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
clear sky above her and the sun impartially burning down. “Oh, Mother of God…” she started, then she broke off. “Our Father…” she began again, and again fell silent. Then her mouth opened in a silent scream and she pitched herself forward on the short coarse grass of the moorland. “God help me!” she said in a grief-stricken whisper. “I am too afraid to pray!”

  It seemed to her that she lay there in despair a long while. When she sat up again and looked around her the sun had moved—it was the middle of the afternoon, time for nones. Alys got to her feet slowly, like an old woman, as if all her bones were aching. She set off with small, slow steps up the hill to where the buds of early heather gleamed like a pale mauve mist on the slopes of the hill. A lapwing called overhead and fluttered down not far from her. Higher again in the blue air a lark circled and climbed, calling and calling, each higher note accompanied by a thrust of the little wings. Bees rolled drunkenly among the early heather flowers, the moor sweated honey. Everything around her was alive and thriving and joyful in the warm roil of the end of summer—everything but Alys, icy Alys, cold to her very bones.

  She stumbled a little as she walked, her eyes watching the sheep track beneath her feet. Every now and then she moaned very softly, like an animal in a trap for a long, long night of darkness. “How shall I ever get back?” she said to herself as she walked. “How shall I ever get back? How shall I ever learn to bear it here with the dirt and the cold and my hunger?”

  At the edge of the moor, where the land flattened in a curved sweep under the wide, unjudging sky, Alys paused. There was a little heap of stones tossed into a cairn by shepherds marking the path. Alys squatted down on one dry stone and leaned back against the others, closed her eyes, and turned her face up to the sun, her face locked in a grimace of grief.

  After a few moments she narrowed her eyes and looked southward. The moorland was very flat, bending across the skyline in a thousand shades of green, from the dark lushness of moss around a bog to the pale yellow color of weak grass growing on stone. The heather roots and old flowers showed pale gray and green, a bleak landscape of subtle beauty, half pasture, half desert. The new heather growth was dark green, the heather flowers pale as a haze. Alys looked more sharply. A man was striding across the moor, his plaid across his shoulder, his step determined. Alys got to her feet quietly, ready to turn and run. As he saw the movement he yelled out, and his voice was whipped away by the steady wind which blew over the top of the moor, even on the calmest of days. Alys hesitated, ready for flight; then he yelled again, faintly:

  “Alys! Wait! It’s me!”

  Her hand went to her pocket, where the beads of her rosary were rounded and warm. “Oh no,” she said. She sat down again on the stones and waited for him to come up to her, watching him as he marched across the moor.

  He had filled out in the four years she had been away. When she had left he had been a boy of thirteen, lanky and awkward but with a fair, coltish beauty. Now he was sturdy, thickset. As he came closer she saw that his face was tanned red from sun and wind, marred with red spiders of broken veins. His eyes, still that piercing blue, were fixed on her.

  “Alys,” he said. “I guessed Morach’s new girl was you. I came at once to see you.”

  “Your farm’s the other way,” she said dryly.

  He flushed a still deeper red. “I had to take a lamb over to Trowheads,” he said. “This is my way back.”

  Alys’s dark eyes scanned his face. “You never could lie to me, Tom.”

  He hung his head and shuffled his thick boots in the dust. “It’s Liza,” he said. “She watches me.”

  “Liza?” Alys asked, surprised. “Liza who?”

  Tom dropped to sit on the heather beside her, his face turned away, looking back over the way he had come. “Liza’s my wife,” he said simply. “They married me off after you took your vows.”

  Alys flinched as if someone had pinched her. “I didn’t know,” she said. “No one told me.”

  Tom shrugged. “I would have sent word but…” he trailed off and let the silence hang. “What was the use?” he asked.

  Alys looked away, gripping the beads in her pocket so tight that they hurt her fingers. “I never thought of you married,” she said. “I suppose I should have known that you would. I told you to marry but I never really thought you would.”

  Tom shrugged. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You’re taller, I reckon, and plumper. But your eyes are the same. Did they cut your hair?”

  Alys nodded, pulling the shawl over her shaven head a little tighter.

  “Your lovely golden hair!” Tom said, as if he were bidding it farewell.

  A silence fell. Alys stared at him. “You were married as soon as I professed?” she asked.

  Tom nodded.

  “Are your mother and father still alive?”

  He nodded again.

  Alys’s face softened, seeking sympathy from Tom, hoping that he would help her. “They did a cruel thing to me that day,” she said tentatively. “I was too young to be sent among strangers.”

  Tom’s face was bitter. “They did what they thought was for the best,” he said. “They were determined I should marry a girl with a dowry. There was never any chance for you and me. And they thought they had treated you fairly. There was no way for them to foretell that the abbey would be burned and you would be homeless and husbandless at the end.”

  “And in peril,” Alys said. “If the soldiers come back they might take me. You won’t tell anyone that I was at the abbey, will you?”

  The look he shot at her was answer enough. “I’d die rather than see you hurt,” he said with a suppressed anger. “You know that! You’ve always known it! There never was anyone else for me and there never will be.”

  Alys turned her face away. “I may not listen to that,” she said.

  He sighed, accepting the reproof. “I’ll keep your secret safe,” he said. “In the village they think only that Morach has a new apprentice. She has said before that she was seeking a girl to do the heavy work. No one has thought of you. You’ve been forgotten. The word is that all the nuns are dead.”

  “Why did you come this way then?” Alys demanded.

  He shrugged his shoulders, his coarse skin blushing brick-red. “I thought I’d know,” he said gruffly. “If you had died I would have known it.” He thumped his chest. “In here,” he said. “Where I carry my pain for you. If you had died it would have gone…or changed. I would have known if you were dead.”

  Alys nodded, accepting Tom’s devotion. “And what of your marriage?” she asked. “Are you comfortable? Do you have children?”

  “A boy and a girl living,” he said indifferently. “And one dead.” He paused. There were four years of longing in his voice. “The girl looks a little like you sometimes,” he said.

  Alys turned her clear, heart-shaped face toward him. “I have been waiting to see you,” she said. Tom shivered helplessly. Her voice was as piercing and sweet as plainsong. “You have to help me get away.”

  “I have been racking my brains to think how I can serve you, how I can get you away from that wretched old woman and that hovel!” Tom exclaimed. “But I cannot think how! Liza watches the farm, she knows to a groat what we have made. My mother and she are hand in glove. I took a risk coming to see you at all.”

  “You always did dare anything to be with me,” Alys said encouragingly.

  Tom inspected a callus on the palm of his hand. He picked moodily at the hard skin with one stubby fingernail. “I know,” he said sullenly. “I ran to you like a puppy when I was a child, and then I waited outside the abbey for you like a whipped dog.”

  He shifted his gaze to Alys’s attentive face. “Now you are come out of the abbey everything is changed again,” he said hesitantly. “The king’s visitors said that you were not true nuns and the lord’s chaplain says Hugo did well to drive you out. The abbey is gone, you are a free woman again, Alys.” He did not dare look at her but stared at the ground beneath hi
s feet. “I never stopped loving you,” he said. “Will you be my lover now?”

  Alys shook her head with an instinctive revulsion. “No!” she said. “My vows still stand. Don’t think of me like that, Tom. I belong to God.”

  She paused, shot him a sideways glance. It was a difficult path she had to find. He had to be tempted to help her, but not tempted to sin. “I wish you would help me,” she said carefully. “If you have money, or a horse I could borrow, I could find an abbey which might take me in. I thought you might know of somewhere, or can you find somewhere for me?”

  Tom got to his feet. “I cannot,” he said simply. “The farm is doing badly, we have only one working horse and no money. God knows I would do anything in the world for you, Alys, but I have neither money nor a horse for you.”

  Alys’s pale face was serene though she was screaming inside. “Perhaps you will think of something,” she said. “I am counting on you, Tom. Without your help, I don’t know what will become of me.”

  “You were the one who always did the thinking,” he reminded her. “I just came to see you, running like a dog to the master’s whistle, like I always have done. The moment I heard the abbey was fired I thought of you. Then when I heard Morach had a new wench I thought she might be you. I came running to you. I had no plans.”

  Alys rose too and stood at his shoulder, very close. She could smell the stale sweat on him, and the stink of old blood from butchering, sour milk from dairying. He smelled like a poor man, like an old man. She stepped back. Her childhood affection for him had been long forgotten. But Alys desperately needed an ally. Without help she would never escape from Morach’s hovel. And Tom was the only friend she had in the world.

  Tom put his hand on her arm and Alys froze, forcing herself not to shake him off. He stared into her face. Alys’s dark blue eyes, as candid as a child’s, met his gaze.