The Queen's Pawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the only language I had learned to read and write well, and I improved greatly under Father Anthony’s tutelage. After a year he declared that he had no more to teach me, and he went away. So my only instruction in Latin after that came from the Mother herself.
    When I passed twelve summers, the Mother took me into the simples garden and showed me how to tend the herbs and plants that lived there. She had given me all of her Church Latin, so now she taught me the names of plants, what they were good for, how some were aids in healing, and others aids in death.
    There was a fountain in this garden, a small one that never ran dry Sometimes when we were done working, the Mother and I would sit beside it, sipping cool, clear water from a dried gourd.
    My favorite of all my work, what I loved more than the garden, more than prayer, was to sit in the small library and work with Sister Bernard on the illuminations.
    We were a small house, but we had the queen’s favor, so others who sought her favor as well would often send us requests for small books. They would ask for a woman’s prayer book very rarely, or sometimes for a Gospel for a small church that had just received an endowment from the Crown.
    It was considered odd for women to paint illuminations, but Sister Bernard had a gift, and what little she could teach of it, she gave to me.
    The day I first found her painting, I gasped to see the colors take shape under her hands. She was working on a small book, its vellum old, scraped many times. But Sister Bernard worked as if the words she drew would last into eternity. Being the Word of God, I suppose they will, though not the ones drawn by her hand.
    I watched her for hours, not returning to my rooms or even to the simples garden to meet the Mother. Mother Sebastian came to find me, and when she saw the look on my face, I did not have to ask permission to stay. She granted the requests she could, for I asked for very little.
    So time was taken out of my day to work with Sister Bernard. At first, I could do only the calligraphy, for we could not risk the costly colors on my lessons. But even the Mother agreed that no one seeing the book when it was finished would be able to tell that it had not been written by a man.
    After a few months, I was allowed to paint with color. Sister Bernard stood next to me by my high table and stool. We sat in full sunlight when we could and brought lamps when it was raining. We needed light for our work, as the rest of the nunnery did not.
    I dipped my brush in the vermilion paint, and began the first word of the Gospel of Saint John. I felt as if the hand of God guided me, keeping me from any mistake. The first letter was done last, after the rest of the calligraphy had dried. It was a testament to the rest of the work, one that would draw the eye and bring the reader’s mind to God. This was a simple Psalter, with no other illumination than the first letter of the first page. Some country squire had ordered it to further his place at court, and it was deemed a good book for me to begin on.
    The Mother came to see the book after it had dried. Sister Bernard and I had worked on this one Psalter for months. We were sorry now that it was done and would go out into the world, away from us.
    I stood by the Mother and looked down at my work. It seemed to me that it had been done by another. How could the hand of a princess, born only for marriage, draw even a shadow of the mind of God? The Mother answered this question for me, though I had not asked it out loud.
    “Our gifts come through us from God, and go back to God from whence they came. We are only their keepers for a little while, sometime stewards of God’s inward grace.”
    Sister Bernard nodded, and I found myself comforted. This Psalter, and every illumination I did after it, belonged to God. It was for me to let them go.
     
     
    I was at the work of painting illuminations, on a day in my fourteenth spring, when the queen came