The Wise Woman (2 page)

She laid them in a row and stared at them; her dark eyes narrowed to slits with pleasure.

“Married to Lord Hugo!” she said softly. “Or as good as! Fat eating, soft living.” She leaned forward a little closer. “Death at the end of it,” she said. “But there is death at the end of every road—and in any case, she should have died tonight.”

She picked up the bones and slid them back into the little ragged purse, hid them beneath her mattress of straw. Then she pulled a verminous bit of woolen shawl up around her shoulders, kicked off her rough clogs, and slept, smiling in her sleep.

Sister Ann was the first to wake in the morning, alert for the knock of the nun summoning her to lauds. She opened her eyes ready to call “
Deo gratias
!” to the familiar “
Benedicite
!” but there was silence. She blinked when she saw dark rafters and the weave of a thatched roof above her eyes instead of the plain, godly, white plaster of her cell. Then her eyes went darker yet with the sudden flooding-in of awareness of her loss and she turned her face and her bald head into the hank of cloth which served as a pillow and wept.

Softly, under her breath, she said her prayers, over and over, with little hope of a hearing. There was no comforting chant of the prayers around her, no sweet strong smell of incense. No clear high voices soaring upward to praise the Lord and His Mother. She had deserted her sisters, she had abandoned her mother the abbess to the cruelty and rage of the wreckers and to the man who had laughed like the devil. She had left them to burn in their beds and she had run like a light-footed fawn all the way back to her old home, as if she had not been a child of the abbey for the past four years, and Mother Hildebrande’s favorite.

“You awake?” Morach said abruptly.

“Yes,” replied the girl with no name.

“Get some fresh water and get the fire going. It’s as cold as a saint’s crotch this morning.”

She got up readily enough and pulled her cape around her shoulders. She scratched the soft white skin of her neck. All around her neck and behind her ears was a chain of red flea bites. She rubbed at them, scowling, while she knelt before the hearth. All that was left of the fire on the little circle of flints embedded on the earth floor was gray ash, with a rosy core. She laid a little kindling and bent down her bald head to blow. The curl of wood-shaving glowed red. She blew a little more strongly. It glowed brighter and then a red line of fire ate its way down the curl of wood. It met a twig, lying across it, and the light died as it smoldered sullenly. Then with a little flicker and a puff the twig caught alight, burned with a yellow flame. She sat back on her heels and rubbed her face with a grimy hand. The smell of the woodsmoke was on her fingers and she flinched from it, as if she smelled blood.

“Get the water!” Morach shouted from her bed.

She pushed her cold feet into her damp boots and went outside.

The cottage stood alone, a few miles west of the village of Bowes. In front of it was the dull silver of the River Greta, slowly moving without a ripple. The river rose and sank through great limestone slabs at this stretch, deep and dangerous in winter, patchy in drought. The cottage had been built beside one of the deeper pools, which was always filled, even in the driest of summers. When Sister Ann had been a little girl, and everyone had used her given name of Alys, and Morach had been Widow Morach and well-respected, the children from the village used to come out here to splash and swim. Alys played with them, with Tom, and with half a dozen of the others. Then Morach had lost her land to a farmer who claimed that he owned it. Morach—no man’s woman, sharp-tempered and independent—had fought him before the parish and before the church court. When she lost (as everyone knew she would, since the farmer was a pious man and wealthy), she swore a curse against him in the hearing of the whole village of Bowes. He had fallen sick that very night and later died. Everyone knew that Morach had killed him with her snake-eyed glare.

If he had not been so thoroughly hated in the village it would have gone badly for Morach after that. But his widow was a pleasant woman, glad to be free of him, and she made no complaint. She called Morach up to the farmhouse and asked her for a poultice to ease her backache, and overpaid her many times to ensure that Morach bore no dangerous grudge. The old farmer’s death was explained easily enough by his family’s history of weak hearts. Morach took care not to boast.

She never got her land back. And after that day the village children did not come to play in the deep pool outside her door. Those visitors who dared the lonely road and the darkness came huddled in their cloaks, under cover of night. They left with small bunches of herbs, or little scraps of writing on paper to be worn next to the skin, sometimes heads full of dreams and unlikely promises. And the village remembered a tradition that there had always been a cunning woman in the cottage by the river. A cunning woman, a wise woman, an indispensable friend, a dangerous enemy. Morach—with no land to support her, and no man to defend her, nurtured the superstitions, took credit and high payment for cures, and blamed deaths on the other local wizards.

No one cared that, stripped of her land, Morach was no better than a pauper; nor that she and the little girl in her care might starve to death from hunger or freeze from the cold in winter. They were hard times in the year of our Lord 1535, and County Durham at the extreme north of England was a hard country. Morach’s long embittering struggle to survive soured her, and overshadowed Alys’s childhood. They had no open enemies, but they had no friends either.

Only Tom still came openly up the road from Bowes, and everyone knew he was courting Morach’s little foundling-girl, Alys, and that they would be wed as soon as his parents gave their consent.

For one long summer they courted, sitting by the river which ran so smoothly and so mysteriously down the deep crevices of the riverbed. For one long summer they met every morning before Tom went to work in his father’s fields and Morach called Alys to walk out over the moor and find some leaf or some weed she wanted, or dig in the stony garden.

They were very tender together, respectful. On greeting and at parting they would kiss, gently, on the mouth. When they walked they would hold hands and sometimes he would put his arm around her waist, and she would lean her golden-brown head on his shoulder. He never caught at her, or pulled her about, or thrust his hands inside her brown shawl or up her gray skirt. He liked best to sit beside her on the riverbank and listen to her telling tales and inventing stories.

Her favorite time was when his parents were working in Lord Hugh’s fields and he could take her to the farm and show her the cow and the calf, the pig, the linen chest, the pewter, and the big wooden bed with the thick old curtains. Alys would smile then, her dark eyes as warm as a stroked cat.

“Soon we’ll be together,” Tom would murmur.

“Here,” Alys said.

“I will love you every day of my life,” Tom would promise.

“And we’ll live here,” she said. “I so want a home, Tom; a home of my own.”

When Morach lost her fields and did not get them back, Tom’s parents looked higher for him than a girl who would bring nothing but a tumbledown shack and a patch of ground all around it. Alys might know more about flowers and herbs than anyone in the village, but Tom’s parents did not need a daughter-in-law who knew twenty different poisons, forty different cures. They wanted a jolly, round-faced girl who would bring a fat dowry of fields and perhaps a grazing cow with a weaned calf. They wanted a girl with broad hips and strong shoulders who could work all day in their fields and have a good supper ready for them at night. One who would give birth without fuss so that there would be another Tom in the farmhouse to inherit when they had gone.

Alys, with her ripple of golden-brown unbraided hair, her basket of leaves, and her pale reserved face, was not their choice. They told Tom frankly to put her out of his mind; and he told them that he would marry where he willed, and that if they forced him to it he would take Alys away—even as far as Darneton itself—he would do it and go into service if needs be.

It could not be done. Lord Hugh would not let two young people up and off his land without his say-so. But Lord Hugh was a bad man to invoke in a domestic dispute. He would come and give fair enough judgment, but he would take a fancy to a pewter pint-pot on his way out, or he saw a horse he must have, cost what it may. And however generous he claimed to be, he would pay less than the Castleton butter-market price. Lord Hugh was a sharp man with a hard eye. It was best to solve any problems well away from him.

They ignored Tom. They went in secret to the abbess at the abbey and they offered her Alys. They claimed that the child had the holy gift of healing, that she was an herbalist in her own right, but dreadfully endangered by living with her guardian—old Morach. They offered the abbey a plump dowry to take her and keep her behind the walls, as a gift from themselves.

Mother Hildebrande, who could hear a lie even from a stranger—and forgive it—asked them why they were so anxious to get the little girl out of the way. Then Tom’s mother cried and told her that Tom was mad for the girl and that she would not do for them. She was too strange and unlike them. She had turned Tom’s head, perhaps with a potion—for whoever heard of a lad wanting to marry for love? He would recover but while the madness was on him they should be parted.

“I’ll see her,” Mother Hildebrande had said.

They sent Alys up to the abbey with a false message and she was shown through the kitchen, through the adjoining refectory, and out of the little door to where Mother Hildebrande was sitting in the physic garden at the smiling western side of the abbey, looking down the hill to the river, deep here, and well stocked with fish. Alys had approached her through the garden in a daze of evening sunshine and her golden-brown hair had shone: like the halo of a saint, Mother Hildebrande had thought. She listened to Alys’s message and smiled at the little girl and then walked with her around the raised flower- and herb-beds. She asked her if she recognized any of the flowers and how she would use them. Alys looked around the walled warm garden as if she had come home after a long journey, and touched everything she saw, her little brown hands darting like harvest mice from one leaf to another. Mother Hildebrande listened to the childish high voice and the unchildish authority. “This one is meadowsweet,” Alys said certainly. “Good for sickness in the belly when there is much soiling. This one looks like rue: herb-grace.” She nodded solemnly. “A very powerful herb against sweating sickness when it is seethed with marygold, feverfew, burnet sorrel, and dragons.” She looked up at Mother Hildebrande. “As a vinegar it can prevent the sickness, did you know? And this one I don’t know.” She touched it, bent her little head and sniffed at it. “It smells like a good herb for strewing,” she said. “It has a clear, clean smell. But I don’t know what powers it has. I have never seen it before.”

Mother Hildebrande nodded, never taking her eyes from the small face, and showed Alys flowers she had never seen, herbs from faraway countries whose names she had never even heard.

“You shall come to my study and see them on a map,” Mother Hildebrande promised. Alys’s heart-shaped face looked up at her. “And perhaps you could stay here. I could teach you to read and write,” the old abbess said. “I need a little clerk, a clever little clerk.”

Alys smiled the puzzled smile of a child who has rarely heard kind words, for Morach’s blows came quicker than her caresses. “I’d work for you,” she said hesitantly. “I can dig, and draw water, and find and pick the herbs you want. If I worked for you, could I stay here?”

Mother Hildebrande put a hand out to Alys’s pale curved cheek. “Would you want to do that?” she asked. “Would you take holy orders and leave the world you know far behind you? It’s a big step, especially for a little girl. And you surely have kin who love you? You surely have friends and family that you love?”

“I’ve no kin,” Alys said, with the easy betrayal of childhood. “I live with old Morach, she took me in twelve years ago, when I was a baby. She does not need me, she is no kin of mine. I am alone in the world.”

The old woman raised her eyebrows. “And no one you love?” she asked. “No one whose happiness depends on you?”

Alys’s deep blue eyes opened wide. “No one,” she said firmly.

The abbess nodded. “You want to stay.”

“Yes,” Alys said. As soon as she had seen the large quiet rooms with the dark wood floors she had set her heart on staying. She had a great longing for the cleanness of the bare white cells, for the silence and order of the library, for the cool light of the refectory where the nuns ate in silence and listened to a clear voice reading holy words. She wanted to become a woman like Mother Hildebrande, old and respected. She wanted a chair to sit on and a silver plate for her dinner. She wanted a cup made of glass, not of tin or bone. And she longed, as only the hungry and the dirty passionately long, for clean linen and good food. “I want to stay,” she said.

“Why?” Mother Hildebrande asked.

Alys frowned as she tried to form the idea in her child’s mind. “If I came here there would be a chance for me,” she said slowly. “A chance of a proper life. I might learn to be good, I might get clean. You’d feed me—” She shot a frightened look at the abbess but she was still smiling sympathetically. “You would feed me,” Alys said. “I’m often hungry at home. And if you beat me—” She glanced upward again. “I don’t think you’d beat me very often,” she said hopefully.

The abbess who had seen so many of the sights and sounds of poverty in the world was moved to tears by the small child’s speech. “Do you get beaten very often?”

Alys nodded. “Often,” she said simply. “I am Morach’s apprentice; she is training me as a wise woman. If I get things wrong she beats me to teach me to do better. But I’d rather live here and work for you.”

Mother Hildebrande rested her hand on the child’s warm dirty head. “And what of your little sweetheart?” she asked. “You will have to renounce him. You may never, ever see him again, Alys. That’s a hard price to pay.”