Authors: Priscilla Royal
Sister Edith and Sister Matilda were actually blood sisters, children of a minor lord, who had come to the convent together because they apparently could not bear to live apart. Yet the two bickered constantly. Even now the thinner sister jostled the stouter one for space while muttering what Eleanor suspected were less than Christian sentiments.
Sister Edith, lean, pale and restless, was in charge of the kitchen,
a position for which she had neither interest nor talent if last night's anonymous food was any indication. Sister Matilda, on the other hand, was red-faced, rotund and in charge of the kitchen garden. From the drooping state of its few pallid vegetables, little had survived her less than tender care over the summer growing months.
Eleanor looked up as she heard scuffling outside the chapter house from the direction of the cloister walk. The sound made her think of a large mouse running in soft leather shoes. Sister Christina rushed through the door and almost tripped over raised spots in the worn, uneven stone floor. All eyes, lowered though they were, watched with great interest the round nun's graceless progress to her assigned seat and their new prioress's reaction.
"I am late!" The nun panted the obvious.
Sister Anne gently smiled and moved to one side to make room for her.
Eleanor lifted one eyebrow and waited in silence for the nun to offer some explanation.
"I was lost in prayer to Our Lady." Christina's face was rose-red. She twisted her hands, round and around, as if she didn't know why she had such strange things attached to her arms and was trying to discover a use for them.
The prioress did not smile.
"It will not happen again!"
Out of the corner of her eye, Eleanor saw Sister Ruth nodding
to the young woman with an almost benevolent smile twitching at her thin lips. The habit of authority is rarely surrendered with ease, Eleanor thought, as she ignored Sister Ruth's act and gestured in silence for the young nun to sit.
The flustered Christina wiggled herself into the space allotted to her.
Sister Ruth's careless attitude about the young nun's absence suggested that it was both habitual and accepted. Why had the former prioress permitted this breach of discipline, Eleanor wondered. Again, Brother Rupert would know the reason. She had so much she needed to ask him.
She looked around again. Although the elder monk's attendance was not obligatory, it would have added some weight of legitimacy to her own presence at Tyndal had he come to her first chapter. He understood that she needed all the support she could get from those respected inside the priory and had pledged his loyalty last night. That the old priest had not shown up was therefore inexplicable. Although aged, he had seemed vigorous enough at table. The meal may have been one of the worst Eleanor had ever eaten, but surely it had not made the good monk ill. Perhaps an emergency had delayed him.
Eleanor looked over at Sister Christina. "Did you see or hear Brother Rupert on your way from the church, sister?"
The nun opened her eyes and blinked as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep. "No, my lady."
"Then we shall start without him," Eleanor said, with what she hoped was a significant look at Christina. "Punctuality is a virtue without which we fail in our obligations to God as well as to man." Her voice sounded sufficiently stern to her own ears, and she prayed it also sounded more mature and forceful than she felt.
With that, Eleanor, duly appointed head of Tyndal Priory, clutched her staff of office with a firm hand, looked with steady eye across the granite slabs marking the graves of her noble predecessors, and began her first official act as prioress.
Chapter Three
From a small clearing at the edge of the forest, an auburn-haired young man mentally measured the distance over the diminishing
hills as they rolled and slipped into the misty horizon to where he
knew the North Sea lay. The late summer sun had warmed the trees, and he delighted in the tangy scent, but the sharp breeze from the ocean chilled his freshly tonsured head.
He raised his hand to cover the round bald spot, then dropped it. He would have to get used to this strange lack of hair. With any luck the scalp was now properly weathered after the long journey from London to this forsaken part of the East Anglian coast. Certainly he did not want any questions from his soon-to-be Fontevraud brothers about his recent commitment to the cloistered life.
He put his hand back on his horse's neck, stroking the sticky, stiff brown hair gently, and looked to his left. Tyndal Priory sat in a small valley between two low hills. He could see the stone walls of the outer court, some outbuildings on the rise of the hill, and the dark, rectangular bell tower. To the right of the priory, a
large stream curved lazily as if it was in no hurry to meet with the
sea, and he could see where it disappeared into the same valley. A grove of trees hid where it passed into the priory grounds. A stream might mean Tyndal had a mill and fishponds, but those were hidden from view.
The village was further to the left and beyond the priory. A fishing village, he assumed, and grimaced at the thought of how it must reek. London might not smell sweet to a countryman's nose, but he was a city man and preferred the familiar stench of civilization to that of dead fish wafting in from the garden, sheep dung next to the porridge pot, and decaying seaweed everywhere else.
His horse snorted, shook its head, and shifted with a definite but gentle show of equine impatience. He patted its neck and sighed.
A man coughed behind him. "My lord, perhaps we should... ?"
Although the phrasing was polite, the tone was not.
"Your 'my lord' was mocking, Giles. Please let us be done with that."
"Perhaps your holiness' then?"
"May you roast in Hell for that sacrilegious remark."
Giles' laugh was scornful.
Indeed, the young man thought, it was he who should be roasting, if not in Hell today, then surely at the stake. He squeezed his eyes shut until they hurt and shook his head 'til the bones in his neck cracked in protest. He still feared he'd wake from this dream to the smell of his own crackling flesh and guts. He took a deep breath to keep from crying out.
"Very well then," he said in a choked voice. "Let us get on with it."
His companion grunted and shifted in his saddle. "You'll find chastity does have merit, Thomas."
Surprised, Thomas turned. The man's tone held a hint of compassion, perhaps even some leftover affection, and, for the first time since they had left London, his companion's expression was not totally contemptuous.
"Aye, I'll not miss the pox," Thomas replied with a hollow laugh. "I am pleased to leave you with the whores' smiles."
"I'd rather the smiles on the whores' faces at my coming than their tears at my failure to properly attend them," the man said with a return of his sneering tone.
"You're rude, knave."
"Neither, I think. A knave is a dishonest man. And of the two of us, I do not qualify as the dishonest man. And if I be not dishonest, then it must be equally true that I am not rude to speak the facts."
Thomas laughed in spite of himself. "I will miss your wit, Giles, and I grieve for what has come between us."
"And I grieve for the man I once believed you to be. What you are, I hate with all the passion of a true Christian." He spat on the ground between them.
"Then there is no more to be said. It is time."
With that, the two men turned their horses away from the
small clearing and guided them with care back over the soft, thick
ground covering of rotted wood, vines and woodland flowers, to the path leading from the forest. In silence they rode single file, a finely dressed courtier on an even finer horse, followed by a simple monk on his very plain mount.
Chapter Four
Eleanor burst through the chapter house door and into the open, covered walk that surrounded the tranquil and fragrant gardens of the cloister square garth. Her step was brisk but light, and her soft shoes made almost no sound on the smooth stones. The nuns had left to start their tasks. She had survived her first chapter. Now she needed to be alone, think in peace, plan her day, to walk, walk, and walk until the tension built up from pretending to feel little when she had in fact felt so much had dissipated.
She entered a dark, narrow passage, cool even after a long summers warmth, which ran between the chapter house and the warming room, unlocked the thick wooden door that protected her encloistered sisters from the world, and stepped into the outer court of the priory.
Beyond the carefully locked quarters where the monks and nuns lived, but still on monastic grounds, the charitable and practical businesses of Tyndal were conducted. The outer court was a largely public area. As Eleanor emerged, she looked to her left where the monks' quarters, brewery, mill, fishponds, stables, barns and livestock lay. The warm and dusty smells of well-tended animals mixed with the sharp odor of fermenting ale were sweet scents to her. They reminded her of her younger years at Wynethorpe Castle before her mother's death, when she and her two older brothers fought and played together with that fresh innocence of childhood. The memory brought both pain and joy to her heart.
She stood for a moment. Although the details of these particular priory grounds were still unfamiliar to her, the general design of Tyndal was very much the same as that of any other monastic house. In the middle of everything, and separating the monks' from the nuns' quarters, was the parish church, a dark and dominating structure of wind-battered stone. To her right would be the nuns' cemetery, then the gardens and orchards that provided food for the priory.
She shut her eyes to picture what stood beyond her vision.
Lying in front of the priory grounds would be the main gate, near
which lay the primary charitable business of Tyndal, a hospital. Just outside that main gate was the almonry where alms and food were given to the poor. Immediately inside the gate was the porter's cottage. The monks' cemetery lay near the stables and just beyond the hospital. It was a respectable distance from that of the nuns and sited against the wall of the outer court.
Eleanor turned right toward the gardens, and, after a short walk along the windowless wall of the nuns' dormitory, she rounded the corner at the stone-enclosed garderobe and stopped to look at the orchard across one of the streams that passed through the priory grounds. The trees were well established and properly pruned, she noted, and a gentle breeze carried the sweet scent of sun-warmed, ripening fruit. Even if the vegetables don't survive the less than gentle touch of Sister Matilda, we should at least have dried fruit over the winter season, she thought wryly.
Immediately in front of her and near the kitchen were the vegetable gardens. Just beyond them grew beds of both culinary and medicinal herbs, and further on was planted a garden growing flowers to adorn the altar. In a short while, lay brothers and sisters under the supervision of Sister Matilda would arrive to weed and harvest the raised beds. Sister Anne and a few of the nuns might also come to gather and tend the herbs, but for the moment all was quiet. Eleanor needed only a short time to concentrate her thoughts, relax her taut muscles.
As she walked along the edge of the beds toward the flower gardens that lay just beyond the hut where the medicines for the hospital were made, she slowed her pace and took in a measured, deep breath. The morning air was still moist and chill from sea fog, but the sun was warm and soothing where it peeked through the light mist drifting above her. She closed her
eyes
and listened to the birdsong, the distant whoosh of ocean waves, and smelled the slightly tart scent of seaweed carried on the light breeze. She smiled. It was lovely here, she thought, but she was still homesick for Amesbury.
After the death of Eleanor s mother in childbirth, Sister Beatrice, her father s elder sister and head of novices at Amesbury Priory, had taken the frightened six-year-old girl back with her to the convent. There Sister Beatrice had raised the child with warmth and kindness, and, having recognized the eager, intel
lectually curious Eleanor as a small version of herself, had wisely
fed her niece s mind with all her own learning as a complement to feeding the child's soul.