The Wise Woman Read online

  With the cold weather came sickness. Every day another person came to tap on Morach's door and ask her or Alys for a spell or a draught or a favour to keep away the flux or chills or fevers. There were four child-births in Bowes and Alys went with Morach and dragged bloody, undersized babies screaming into the world.

  'You have the hands for it,' Morach said, looking at Alys' slim long fingers. 'And you practised on half a dozen paupers' babies at that nunnery of yours. You can do all the childbirths. You have the skills and I'm getting too old to go out at midnight.'

  Alys looked at her with silent hatred. Childbirth was the most dangerous task for a wise woman. Too much could go wrong, there were two lives at risk, people wanted both the mother and the child to survive and blamed the midwife for sickness and death. Morach feared failure, feared the hatred of the village. It was safer for her to send Alys alone.

  The village was nervous, suspicious. A wise woman had been taken up at Boldron, not four miles away, taken and charged with plaguing her neighbour's cattle. The evidence against her was dramatic. Neighbours swore they had seen her running down the river, her feet moving swiftly over the water but dry-shod. Someone had seen her whispering into the ear of a horse, and the horse had gone lame. A woman said that they had jostled each other for a flitch of bacon at Castleton market and that ever since her arm had ached and she feared it would rot and fall off. A man swore that he had ridden the wise woman down in the fog on Boldron Lane and she had cursed him and at once his horse shied and he had fallen. A little boy from the village attested that he had seen her flying and talking with the doves at the manor dovecot. All the country had evidence against her, the trial took days.

  'It's all nonsense,' Alys said, coming back from Bowes with the news. 'Chances that could happen to anyone, a little child's bad dream. It's as if they had gone mad. They are listening to everything. Anyone can say anything against her.'

  Morach looked grim. 'It's a bad fashion,' she said, surly. Alys dumped a sack of goods on the floor beside the fire and threw three fatty rashers of bacon into the broth bubbling in the three-legged pot. 'A bad fashion,' Morach said again. 'I've seen it come through before, like a plague. Sometimes this time of year, sometimes midsummer. Whenever people are restless and idle and spiteful.'

  Alys looked at her fearfully. 'Why do they do it?' she asked.

  'Sport,' Morach said. 'It's a dull time of year, autumn. People sit around fires and tell stories to frighten themselves. There's colds and agues that nothing can cure. There's winter and starvation around the corner. They need someone to blame. And they like to mass together, to shout and name names. They're an animal then, an animal with a hundred mouths and a hundred beating hearts and no thought at all. Just appetites.' 'What will they do to her?' Alys asked. Morach spat accurately into the fire. 'They've started already,' she said. "They've searched her for marks that she has been suckling the devil and they've burned the marks off with a poker. If the wounds show pus, that proves witchcraft. They'll strap her hands and legs and throw her in the River Greta. If she comes up alive -that's witchcraft. They might make her put her hand in the blacksmith's fire and swear her innocence. They might tie her out on the moor all night to see if the devil rescues her. They'll play with her until their lust is slaked.'

  Alys handed Morach a bowl of broth and a trencher of bread. 'And then?'

  'They'll set up a stake on the village green and the priest will pray over her, and then someone – the blacksmith probably – will strangle her and then they'll bury her at the crossroads,' Morach said. 'Then they'll look around for another, and another after that. Until something else happens, a feast or a holy day, and they have different sport. It's like a madness which catches a village. It's a bad time for us. I'll not go into Bowes until the Boldron wise woman is dead and forgotten.'

  'How shall we get flour?' Alys asked. 'And cheese?'

  'You can go,' Morach said unfeelingly. 'Or we can do without for a week or two.'

  Alys shot a cold look at Morach. 'We'll do without,' she said, though her stomach rumbled with hunger.

  At the end of October it grew suddenly sharply cold with a hard white frost every morning. Alys gave up washing for the winter season. The river water was stormy and brown between stones which were white and slippery with ice in the morning. Every day she heaved a full bucket of water up the hill to the cottage for cooking; she had neither time nor energy to fetch water for washing. Alys' growing hair was crawly with lice, her black nun's robe rancid. She caught fleas between her fingers and cracked their little bodies between her finger and ragged thumbnail without shame. She had become inured to the smell, to the dirt. When she slopped out the cracked chamber-pot on to the midden she no longer had to turn away and struggle not to vomit. Morach's muck and her own, the dirt from the hens and the scraps of waste piled high on the midden and Alys spread it and dug it into the vegetable patch, indifferent to the stench.

  The clean white linen and the sweet smell of herbs in the still-room and flowers on the altar of the abbey were like a dream. Sometimes Alys thought that Morach's lie was true and she had never been to the abbey, never known the nuns. But then she would wake in the night and her dirty face would be stiff and salty with tears and she would know that she had been dreaming of her mother again, and of the life that she had lost.

  She could forget the pleasure of being clean, but her hungry, growing, young body reminded her daily of the food at the abbey. All autumn Alys and Morach ate thin vegetable broth, sometimes with a rasher of bacon boiled in it and the bacon fat floating in golden globules on the top. Sometimes they had a slice of cheese, always they had black rye bread with the thick, badly milled grains tough in the dough. Sometimes they had the innards of a newly slaughtered pig from a grateful farmer's wife. Sometimes they had rabbit. Morach had a snare and Alys set a net for fish. Morach's pair of hens, which lived underfoot in the house feeding miserably off scraps, laid well for a couple of days and Morach and Alys ate eggs. Most days they had a thin gruel for breakfast and then fasted all day until nightfall when they had broth and bread and perhaps a slice of cheese or meat.

  Alys could remember the taste of lightly stewed carp from the abbey ponds. The fast days when they ate salmon and trout or sea fish brought specially for them from the coast. The smell of roast beef with thick fluffy puddings, the warm, nourishing porridge in the early morning after prayers with a blob of abbey honey in the middle and cream as yellow as butter to pour over the top, hot ale at bedtime, the feast-day treats of marchpane, roasted almonds, sugared fruit. She craved for the heavy, warm sweetness of hippocras wine after a feast, venison in port-wine gravy, jugged hare, vegetables roasted in butter, the tang of fresh cherries. Sometimes Morach kicked her awake in the night and said with a sleepy chuckle: 'You're moaning, Alys, you're dreaming of food again. Practise mortifying your flesh, my little angel!' And Alys would find her mouth running wet with saliva at her dreams of dinners in the quiet refectory while a nun read aloud to them, and always at the head of the table was Mother Hildebrande, her arms outstretched, blessing the food and giving thanks for the easy richness of their lives, and sometimes glancing down the table to Alys to make sure that the little girl had plenty. 'Plenty,' Alys said longingly.

  At the end of October there was a plague of sickness in Bowes with half a dozen children and some adults vomiting and choking on their vomit. Mothers walked the few miles out to Morach's cottage every day with a gift, a round yellow cheese, or even a penny. Morach burned fennel root over the little fire, set it to dry and then ground it into powder and gave Alys a sheet of good paper, a pen and ink.

  'Write a prayer,' she said. 'Any one of the good prayers in Latin.'

  Alys' fingers welcomed the touch of a quill. She held it awkwardly in her swollen, callused hands like the key to a kingdom she had lost.

  'Write it! Write it!' Morach said impatiently. 'A good prayer against sickness.'

  Very carefully Alys dipped her pen and wrote the simple words of the L