Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  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