The apostate's tale (7 page)

W
hile the Offices of these holy days were longer, daylight was not. The dark rigors of Good Friday were nearly done, but only because their supper had been so slight did the nuns have time at all for what should have been their hour of recreation before Compline and bed. Still, Frevisse welcomed even that little while and was come out with those nuns who were free to it into the fading twilight to walk the graveled paths of the cloister’s high-walled garden.

It was a needed respite for those who had it. Ahead were tonight’s prayers, then the long mourning of Holy Saturday, and finally the night of vigil and prayers that would bring them at last to Easter. This pause in the effort of Holy Week’s prayers, this time of simply walking in the garden, gave minds and bodies chance to rest and ready themselves for the more that was to come. But Domina Elisabeth and Dame Claire were not there. From now until Easter two nuns would be constantly at vigil in the church, turn and turn about. This was their time.

Dame Margrett was absent, too, allowed to spend this time with her mother, but Dame Thomasine was there, standing alone beside the pear tree, her face lifted to the pale sunset sky as if she were watching the last soft yellow drain away, so thin in her black nun’s gown and so still that she might have been another tree rooted there beside the path. Dame Juliana was, as usual, bent over the very young plants in one of the beds she so lovingly tended, while Dame Amicia and Dame Johane were walking together, their talk keeping pace with their brisk steps although their voices were too low for words to carry. Sister Helen usually walked with them when she did not walk with Dame Margrett, but this evening she was walking alone, her hands tucked into the opposite sleeves of her novice’s gown, her head bowed in thought or prayer.

For her part, Frevisse was standing just outside the gate, not free to go into the garden yet. Her turn at watching Sister Cecely had begun, and as the nuns had come along the slype—the narrow passageway from the cloister walk to the garden—Sister Cecely had said suddenly and somewhat desperately, “I must go,” and turned aside to the stairs up to the necessarium. Frevisse had let her go. The only two ways to the necessarium were this one and a door to the nuns’ dorter. Not believing Sister Cecely was going to flee from the necessarium to the dorter and from the dorter down its stairs to the cloister walk and away, Frevisse had felt no need to follow her, was simply lingering in sight of the door, waiting for her and watching the others.

Or, now, was watching Sister Helen in particular, who was come to a stop not far from Dame Thomasine and was standing watching her watch the sky. This was Sister Helen’s first Eastertide in the nunnery, and Frevisse suspected that, as was usual with novices, she was seeking to match the high holiness of the days by working over-hard at her prayers and penances. Only experience and maybe the careful guidance of others would teach her that zeal was best balanced by consideration of the body’s need for reasonable rest from the rigors of prayer, lest both prayer and body suffer and fail together. Silently, Frevisse hoped that Domina Elisabeth was having quiet words with the girl on the side, guiding her. Or, if nothing else, was warning her that Dame Thomasine’s holiness was beyond the ordinary and not for a novice to copy but only to grow toward, the way that Dame Thomasine had grown toward and into it. As Dame Margrett not long after taking her final vows had told Frevisse, a little sadly, “Domina Elisabeth told me we can’t seize holiness out of God’s hand by force. She said we have to grow to where we can receive it from him. Is that what you’ve found?”

Keeping to herself both her surprise at such wise advice from Domina Elisabeth and the wry thought that she did not know since she was not holy yet, Frevisse had answered, “Having seen Dame Thomasine over the years, I would say, yes, holiness is a thing we grow into, not simply get. Although in another way”—She had paused, trying for outward words for what she inwardly felt—“what’s needed is a lessening of our selves, because if we’re too bound up with worry over this, desire for that, pleasure in things too apart from God so that we can’t see him for looking at them, then there’s no place in us for holiness to come. It’s as if our hands were too full of earthen tableware to take a golden platter someone is holding out to us. He can’t give us what we aren’t able to take.”

“He gave it to St. Paul on the road to Damascus,” Dame Margrett had ventured uncertainly.

“He did, and at a time when it was probably the last thing St. Paul thought he wanted. So we know it can happen that way to a soul already great enough. But,” Frevisse had said dryly, “first, I know quite surely I’m far from being that great a soul, and secondly, I’m not sure I want to be blasted into holiness.”

That had made Dame Margrett laugh, which was to the good. The Rule was firmly against unseemly laughter but Frevisse had found that laughter rightly made could clear thickened thought and let it flow again.

She wondered if her congested feelings about Sister Cecely would clear if she could find something about her at which to laugh. But she could see nothing even slightly worth laughter where Sister Cecely was concerned. Moreover, as Dame Claire had said on an aggravated sigh this afternoon, “If she stayed away this long, why couldn’t she have stayed away until after Easter?”

Why not indeed?

But here she was again, coming down from the necessarium. She had been there over-long for someone who gave no sign of being ill, and Frevisse suspected she had used it for an excuse to be away from them all for a while, which Frevisse did not mind, being all too willing to be likewise away from Sister Cecely, but as Sister Cecely joined her at the garden’s gate, the clacker made its sharp summons to Compline, ending recreation and turning them both back toward the cloister.

Cecely
had been enduring everything these women forced on her, but having that hard-faced Dame Frevisse keep watch on her was nearly too much. Along with all else, it meant that when, just after Lauds, Dame Frevisse took her turn at keeping vigil in the church, Cecely had to keep it with her, and that meant no going to the kitchen for warmth and something to drink. Instead, here she was, kneeling in the pitch-black church behind Dame Frevisse and Dame Amicia, cold and hungry and with nothing to do but think. Of course she was supposed to be praying and she kept her head bent to that seeming, although how anyone would know in the darkness whether she did even that much, she didn’t know. How did these women find so much to say to God? She remembered that her own prayers in Holy Week had been mostly, simply, for Lent to be over. The weeks of fasting, hard enough in the usual way of things, had been almost impossible to bear in the nunnery. Why did women with so few chances to sin think they had to be more penitent than anyone else?

Now, besides the discomfort of it all, she hated having the time to think. All thinking brought was chance to hurt with missing Guy. He had been everything she ever wanted. He and their life together. Now everything was gone except Neddie, and she was hungry and cold and could not stop the fear that she might fail at what she meant to do, nor hold back the tears that brimmed over and slid down her cheeks there in the darkened church. A sob came with them, and she let it. If she could not help crying, there was no use in wasting it. Dame Frevisse and Dame Amicia would likely take her sob for an outward sign of penitence, a sign that her broken heart was seeking to mend itself in Christ.

Let them think whatever they wanted.

Lord of mercy, she hated it here.

Still, the night finally ended, Prime and Tierce were endured, her time with Neddie came, and with it came reward for all her “humility” since coming here. This was the hour when the nuns were either nodding over their Lenten reading in the cloister walk or else kneeling at the altar, intent on being as pious as possible these last hours before Easter. Yesterday Dame Claire had felt no need to keep absolute watch on her while she was with Neddie, had instead been satisfied to join the nuns kneeling in yet more prayer at the altar. Today, Dame Frevisse saw fit to do the same, leaving her and Neddie to go alone into the nave.

Or as alone as they could hope to be.

Yesterday, to the sorrowful chanting of the nuns, Father Henry had carefully removed the Host in its silver and crystal pyx from the altar and put it in the Easter sepulchre, set into the church’s wall and closed with a pair of wooden doors carved with the crown of thorns and whip and nails of Christ’s suffering. There the Host would stay until Easter, shut away as Christ had been shut away in the tomb. In token of mourning, all lights in the church were out, the altar cloth was black, the church altogether gloom-laden, making it a place Cecely would have avoided if she’d had any choice, but besides the nuns kneeling at the altar beyond the rood screen, there were common people kneeling here and there about the nave. Not many but some. Here to share in the holiness of the day, Cecely supposed. And God bless you all, she thought, so long as you stay away from me. For one thing, since they were gathered closer to the rood screen than not, they gave her reason to take Neddie farther down the nave, closer to the west door, and aside to the stone bench that ran along the nave’s wall for such folk as were too aged or ill to stand through an Office or the Mass.

The nuns, of course, sat in their stalls beyond the rood screen, where “lesser folk” were not allowed. As if nuns, by being nuns, had made themselves better than other folk, Cecely thought. She knew for a truth they were just women without the courage to be women, and she sat herself and Neddie down on the cold stone and pulled him tightly against her with an arm around his shoulders. He was her proof that she had dared
not
to waste her life away inside nunnery walls, and she lightly kissed his smooth hair and said, “Talk to me, Neddie. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

He was clinging to her free hand with both his own, his head burrowed against her, his face hidden and his answer muffled so that she had to bend closer over him and ask, “What, dearling? I didn’t hear you. You’ve been doing what?”

With his face still hidden against her, he said, a little louder, “Nothing.”

“You’ve been doing nothing? Surely you’ve been doing something.”

He held quiet a moment, then said, still muffled, “Reading.”

“Reading?” She freed her hand from his, slipped a finger under his chin, and pried his head up so she could see his face. “What have you been reading, dearling?”

“A book. To Mistress Petham.”

“You’ve been reading to Mistress Petham?” Jealousy stabbed at Cecely. She had never thought of having Neddie read to her. How dare the woman make such use of her son?

But, no, it was maybe just as well. It meant the nuns weren’t watching him, were leaving him to Mistress Petham, who had yet to leave her chamber. And very comfortable
that
must be—to come to a nunnery and never have to go to prayers, just lie about and be waited on.

Cecely kept that sharp thought tucked under her tongue, instead kissed Neddie on the forehead and said, “That’s lovely. What a good boy you are.”

But thank the saints for Alson. Cecely had supposed she would have to use Neddie, but with Alson here there was no need yet for that. With a servant’s usual sharp ways, she had slipped away from whatever duty she should have had last evening and been waiting in the necessarium when Cecely came. Not to waste any of the little time they probably had, Cecely had caught tight hold on her hands and said, “I may need your help. Will you help me?”

Alson’s eyes had widened. “To do what?”

“I can’t stay here.”

“But you came back.”

“Not to stay.”

Alson’s eyes had widened farther and her mouth opened in silent “Oh.” Much about Cecely’s age, she seemed never to have married: she had no ring, still wore only a plain headkerchief of the sort suited to a servant but not to a wife. With what pale prettiness she had once all faded from her, she was unlikely ever to marry now, poor thing, Cecely thought. But the merriment that Cecely remembered was still in her and with her surprise turning to mischievousness, she had asked, “What are you going to do?”

Cecely had squeezed her hands in thanks. “Can you take a message to someone in the guesthall without anyone suspicious of you?”

“To who?”

“Can you?” Cecely insisted.

“My brother is still there. I go to see him sometimes.”

Cecely had forgotten Alson had a brother, he had not figured in anything she had needed all those years ago. He would be useful now, though, and she had thrown her arms around Alson in a quick hug, then told her what she needed, making Alson’s eyes go wide again.

“Can you do that?” Cecely had demanded.

Stifling a laugh with a hand over her mouth, Alson had nodded that she could. Cecely had given her another quick embrace and said, “I can’t linger. That dragon Dame Frevisse is waiting for me.”

“Oh,
her
.” Alson had shrugged. “Stiff as a stick, that one.”

Cecely entirely agreed, but this morning she would forgive Dame Frevisse that and much else, just so long as she stayed there at the altar with her back to the nave.