edric had come to this place eighteen months ago, asking questions about a fragment of a letter he had found in the cathedral archive at Vellan, a letter in which the name of a certain saint was spelled in a way no scribe would spell it by accident. He had written to her twice from the village at the foot of the hill. Then he had not written at all. When she rode up the road to the gatehouse, the porter had no record of a Vance, but he had, after some reluctance, a record of a brother who had entered under the old name and had since been received into the order. He could not, the porter had said, speak the name aloud. Some things in this house, he had added, were not for portering.

She had not pressed him. Pressing was for people who had the luxury of time. She had taken her pilgrim's place at the table and waited.

Now, lantern in hand, she counted doors. The first was a storeroom, its shelves bowed under jars of dried comfrey. The second was empty, its flagstones swept bare. The third had a lock on it newer than the others, a London lock, well-oiled, and Edda stood before it for a long moment with her lantern raised and her head tilted, listening to the silence on the other side. The silence answered her in kind.

She knelt and set the lantern on the floor. Its light climbed the wall and found, halfway up the plaster, a small painted cross in red ochre, the kind a brother might mark above his cell to keep his devotions honest. She noted the position of the cross in her mind. She noted also that the door, when she pressed her ear against it, gave back nothing. No breath. No movement. Only the slow, patient creak of old wood adjusting to its own weight.

She fitted her picks. The London lock was better made, but it had been made by the same hand that had made the last lock she had opened in Vellan, in a chapter house that no longer had a chapter, and her fingers remembered the trick of it. Two minutes, perhaps three. The wick of the lantern guttered once, throwing a long bruise of shadow across the corridor, and she steadied it with her thumb without thinking. The pin sheared. The bolt turned. The door swung inward on a breath of air that smelled, distinctly and unmistakably, of old ink and of the particular dry sweetness of vellum that had been stored too long without being read.

Edda rose. She lifted the lantern. She stepped across the threshold into a room that had once been a scriptorium and was now, to her eye, something else entirely.

The long reading desks had been pushed back against the walls and stripped of their sloping tops. In their place, on trestles set end to end down the center of the room, lay sheets of parchment in rows, and on the parchment lay more ink than she had ever seen in one place outside of the royal chancery at Norham. The work was not finished. Pens lay across the pages as if their owners had set them down only a moment ago and might return at any second to take them up again. There were pots of red wax melted and reset. There were cords knotted and cut. And at the far end of the longest trestle, weighted down by a smooth river stone that might have come from any stream in the valley, lay a single folio turned face down, as if whoever had been reading it had meant to come back to it.

Edda did not touch anything yet. She raised the lantern high and walked the length of the room once, slowly, the way her old master at the scriptorium had taught her to walk a room he meant to copy. She let her eyes do the work first. Names. Dates. Marginal hands. The sharp, severe hand of a corrector. The looser, hurried hand of a copyist working against a deadline she could not read. She saw, pinned to a board near the door, a list in a hand she did not know, and at the head of it the single word Retractanda , and beneath it in a column the beginnings of names she did recognize, because she had read them in her brother's last letter. She saw the name of a bishop who had been dead for forty years. She saw the name of a queen who had never been a queen. She saw, three lines down, in a hand that might have been her brother's and might not have been, a single entry that read only E. V. anno praesenti , and the year beside it was the year her brother had not come home.

Her hand went out before she could stop it. She caught herself with her fingertips a finger's width above the page, and stood there, breathing.

The flame in the lantern dipped, and a thin ribbon of smoke rose from the wick and curled against the plaster above her head, and somewhere down the corridor, very faintly, she heard the shuffle of sandaled feet on stone.

The footsteps stopped. Then resumed, closer now, with the uneven rhythm of someone trying to be quiet and failing at it. Edda lowered her lantern slowly and stepped back from the board, letting her hand fall to her side. She could feel her pulse in her throat. She counted the beats the way she had learned to count them in the days after her brother's letter had stopped arriving, the way she still counted them when she woke in strange rooms and could not remember where she was. Seven. Eight. Nine.

The door opened inward without a knock, and Brother Caelum Madren stood on the threshold with his hands full of a wooden tray and his face arranged in the particular expression of a man who had hoped to surprise no one and had succeeded only in being surprised himself. He looked at her. He looked at the board. He set the tray down on the nearest lectern with the exaggerated care of someone trying not to make a sound.

"I brought the tea," he said. "It will have gone cold by now, I expect."

"I expect so," Edda said.

He did not come further into the room. He stood with one shoulder against the doorframe, and she could see by the lantern-light the fine dust on his sleeve, and a darker smudge at his cuff that might have been ink. His eyes moved past her to the board and then back to her face, and she watched him decide, visibly, not to ask what she had been reading.

"You have been here some time," he said instead, and his voice was careful, the way a man is careful when he is walking along the edge of a well in the dark.

"I have been looking at the room," Edda said. "You said it was the scriptorium. I wanted to see it as it was."

"It is not as it was." He said it quickly, and then, as if hearing himself, he softened. "Nothing is, after three centuries. The desks were moved in the time of Father Oren. The windows were widened under Mother Aelis. The chest at the far wall was sealed in the year of the great mortality, and not opened since."

"Until now."

He did not answer that. He picked up the tray again and carried it to the small table by the cold hearth, and she heard the soft clink of the cup against the saucer, and the thinner sound of something else, something metal, being set down beside it. He did not look at her as he worked. He had the air of a man performing a small ritual to keep his hands occupied while his mind argued with itself.

"Brother Caelum," Edda said. "What is in the chest?"

His hands stopped. He stood very still for a moment with his back to her, and then he turned, and the look on his face was one she recognized, because she had worn it herself often enough: the look of a person who has been waiting a long time to be asked a particular question and is now afraid of the answer he will have to give.

"It was sealed by Brother Ren of the Vale," he said. "He was the last sacristan of this house before the schism. He was also, by the testimony of his contemporaries, not entirely well in his mind. He believed that the saint had been buried alive."

The room was very quiet. Somewhere far off in the abbey a bell rang for the hour, and the sound came down the stone corridor and into the scriptorium as a low, sourceless hum that seemed to come from the walls themselves.

"Buried alive," Edda said.

"That is what he wrote." Brother Caelum came toward her then, but only as far as the next lectern, and he set his hand on it as if he needed something to lean against. "There is a document inside. He sealed the chest with the document inside. He asked, in his last illness, that it not be opened until such time as the matter of the saint's death could be properly inquired into, which is to say, never, because no one has ever wished to inquire. The abbey has a saint. The abbey wishes to keep its saint. That is the whole of the matter, until it is not."

Edda set the lantern down on the floor and straightened. She could feel the weight of the cold air on her face, and beneath that the warmer, fainter smell of old vellum and the iron-and-ink smell of the room itself, which she was beginning to know.

"Will you open it?" she asked.

"I am not permitted to open it." He swallowed. "I have thought about it, many times. There is a lock. There is a key, in the prior's keeping. I do not have the prior's permission. I do not expect to receive it."

"And yet you brought me here."

He looked at her then, fully, and there was something in his face she had not seen before, something that did not belong to the soft, careful librarian of the corridor and the cloister, but to a younger man, perhaps, or to a man who had once been young and had not entirely forgotten how.

"I brought you here because you asked," he said. "And because pilgrims are permitted to see the sealed things of the house, if a brother of the house is with them, and if the chest is not opened. I have not opened it. I would not open it. But you may look at it, if you wish. You may touch the lock. I will be in the room the whole while."

He said the last of it as if it were a vow. She believed him, or nearly believed him, which was as much as she ever believed anyone in houses of stone.

She crossed the room. The chest stood against the far wall beneath a small, barred window through which the last of the evening light came in a single thin bar, and across the floor of that bar of light, dust moved very slowly, the way dust moves in rooms where no one has breathed for a long time. The chest was of oak, darkened almost to black, and bound with iron bands that had gone red with rust in places, and the iron had bled into the wood in long streaks that looked, when she bent her head, like the trails of old tears. The lock was of a size and shape she had not seen before, larger than her palm, and the keyhole was a tall, narrow slit, and around the slit someone had once cut, very carefully, a small star.

She knelt. The stone was cold through the linen of her kirtle. She could smell the dust of the floor and, beneath it, the older smell of the stone itself, wet-stone and old mortar, and beneath that, faintly, the smell of something else. She could not name it. It was sweet and a little rotten, the way incense smells a long time after it has gone out.

"Brother Ren," she said, half to herself.

"He was sacristan for eleven years," Brother Caelum said from behind her. He had not moved from the lectern. His voice came to her over the tops of the other desks, low and even, the way a man reads aloud when he has read a thing many times. "He came to the abbey as a boy. He was here when the saint died. He helped, by his own account, to lay the saint in the reliquary. He wrote, in the year before he died, that the saint had opened his eyes."

She did not turn around.

"Opened his eyes," she said.

"He wrote that the saint had opened his eyes and looked at him. He wrote that he had sealed the chest because he did not know what else to do. He wrote that he was afraid."

She lifted the lantern from where she had set it and held it close to the lock, and the light fell into the keyhole and came back at her flat and black, as if there were nothing on the other side, or as if there were something that did not wish to be seen. She could feel, through the wood of the chest, through her knees against the stone, the faintest vibration, the way one feels a bell that has been rung a long time ago and has not quite stopped.

"Will you read it to me," she said, "what he wrote, if I cannot open it?"

"It is sealed," Brother Caelum said. His voice was smaller now. "No one has read it. The prior has not read it. The abbot before him did not read it. It has not been read in three hundred years."

"Then I will have to read it myself," Edda said. She stood, and the bones of her knees cracked, and she looked at him across the room. "I will ask the prior. I will ask him tomorrow, in the light, with witnesses, as is proper. Will you stand with me when I ask?"

He did not answer at once. He looked at the chest, and then at her, and then at his own hands, which were not steady. She watched him fold them together and press them against his belt, the way a child folds its hands when it is being told to be still.

"I will stand with you," he said, at last, and his voice was not the voice of the careful librarian any longer, but of a man who had made a decision he was not yet sure he could keep.

She nodded. She did not thank him. She picked up the lantern and walked back across the room, and the thin bar of evening light caught her shadow and laid it long on the floor behind her, and somewhere in the walls the bell went on humming, and somewhere further off, in a part of the abbey she had not yet been taken to, something moved, and was still.

She did not sleep well. The pallet in the guest cell smelled of straw and something older, a sweetness that might have been dried herbs or might have been the slow exhalation of the walls themselves, and the shutters let in a thin line of dawn that lay across her folded hands like a blade. She lay still and watched it brighten. Somewhere a bell began, low, then higher, then higher still, and the abbey answered it with footsteps, with the murmur of a prayer she could not quite make out, with the distant percussion of a door.

She rose and dressed and combed her hair with her fingers and went down the cold stair. Brother Caelum was already waiting at the foot of it. He had a small leather satchel slung across his shoulder, and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow as if he had been working, and there was ink on his right thumb.

"I thought you might not come," he said.

"I came," she said. That was all.

They crossed the cloister in the early light. The sky was the color of tin and the fountain in the center ran quietly, and the air had that thin clarity that comes after a long night of waiting. Brother Caelum walked half a step behind her, which she noted, and which she did not mention, and they reached the prior's office as the last of the bells died away into the stone.

Father Orin received them standing. He was a tall man, and he had the kind of stillness that looks like patience and is sometimes only the habit of authority. His hands were folded across his stomach, and his eyes went from Edda to Brother Caelum and back to Edda.

"Sister Vance," he said. "I had not expected you so early."

"You expected me to ask," she said. "You did not expect me to ask so soon."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He gestured to the chairs. They sat. He did not.

"I would like to open the chest," Edda said. "I would like to read what Brother Caelum showed me was inside it, and what no one in this abbey has read for three hundred years. I would like to do it here, with witnesses, as the rules require."

"The rules," Father Orin said, "require many things."

"They require that a relic which speaks be heard," she said. "They require that a sealed writing be opened in the presence of two of the order and a petitioner of honest intention. I am the petitioner. Brother Caelum is one of the order. I ask that you, Father, be the second."

He looked at Brother Caelum.

"You wish this, Brother Caelum?"

"I do," Brother Caelum said. His voice was thin, but it did not waver.

Father Orin was quiet for a long time. The light moved across the floor and touched the edge of his desk, and a moth that had come in through some high window circled once and settled on the wood.

"Very well," he said. "Bring the chest. Bring Sister Pelia, if she is to be found, and Mother Seraine Ousborne, for she will have something to say about it and I would rather she say it here. Let it be done in the chapel, where the saint himself lies, and let it be done before the midday office, that there may be time to repair what may be torn."

Brother Caelum stood and went. Edda remained. She looked at the prior, and the prior looked at her, and neither of them spoke, because there was nothing yet to be said that was not better said in the chapel, with the candles lit.

The chapel was small and old and smelled of beeswax and dust. The bones of the saint were in a reliquary against the far wall, behind a grille of hammered iron, and the grille threw a complicated shadow on the floor when the candles were lit, and the shadow looked almost like a hand. Mother Seraine Ousborne sat on the bench nearest the door, and her rosary clicked softly between her fingers. Sister Pelia stood behind her, very straight, her hands folded into the opposite sleeves of her habit. Father Orin stood at the altar, and Brother Caelum knelt at the foot of the reliquary, and Edda knelt beside him.

The chest was set between them on a square of undyed cloth. The seals upon it were dark and cracked. Father Orin read the prayer of opening, which was long, and his voice was measured and did not tremble. When he had finished, he nodded to Edda.

She broke the seals one at a time. The wax crumbled under her thumb with a small dry sound. She lifted the lid. Inside, on a bed of cloth that had once been white and was now the color of weak tea, lay a single sheet of vellum, folded twice, and a sprig of something dried that crumbled when she touched it. She lifted the vellum. She unfolded it. The ink was brown at the edges and blacker at the center where the hand that wrote it had pressed harder, and the hand, she could tell, had been an old one.

She read it aloud.

It was not a confession. It was a record.

It said: I have broken the seal of confession, and I have done it knowingly, and I have done it because I cannot carry it further. I will die soon. They have made that clear. The order smothered the saint in his sleep. I was not the one who held the pillow, but I was the one who held the door. His will had broken. He had been trying to leave. He had been trying to go to the low country and tell what he knew of the abbot's dealings with the southern houses. They could not let him go. They could not let him speak. He was an old man and a tired one, and he had wept, and then he had slept, and in his sleep he did not wake again.

It said: I heard the shape of it in confession from the one who held the pillow, and he died a year later of a winter fever, and I heard it again from the one who held his feet, and he died a year after that of a fall from a horse that was not, I think, a horse's doing. The truth died with the seal of confession. But the bleeding began the day the seal was lifted, and I think it has not stopped, and I think it will not stop until someone reads this and believes it.

It said: I am sorry.

It was signed with a name that had been worn almost away by three hundred years of being touched by the same cloth that wrapped the relic. She could not read the name. She read it anyway.

When she had finished, no one spoke. The candles guttered. Somewhere in the chapel, the iron grille creaked, though no one had touched it. Mother Seraine's rosary had stopped clicking. Sister Pelia was weeping without sound, her face turned toward the wall.

Brother Caelum rose. He stood very straight, and his hands were not folded, and his sleeves were still rolled to the elbow, and the ink was still on his thumb.

"Father," he said, "what shall be done with this?"

Father Orin did not answer at once. He looked at the vellum, and then at the reliquary, and then at his own hands, which were folded across his stomach in the way she had seen him fold them when she first came in, and which looked now, she thought, less like patience and more like the holding of something that wished to fall.

"It will be read again," he said. "It will be read before the brothers, and the sisters, and any pilgrim who wishes to hear it. It will be sent to the bishop. It will be sent to the mother house. The relic will remain, because the relic is the relic, and a man who was killed for what he knew is still a man who knew it, and the order will have to live with both of those things."

Mother Seraine rose. She looked at Edda.

"You came here," she said, "looking for your brother."

"Yes," Edda said.

"You have found him?"

"No," Edda said. "But I have found out why he was looking."

Mother Seraine nodded. She did not ask how. She crossed herself and walked out of the chapel, and her rosary began to click again as she went, and Sister Pelia followed her, still weeping, and Father Orin remained, and Brother Caelum remained, and Edda remained, and the chest remained open upon its square of undyed cloth, and the vellum lay upon it, and the saint lay behind his grille, and the light from the high window moved slowly across them all, and the bell began again, somewhere, low, then higher, then higher still.