The Wise Woman (4 page)

Alys knew better. When she and Tom had been little children they had explored one of the caves which riddled the riverbank. Squirming like fox cubs they had gone downward and downward until the passage had narrowed and they had stuck—but below them, they had heard the loud echoing thunder of flowing water, and they knew they were near the real river, the secret river which flowed all day and all night in eternal darkness, hidden deep beneath the false riverbed of dry stones above.

Tom had been scared at the echoing, rushing noise so far below them. “What if it rose?” he asked her. “It would come out here!”

“It does come out here,” Alys had replied. The seasons of her young life had been marked by the ebb and flow of the river, a dull drain in summer, a rushing torrent during the autumn storms. The gurgling holes where the sluggish water seeped away in summertime became springs and fountains in winter, whirlpools where the brown water boiled upward, bubbling from the exploring pressure of the underground streams and underground rivers flooding from their stone cellars.

“Old Hob is down there,” Tom said fearfully, his eyes dark.

Alys had snorted and spat disdainfully toward the darkness before them. “I ain’t afraid of him!” she said. “I reckon Morach can deal with him all right!”

Tom had crossed his finger with his thumb in the sign against witchcraft and crawled backward out of the hole and into the sunshine. Alys would have lingered longer. She had not been boasting to Tom; it was true: raised by Morach she feared nothing.

“Until now,” she said quietly to herself. She looked up at the clear sky above her and the sun impartially burning down. “Oh, Mother of God…” she started, then she broke off. “Our Father…” she began again, and again fell silent. Then her mouth opened in a silent scream and she pitched herself forward on the short coarse grass of the moorland. “God help me!” she said in a grief-stricken whisper. “I am too afraid to pray!”

It seemed to her that she lay there in despair a long while. When she sat up again and looked around her the sun had moved—it was the middle of the afternoon, time for nones. Alys got to her feet slowly, like an old woman, as if all her bones were aching. She set off with small, slow steps up the hill to where the buds of early heather gleamed like a pale mauve mist on the slopes of the hill. A lapwing called overhead and fluttered down not far from her. Higher again in the blue air a lark circled and climbed, calling and calling, each higher note accompanied by a thrust of the little wings. Bees rolled drunkenly among the early heather flowers, the moor sweated honey. Everything around her was alive and thriving and joyful in the warm roil of the end of summer—everything but Alys, icy Alys, cold to her very bones.

She stumbled a little as she walked, her eyes watching the sheep track beneath her feet. Every now and then she moaned very softly, like an animal in a trap for a long, long night of darkness. “How shall I ever get back?” she said to herself as she walked. “How shall I ever get back? How shall I ever learn to bear it here with the dirt and the cold and my hunger?”

At the edge of the moor, where the land flattened in a curved sweep under the wide, unjudging sky, Alys paused. There was a little heap of stones tossed into a cairn by shepherds marking the path. Alys squatted down on one dry stone and leaned back against the others, closed her eyes, and turned her face up to the sun, her face locked in a grimace of grief.

After a few moments she narrowed her eyes and looked southward. The moorland was very flat, bending across the skyline in a thousand shades of green, from the dark lushness of moss around a bog to the pale yellow color of weak grass growing on stone. The heather roots and old flowers showed pale gray and green, a bleak landscape of subtle beauty, half pasture, half desert. The new heather growth was dark green, the heather flowers pale as a haze. Alys looked more sharply. A man was striding across the moor, his plaid across his shoulder, his step determined. Alys got to her feet quietly, ready to turn and run. As he saw the movement he yelled out, and his voice was whipped away by the steady wind which blew over the top of the moor, even on the calmest of days. Alys hesitated, ready for flight; then he yelled again, faintly:

“Alys! Wait! It’s me!”

Her hand went to her pocket, where the beads of her rosary were rounded and warm. “Oh no,” she said. She sat down again on the stones and waited for him to come up to her, watching him as he marched across the moor.

He had filled out in the four years she had been away. When she had left he had been a boy of thirteen, lanky and awkward but with a fair, coltish beauty. Now he was sturdy, thickset. As he came closer she saw that his face was tanned red from sun and wind, marred with red spiders of broken veins. His eyes, still that piercing blue, were fixed on her.

“Alys,” he said. “I guessed Morach’s new girl was you. I came at once to see you.”

“Your farm’s the other way,” she said dryly.

He flushed a still deeper red. “I had to take a lamb over to Trowheads,” he said. “This is my way back.”

Alys’s dark eyes scanned his face. “You never could lie to me, Tom.”

He hung his head and shuffled his thick boots in the dust. “It’s Liza,” he said. “She watches me.”

“Liza?” Alys asked, surprised. “Liza who?”

Tom dropped to sit on the heather beside her, his face turned away, looking back over the way he had come. “Liza’s my wife,” he said simply. “They married me off after you took your vows.”

Alys flinched as if someone had pinched her. “I didn’t know,” she said. “No one told me.”

Tom shrugged. “I would have sent word but…” he trailed off and let the silence hang. “What was the use?” he asked.

Alys looked away, gripping the beads in her pocket so tight that they hurt her fingers. “I never thought of you married,” she said. “I suppose I should have known that you would. I told you to marry but I never really thought you would.”

Tom shrugged. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You’re taller, I reckon, and plumper. But your eyes are the same. Did they cut your hair?”

Alys nodded, pulling the shawl over her shaven head a little tighter.

“Your lovely golden hair!” Tom said, as if he were bidding it farewell.

A silence fell. Alys stared at him. “You were married as soon as I professed?” she asked.

Tom nodded.

“Are your mother and father still alive?”

He nodded again.

Alys’s face softened, seeking sympathy from Tom, hoping that he would help her. “They did a cruel thing to me that day,” she said tentatively. “I was too young to be sent among strangers.”

Tom’s face was bitter. “They did what they thought was for the best,” he said. “They were determined I should marry a girl with a dowry. There was never any chance for you and me. And they thought they had treated you fairly. There was no way for them to foretell that the abbey would be burned and you would be homeless and husbandless at the end.”

“And in peril,” Alys said. “If the soldiers come back they might take me. You won’t tell anyone that I was at the abbey, will you?”

The look he shot at her was answer enough. “I’d
die
rather than see you hurt,” he said with a suppressed anger. “You know that! You’ve always known it! There never was anyone else for me and there never will be.”

Alys turned her face away. “I may not listen to that,” she said.

He sighed, accepting the reproof. “I’ll keep your secret safe,” he said. “In the village they think only that Morach has a new apprentice. She has said before that she was seeking a girl to do the heavy work. No one has thought of you. You’ve been forgotten. The word is that all the nuns are dead.”

“Why did you come this way then?” Alys demanded.

He shrugged his shoulders, his coarse skin blushing brick-red. “I thought I’d know,” he said gruffly. “If you had died I would have known it.” He thumped his chest. “In here,” he said. “Where I carry my pain for you. If you had died it would have gone…or changed. I would have known if you were dead.”

Alys nodded, accepting Tom’s devotion. “And what of your marriage?” she asked. “Are you comfortable? Do you have children?”

“A boy and a girl living,” he said indifferently. “And one dead.” He paused. There were four years of longing in his voice. “The girl looks a little like you sometimes,” he said.

Alys turned her clear, heart-shaped face toward him. “I have been waiting to see you,” she said. Tom 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,” she said candidly. “And if the abbey was standing I would be there now, the favored daughter of the abbess, the most beloved sister…” She trailed off, her eyes on the distant horizon as if she could still see the warm herb garden and the sunset over the quiet trees. “I know I have no rights over you,” she said, her voice very low. “But Tom, I have nowhere that I can turn. I have no one who will help me, I have not a friend in the world save you. If you will not help me then I am abandoned to Morach’s sin and dirt with no hope of escape.”

Tom shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. “I can’t think straight!” he said. “Alys, tell me simply what you want me to do! You know I will do it. You know I always did what you wished.”

“Find somewhere I can go,” she said rapidly. “Morach hears nothing and I dare not go further than Castleton. But you can travel and ask people. Find me a nunnery which is safe, and then take me there. Lord Hugo cannot rage around the whole of the north. There must be other abbeys safe from his spite: Hartlepool, Durham, or Whitby. Find where I can go, Tom, and take me.”

“You cannot hope to find your abbess again?” Tom asked. “I thought that all the nuns died?”

Alys shook her head. 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 center 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 toward her like a rowan sways in a breath of wind.