The Wise Woman (3 page)

“I didn’t know of places like this,” Alys said simply. “I didn’t know you could be clean like this, I didn’t know that you could live like this unless you were Lord Hugh. I didn’t know. Tom’s farmhouse was the best I had ever seen, so that was what I wanted. I did not know any better.”

“And you want the best,” Mother Hildebrande prompted gently. The child’s yearning for quality was endearing in one so young. She could not call it vanity and condemn it. The little girl loved the herb garden as well as the refectory silver. She was not seeking wealth, but some beauty in her life.

Alys hesitated and looked up at the old lady. “Yes, I do. I don’t want to go back to Morach’s. I don’t want to go back to Tom. I want to live here. I want to live here for ever and ever and ever.”

Mother Hildebrande smiled. “Very well,” she said gently. “For ever and ever and ever. I will teach you to read and write and to draw and to work in the still-room before you need think of taking your vows. A little maid like you should not come into the order too young. I want you to be sure.”

“I am sure,” Alys said softly. “I am sure now. I want to live here for always.”

Then Mother Hildebrande had taken Alys into the abbey and put her in the charge of one of the young novitiates, who had laughed at her broad speech and cut down a little habit for her. They had gone to supper together and to prayers.

It was characteristic of both Alys and Tom that while he waited for her as the sun set and a mocking lovers’ moon came out to watch with him, Alys supped on hot milk and bread from a china bowl, and slept peacefully in the first clean pallet she had ever known.

All through the night the abbess waked for the little girl. All through the night she knelt in the lowliest stall in the chapel and prayed for her. “Keep her safe, Holy Mother,” she finished as the nuns filed in to their pews in sleepy silence for the first of the eight services of the day. “Keep her safe, for in little Alys I think we have found a special child.”

Mother Hildebrande set Alys to work in the herb garden and still-room, and prepared her to take her vows. Alys was quick to learn and they taught her to read and write. She memorized the solemn cadences of the Mass without understanding the words, then slowly she came to understand the Latin and then to read and write it. She faultlessly, flawlessly charmed Mother Hildebrande into loving her as if she had been her own daughter. She was the favorite of the house, the pet of all the nuns, their little sister, their prodigy, their blessing. The women who had been denied children of their own took a special pleasure in teaching Alys and playing with her, and young women, who missed their little brothers and sisters at home, could pet Alys and laugh with her, and watch her grow.

Tom—after hanging around the gate for weeks and getting several beatings from the porter—slouched back to his farm and his parents, and waited in painful silence for Alys to come home to him as she had promised faithfully she would.

She never did. The quiet order of the place soothed her after Morach’s tantrums and curses. The perfume of the still-room and the smell of the herbs scented her hands, her gown. She learned to love the smooth coolness of clean linen next to her skin, she saw her dirty hair and the wriggling lice shaved off without regret, and smoothed the crisp folds of her wimple around her face. Mother Hildebrande employed her in writing letters in Latin and English for the abbey, and dreamed of setting her to copying and illuminating a Bible, a grand new Bible for the abbey. Alys learned to kneel in prayer until the ache in her legs faded from her mind and all she could see through her half-closed eyes were the dizzying colors of the abbey’s windows and the saints twirling like rainbows. When she was fourteen, and had been fasting all day and praying all night, she saw the statue of the Holy Mother turn Her graceful head and smile at her, directly at Alys. She knew then, as she had only hoped before, that Our Lady had chosen her for a special task, for a special lesson, and she dedicated herself to the life of holiness.

“Let me learn to be like mother,” she whispered. “Let me learn to be like Mother Hildebrande.”

She saw Tom only once again. She spoke to him through the little grille in the thick gate, the day after she had taken her vows. In her sweet clear voice she told him that she was a bride of Christ and she would never know a man. She told him to find himself a wife, and be happy with her blessing. And she shut the little hatch of the thick door in his surprised face before he could cry out to her, or even give her the brass ring he had carried in his pocket for her ever since the day they plighted their troth when they were little children of nine.

In the cold morning of her new life Sister Ann shivered, and drew her cape tighter around her. She dipped the bucket in the river and lugged it back up the path to the cottage. Morach, who had been watching her dreaming at the riverside, made no comment, but tumbled down the ladder to the fireside and nodded to Sister Ann to fill the pot and put some water on to heat.

She said nothing while they shared a small piece of bread with last night’s porridge moistened with hot water. They shared a mug to drink the sour, strong water. It was brown and peaty from the moorland. Sister Ann was careful to turn it so her lips did not touch where Morach had drunk. She had lost the habit of unhealthy, unavoidable intimacy. Morach watched her from under her thick black eyebrows and said nothing.

“Now then,” she said, when Ann had washed the cup and plate and the tin spoon and set them at the fireside. “What will you do?”

Sister Ann looked at her. Her dreaming of the past had reminded her of where she belonged. “I must find another abbey,” she said decisively. “My life is dedicated to Christ and His sainted Mother.”

Morach hid a smile and nodded. “Yes, little sister,” she said. “But all this was not sent solely to try your faith, others are suffering also. They are all being visited, they are all being questioned. You were fools enough at Bowes to make an enemy of Lord Hugh and his son but nowhere are the abbeys safe. The king has his eye on their wealth and your God is no longer keeping open house. I dare say there is not an abbey within fifty miles which would dare to open its doors to you.”

“Then I must travel. I must travel outside the fifty miles, north to Durham if need be, south to York. I must find another abbey. I have made my vows, I cannot live in the world.”

Morach picked her teeth with a twig from the basket of kindling and spat accurately into the flames. “D’you have some story ready?” she asked innocently. “Got some fable prepared already?”

Sister Ann looked blank. Already the skin on her head was less shiny, the haze of light brown hair showed like an itchy shadow. She rubbed it with a grimy hand and left another dark smear. Her dark blue eyes were sunk in her face with weariness. She looked as old as Morach herself.

“Why should I need a story?” she asked. Then she remembered her cowardice—“Oh Mary, Mother of God…”

“If you were seen skipping off it would go hard for you,” Morach said cheerily. “I can’t think an abbess would welcome you once she knew that you smelled smoke and bolted like any sinner.”

“I could do penance…” Sister Ann started.

Morach chortled disbelievingly. “It’s more like they’d throw you out in your shift for strangers to use as they wish,” she said. “They’ll think you a spy or a heretic. Lord Hugo’s paid informer come to spy on them and report back to him. They’ll ask you how you got out alone and charge you with arson or witchcraft or both. They’re scared—there isn’t an abbey in the land which isn’t guilty of corrupt practices, it’s not a time for them to take in new recruits, and certainly not one who smells of smoke. You’re ruined, Sister Ann! Your vows are broke, your abbey is a smoking ruin, your sisters are dead or raped or have fled. So what will you do?”

Sister Ann buried her face in her hands. Morach sat at her ease until her shoulders stopped shaking and the sobbed prayers were silenced. It took some time. Morach lit a little black pipe, inhaled the heady herbal smoke and sighed with pleasure.

“Best stay here,” she offered. “That’s your best way. We’ll get news here of your sisters and how they fared. If the abbess survived she’ll seek you here. Wander off, and she’ll not know where to find you. Maybe all of the girls ran like you—scattered back to their old homes—perhaps you’ll all be forgiven.”

Sister Ann shook her head. The smoke had been hot, the fire close to the cloisters. Most of the nuns would have been burned in their cells while they slept. “I doubt they escaped,” she said.

Morach nodded, hiding a gleam of amusement. “You were the first out, eh?” she asked. “The quickest?” She paused for emphasis. “Then there is nowhere for you to go. Nowhere at all.”

Sister Ann swayed against the blow. Morach noticed the pallor of her skin. The girl was sick with shock.

“I’ll take you back,” Morach said. “And people will stay mum. It will be as if you were never away. Four years gone and now you’re back. Aged sixteen, aren’t you?”

She nodded, only half hearing.

“Ready to wed,” Morach said with satisfaction. “Or bed,” she added, remembering the reading of the bones and the young Lord Hugo.

“Not that,” she said, her voice very low. “I will stay with you, Morach, and I’ll work for you, as I did before. I know more now, and I can read and write. I know more herbs, too, and flowers—garden flowers, not just wild ones. But I will only do God’s work, only healing and midwifery. No charms, no spells. I belong to Christ. I will keep my vows here, as well as I can, until I can find somewhere to go, until I can find an abbess who will take me. I will do God’s work of healing here, I will be Christ’s bride here…” She looked around her. “In this miserable place,” she said brokenly. “I will do it as well as I can.”

“Well enough,” Morach said, quite unperturbed. “You’ll work for me. And when the young lord has ridden off north to harry the Scots and forgotten his new sport of tormenting nuns, you can step down to Castleton and seek some news.”

She hauled herself to her feet and shook out her filthy gown. “Now you’re back you can dig that patch,” she said. “It’s been overgrown since you left. I’ve a mind to grow some turnips there for the winter months.”

The girl nodded, and rose to her feet and went to the door. A new hoe stood at the side—payment in kind for hexing a neighbor’s straying cattle.

“Sister Ann!” Morach called softly.

She spun around at once.

Morach scowled at her. “You never answer to that name again,” she said. “D’you hear me? Never. You’re Alys again now, and if anyone asks you, tell them you went to stay with your kin near Penrith. You’re Alys. That’s your name. I gave it to you once, now I give it to you back. Forget being Sister Ann, that was another life and it ended badly. You’re Alys now—remember it.”

I
n the aftermath of the firing of the abbey there were soldiers and bullyboys chasing the rumors of hidden treasure and gold. They had little joy in Bowes village, where the half-dozen families did not take kindly to any strangers and where four or five were now out of work with the abbey ruined and no services needed. Morach let it be known that she had a new apprentice, and if anyone remembered the previous girl who had gone four long years ago, no one said. Even if they had, no one would have taken the risk of reporting her, which would bring Lord Hugh down on the village—or even worse—his son, the mad young lord. It was not a time for speculation and gossip. There were a dozen vagrants still hanging around the ruins of the abbey—refugees from the nuns’ charity with nowhere else to go. The villagers of Bowes locked their doors, resisted any attempt by anyone to claim rights of residence, and chose not to talk about the abbey, or the nuns, or the night of the fire, or the minor thefts and pillaging of the ruined abbey which went on in the later days.

It was said that the firing of the abbey had been a mistake. The soldiers led by the young Lord Hugo were homeward bound from a raid on the moss-troopers, and they stopped at the abbey only to frighten the nuns into doing the king’s will and surrender their treasure and their bad popish ways. It had all begun with some wild sport, a bonfire of broken wood and some tar. Once the flames had caught there was nothing that Hugo could do, and besides the nuns had all died in the first minutes. The young lord had been drunk anyway, and could remember little. He confessed and did penance with his own priest—Father Stephen, one of the new faith who saw little sin in stamping out a nest of treasonous papists—and the villagers gleaned over the half-burned building and then started carting the stones away. Within a few weeks of her return to Morach’s hovel, Alys could walk where she wished unnoticed.

Mostly she went up on the moor. Every day, after digging and weeding in the dusty scrape of the vegetable patch, she went down to the river to wash her hands and splash water over her face. In the first few days she had stripped and waded into the water with her teeth chattering, to wash herself clean of the smell of sweat and smoke and midden. It was no use. The earth under her fingernails and the grime in the creases of her skin would not come clean in the cold brackish water, and anyway, wading back to the frosty bank with shivery gooseflesh skin Alys had only dirty clothes to wear. She scraped the body lice off the seams of her robe but within a day they were back; she felt them crawling in the growing stubble of her hair. Her fair skin was soon scarred with insect bites, some red and bloody and fresh, some scaly and old. After a few weeks Alys despaired of keeping herself clean. There was no soap or oil, there was no hot water. She could wash herself in the peaty brown river water but she knew that as it became colder it would be unbearable. In the first weeks Alys wept with self-disgust at the fleas and lice on her body. She still splashed water in her face but she no longer hoped to keep clean.

She rubbed her face dry on the thick wool of her dirty robe and walked upstream along the riverbank till she came to the bridge where the river ran beneath a natural causeway of limestone slabs—wide enough to drive a wagon across, strong enough to carry oxen. She paused there and looked down into the brown peaty water. It flowed so slowly there seemed to be no movement at all, as if the river had died, had given up its life into stagnant, dark ponds.