Chapter Eight #3
‘They look very clean, Father. Very crisp to the eye.’ She also thought they looked cheap.
She couldn’t see them lasting. The gentry wanted things made just for them after all, not something anyone could have.
How was a printed book to be special? You couldn’t order it differently as you could when copying quires, you couldn’t add in a flourish here or there – although she’d seen some of the printed books left spaces to fill in a coat of arms or a painted initial letter.
‘Not as pretty as some of the writing you do. Costs plenty though, I expect.’
He was leaning over the prayer book now, looking at the gilt and the images she’d spent hours on.
‘Some inks are more costly than others,’ she admitted.
‘How did you know how to make them? Who taught you?’
‘The monks we met, me and my father.’ She wouldn’t tell him about the copy of Theophilus’s On Divers Arts that she had stolen.
It was a poor thing, it had been in a fire and half the pages were missing, and she wasn’t sure the scribe who copied it had it right.
She had used the recipes for ink though, and written her own adaptations on it.
She was sure the Abbey she had stolen it from hadn’t missed it – the scribes there were lazy and never looked to make anything more than oak gall ink.
It was one of her most precious possessions, that and her knife.
‘Have you seen the Holy Island Gospel in Durham?’ he asked.
Was this a trick question? It was held in a special shrine by the monks, she certainly shouldn’t have seen it. She looked blankly at him.
‘The blues,’ he was musing now, as if she weren’t there, ‘the divine blues.’
‘That would be the lapis lazuli,’ she explained, ‘from the East. The Prior is hoping to get some for the work we’ll be doing here.’
He looked around suddenly as if hearing her for the first time. ‘I think I saw a note for that in Oswyn’s book. Come look at it with me.’
She followed him into the parlour where he rifled through the accounts until he found the right page. Brother Marcus was near, watching closely as they looked. A note, right at the bottom of a page, carelessly scribbled in, not Oswyn’s usual hand, Linnet noticed, but he wasn’t always neat.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the Prior will have ordered it off one of the pedlars, I’ve not seen it yet though.’
She would love to work with it. The Virgin Mary’s cloak perhaps, or a divine sky for the sparkling gilt stars.
The Inspector abruptly lost interest in her and the lapis and turned his back on her to get back into the books. She slipped from the room, back to the Scriptorium.
She had indeed seen the Holy Island Gospel once.
There was little in Durham Cathedral she’d not stolen a look at while they lived there.
Not a big book but so richly filled with images and words.
She’d looked through it by candlelight, after the pilgrims had gone and when the monks were all asleep.
It had been brought out late to show a visiting bishop and left safe in the room off the shrine to be put away with full ceremony the next day, locked away in the book safe.
She shouldn’t have been in the room or anywhere near the shrine, which was well past the black line on the floor of the cathedral telling women to stop there. A child though, she could slip through shadows and she had learnt how to jiggle locks and get into rooms that had been left carelessly shut.
Even then, books had entranced her. She remembered running her hand over the bumps and curls of the letters, curious about the gloss marked out beneath the words.
Her Latin was slight, but the gloss, the words underneath, even though they were supposed to be English, didn’t mean much more to her.
Her favourite pages were the drawings of pillars surrounding lists of words.
They reminded her of the pillars in Durham Cathedral, and here at the Priory, with their sharp lines cut at angles, making patterns.
Linnet had never slept much, and it served her well. As a child she could wander freely at night without anyone asking what she was doing, or giving her little tasks. She could also get into forbidden places and take things without anyone seeing.
She’d never felt bad about what she thieved. She had a rule (although she suspected all thieves thought they had a rule). She only took from those who had plenty and those who she felt had wronged her or others in some way. Or, of course, if she really really wanted it.
Her good cloak was from a travelling pilgrim’s wife, rude and cruel to the child who was with them.
Linnet had taken great satisfaction in watching her having to wait for hours for her husband to come out from seeing the saint’s tomb.
The wife had put it carefully on a pew to save her place for later and blamed everyone around her for thieving it.
Not Linnet though, who had unpicked the fine stitching decoration and hidden it away until that pilgrim, that wife and that cloak were all forgotten, swept away in the tide of more pilgrims, more wives, and more thefts.