Read The Wise Woman for Free Online

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 his 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.
    “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,”