Sing Me Home (28 page)

“Maura!
Our
Maura!” Sister Agnes patted her chest and flushed right to the edge of her starched veil. “We thought you were lost forever!”

“I was always in good hands, Agnes.”

“Did you say
betrothed
?” She grew flustered as Colin walked around to help Maura down. “We’ll be praying blessings for the happy day, then.” The nun all but tripped back toward the door, trying to find her balance. “We’ve prepared for your arrival—the Abbess is waiting for you—I must run ahead and tell her the good news!”

Agnes ran off as Colin’s hands encircled her waist. Maura slipped off the saddle into his arms. He held her longer than was necessary, and she welcomed his embrace. It had taken more than a week to arrive here in Killeigh, but she couldn’t call it hard travel. The nights had been full of the music of Padraig’s pipe, the bellow of Arnaud complaining of the pace, the mewling sounds of Matilda’s new child wanting to nurse. In the evenings she’d stared up at the bright sparks of the sky, the only blanket she needed for her bed, thankful that Lord William’s guards were hardly vigilant—especially with the twins on their laps—so she and Colin could sneak off and sleep in each other’s arms.

“Milord,” she said pointedly, finally flattening her hands against his chest. “We’re in a convent now, if you please.”

With a wink he curled her hand under his elbow and led her in. Maura breathed in the scent of frankincense, the scent of laundry, the scent of old crinkling rushes and years of dampness with a rush of nostalgia. They passed through the hall where she had seen served so many meals—the chairs lined up just the way they’d always been, the tapestries just as bright. They passed the cells where the nuns slept, and the bright, cold rooms where the novices took their lessons.

She paused for a moment when they passed the cell where Sabine had lived. Once, this small cell had rung with the chirping of birds, the cracking of nuts, and the scent of a perfume far more exotic than any incense of the chapel. This cell had been a magical place of scent and color and wonder in the hushed confines of the convent. Now she wondered with a nervous mix of curiosity and hope and resentment if this room had also been her nursery.

When they reached the Abbess’s rooms, the great oak doors opened to a blaze of light. A draft ruffled a single piece of vellum and twisted a quill around the edge of an inkwell. Upon a tilted rostrum nearby lay a leather-tooled Bible, a page lovingly marked with a scarlet silk ribbon.

The Abbess leapt up from behind a battered oak table. “By the blessed milk of the Holy Mother Mary.” The Abbess pressed a hand in the hollow below her bosom. “Sister Agnes said it was you, Maura, but I could hardly believe it. My dear Maura!”

“Lady Abbess,” Maura said, bobbing like the kitchen maid she once had been. “It’s me, whole and healthy.”

The Abbess strode toward her and gripped her hands. The Abbess had lively, unusual eyes, bright and expressive against the white of her wimple, and now that gaze darted across her face, up and down her dress, while the muscles in the Abbess’s face quivered in odd ways.

“We thought you were lost,” the Abbess said. “Or stolen away. We’ve been saying prayers for your soul every day at vespers, worrying about what had become of you.”

Maura felt a pang of guilt to go along with a pang of pain for the tightness of the Abbess’s grip.

“Did you doubt it, Maura? Didn’t we all raise you since you were barely out of swaddling?” The Abbess gave her a twitchy smile. “And our daily fare has not been the same since you disappeared so abruptly. I fear half the sisters prayed not just for your safety, but also for your venison baked in jelly. Or your salmon in butter sauce. And of course, the butcher’s son, he all but abed with worry for you—”

The Abbess bit down on her own chatter. She raised her chin as if she was trying to get herself in hand.

Maura’s heart softened to see the nun so affected.

“But look at you now.” The Abbess gestured to Maura’s silver embroidery, the fine rose-colored surcoat, the well-tooled leather shoes peeping out beneath the hem. “Such a lady. And betrothed to an Irish chieftain. There’s a tale in this, I see.”

The nun sidled a glance at Colin, and in her eyes swam suspicion and uncertainty and a growing coolness of manner. The Abbess cleared her throat and stepped into her straight-backed authority. “Will you stay awhile, tell me what has happened?” She strode to the hearth and rang a pulley hanging by its side. “Surely,” the Abbess continued, “it’s the stuff of the French romances our dear Sabine used to smuggle in from the fairs and hide from me under her pallet.”

“I shall tell it to you,” Maura said, hesitating. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to explain everything that had happened without lying, and just the thought of lying to the Abbess brought back too many youthful memories of the threat of the paddle. “But first,” she said, “I need your help.”

“My help?”

“Did you receive a letter from the Baron of Shrule?”

“The Baron of—my goodness, Maura, what are you talking about?”

So William Caddell hadn’t sent a letter as he’d threatened. He probably didn’t believe her story at all. Maura shook off the thought and splayed her hand, letting the gold ring wink in the sunlight.

“Do you remember this ring?”

“Of course I remember that ring.” A knot tightened in the Abbess’s forehead. “You could speak of nothing but that ring in those weeks before you disappeared.” She sank into the chair behind her desk. “I thought maybe you’d been taken captive by thieves who’d seen it. All these weeks, I wish I’d never given it to you.”

“It was this ring that sent me out of the convent.” Maura rubbed the face of the gold. “I left to find my parents.”

The Abbess looked from her to Colin in confusion. “I don’t understand. How did you think that the ring could ever help you?”

Because I was foolish, and young, and curious, and ignorant of the world.
“You told me about the pilgrims who passed by here around the time I was abandoned on the steps,” she stuttered. “The ones from St. Patrick’s Purgatory.”

“Yes, yes I did.” The Abbess took a deep breath, lines deepening below the hem of her wimple. “You were so full of questions, I had to tell you something to make them stop. But that ring,” she said, “is from St. James of Compostela.”

Maura was thankful she was already sitting, for at those words she would surely have fallen in a heap. “You never told me that.”

The Abbess’s shrug was stiff. “I didn’t think it of importance.”

“Why did Lady Sabine wear it, then, all her life?”

“The Lady Sabine tended to excess in all things. You know this.” The Abbess’s expression darkened. “I wasn’t aware that she’d borrowed the ring from me until I discovered it among her things after her death.”

“She
stole
the ring?”

“I will not speak ill of the dead,” the Abbess said, her jaw tightening, “but I can only speculate as to how she found it. I was keeping the ring for you, you see. For your wedding day, if you chose to marry the butcher’s son. For a donation to the church, if you chose to take the veil. I’d put it in a safe place and didn’t give it another thought. There was no reason for me to imagine it was missing until I found it amid Sabine’s things.”

The door squealed open. A novice poked in her head. The Abbess glanced blankly at the intruder, as if she forgot that she’d summoned her moments ago with a tug of the bell-pull.

The novice looked past the edge of the door to grant Maura an excited smile. Therese, Maura remembered. A bright spark of a novice, far too lively for the veil.

“Bring wine,” the Abbess said. “The knight and his lady need refreshment after their long journey.”

The girl bobbed her head and closed the door. The Abbess gathered herself, then leaned back in her straight-backed chair, grasping the arms. “You announced yourself as Lady Maura Caddell. So in your travels—and adventuresome they must have been—you have found your father?”

“Lord William Caddell,” Maura began, “has claimed me as his firstborn daughter, aye.”

The tendons in the Abbess’s throat tightened. “A highborn father. So unusual, to have found your relations.”

“More unusual than you know, Abbess.”

“You must tell me, my dear, how you found this family, for I fear I find it very hard to believe.”

Maura glanced at her lap. Along the road, she and Colin had talked long and hard about how much to tell the Abbess about their situation. There were risks involved in exposing herself as the false daughter of William Caddell. Colin had been surprisingly calm about the risk. He said that any woman who’d gone to such great lengths to hide a secret baby would not want it exposed now, either, lest it put the convent in a bad light.

Now he gave her a nod, his strength flooding over her like a warm wind.

Maura dug her fingers into her tunic. “Lord William Caddell, my father—” the word still stumbled over her tongue “—has agreed to my marriage to The MacEgan to forge a long-awaited peace. It’s an important marriage, a marriage that will bring peace to a place that has not seen it in a decade.”

“A marriage to forge a peace.”

“Yes.”

“Maura, my dear, this story is like—”

“Bear with me, Lady Abbess,” she interrupted, surprised at her own temerity. “What I really need to know, what I came back to discover, is whether my natural mother lived here, in this very convent. If my mother were perhaps … Sabine.”

The Abbess made a choking sound. Her face went ashen. Then she leaned forward and grasped the edge of the desk. Maura was halfway out of her chair, frightened by the thought that the Lady Abbess was choking on something, when a knock came from the oak door.

The Abbess leapt up, undeterred. She strode through the rushes and swung open the door. Hiding behind it, she muttered something to someone just outside and then backed into the room holding a tray of wine and cups.

The Abbess crossed the room and clattered the tray on the table between her and Colin. “I suppose,” she said, her voice oddly hoarse, “that Sabine’s special treatment of you gave you the impression that she might be your mother?”

“Her affection wasn’t always steady,” Maura confessed, tightening her grip on the arms of the chair. “And she liked me less as I grew older. But she did hold my ring, and hold it a long time—”

“Maura,” the Abbess said. “Sabine was certainly
not
your mother.”

Maura felt as if one of the legs had been pulled off the chair beneath her. Colin’s hand on her arm was a steady weight, keeping her still.

“But,” the nun continued, “I can see how you may have concluded such a ridiculous thing, considering Sabine’s affection for you.”

Maura remembered the dolls, the birds, the little songs Sabine would sing as she combed Maura’s hair.

“Sabine lost a child,” the Abbess said, splattering wine into two cups. “A stillborn baby girl.”

Maura struggled to breathe.

“Illegitimate,” the Abbess explained. “That’s why she was sent to this convent by her father in the first place.” The Abbess handed her a cup of wine. “You must have known that she wasn’t the most excellent example of piety among the laywomen.”

Maura stared into the ruby depths of the wine, watching the shimmer of her own reflection.

“That’s why, I suspect, she liked you so much when you were young and … still pliable.” The Abbess backed up to the edge of her desk without taking a glass of her own. “Willing to sit there and have your hair pulled and pulled with her endless brushing. I just broke a solemn vow to a very powerful nobleman by telling you that.”

Maura caught the worry in the Abbess’s eyes, a glimpse of guilt she’d never seen before.

“I take my vows very seriously, Maura,” the Abbess said. “I always have, from the moment I left my home in Avignon and came to this convent. I do not lightly break vows, or tell secrets that others have entrusted me with.”

Months ago, Maura would have heard this tone of voice from the Abbess and she’d have never dared to ask another question. But Maura had been out in the world now. Now she realized that the tremor in the nun’s voice wasn’t fury. There was something else behind her words, something the older woman hesitated to say. Maura didn’t come all this way to leave without finding out.

“I must trust your discretion, Abbess, and you must trust mine. I have a future that lies bright before me.” She closed her hand over the one Colin had placed on her arm. “Before I walk that path, I need to know why I have a ring from St. James of Compostela, why it was buried so deep in my swaddling clothes, and, most of all, who put it there.”

“Oh, Maura, the story is common,” the Abbess said, a weariness in her words, “and as old as time.”

The Abbess headed around her desk. She stumbled blindly against the corner and then paused, her fingers on the surface turning white.

Maura could almost hear her will cracking.

“Once upon a time,” the Abbess began, in a voice so low that Maura had to lean forward to hear her, “a young woman went on a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostela. She was headstrong, ill-guarded among the children of a large family, beloved but given more freedom than she deserved.”

Maura’s heart stopped for a moment—another, yet another—and then throbbed hard in her chest.

“That woman,” the Abbess continued, “took interest in a tall, dark-haired stranger on the same roads. He had an accent so charming, and his eyes were warm, and his touch was the closest she’d ever gotten to Heaven.”

The Abbess turned her face toward her, flaming with color now, and Maura’s throat swelled with understanding.

“I took two things back from that pilgrimage to Compostela,” the Abbess said. “The first was the ring. The second was you, growing in my womb.”

***

For the second time in his life, Colin sat as still as stone outside the center of events, listening to a woman tell a wild tale about how Maura came to be a foundling left on the convent steps.

But this was no elaborate spectacle. This was no well-orchestrated set of players. The Abbess’s bright gaze lay desperate upon Maura’s face as she told the story of returning home to her village in France only to discover that she was with child. The Abbess’s voice trembled as she spoke of her fear of her father, who she knew would take the child away forever. She’d loved the man she’d met on the pilgrimage no matter how brief their acquaintance. She wanted his child so she kept the pregnancy a secret. She told her father she wanted to join a neighbor who’d taken vows in an Irish nunnery the year before. With six daughters to marry off, her piety was a relief to him, and would cost no more than a small chest of gold. Within a few months she was on a ship to Ireland, her only companion a trusted nursemaid who would see the child born in an Irish field outside of Wexford, see the novice that would become an Abbess escorted to the nunnery, and see the child left behind on the convent steps.