Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  If he had not been so thoroughly hated in the village it would have gone badly for Morach after that. But his widow was a pleasant woman, glad to be free of him, and she made no complaint. She called Morach up to the farmhouse and asked her for a poultice to ease her backache, and overpaid her many times to ensure that Morach bore no dangerous grudge. The old farmer’s death was explained easily enough by his family’s history of weak hearts. Morach took care not to boast.

  She never got her land back. And after that day the village children did not come to play in the deep pool outside her door. Those visitors who dared the lonely road and the darkness came huddled in their cloaks, under cover of night. They left with small bunches of herbs, or little scraps of writing on paper to be worn next to the skin, sometimes heads full of dreams and unlikely promises. And the village remembered a tradition that there had always been a cunning woman in the cottage by the river. A cunning woman, a wise woman, an indispensable friend, a dangerous enemy. Morach—with no land to support her, and no man to defend her, nurtured the superstitions, took credit and high payment for cures, and blamed deaths on the other local wizards.

  No one cared that, stripped of her land, Morach was no better than a pauper; nor that she and the little girl in her care might starve to death from hunger or freeze from the cold in winter. They were hard times in the year of our Lord 1535, and County Durham at the extreme north of England was a hard country. Morach’s long embittering struggle to survive soured her, and overshadowed Alys’s childhood. They had no open enemies, but they had no friends either.

  Only Tom still came openly up the road from Bowes, and everyone knew he was courting Morach’s little foundling-girl, Alys, and that they would be wed as soon as his parents gave their consent.

  For one long summer they courted, sitting by the river which ran so smoothly and so mysteriously down the deep crevices of the riverbed. For one long summer they met every morning before Tom went to work in his father’s fields and Morach called Alys to walk out over the moor and find some leaf or some weed she wanted, or dig in the stony garden.

  They were very tender together, respectful. On greeting and at parting they would kiss, gently, on the mouth. When they walked they would hold hands and sometimes he would put his arm around her waist, and she would lean her golden-brown head on his shoulder. He never caught at her, or pulled her about, or thrust his hands inside her brown shawl or up her gray skirt. He liked best to sit beside her on the riverbank and listen to her telling tales and inventing stories.

  Her favorite time was when his parents were working in Lord Hugh’s fields and he could take her to the farm and show her the cow and the calf, the pig, the linen chest, the pewter, and the big wooden bed with the thick old curtains. Alys would smile then, her dark eyes as warm as a stroked cat.

  “Soon we’ll be together,” Tom would murmur.

  “Here,” Alys said.

  “I will love you every day of my life,” Tom would promise.

  “And we’ll live here,” she said. “I so want a home, Tom; a home of my own.”

  When Morach lost her fields and did not get them back, Tom’s parents looked higher for him than a girl who would bring nothing but a tumbledown shack and a patch of ground all around it. Alys might know more about flowers and herbs than anyone in the village, but Tom’s parents did not need a daughter-in-law who knew twenty different poisons, forty different cures. They wanted a jolly, round-faced girl who would bring a fat dowry of fields and perhaps a grazing cow with a weaned calf. They wanted a girl with broad hips and strong shoulders who could work all day in their fields and have a good supper ready for them at night. One who would give birth without fuss so that there would be another Tom in the farmhouse to inherit when they had gone.

  Alys, with her ripple of golden-brown unbraided hair, her basket of leaves, and her pale reserved face, was not their choice. They told Tom frankly to put her out of his mind; and he told them that he would marry where he willed, and that if they forced him to it he would take Alys away—even as far as Darneton itself—he would do it and go into service if needs be.

  It could not be done. Lord Hugh would not let two young people up and off his land without his say-so. But Lord Hugh was a bad man to invoke in a domestic dispute. He would come and give fair enough judgment, but he would take a fancy to a pewter pint-pot on his way out, or he saw a horse he must have, cost what it may. And however generous he claimed to be, he would pay less than the Castleton butter-market price. Lord Hugh was a sharp man with a hard eye. It was best to solve any problems well away from him.

  They ignored Tom. They went in secret to the abbess at the abbey and they offered her Alys. They claimed that the child had the holy gift of healing, that she was an herbalist in her own right, but dreadfully endangered by living with her guardian—old Morach. They offered the abbey a plump dowry to take her and keep her behind the walls, as a gift from themselves.

  Mother Hildebrande, who could hear a lie even from a stranger—and forgive it—asked them why they were so anxious to get the little girl out of the way. Then Tom’s mother cried and told her that Tom was mad for the girl and that she would not do for them. She was too strange and unlike them. She had turned Tom’s head, perhaps with a potion—for whoever heard of a lad wanting to marry for love? He would recover but while the madness was on him they should be parted.

  “I’ll see her,” Mother Hildebrande had said.

  They sent Alys up to the abbey with a false message and she was shown through the kitchen, through the adjoining refectory, and out of the little door to where Mother Hildebrande was sitting in the physic garden at the smiling western side of the abbey, looking down the hill to the river, deep here, and well stocked with fish. Alys had approached her through the garden in a daze of evening sunshine and her golden-brown hair had shone: like the halo of a saint, Mother Hildebrande had thought. She listened to Alys’s message and smiled at the little girl and then walked with her around the raised flower- and herb-beds. She asked her if she recognized any of the flowers and how she would use them. Alys looked around the walled warm garden as if she had come home after a long journey, and touched everything she saw, her little brown hands darting like harvest mice from one leaf to another. Mother Hildebrande listened to the childish high voice and the unchildish authority. “This one is meadowsweet,” Alys said certainly. “Good for sickness in the belly when there is much soiling. This one looks like rue: herb-grace.” She nodded solemnly. “A very powerful herb against sweating sickness when it is seethed with marygold, feverfew, burnet sorrel, and dragons.” She looked up at Mother Hildebrande. “As a vinegar it can prevent the sickness, did you know? And this one I don’t know.” She touched it, bent her little head and sniffed at it. “It smells like a good herb for strewing,” she said. “It has a clear, clean smell. But I don’t know what powers it has. I have never seen it before.”

  Mother Hildebrande nodded, never taking her eyes from the small face, and showed Alys flowers she had never seen, herbs from faraway countries whose names she had never even heard.

  “You shall come to my study and see them on a map,” Mother Hildebrande promised. Alys’s heart-shaped face looked up at her. “And perhaps you could stay here. I could teach you to read and write,” the old abbess said. “I need a little clerk, a clever little clerk.”

  Alys smiled the puzzled smile of a child who has rarely heard kind words, for Morach’s blows came quicker than her caresses. “I’d work for you,” she said hesitantly. “I can dig, and draw water, and find and pick the herbs you want. If I worked for you, could I stay here?”

  Mother Hildebrande put a hand out to Alys’s pale curved cheek. “Would you want to do that?” she asked. “Would you take holy orders and leave the world you know far behind you? It’s a big step, especially for a little girl. And you surely have kin who love you? You surely have friends and family that you love?”

  “I’ve no kin,” Alys said, with the easy betrayal of childhood. “I live
with old Morach, she took me in twelve years ago, when I was a baby. She does not need me, she is no kin of mine. I am alone in the world.”

  The old woman raised her eyebrows. “And no one you love?” she asked. “No one whose happiness depends on you?”

  Alys’s deep blue eyes opened wide. “No one,” she said firmly.

  The abbess nodded. “You want to stay.”

  “Yes,” Alys said. As soon as she had seen the large quiet rooms with the dark wood floors she had set her heart on staying. She had a great longing for the cleanness of the bare white cells, for the silence and order of the library, for the cool light of the refectory where the nuns ate in silence and listened to a clear voice reading holy words. She wanted to become a woman like Mother Hildebrande, old and respected. She wanted a chair to sit on and a silver plate for her dinner. She wanted a cup made of glass, not of tin or bone. And she longed, as only the hungry and the dirty passionately long, for clean linen and good food. “I want to stay,” she said.

  “Why?” Mother Hildebrande asked.

  Alys frowned as she tried to form the idea in her child’s mind. “If I came here there would be a chance for me,” she said slowly. “A chance of a proper life. I might learn to be good, I might get clean. You’d feed me—” She shot a frightened look at the abbess but she was still smiling sympathetically. “You would feed me,” Alys said. “I’m often hungry at home. And if you beat me—” She glanced upward again. “I don’t think you’d beat me very often,” she said hopefully.

  The abbess who had seen so many of the sights and sounds of poverty in the world was moved to tears by the small child’s speech. “Do you get beaten very often?”

  Alys nodded. “Often,” she said simply. “I am Morach’s apprentice; she is training me as a wise woman. If I get things wrong she beats me to teach me to do better. But I’d rather live here and work for you.”

  Mother Hildebrande rested her hand on the child’s warm dirty head. “And what of your little sweetheart?” she asked. “You will have to renounce him. You may never, ever see him again, Alys. That’s a hard price to pay.”

  “I didn’t know of places like this,” Alys said simply. “I didn’t know you could be clean like this, I didn’t know that you could live like this unless you were Lord Hugh. I didn’t know. Tom’s farmhouse was the best I had ever seen, so that was what I wanted. I did not know any better.”

  “And you want the best,” Mother Hildebrande prompted gently. The child’s yearning for quality was endearing in one so young. She could not call it vanity and condemn it. The little girl loved the herb garden as well as the refectory silver. She was not seeking wealth, but some beauty in her life.

  Alys hesitated and looked up at the old lady. “Yes, I do. I don’t want to go back to Morach’s. I don’t want to go back to Tom. I want to live here. I want to live here for ever and ever and ever.”

  Mother Hildebrande smiled. “Very well,” she said gently. “For ever and ever and ever. I will teach you to read and write and to draw and to work in the still-room before you need think of taking your vows. A little maid like you should not come into the order too young. I want you to be sure.”

  “I am sure,” Alys said softly. “I am sure now. I want to live here for always.”

  Then Mother Hildebrande had taken Alys into the abbey and put her in the charge of one of the young novitiates, who had laughed at her broad speech and cut down a little habit for her. They had gone to supper together and to prayers.

  It was characteristic of both Alys and Tom that while he waited for her as the sun set and a mocking lovers’ moon came out to watch with him, Alys supped on hot milk and bread from a china bowl, and slept peacefully in the first clean pallet she had ever known.

  All through the night the abbess waked for the little girl. All through the night she knelt in the lowliest stall in the chapel and prayed for her. “Keep her safe, Holy Mother,” she finished as the nuns filed in to their pews in sleepy silence for the first of the eight services of the day. “Keep her safe, for in little Alys I think we have found a special child.”

  Mother Hildebrande set Alys to work in the herb garden and still-room, and prepared her to take her vows. Alys was quick to learn and they taught her to read and write. She memorized the solemn cadences of the Mass without understanding the words, then slowly she came to understand the Latin and then to read and write it. She faultlessly, flawlessly charmed Mother Hildebrande into loving her as if she had been her own daughter. She was the favorite of the house, the pet of all the nuns, their little sister, their prodigy, their blessing. The women who had been denied children of their own took a special pleasure in teaching Alys and playing with her, and young women, who missed their little brothers and sisters at home, could pet Alys and laugh with her, and watch her grow.

  Tom—after hanging around the gate for weeks and getting several beatings from the porter—slouched back to his farm and his parents, and waited in painful silence for Alys to come home to him as she had promised faithfully she would.

  She never did. The quiet order of the place soothed her after Morach’s tantrums and curses. The perfume of the still-room and the smell of the herbs scented her hands, her gown. She learned to love the smooth coolness of clean linen next to her skin, she saw her dirty hair and the wriggling lice shaved off without regret, and smoothed the crisp folds of her wimple around her face. Mother Hildebrande employed her in writing letters in Latin and English for the abbey, and dreamed of setting her to copying and illuminating a Bible, a grand new Bible for the abbey. Alys learned to kneel in prayer until the ache in her legs faded from her mind and all she could see through her half-closed eyes were the dizzying colors of the abbey’s windows and the saints twirling like rainbows. When she was fourteen, and had been fasting all day and praying all night, she saw the statue of the Holy Mother turn Her graceful head and smile at her, directly at Alys. She knew then, as she had only hoped before, that Our Lady had chosen her for a special task, for a special lesson, and she dedicated herself to the life of holiness.

  “Let me learn to be like mother,” she whispered. “Let me learn to be like Mother Hildebrande.”

  She saw Tom only once again. She spoke to him through the little grille in the thick gate, the day after she had taken her vows. In her sweet clear voice she told him that she was a bride of Christ and she would never know a man. She told him to find himself a wife, and be happy with her blessing. And she shut the little hatch of the thick door in his surprised face before he could cry out to her, or even give her the brass ring he had carried in his pocket for her ever since the day they plighted their troth when they were little children of nine.

  In the cold morning of her new life Sister Ann shivered, and drew her cape tighter around her. She dipped the bucket in the river and lugged it back up the path to the cottage. Morach, who had been watching her dreaming at the riverside, made no comment, but tumbled down the ladder to the fireside and nodded to Sister Ann to fill the pot and put some water on to heat.

  She said nothing while they shared a small piece of bread with last night’s porridge moistened with hot water. They shared a mug to drink the sour, strong water. It was brown and peaty from the moorland. Sister Ann was careful to turn it so her lips did not touch where Morach had drunk. She had lost the habit of unhealthy, unavoidable intimacy. Morach watched her from under her thick black eyebrows and said nothing.

  “Now then,” she said, when Ann had washed the cup and plate and the tin spoon and set them at the fireside. “What will you do?”

  Sister Ann looked at her. Her dreaming of the past had reminded her of where she belonged. “I must find another abbey,” she said decisively. “My life is dedicated to Christ and His sainted Mother.”

  Morach hid a smile and nodded. “Yes, little sister,” she said. “But all this was not sent solely to try your faith, others are suffering also. They are all being visited, they are all being questioned. You were fools enough at Bowes to make an enemy of Lo
rd Hugh and his son but nowhere are the abbeys safe. The king has his eye on their wealth and your God is no longer keeping open house. I dare say there is not an abbey within fifty miles which would dare to open its doors to you.”

  “Then I must travel. I must travel outside the fifty miles, north to Durham if need be, south to York. I must find another abbey. I have made my vows, I cannot live in the world.”

  Morach picked her teeth with a twig from the basket of kindling and spat accurately into the flames. “D’you have some story ready?” she asked innocently. “Got some fable prepared already?”

  Sister Ann looked blank. Already the skin on her head was less shiny, the haze of light brown hair showed like an itchy shadow. She rubbed it with a grimy hand and left another dark smear. Her dark blue eyes were sunk in her face with weariness. She looked as old as Morach herself.

  “Why should I need a story?” she asked. Then she remembered her cowardice—“Oh Mary, Mother of God…”

  “If you were seen skipping off it would go hard for you,” Morach said cheerily. “I can’t think an abbess would welcome you once she knew that you smelled smoke and bolted like any sinner.”

  “I could do penance…” Sister Ann started.

  Morach chortled disbelievingly. “It’s more like they’d throw you out in your shift for strangers to use as they wish,” she said. “They’ll think you a spy or a heretic. Lord Hugo’s paid informer come to spy on them and report back to him. They’ll ask you how you got out alone and charge you with arson or witchcraft or both. They’re scared—there isn’t an abbey in the land which isn’t guilty of corrupt practices, it’s not a time for them to take in new recruits, and certainly not one who smells of smoke. You’re ruined, Sister Ann! Your vows are broke, your abbey is a smoking ruin, your sisters are dead or raped or have fled. So what will you do?”