The Wise Woman. Philippa Gregory
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 centre 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 towards her as 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 stumbled over the words and realized she was forgetting them already. Forgetting her prayers. ‘I’m still fit to be a nun,’ she said grimly before she slept. ‘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 burned 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 dreamed she was 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 towards Bowes where the oak, elm and beech trees grew, looking for firewood. Every day she dragged home a fallen bough of heavy timber and hacked at it with Morach’s old axe. 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 favour to keep away the flux or chills or fevers. There were four child-births 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’ slim long fingers. ‘And you practised 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 neighbour’s cattle. The evidence against her was dramatic. Neighbours 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 that could happen to anyone, a little child’s bad dream. It’s as if they had gone mad. They are listening to everything.