The Chalice

Cynethrith, the heroine of Courting Trouble, is visiting the abbey her mother founded. As Christianity was taking root in Anglo Saxon England, rich patrons demonstrated their piety by establishing abbeys and furnishing them with treasures and relics. Cynethrith describes what she sees. 

The altar, covered with a gold-embroidered frontal, held a silver and gold chalice [my mother] had commissioned in East Anglia: around its rim fantastic birds interlaced so cleverly that you could hardly tell where one began and the other ended. Her father had bought the imposing altar cross of gold and precious stones from a Byzantine trader. In its center a tiny vial contained a drop of St. Etheldreda’s blood. My eye came back to the chancel arch—its grappling angels and demons carved by a sculptor my mother had brought in from Kent—then was pulled to the center of the choir where, in darkness beneath the floor, lay my mother.