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husband’s great estates adapted perfectly to running an abbey?
    The Hawkenlye opposition did not stand much of a chance, and even that evaporated when Queen Eleanor herself paid a visit. A handful of senior nuns with the temperament and the experience to run her new abbey had been suggested to her, and she had made her choice with customary decisiveness and speed. Her first appointee was a success, so was her second. By 1184, when the need arose to select a fourth abbess, the precedent was established; Eleanor spared time from her busy schedule to return to Hawkenlye and view the shortlisted nuns, and she made her selection within minutes of meeting the successful candidate.
    Helewise Warin, thirty-two years old, was as enchanted by Queen Eleanor as Eleanor was by her. From the moment of her appointment onwards, Helewise made up her mind that she would be the most efficient, most effective abbess that Hawkenlye had ever had.
    This determination arose, to a large extent, from a laudable desire not to let the Queen down, not to make her, even for a moment, regret her choice.
    But it also arose from Helewise’s pride.
    Pride had no place in a nun, she was well aware. And was she not reminded of the penalty, every time she entered the church and looked up at the Last Judgement tympanum? But, reasoned her intellect – another quality which a nun ought to suppress, especially when it was at war with obedience and humility – I am no longer merely a nun. I am an abbess, with an immediate community of nearly a hundred sisters, fifteen monks and twenty lay brothers dependent on me, and, in addition to them, the secular population of this small but thriving little place.
    If pride led to her doing the job well, Helewise concluded, then proud she would be. The good of the community would undoubtedly benefit from her resolve not to let either the Queen or herself down. And if that pride was a dirty stain on her soul which earned her prolonged aeons naked and walking on flames in purgatory, then that was a price she would just have to pay.
    Perhaps some kind soul would remember her in their prayers or have a Mass or two said for her.
    *   *   *
    Josse obtained directions for Hawkenlye Abbey. They were fairly vague, but he realised as he reached the summit of the rise that they had been quite adequate; from there, he could see the tall sloping roof of the Abbey church, and from then on, it was easy.
    Nearing the entrance, he looked about him. The forest crept almost up to the road on his left-hand side, but on the right, the trees and undergrowth had been cleared. Some of the land was under cultivation, some was pasture. A small flock of sheep raised nervous heads as he rode by, and he noticed a nanny goat tethered to a post, a well-grown kid running around her. In the distance, where the cleared land gave way once more to the surrounding forest, he caught sight of a huddle of dwellings, from one of which a thin spire of smoke rose up into the still morning air.
    The pasture land fell away into a narrow valley, in which Josse could see the roof of a small building with a large cross rising from one end. Beside the building was another one, longer and lower. From what he had been told of the Hawkenlye community, he guessed these must be the shrine of Our Lady’s spring and the monks’ house.
    He was nearing the imposing gates of the Abbey. As he drew level with the enclosing wall, a nun emerged from a small room let into a corner tower, and demanded to know his name and his business.
    He was prepared for this. Nobody required to know your identity or your bona fides when you checked into an inn in a market town, but riding into a convent was different. Reaching inside his tunic, he took out the papers which King Richard’s secretary had issued. One of them bore Richard’s personal seal.
    It was enough for the porteress, who bobbed a sort of curtsey and said, ‘You’ll be wanting Abbess Helewise, I shouldn’t wonder,’ at