The Wise Woman (70 page)

“Please call the old woman to account for herself,” Stephen said. He slid the ledger across the table toward Alys and motioned her to open it. “There is the charge.”

Dumbly Alys opened the book where a dark ribbon marked the place. The old lord leaned forward to see. Father Stephen went around to the back of the dais, mounted the steps, and took a stool beside Alys at the foot of the table.

Alys looked at the bishop’s court records in the heavy black ledger. There was a column for the date, and for the name, and for the occupation. There was a space for the charge. There was a space for the verdict. There was a space for the punishment. Alys looked along the page. There were rows after rows of names arraigned for all sorts of crimes, from adultery to heresy. Wherever it said “Heresy,” along the line it said “Guilty,” and then further on it said “Burned.”

“Burned,” Alys whispered incredulously.

“Do you see how to write it?” Stephen whispered encouragingly. “And this other paper, the roll, is a record of what is said here this afternoon. I will nod to you when you need to make a note of something. You can write in English, we can copy it fair into Latin later.”

“Make way for the old woman of Bowes Moor,” Lord Hugh said impatiently. He waved at the people in the center of the hall. “Let her through, for God’s sake,” he said irritably. “We don’t have all day to spend on this.”

Alys leaned toward Lord Hugh. “I don’t want to do this,” she said urgently. “I must ask to be excused.”

He glanced down at her white face. “Not now, not now,” he said. “Let’s get this over and done with. It’s a messy business. I like it not.”

“
Please
,” Alys hissed.

Lord Hugh shook his head, he was not listening. “Do your work, Alys,” he said roughly. “This is the last case. I am weary myself.”

Alys bowed her head over the ledger, writing the date with exquisite care. She was aware of the commotion in the hall, of the sound of the soldiers coming in slowly, out of step, not marching as they usually did, but delayed by a limping pace.

“Give her a stool,” Lord Hugh said impatiently. “Give her a seat, the old woman can’t stand. And give her some wine.”

Alys kept her head down. She had an insane thought that if she never looked up, if she never raised her eyes, then she would never see Mother Hildebrande sitting on a stool in the center of the great hall surrounded by staring people. If she kept her head down and never looked, then it would not be Mother Hildebrande. It would be someone else entirely. On a different charge. A different charge entirely. Another person.

“Your name?” Stephen rose to his feet. Alys did not look up.

“Hildebrande of the Priory of Egglestone.” The voice was different, it rasped as if the speaker’s throat was scraped. It was deeper, hoarser. And the speech was different too. This old woman could not speak clearly, could not form her words, lisped on her “s” and gargled the other words in her throat. Alys copied “Hildebrande” in the space in the book for the name of the accused; and told herself that since it was not Mother Hildebrande’s clear voice, not Mother Hildebrande’s pure speech—it could not be her.

“Not your popish pretense of a name, but your real name,” Stephen said. He sounded angry, Alys thought, keeping her head bowed over the book. He should not be angry with this old lady with the sore throat, whatever she had done.

“My real name is Hildebrande,” the rasping voice said and stopped for breath. “Of the Abbey of Egglestone.”

“Write: ‘Refuses to give true name,’” Stephen said in an aside to Alys. Laboriously she opened a bracket beneath the name she had already written, then she copied—“Refuses to give true name.” She nodded with satisfaction. It was not her mother’s voice, Hildebrande was not her name. It was someone else altogether. Above her head the questions went on.

“You were a nun at the abbey?” Stephen asked.

“I was.”

“You were there on the night that the abbey was inspected for heresy, popish practices, gross impropriety, and blasphemy, and closed?”

There was a murmur from the audience. Alys could not tell whether it was moral outrage at the nuns, or resentment toward Stephen. She did not look up to see.

There was no answer for long minutes.

“I was there when the abbey was burned,” the voice said wearily. “There was no inspection, there was no impropriety. It was an attack of arson. It was a criminal attack.”

There was a surge of speech from the crowd. The old lord banged the handle of his ebony stick on his board and shouted, “Quiet!”

“That is a lie,” Stephen said. “It was a legal inspection of a corrupt and dangerous nest of abuse. You were smoked out like the vipers you were.”

There was a silence.

“And where did you go, when you fled from justice and mercy?” Stephen demanded. “Where have you been these eleven months?”

“I will not answer that question,” the hoarse voice said steadily.

“You have been asked it before with torture,” Stephen said warningly. “You can be put to question again.”

Alys did not look up. The hall was very quiet.

“I know,” the voice said in a ghost of a sigh. “I am prepared to die down there.”

There was a low angry mutter from the crowd. Alys, hidden behind her arm as she bent over the book, peeped up. She could see the first couple of rows of men. They were Hugo’s own soldiers, but they were shifting uneasily on their seats.

“Write down: ‘Is shielding fellow-conspirators,’” Stephen said to Alys. Alys copied the words into the roll of paper.

Stephen changed tack. “Were there any others who also fled from justice on that night?” Stephen asked. “Others who have been hiding, as you have been hiding? Who have perhaps plotted to meet with you? Who planned to be with you?”

There was a silence.

“Who is ‘Ann’?” Stephen asked softly.

Shocked, Alys’s head jerked up before she could stop herself—and then she saw her.

Hildebrande sat slumped on her stool. Her fingers were spread out over her knees, as if she were holding sinew and bone together. The old blue gown Alys had given her was bloodstained and spattered. There was a large dark stain at the hem—she had soiled herself in her agony. Her shoulders were hunched awkwardly, one side irregular where the shoulder had been dislocated and not thrust back into the socket. Her feet were bare. On the pale old skin of her feet were deep purple and red blood-bruises, perfect copies of the knots which had tied her to the rack. Her wrists were black with bruising, where the rope had tied her arms above her head. Her thin toes were stained with blood. They had ripped out the toenails. The fingernails, too, were gone. The hands spread like old bloody talons, clinging to her own body, as if to hold it together, clinging to her faith.

At Alys’s sudden movement Hildebrande looked in her direction.

Their eyes met.

She recognized Alys at once. Her bloodstained mouth opened in a dreadful smile. Alys saw the deep, dark bruises on her cheeks from the metal gag and then, as her ghastly smile widened, saw that her teeth had been pulled out from the gums, some broken and left as stumps, others leaving dark, blood-filled holes. Alys saw the smile and knew Hildebrande’s revenge had come easily to her hand. Hildebrande would not suffer alone. She would not burn alone.

Mutely, Alys watched her. She said nothing. She did not plead with her eyes, she did not put her soft hands together in a secret sign for forgiveness. She waited for the horror of Hildebrande naming her as her accomplice and a runaway nun. The evidence was there. She was wearing Alys’s gown, there was food from the castle at the cottage. Alys waited to be named and Hildebrande to be revenged on her for her pain of disappointment, and for the pain of the rack and the tortures.

Hildebrande’s pale blue eyes in the blackened strained sockets never wavered. “There was no one conspiring with me,” she said, her voice clearer. “I was alone. Always. All alone.”

“Who is Ann?” Stephen said again.

Mother Hildebrande smiled directly at Alys, her old face a ghastly, toothless mask.

“Saint Anne,” she lied without hesitation. “I was calling on Saint Anne.”

Alys dropped her head and wrote blindly, one word after another.

The old lord leaned forward and tweaked Stephen’s gown. “Finish it,” he said. “I mislike this crowd.”

Stephen nodded, straightened up, raised his voice to a shout. “I demand that before this court you deny your mistaken loyalty to the pope and affirm your loyalty to the king, His Majesty Henry the Eighth, and your faith in his Holy Church of England.”

“I cannot do that,” the weary voice replied.

“I caution you that if you fail to repent now you will be found guilty of heresy to the Holy Church of England and you will be burned at the stake for your sins and burn here-after in the everlasting torments of hell,” Stephen said in a shower of words like hailstones.

“I keep my faith,” Hildebrande said quietly. “I await my cross.”

Father Stephen looked uncertainly toward Lord Hugh. “Shall I wrestle with her for her soul?” he asked.

“She looks as if she has done enough wrestling,” the old lord said acidly. “I’ll sentence her, shall I?”

Father Stephen nodded and sat down.

Lord Hugh banged on the table with his stick. “It is the judgment of this court that you are guilty of treason to His Supreme Majesty Henry the Eighth, and guilty of heresy to the Holy Church of England,” he said rapidly. “Tomorrow morning at dawn you shall be taken from here to a place of execution where you will be burned at the stake for your crimes.”

Alys was writing blindly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, watching the quill move up and down the paper. She felt Hildebrande’s eyes on her, she felt the old woman willing her to look up, to exchange one look. She felt the weight of Hildebrande’s need for the two of them to look into each other’s faces once more, without deceit, without pretense, knowing what the other one truly was—as clear and as open as when Alys had been the little child in the garden and Hildebrande had seen the daughter she would never have.

Alys knew that Hildebrande was waiting for one glance from her. One honest exchange of penitence, of forgiveness, of release.

Of farewell.

Alys kept her head down until she heard them carry the old woman out. She would not look at her. She never said good-bye.

In my dream I smelled the dark sulphurous stink of a passing witch and I pulled the smooth embroidered sheets up over my head and whispered “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us,” to shield me from my dream, from a nightmare of terror. Then I heard shouting and the terrifying crackle of hungry flames and I came awake in a rush with a thudding heart and sat up in my bed and looked fearfully around the whitewashed walls of my room
.

The walls were orange, scarlet, with the bobbing light of reflected flames, and I could hear the deep excited murmur of a waiting crowd. I had slept too long, in my grief and confusion—I had slept too long and they had the faggots piled around her feet and they had already set them alight. I snatched for my cape and I ran barefoot through the open door of my chamber and out into the ladies’ gallery, where the light was shining brightly through the colored glass of the oriel window, and the smoke was pouring in through the open casement where the women were gathered. Eliza Herring turned to me, one side of her face glowing with the brightness of the fire outside, and she said: “We called you, but you were fast asleep. Come quick, Lady Alys, the flames have caught.”

I said nothing to her, but ran for the door, down the winding stairs and out into the courtyard
.

They had set up a stake for her in the square stone-filled pit before the prison tower, and heaped small pieces of dry kindling at the base of the pile and faggots of wood, to burn brightly and strongly, at the top
.

Before the fire were the soldiers and servants and Lord Hugh, Stephen the priest and my Hugo. But they had kept the townspeople away, afraid of their anger. Hugo turned and saw me in the doorway, my hair flying loose, my eyes glazed with fear. He put a hand out to beckon me, turned to come toward me, but I was too quick for him
.

I raced across the courtyard toward the fire, toward the flames, and I saw through the heat haze the white tortured face of Hildebrande. The wind was blowing from the west, a clean wind with the smell of rain behind it, and it kept the flames away from me. I scrambled, like a child rock-climbing, over the wide spread of kindling and then up the faggots to the central pole, and grabbed her thin, racked body around the knees, and then found my feet and pulled myself up, and held her around the waist
.

Her hands were bound behind her, she could not hold me. But she turned her face toward me and her bruised eyes were full of love. She said nothing, she was silent, as if she were at peace, like the quiet center of a storm, as the flames came licking closer, all around us like the tongues of hungry serpents and I was choking in the swirl of smoke and dizzy with the heat and the terror
.

Deep in my belly my baby churned and struggled as if he too could feel the heat, as if he too wanted, more than anything in the world, to live. I looked through the shifting heat haze of the smoke and saw Hugo’s white, panic-stricken face turned toward me, and I tried to make my lips say “Good-bye” but I knew he could not see me properly. His sight was too blurred, it was fading fast. He could not see me when I said to him “Good-bye
.”

I held firmly around her waist and tried to force myself to stand still like a woman with holy courage. It was no use. The bundles of dry wood beneath my feet were shifting, the flames were licking up from underneath. I stepped from one foot to the other in a foolish dance, vainly trying to spare my bare feet from the pain of burning
.

“Alys! Jump!” Hugo yelled. He was beating at the flames with his cloak. Stephen was behind him, screaming for water to douse the fire. “Jump off!” Hugo shrieked
.