‘And two 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 towards him. ‘I have been waiting to see you,’ she said. Tom shivered helplessly. Her voice was as piercing and sweet as plain-song. ‘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’ 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’ 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.
Tom put his hand on her arm and Alys froze, forcing herself not to shake him off. He stared into her face. Alys’ dark blue eyes, as candid as a child’s, met his gaze.
‘You don’t want me as a man,’ he said with a sudden insight. ‘You wanted to see me, and 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 dirt. I cannot stay there! I don’t want you as a man, my vows and my inclinations are not that way. But I need you desperately as a friend, Tom. Without your help I don’t 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.’
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 heard 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 centre 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 towards her as a rowan sways in a breath of wind.
‘Alys,’ he said, and his voice was filled with longing.
She took her hand away and he slowly opened his eyes.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘Do you promise you will find somewhere for me?’
He nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said and hitched the plaid at his shoulder.
‘And take me there?’
‘I’ll do all I can,’ he said. ‘I will ask what abbeys are safe. And when I find somewhere, I’ll get you to it, cost me what it will.’
Alys raised her hand in farewell and watched him walk away. When he was too distant to hear she breathed out her will after him. ‘Do it, Tom,’ she said. ‘Do it at once. Find me a place. Get me back to an abbey. I cannot stay here.’
It grew colder. The winds got up for a week of gales in September and when they fell still the moors, the hills, and even the valley were shrouded in a thick mist which did not lift for days. Morach lay in bed later and later every morning.
‘I’ll get up when the fire’s lit and the porridge is hot,’ she said, watching Alys from the sleeping platform. ‘There’s little point in us both getting chilled to death.’
Alys kept her head down and said little. Every evening she would turn her hands to the light of the fire and inspect the palms for roughness. The skin had grown red and sore, and then blistered, and the blisters had broken and then healed. The plump heel of her thumb was toughened already, and at the base of each finger the skin was getting dry and hard. She rubbed the oil from sheep’s fleeces into the calluses, frowning in disgust at the rich, dirty smell, but nothing could stop her hands hardening and growing red and rough.
‘I am still fit to be a nun,’ she whispered
