over the words and realized she was forgetting them already. Forgetting her prayers. ‘I’m still fit to be a nun,’ she said grimly before she slept. ‘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 burned 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 dreamed she was 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 towards 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 axe. 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 trudge there and back on the slippery riverside track or the exposed high road. Alys missed the well-cooked rich food of the nunnery and became paler and thinner. Her face grew gaunt and strained. When she went into Bowes one day a child shied a stone at the back of her gown and as she turned and cursed him he howled with fright at the blank, mad anger of her eyes.
With the cold weather came sickness. Every day another person came to tap on Morach’s door and ask her or Alys for a spell or a draught or a favour to keep away the flux or chills or fevers. There were four child-births in Bowes and Alys went with Morach and dragged bloody, undersized babies screaming into the world.
‘You have the hands for it,’ Morach said, looking at Alys’ slim long fingers. ‘And you practised on half a dozen paupers’ babies at that nunnery of yours. You can do all the childbirths. You have the skills and I’m getting too old to go out at midnight.’
Alys looked at her with silent hatred. Childbirth was the most dangerous task for a wise woman. Too much could go wrong, there were two lives at risk, people wanted both the mother and the child to survive and blamed the midwife for sickness and death. Morach feared failure, feared the hatred of the village. It was safer for her to send Alys alone.
The village was nervous, suspicious. A wise woman had been taken up at Boldron, not four miles away, taken and charged with plaguing her neighbour’s cattle. The evidence against her was dramatic. Neighbours swore they had seen her running down the river, her feet moving swiftly over the water but dry-shod. Someone had seen her whispering into the ear of a horse, and the horse had gone lame. A woman said that they had jostled each other for a flitch of bacon at Castleton market and that ever since her arm had ached and she feared it would rot and fall off. A man swore that he had ridden the wise woman down in the fog on Boldron Lane and she had cursed him and at once his horse shied and he had fallen. A little boy from the village attested that he had seen her flying and talking with the doves at the manor dovecot. All the country had evidence against her, the trial took days.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ Alys said, coming back from Bowes with the news. ‘Chances that could happen to anyone, a little child’s bad dream. It’s as if they had gone mad. They are listening to everything. Anyone can say anything against her.’
Morach looked grim. ‘It’s a bad fashion,’ she said, surly. Alys dumped a sack of goods on the floor beside the fire and threw three fatty rashers of bacon into the broth bubbling in the three-legged pot. ‘A bad fashion,’ Morach said again. ‘I’ve seen it come through before, like a plague. Sometimes this time of year, sometimes midsummer. Whenever people are restless and idle and spiteful.’
Alys looked at her fearfully. ‘Why do they do it?’ she asked.
‘Sport,’ Morach said. ‘It’s a dull time of year, autumn. People sit around fires and tell stories to frighten themselves. There’s colds and agues that nothing can cure. There’s winter and starvation around the corner. They need someone to blame. And they like to mass together, to shout and name names. They’re an animal then, an animal with a hundred mouths and a hundred beating hearts and no thought at all. Just appetites.’
‘What will they do to her?’ Alys asked.
Morach spat accurately into the fire. ‘They’ve started already,’ she said. ‘They’ve searched her for marks that she has been suckling the devil and they’ve burned the marks off with a poker. If the wounds show pus, that proves witchcraft. They’ll strap her hands and legs and throw her in the River Greta. If she comes up alive – that’s witchcraft. They might make her put her hand in the blacksmith’s fire and swear her innocence. They might tie her out on the moor all night to see if the devil rescues her. They’ll play with her until their lust is slaked.’
Alys handed Morach a bowl of broth and a trencher of bread. ‘And then?’
‘They’ll set up a stake on the village green and the priest will pray over her, and then someone – the blacksmith probably – will strangle her and then they’ll bury her at the crossroads,’ Morach said. ‘Then they’ll look around for another, and another after that. Until something else happens, a feast or a holy day, and they have different sport. It’s like a madness which catches a village. It’s a bad time for us. I’ll not go into Bowes until the Boldron wise woman is dead and forgotten.’
‘How shall we get flour?’ Alys asked. ‘And cheese?’
‘You can go,’ Morach said unfeelingly. ‘Or we can do without for a week or two.’
Alys shot a cold look at Morach. ‘We’ll do without,’ she said, though her stomach rumbled with hunger.
At the end of October it grew suddenly sharply cold with a hard white frost every morning. Alys gave up washing for the winter season. The river water was stormy and brown between stones which were white
