Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  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.”

  Chapter

  2

  In 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.

  Alys knew better. When she and Tom had been little children they had explored one of the caves which riddled the riverbank. Squirming like fox cubs they had gone downward and downward 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 riverbed 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 upward, bubbling from the exploring 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 toward 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 backward 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