Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  “You don’t want me as a man,” he said with sudden insight. “You talk sweet but all you want is for me to save you from living with Morach, just as your old abbess saved you from her before.”

  “Why not?” Alys demanded. “I cannot live there! Morach is deep in sin and in dirt. I cannot stay there! If you ever cared for me at all, Tom, you must help me get away from there.

  “It’s true, I don’t want you as a man, my vows forbid desire, and truly I cannot imagine wanting a man, any man. But I need you desperately as a friend, Tom. Without your help I do not know what I will do. We promised to be true to one another and to always be there when the other was in any need or trouble.” She tightened the rack on his guilt: “I would have helped you if you had been in need, Tom. If I had a horse you would never walk.

  “I know the vows are old vows,” she said candidly. “And if the abbey was standing I would be there now, the favored daughter of the abbess, the most beloved sister…” She trailed off, her eyes on the distant horizon as if she could still see the warm herb garden and the sunset over the quiet trees. “I know I have no rights over you,” she said, her voice very low. “But Tom, I have nowhere that I can turn. I have no one who will help me, I have not a friend in the world save you. If you will not help me then I am abandoned to Morach’s sin and dirt with no hope of escape.”

  Tom shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. “I can’t think straight!” he said. “Alys, tell me simply what you want me to do! You know I will do it. You know I always did what you wished.”

  “Find somewhere I can go,” she said rapidly. “Morach hears nothing and I dare not go further than Castleton. But you can travel and ask people. Find me a nunnery which is safe, and then take me there. Lord Hugo cannot rage around the whole of the north. There must be other abbeys safe from his spite: Hartlepool, Durham, or Whitby. Find where I can go, Tom, and take me.”

  “You cannot hope to find your abbess again?” Tom asked. “I thought that all the nuns died?”

  Alys shook her head. She could remember the heat in the smoke which had warned her that the flames were very close. She remembered the thin clear scream of pain she had heard as she dived through the garden door. “I will find a new order, and take a new name, and take my vows again,” she said.

  Tom blinked. “Are you allowed to do that?” he asked. “Won’t they wonder who you are and where you come from?”

  Alys slid a measuring sideways glance at him. “You would surely vouch for me, Tom. You could tell them I was your sister, could you not?”

  Tom shook his head again. “No! I don’t know! I suppose I would. Alys, I don’t know what I can do and what I can’t do! My head’s whirling!”

  Alys stretched out her soft white hand to him and touched him gently in the center of his forehead, between his eyes, with all her power in her fingertips. She felt her fingers warm as her power flowed through them. For a dizzying moment she thought she could do anything with Tom, make him believe anything, do anything. Tom closed his eyes at her touch and swayed toward her like a rowan sways in a breath of wind.

  “Alys,” he said, and his voice was filled with longing.

  She took her hand away and he slowly opened his eyes.

  “I must go,” she said. “Do you promise you will find somewhere for me?”

  He nodded. “Aye,” he said and hitched the plaid at his shoulder.

  “And take me there?”

  “I’ll do all I can,” he said. “I will ask what abbeys are safe. And when I find somewhere, I’ll get you to it, cost me what it will.”

  Alys raised her hand in farewell and watched him walk away. When he was too distant to hear she breathed out her will after him. “Do it, Tom,” she said. “Do it at once. Find me a place. Get me back to an abbey. I cannot stay here.”

  It grew colder. The winds got up for a week of gales in September and when they fell still the moors, the hills, and even the valley were shrouded in a thick mist which did not lift for days. Morach lay in bed later and later every morning.

  “I’ll get up when the fire’s lit and the porridge is hot,” she said, watching Alys from the sleeping platform. “There’s little point in us both getting chilled to death.”

  Alys kept her head down and said little. Every evening she would turn her hands to the light of the fire and inspect the palms for roughness. The skin had grown red and sore, and then blistered, and the blisters had broken and then healed. The plump heel of her thumb was toughened already, and at the base of each finger the skin was getting dry and hard. She rubbed the oil from sheep’s fleeces into the calluses, frowning in disgust at the rich, dirty smell, but nothing could stop her hands hardening and growing red and rough.

  “I am still fit to be a nun,” she whispered to herself. She told her rosary before she went to bed and said the evening prayers of vespers, not knowing the time, far away from the discipline of the chapel bell. One evening she was so weary with the labors of the day that she decided to say the evening prayers in her pallet bed. She was asleep before she completed them, and in the morning she forgot to pray again. She knew then that the holy discipline of her life was slipping away from her, like water through grasping fingers. Without the abbey, without the day measured out by the bell, Alys could not keep to the regular rhythm of prayers. She could not live as a nun in an enclosed order while struggling for food, for water, for fuel, for survival in the outside world. “But I’m still fit to be a nun,” she said grimly before she slept. “I’m still fit to be a nun—if I get there soon.”

  She waited for news from Tom but none came. All she could hear in Bowes were confused stories of inspections and changes. The king’s visitors went everywhere, demanding answers in silent cloisters, inspecting the treasures in orders sworn to poverty. No one knew how far the king would go. He had executed a bishop, he had beheaded Thomas More, the most revered man in England, he had burned monks at the stake. He claimed that the whole clergy was his, parish priests, vicars, bishops. And now he was looking to the abbeys, the nunneries, the monasteries. He wanted their power, he wanted their land, he could not survive without their wealth. It was not a time to attempt to enter an order with a false name and a scorched gown.

  “I am cursed and followed by my curse,” Alys said resentfully, as she hauled water for Morach and pulled turnips from the cold, sticky ground.

  Alys felt the cold badly. After four years of sleeping in a stone building where huge fires of split trees were banked in to burn all night she found the mud floor of Morach’s cottage unbearably damp and chill. She started coughing at night, and her cough turned to racking sobs of homesickness. Worst of all were the dreams, when she saw herself safe in the abbey, leaning back against Mother Hildebrande’s knees and reading aloud by the light of clear wax candles. One night she dreamed that Mother Hildebrande had come to the cottage and called to Alys, scrabbling on her knees in the mud of the vegetable patch. “Of course I am not dead!” Mother Hildebrande had said joyously. Alys felt her mother’s arms come around her and hold her close, smelled the clean, sweet scent of her starched linen. “Of course I am not dead!” she said. “Come home with me!”

  Alys clung to the rags of her pillow and closed her eyes tighter to try to stay asleep, to live inside the dream. But always the cold of the floor would wake her, or Morach’s irascible yell, and she would open her eyes and know again the ache of loss, and have to face again that she was far from her home and far from the woman who loved her, with no hope of seeing her mother or any of her sisters ever again.

  It rained for weeks, solid torrential rain which wept down out of the skies unceasingly. Every morning Alys woke to find her pallet bed wet from the earth of the hovel and her robe and her cape damp with morning mist. Morach, grumbling, made a space for her on the sleeping platform and woke her once, twice a night to clamber down the rickety ladder and keep the fire burning. Every day Alys went out downriver toward Bowes where the oak, elm, and beech trees grew, looking for firewood. Every day she dr