Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  Involuntarily Alys stepped back, her hand reaching behind her for the reins of her horse. The footsteps inside the cottage paused. Alys opened her mouth to call out, but no sound came. The horse dipped its head, its ears pressed back as if it smelled Alys’s fear and the uncanny eerie smell of death from the cottage.

  There was another noise, a dragging noise, like someone pulling a stool up to the fireside. Bright in Alys’s mind was the image of Morach, dripping with river water, blue with cold, her skin puffy and soggy from months underwater, climbing out of her cave as the river level sank, walking wetly upstream to her cottage, and pulling her stool up to her cold fireside to hold her white waterlogged hands toward the empty gate. A damp smell of death seemed to swirl outward from the cottage. Alys imagined Morach’s half-rotten body decaying as she walked, falling off her bones as she waited for Alys to come to her. As she waited in the darkness of the cottage for Alys to open the door.

  Alys gave a little moan of terror. Morach was indoors waiting for her and the moment of reckoning between the two of them was to be now. If Alys turned and fled she knew she would hear the swift squelch of rotting feet running behind her and then feel the icy cold touch of fingers on her shoulder.

  With a cry of terror Alys stepped forward, wrenched open the door, and flung it wide. At once her worst nightmares became real.

  She had not imagined the noise.

  She had not imagined the footsteps.

  In the shadowy cottage she could see the figure of a woman seated before the fireplace, a stooped figure of a woman shrouded in her cloak. As the door banged open she slowly straightened up and turned around.

  Alys screamed, a breathless, choked-off scream. In the darkness of the cottage she could see no face. All she could see was the hooded woman rising to her feet and coming nearer and nearer; coming toward her and stepping over the threshold so the sun shone full on her face. Alys half closed her eyes, waiting for the glimpse of ghastly blue puffy flesh, waiting for the stink of a drowned corpse.

  It was not Morach. The woman was taller than Morach had been. The face she turned to Alys was white, aged and lined with pain. Half-hidden by the hood of her cloak was a thick mane of white hair. Her eyes were gray. Her hands, stretched out to Alys, were thin and freckled with age spots. They shook as if she were sick with the palsy.

  “Please…” was all she said. “Please…”

  “Who are you?” Alys said wildly, her voice high with terror. “I thought you were Morach! Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  The woman trembled all over. “I am sorry,” she said humbly. Her voice was cracked with age or grief but her speech was slow and sweet. “Forgive me. I thought this place was empty. I was seeking…”

  Alys stepped closer, her anger flowing into her like hot wine reviving her. “You’ve no right to be here!” she shouted. “This place is not empty. It is no shelter for beggars and paupers. You will have to leave.”

  The woman raised her face imploringly. “Please, my lady,” she started, and then a clear light of joy suddenly flooded over her face, and she cried out, “Sister Ann! My darling! My little Sister Ann! Oh, my darling! You are safe!”

  “Mother!” Alys said in a sudden blinding moment of recognition and then fell forward as the arms of Mother Hildebrande came around her again and held her as if she had never been away.

  The two women clung to each other. “Mother, my mother,” was all Alys said. The abbess felt Alys’s body shake with sobs. “My mother.”

  Gently Hildebrande released her. “I have to sit,” she said apologetically. “I am very weak.” She sank down to a stool. Alys dropped to her knees beside the abbess.

  “How did you come here?” she asked.

  The woman smiled. “I think Our Lady must have brought me to you,” she said. “I have been ill all this long while, in hiding with some faithful people in a farm a little way from Startforth. They told me of this little hovel. There was an old woman living here once, but she has gone missing. They thought that if I lived here and sold medicines to those that asked it of me, that it was my best chance for safety. In a little while, we thought, no one would distinguish one old woman from another.”

  “She was a witch,” Alys said with revulsion. “She was a dirty old witch. Anyone could tell you apart.”

  Mother Hildebrande smiled. “She was an old woman with more learning than was safe for her,” she said. “And so am I. She was a woman wise beyond her station, and so am I. She must have been a woman who by chance or choice was an outlaw, and so am I. I shall live here, in hiding, at peace with my soul, until the times change and I can again worship God in the church of His choosing.”

  She smiled at Alys as if it were a life that anyone would prefer, that a wise woman would envy. “And what of you?” she asked gently. “I have mourned you and prayed for your immortal soul every night of my life since I last saw you. And now I have you back again! Surely God is good. What of you, Sister Ann? How did you escape the fire?”

  “I woke when the fire started,” Alys lied rapidly. “And I was running to the chapel to ring the bell when they caught me. They took me into the woods to rape me, but I managed to get away. I went far away, all the way to Newcastle searching for another nunnery, so that I could keep my vows; but it was unsafe everywhere. When I came back to look for you or any of the sisters, Lord Hugh at the castle heard of me and employed me as his clerk.”

  Mother Hildebrande’s face was stern. “Has he ordered you to take the oath to deny your church and your faith?” she asked. Her hands were still palsied and her face was that of a frail old woman. But her voice was strong and certain.

  “Oh no!” Alys exclaimed. “No! Lord Hugh believes in the old ways. He has sheltered me from that.”

  “And have you kept your vows?” the old woman asked. She glanced at Alys’s rich gown, the red gown of Meg the whore who died of the pox.

  “Oh yes,” Alys said quickly. She turned her pale heart-shaped face upward to Mother Hildebrande. “I keep the hours of prayer in silence, in my own mind. I may not pray aloud of course, nor can I choose what I wear. But I fast when I should and I own nothing of my own. I have been touched by no man. I am ready to show you my obedience. All my major vows are unbroken.”

  Mother Hildebrande cupped her hand around Alys’s cheek. “Well done,” she said softly. “We have had a hard and weary trial, you and I, daughter. I have thought often that it was easier for the others, those who died that night and are in paradise today, than for me trying to hold to my vows and struggling with a world which grows more wicked every day. And it must have been so hard for you,” Mother Hildebrande said gently. “Thank God we are together now. And we need never be apart again.”

  Alys hid her face in Mother Hildebrande’s lap. The old woman rested her hand on Alys’s bright head.

  “Such lovely hair,” she said gently. “I had forgotten, Sister Ann, that you were so fair.”

  Alys smiled up at her.

  “I have not seen your hair since your girlhood,” Mother Hildebrande remembered. “When you first came to me, out of the world of sin, with your bright curly hair and your pale, beautiful face.” She paused. “You must beware of the sin of vanity,” she said gently. “Now you are thrust out into the world in your womanhood. Now that you wear a red gown, Sister Ann, and with your hair worn loose.”

  “They make me dress like this,” Alys said swiftly. “I have no other clothes. And I thought it right not to endanger Lord Hugh, who protects me, by insisting on a dark gown.”

  Mother Hildebrande shook her head, unconvinced. “Very well,” she said. “You have had to make compromises. But now we can make our own lives again. Here, in this little cottage, we will start. We will make a new nunnery here. Just the two of us for now, but perhaps there will be more later on. You and I will keep our vows and lead the life that is appointed to us. We shall be a little light in the darkness of the moorland. We will be a little light for the world.”

  “Here?” Al