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
agged home a fallen bough of heavy timber and hacked at it with Morach’s old ax. Fetching wood for the pile could take most of the hours of daylight, but also there was the pot to be emptied on the sloppy midden, water to be lugged up from the river, and turnips and carrots to be pulled in the vegetable patch. Once a week there was marketing to do in Bowes—a weary five-mile trudge there and back on the slippery riverside track or the exposed high road. Alys missed the well-cooked rich food of the nunnery and became paler and thinner. Her face grew gaunt and strained. When she went into Bowes one day a child shied a stone at the back of her gown and as she turned and cursed him he howled with fright at the blank, mad anger of her eyes.

  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 favor to keep away the flux or chills or fevers. There were four childbirths 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’s slim long fingers. “And you practiced 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 neighbor’s cattle. The evidence against her was dramatic. Neighbors 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 are 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. And this Sepreubo is wickedly cold. 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 cross-roads,” 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’s 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 shouted to wake her in the night and said with a sleepy chuckle: “You’re moaning, Alys, you’re dreaming of food again. Practice 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 th
eir lives, and sometimes glancing down the table to Alys to make sure that the little girl had plenty. “Plenty,” Alys said longingly. She thought she would never know again the comfort of a full belly. Her hunger went with her everywhere and her face grew gaunt and thin.

  “You’ve grown soft,” Morach said unsympathetically. “How will you manage in midwinter if you are thin as a rake in autumn?”

  “It will kill me,” Alys replied bleakly. “I know it will. I am hungry and I am cold and I am weary to my bones with the labor of living here.”

  Morach grinned. “You won’t die,” she said cheerfully. “It takes more than an empty belly and a nip in the air to kill a woman with a future before her. You should find your courage and put it in your belly, Alys! You should learn to fight, not prepare for death!”

  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’s 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 Lord’s Prayer, her lips moving in time to the cadence of the Latin. It was the first prayer Mother Hildebrande had ever taught her.

  Morach watched inquisitively. “Is it done?” she asked, and when Alys nodded, silenced by the tightness of her throat, Morach took the paper and tore it into half a dozen little squares, tipped the dusty powder into it, and twisted the paper to keep the powder safe.