The Wise Woman Read online

  She rubbed her face dry on the thick wool of her dirty robe and walked upstream along the river-bank 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.

  Alys knew better. When she and Tom had been little children they had explored one of the caves which riddled the river-bank. Squirming like fox cubs they had gone downwards and downwards until the passage had narrowed and they had stuck – but below them, they had heard the loud echoing thunder of flowing water, and they knew they were near the real river, the secret river which flowed all day and all night in eternal darkness, hidden deep beneath the false river bed of dry stones above.

  Tom had been scared at the echoing, rushing noise so far below them. 'What if it rose?' he asked her. 'It would come out here!'

  'It does come out here,' Alys had replied. The seasons of her young life had been marked by the ebb and flow of the river, a dull drain in summer, a rushing torrent during the autumn storms. The gurgling holes where the sluggish water seeped away in summertime became springs and fountains in winter, whirlpools where the brown water boiled upwards, bubbling from the exploding pressure of the underground streams and underground rivers flooding from their stone cellars.

  'Old Hob is down there,' Tom said fearfully, his eyes dark.

  Alys had snorted and spat disdainfully, towards the darkness before them. 'I ain't afraid of him!' she said. 'I reckon Morach can deal with him all right!'

  Tom had crossed his finger with his thumb in the sign against witchcraft and crawled backwards out of the hole and into the sunshine. Alys would have lingered longer. She had not been boasting to Tom, it was true: raised by Morach she feared nothing.

  'Until now,' she said quietly to herself. She looked up at the clear sky above her and the sun impartially burning down. 'Oh, Mother of God…' she started, then she broke off. 'Our Father…' she began again, and again fell silent. Then her mouth opened in a silent scream and she pitched herself forward on the short coarse grass of the moorland. 'God help me!' she said in a grief-stricken whisper. 'I am too afraid to pray!'

  It seemed to her that she lay there in despair a long while. When she sat up again and looked around her the sun had moved – it was the middle of the afternoon, time for nones. Alys got to her feet slowly, like an old woman, as if all her bones were aching. She set off with small, slow steps up the hill to where the buds of early heather gleamed like a pale mauve mist on the slopes of the hill. A lapwing called overhead and fluttered down not far from her. Higher again in the blue air a lark circled and climbed, calling and calling, each higher note accompanied by a thrust of the little wings. Bees rolled drunkenly among the early heather flowers, the moor sweated honey. Everything around her was alive and thriving and joyful in the warm roil of the end of summer – everything but Alys, icy Alys, cold to her very bones.

  She stumbled a little as she walked, her eyes watching the sheep track beneath her feet. Every now and then she moaned very softly, like an animal in a trap for a long, long night of darkness. 'How shall I ever get back?' she said to herself as she walked. 'How shall I ever get back? How shall I ever learn to bear it here?'

  At the edge of the moor, where the land flattened in a curved sweep under the wide, unjudging sky, Alys paused. There was a little heap of stones tossed into a cairn by shepherds marking the path. Alys squatted down on one dry stone and leaned back against the others, closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun, her face locked in a grimace of grief.

  After a few moments she narrowed her eyes and looked southward. The moorland was very flat, bending across the skyline in a thousand shades of green, from the dark lushness of moss around a bog, to the pale yellow colour of weak grass growing on stone. The heather roots and old flowers showed pale grey and green, a bleak landscape of subtle beauty, half pasture, half desert. The new heather growth was dark green, the heather flowers pale as a haze. Alys looked more sharply. A man was striding across the moor, his plaid across his shoulder, his step determined. Alys got to her feet quietly, ready to turn and run. As he saw the movement he yelled out, and his voice was whipped away by the steady wind which blew over the top of the moor, even on the calmest of days. Alys hesitated, ready for flight, then he yelled again, faintly: 'Alys! Wait! It's me!'

  Her hand went to her pocket where the beads of her rosary were rounded and warm. 'Oh no,' she said. She sat down again on the stones and waited for him to come up to her, watching him as he marched across the moor.

  He had filled out in the four years she had been away. When she had left he had been a boy, lanky and awkward but with a fair coltish beauty. Now he was sturdy, thickset. As he came closer she saw that his face was tanned red from sun and wind, marred with red spiders of broken veins. His eyes, still that piercing blue, were fixed on her.

  'Alys,' he said. 'I've only just heard you were back. I came at once to see you.'

  'Your farm's the other way,' she said drily. He flushed a still deeper red. 'I had to take a lamb over to Trowheads,' he said. 'This is my way back.'

  Alys' dark eyes scanned his face. 'You never could lie to me, Tom.'

  He hung his head and shuffled his thick boots in the dust. 'It's Liza,' he said. 'She watches me.' 'Liza?' Alys asked, surprised. 'Liza who?' Tom dropped to sit on the heather beside her, his face turned away, looking back over the way he had come. 'Liza's my wife,' he said simply. 'They married me off after you took your vows.'

  Alys flinched as if someone had pinched her. 'I didn't know,' she said. 'No one told me.'

  Tom shrugged. 'I would have sent word but…' he trailed off and let the silence hang. 'What was the use?' he asked.

  Alys looked away, gripping the beads in her pocket so tight that they hurt her fingers. 'I never thought of you married,' she said. 'I suppose I should have known that you would.'

  Tom shrugged. 'You've changed,' he said. 'You're taller, I reckon, and plumper. But your eyes are the same. Did they cut your hair?'

  Alys nodded, pulling the shawl over her shaven head a little tighter.

  'Your lovely golden hair!' Tom said, as if he were bidding it farewell.

  A silence fell. Alys stared at him. 'You were married as soon as I left?' she asked. Tom nodded.

  'Are your mother and father still alive?' He nodded again. Alys' face softened, seeking sympathy. 'They did a cruel thing to me that day,' she said. 'I was too young to be sent among strangers.'

  Tom shrugged. 'They did what they thought was for the best,' he said. 'No way for them to foretell that the abbey would be burned and you would be homeless and husbandless at the end.'

  'And in peril,' Alys said. 'If the soldiers come back they might take me. You won't tell anyone that I was at the abbey, will you?'

  The look he shot at her was answer enough. 'I'd die rather than see you hurt,' he said with a suppressed anger. 'You know that! You've always known it! There never was anyone else for me and there never will be.'

  Alys turned her face away. 'I may not listen to that,' she said.

  He sighed, accepting the reproof. 'I'll keep your secret safe,' he said. 'In the village they think only that Morach has a new apprentice. She has said before that she was seeking a girl to do the heavy work. No one has thought of you. You've been forgotten. The word is that all the nuns are dead.'

  'Why did you come this way then?' Alys demanded. He shrugged his shoulders, his coarse skin blushing brick-red. 'I thought I'd know,' he said gruffly. 'If you had died I would have known it.' He thumped his chest. 'In here,' he said. 'Where I carry my pain for you. If you had died it would have gone… or changed. I would have known if you were dead.'

  Alys nodded, accepting Tom's devotion. 'And what of your marriage?' she asked. 'Are you comfortable? Do you have children?'

  'A boy