Read The Wise Woman for Free Online Page B

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 dragged 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