Fortune Like the Moon

PRELUDE

Dead, she was a pattern of black, white and red on the sparse, short grass of a dry July.

Black for the fine wool habit, still quite new. It bore none of the darns in the front panel of the skirt that told of years spent kneeling in prayer, and the rear hem was still pristine, not yet worn by careless contact with stone steps. White for the wimple and barbette which had framed the face, although the wimple was no longer secured around the throat and chin but torn away. White, too, for the pale, pale skin. For the face, frozen into the expression of abject terror that it would wear until the flesh rotted from the skull. For the shockingly exposed legs and loins, from which habit and underskirt had been thrown back. In death she was immodest, poor lass, lying there with her thin white legs wide apart. It was as if her corpse had been arranged deliberately so as to make a pleasing pattern, for the outflung arms matched the angle of the spread legs.

Red for the blood.

So much blood.

Her throat had been cut, with the same eye for symmetry that had arranged the limbs. The slash began exactly under the right ear lobe and ended precisely under the left, and it gaped open to its widest immediately beneath the small and somewhat feeble chin.

Her bare neck and throat were soaked with blood, and it had trickled down in several fine streams on to the collar of the habit, where it was absorbed by the wool.

There was blood, too, on the white legs. A great deal of blood, glistening on the dark pubic hair and smeared on the inner thighs.

The morning sun came up over the horizon, and the greyish light of dawn quickly grew stronger, brightening the black and the white so that the contrast deepened. Sunlight shone on the dark crimson blood, making it shine like a jewel. A ruby, perhaps, as dazzling as the one set in the gold cross that lay a few paces from the horror-struck, dead face.

The daylight waxed, and from somewhere quite near a cockerel began to crow, repeatedly, as if determined to be heard. In a nearby building a bell rang, its summons followed by sounds of life as people set about beginning the day.

A new day.

The first of the infinite number that the dead woman would not see.