what with the plague … Although it was always said that …’
‘What was said?’
Sister Goda looked down at the old parchment. ‘Sister Agnes always said it was not what it seemed …’
‘What wasn’t?’
Sister Goda clapped her hands sharply, her gaze once more narrowing on my face. ‘She was very old and not always clear in her head. Mother Abbess says you’re most likely the child of some labourer—a maker of tiles—got on a whore of a tavern without the blessing of marriage. Now—enough of this! Set your mind on higher things. Let us repeat the Paternoster.’
So I was a bastard.
As I duly mouthed the words of the Paternoster, my mind remained fixed on my parentage, or lack of it, and what Sister Agnes might or might not have said about it. I was just one of many unwanted infants and should be grateful that I had not been left to die.
But it did not quite ring true. If I was the child of a tavern whore, why had I been taken in and given teaching? Why was I not set to work as one of the conversa, the lay sisters, employed to undertake the heavy toil on the Abbey’s lands or in the kitchens and bakehouse? True, I was clothed in the most worn garments, passed down from the sick and the dead, I was treated with no care or affection, yet I was taught to read and even to write, however poorly I attended to the lessons.
It was meant that I would become a nun. Not a lay sister.
‘Sister Goda—’ I tried again.
‘I have nothing to tell you,’ she snapped. There is nothing to tell! You will learn this text!’ Her cane cracked across my knuckles but without any real force. Perhaps she had already decided I was a lost cause, her impatience increasingly replaced by indifference. ‘And you will stay here until you do! Why do you resist? What else is there for you? Thank God on your knees every day that you are not forced to find your bread in the gutters of London. And by what means I can only guess!’ Her voice fell to a harsh whisper. ‘Do you want to be a whore? A fallen woman?’
I lifted a shoulder in what was undoubtedly vulgar insolence. ‘I am not made to be a nun,’ I replied with misguided courage.
‘What choice do you have? Where else would you go? Who would take you in?’
I had no answer. But as Sister Goda’s cane thwacked once more like a thunderclap on the wooden desk, indignation burned hot in my mind, firing the only thought that remained to me. If you do not help yourself, Alice, no one else will.
Even then I had a sharp precocity. Product, no doubt, of a wily labourer who tumbled a sluttish tavern whore after a surfeit of sour ale.
Chapter Two
WHEN I achieved my escape from the Abbey, it was not by my own instigation. Fate took a hand when I reached the age of fifteen years and it came as a lightning bolt from heaven.
‘Put this on. And this. Take this. Be at the Abbey gate in half an hour.’
The garments were thrust into my arms by Sister Matilda, Mother Abbess’s chaplain.
‘Why, Sister?’
‘Do as you’re told!’
I had been given a woollen kirtle, thin, its colour unrecognisable from much washing, and a long sleeveless overgown in a dense brown, reminiscent of the sludge that collected on the river bank after stormy weather. It too had seen better days on someone else’s back, and was far too short, exhibiting, as I had feared, my ankles. When I scratched indelicately, an immediate fear bloomed. I had inherited the fleas as well as the garments. A hood of an indeterminate grey completed the whole.
But why? Was I being sent on an errand? A feverish excitement danced over my skin. A lively fear as well—after all, life in the Abbey was all I knew—but not for long. If I was to escape the walls for only a day, it would be worth it. I was fifteen years old and the days of my transformation from novice to nun loomed, like the noxious overflowing contents of the town drain after heavy rainfall.
‘Where am I going?’ I asked the wagon master to whom I was directed, a dour man with a bad head cold and an overpowering smell of rancid wool. Sister Faith, keeper of the Abbey gate, had done nothing but point in his direction and close the door against me. The soft snick of the latch, with me on the outside, was far sweeter than any singing of the Angelus.
‘London. Master Janyn Perrers’s household,’ he growled, spitting into the gutter already swimming with filth and detritus from the day’s market dealings.
‘Pull me up, then,’ I ordered.
‘Tha’s a feisty moppet, and no mistake!’ But he grasped my hand in his enormous one and hauled me up onto the bales where I settled myself as well as I could. ‘God help th’man who weds you, mistress!’
‘I’m not going to be married,’ I retorted. ‘Not ever.’
‘And why’s that, then?’
‘Too ugly!’ Had I not seen it for myself? Since the day I had peered into my water bowl I had been shown the undisputable truth of my unlovely features in a looking glass belonging to a countess, no less. How would any man look at me and want me for his wife?
‘A man don’t need to look too often at the wench he weds!’
I did not care. I tossed my head. London! The wagon master cracked his whip over the heads of the oxen to end the conversation, leaving me to try to fill in the spaces. To my mind there was only one possible reason for my joining the household of this Janyn Perrers. My services as a maidservant had been bought, enough gold changing hands to encourage Mother Abbess to part with her impoverished novice who would bring nothing of fame or monetary value to the Abbey. As the wagon jolted and swayed, I imagined the request that had been made. A strong, hard-working girl to help to run the house. A biddable girl … I hoped Mother Abbess had not perjured herself.
I twitched and shuffled, impatient with every slow step of the oxen. London. The name bubbled through my blood as I clung to the lumbering wagon. Freedom was as seductive and heady as fine wine.
The noisome overcrowded squalor of London shocked me. The environs of Barking Abbey, bustling as they might be on market day, had not prepared me for the crowds, the perpetual racket, the stench of humanity packed so close together. I did not know where to look next. At close-packed houses in streets barely wider than the wagon, where upper storeys leaned drunkenly to embrace each other, blocking out the sky. At the wares on display in shop frontages, at women who paraded in bright colours. At scruffy urchins and bold prostitutes who carried on a different business in the rank courts and passageways. A new world, both frightening and seductive: I stared, gawped, as naive as any child from the country.
‘Here’s where you get off.’
The wagon lurched and I was set down, directed by a filthy finger that pointed at my destination, a narrow house taking up no space at all, but rising above my head in three storeys. I picked my way through the mess of offal and waste in the gutters to the door. Was this the one? It did not seem to be the house of a man of means. I knocked.
The woman who opened the door was far taller
