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prayer when she could reach beyond life’s limits toward God and joy and the soul’s freedom.
    But Vespers came to its end, trailing into quietness, and for once Domina Elisabeth did not immediately rise but stayed seated, her head bowed in thought or further prayer for a long moment more. Beyond the rood screen, such folk as had come to the Office from the guesthall and among the servants rustled and shuffled into movement, away to their suppers and, for the servants, what evening duties they might have. The nuns, perforce, waited for their prioress.
    Such a wait was unusual. Domina Elisabeth brought to the Offices the sense that they were owed to God much like a business debt, a repeated daily payment for his blessings. Seeing it that way, she always saw to it that her nuns made their payments on time and well, and when the payment had been made, she always promptly moved herself and them on to their next duties. That was why there was now a moment of poised waiting and then, when she did not stir, a slight head-turning among her nuns, enough to look past the edge of their veils, first toward Domina Elisabeth, then at each other.
    Frevisse, finding herself doing it, stopped and set her gaze firmly on her hands folded together on her closed breviary. Of all weeks, this one before Easter, with the wonder of Christ’s sacrifice of his earthly life for the sake of mankind’s eternal souls and then his resurrection in promise of mankind’s resurrection into God’s forgiveness and love, was the one most likely to draw extra prayer from even the least prayerful, and Domina Elisabeth was far from being that. Still, whatever prayer—or thought—holding Domina Elisabeth now was brief. Only Dame Amicia had actually begun to shift restlessly in her place before Domina Elisabeth lifted her head, put out the candle beside her, came briskly to her feet, and stepped from her place to lead them from the choir and to their supper.

Chapter 5
     
    W hile the nuns filed out, Cecely stayed on her knees in the choir stall but dropped her hands from the slanted ledge and breviary in front of her to hide how tightly they were clenched together. Of all the weeks to come back here, this one had to be the worst. Not that she had had much choice in the matter. This was how things had played out and here she was, but she had forgotten how long the Offices were in Holy Week. Long enough on ordinary days, they were hideously longer now. Add that to the hours Domina Elisabeth looked likely to keep her kneeling penitent in front of the altar and she was likely to die of the tediousness, if not of her knees’ pain and her back’s ache, before this was over.
    Now the church was empty, dark except for the small glow of the lamp above the altar and what slight gray light came through the small, high windows. Everyone else was gone. That meant she was freed to go, too. Domina Elisabeth’s order had been plain: when the nuns were gone to supper, then she could go, too. Her stomach growled at her as she climbed to her feet. She stepped from the stall, made a low curtsy to the altar, and left the choir, going out into the cloister walk where, as she expected, a nun was waiting for her. Dame Juliana, she thought. Older than Cecely remembered her and grown more grim with her years in this place, the way they all seemed to have done. She did not even nod to Cecely, just turned and walked away, expecting Cecely to follow her, as if Cecely could not find her own way to the refectory. St. Frideswide’s was too small a place for anyone to forget where anywhere in it was, no matter how long they had been gone, but after all Dame Juliana was her guard, not her guide, and Cecely followed her silently through the deepening gray twilight, around the cloister walk to where the refectory door stood open to a yellow glow of candlelight.
    Dame Juliana paused to wash her hands in the waiting bowl of water on the stand beside the door and dry them on the towel there,