The Anchoress

Usually, Father Ranaulf’s voice sounds adamant and hard. But it’s a bit softer on the day he brings the parchment pages on which he’s written down what he knows about Isabella and passes them through the curtain to Sarah. She reads them over and over, fear spreading through her body like a chill. Eventually, she realizes that by giving them to her, Ranaulf wants to protect her (and himself) from Bishop Michael.

Sarah takes matters into her own hands, even though she knows she’s disobeying her confessor. When Ranaulf refuses again to make an amulet—having asked his abbot and consulted the writings of the church fathers—she follows Lizzie’s advice and decides to carve St. Margaret’s words onto an apple for Anna to eat. It’s harder than she expects, and by the time she’s finished carving a few abbreviated marks—a cross, a St. M, “mercy,” and an Amen—she has sliced her own fingers, and the apple is browning and softening to mush where she cut it. Sarah calls Anna to the maid’s window, explains the apple, and gives it to her to eat. Anna eats slowly and insists on sharing some of the apple with Sarah.

One evening in Advent, Louise knocks on the shutter to tell Sarah that Anna is in labor at Lizzie’s house, attended by Lizzie, Maud, Jocelyn, and Avice. Sarah paces her cell and worries. And she remembers the fear she felt during Emma’s labor. She knows that the women will surround Anna, that they will open doors and windows and cupboards and drawers. She knows they’ll pray the Latin charm meant to call the baby forth without it harming its mother, and she recites it too. She remembers her fear as she watched Emma labor, weaken, and die. She remembers how surprised she was that her sister submitted to the pain without anger. She remembers telling Emma’s husband to fetch the priest. She hears banging on Father Simon’s door and knows that one of the women has come to fetch him because someone is dying, either Anna or the baby—or both.

Afterwards, Sarah goes half wild with anger and grief. Time shatters into tiny fragments. St. Margaret failed in her promise, and Sarah now wonders how a virgin could possibly help women in childbirth. She remembers washing Emma’s dead body, wiping away the blood and water from her thighs and finding no peace on her face. She hears the villagers passing outside, knows that they worry about her and gossip about her and her failure to protect Anna, to save her. From her cell, she hears Anna’s funeral—the baby lived—and she knows that Sir Thomas is there, consulting in hushed tones with Father Simon about the  poor, mad, shamed, grief-stricken anchoress. 

The stone walls of Sarah’s anchorhold beg for her to tell them a story. Inspired by the abandoned embroidery piece on her desk (she no longer recognizes it as her own), she tells them about a tall, handsome man who carries people across the river. One day, he carries a small child across. But there, Sarah falters, unsure. Wasn’t it a woman who carried the child, she wonders? As the woman crosses the river, the child grows heavier and heavier until they both sink to the river’s bottom, where monsters of the deep swirl around them like silk shrouds. Sarah confesses her failure to the stone walls. Anna—who shared a sweet apple with Sarah on May Day and then who ate a prayer-carved apple with her so recently—is gone. Sarah doesn’t know what price she will pay for her failure to protect her.