The Prioress’ Tale (6 page)

There was an hour’s recreation now, between supper and the day’s last prayers at Compline, and they were all eager to be off to make the most of it, to crowd around the fire in the warming room and let their tongues run away from their wits over everything they thought they knew about this afternoon, with Dame Frevisse to lead them on.

Briefly, bitterly, Alys considered ordering them to silence for the evening—or forbidding them their fire. That would curb their ways a little, give them something else to think on.

But suddenly they were not worth the bother. What she really wanted, besides to be rid of her throbbing head, was to not be looking at their foolish faces anymore and that was easily managed.

“Tell Dame Perpetua she’s to lead you in prayers at Compline,” she said curtly, and ignoring everything but the need to hide how much her head was hurting, left them with stiff dignity.

Outside, in the almost dark of the cloister walk, she let her shoulders slump and increased her stride so that she was well away toward her rooms before they came out of the refectory behind her, heading the other way for the warming room, already in low-voiced, eager talk.

Alys paused at the foot of her stairs, listening but not able to make out the words across the darkening cloister. She supposed she did not need to. They would be on about her and none of it to the good, likely.

Discouraged by the thought, she climbed the stairs to her rooms with heavy-legged weariness and the relief of escape.

She had not known when she became prioress how greatly she would come to depend on her rooms. The other women—just as she had all her years after coming to the nunnery, until she became prioress—slept in the dormitory across the cloister, each in her own cell, closed in by thin wooden walls and a curtain for a door, with a bed and not much else, but the prioress had two rooms for herself— bedroom and parlor all her own—and even a fireplace, the only one in the cloister except for those in the kitchen and the warming room. It gave her somewhere all of her own, somewhere away from all the endless demands and needs and envies turned on her for being prioress.

Envy. That was the sin that drove Dame Claire and Dame Frevisse on and on against her. They had both wanted to be prioress, had been counting on it being one of them when Domina Edith died, and could not forgive that the election had gone against them, that God had chosen her instead.

That was the thing she clung to at the end of days like this one. God had chosen her.

Standing in her darkened doorway, peering into the parlor’s gloom, where there should have been at least lamplight and, better yet, a fire on the hearth and wine set out, she demanded, “Katerin!”

A scrabbling near the fireplace showed Katerin was there. Alys took a step into the room.

“Katerin, where’s my fire?”

“Nearly,” Katerin piped a little desperately from the darkness. “Nearly.” The scrabbling went on, steel struck flint, and there were sparks and then small flames in dry tinder on the hearth, with Katerin’s earnest face leaning over them, red-cast in the dark as she blew gently on the flames, urging them alive, with a hand poised to the side with more tinder for when they were strong enough.

Alys had stayed where she was but now went forward to stand beside her, near the warmth that would soon reach out as the fire grew. Katerin glanced up with a pleased smile. Alys nodded back reassuringly. Katerin’s brain had been burned out by a fever when she was a child; she had spent much of her nearly thirty years following her mother around the village like a toddling infant, until, when the woman came to die, she begged, by way of Father Henry, the nuns to take Katerin into the priory.

“She’s cleanly kept and good at simple tasks. She’ll earn her keep,” Father Henry had said on Katerin’s behalf. “And it would be a mercy to her mother to know what’s going to become of her.”

For no good reason that Alys remembered now, except maybe to spite the distaste some of her nuns had shown at the thought of having a half-wit among them, she had agreed. As it had turned out, although Katerin had little to work with in the way of wits, what little she had was given over entirely to trying to please. Finding that if only an order was simple enough for Katerin to grasp, she never questioned or hesitated over it, Alys had very shortly made her entirely into her own servant. The only troubles were that an order had to be very simple, and that if Katerin felt she had failed or someone was angry at her, she panicked into complete incompetence. On the whole, it was easiest not to panic her by showing any anger, so Alys said nothing about her being late with the fire, only nodded to show it was all right and waited until Katerin had nursed the fire past kindling into flames licking along logs before saying, “That’s a good fire, Katerin. Very good.”

Katerin stood up, wiping her hands on her apron, smiling widely, and made a curtsy with much of the gladness a puppy would have shown for being patted.

“There’s something else I want you to do for me,” Alys said. Katerin bobbed her head eagerly, to show she was ready. She rarely spoke unless she had to, but she was always ready to do whatever was asked of her, if only she could understand it.

“I need you to go to Father Henry and Sir Reynold,” Alys said with careful slowness, giving time for the names to take hold in Katerin’s head. “You remember Sir Reynold?”

Katerin nodded willingly. It was a chancy thing what would stay in her mind and what slip away, but she always remembered Father Henry and Reynold seemed to stay more often than not.

“I want you to go to them and tell them I’m ready for them to come here. To come here now. You understand?”

Katerin’s nodding increased in eagerness to show she did.

Alys found she was nodding along with her, and stopped herself before saying, still carefully, “Go on, then. Go find Father Henry and Sir Reynold. Tell them to come here.”

Katerin curtsied, smiling with gladness for something else to do, and scurried away. Alys, with a sigh for her aching head and weary legs, sank into the tall-backed chair beside the hearth leaned her head back and shut her eyes.

Because there was occasionally need for the prioress to entertain guests apart or see to business better not dealt with in chapter meetings, her parlor was more richly furnished than anywhere else in the priory, with not only the fireplace and chair but another chair besides, almost as good, and a table covered by a richly woven Spanish cloth, and brightly embroidered cushions on the seat below the long window overlooking the guest halls’ yard.

And when the evening was done, there was her bedroom. Domina Edith had kept it sparsely furnished, with a plain prie-dieu and a straw-mattressed bed. Alys had been rid of the prie-dieu her first day as prioress, moving in her own that had been kept cramped in her cell until then. Elaborately carved to pleasure the eyes, thickly cushioned to ease the knees, it was to her mind much more the kind of prie-dieu a prioress should have. And the straw mattress had been replaced by a feather one as soon as might be, too.

Alys opened her eyes, not aware until then that she had closed them. This was not the time for being tired. The flames had good hold on the kindling now, feeding along its slender lengths and up into the larger wood above. Watching them, her elbow on the chair’s arm and her chin leaned into her hand, Alys tried to decide how she should handle Reynold and found she was thinking instead of Domina Edith, sitting here through all those years she had been prioress, watching other fires through other evenings, just as Domina Geretrude had done before her and Domina Hawise before that, back to the priory’s founding; all of them probably in this same chair, just as Alys now was and just as the prioresses who came after her would do.

Alys had had that thought before, other evenings, sitting here, and mostly took a kind of comfort from it that she never troubled to look at too closely. Looking too closely at things tended to lead to muddled thinking, she had found, and she did not need her thinking muddled. What she needed was a way to deal with Reynold tonight, and find more money for her priory soon.

They had always understood each other, she and Reynold; had always seen things straight on and from the same angle, with none of this wrongheaded fumbling about that most people called thinking. Most people could not think at all, needed their thinking done for them—or undone for them after they had made a mess of it—but it had never been like that for her or Reynold. They thought their way through to what they wanted and then went after it.

So why wasn’t he seeing how impossible a thing he was expecting of her about this girl?

And he wasn’t charming her into changing her mind. He always thought he could manage that whenever they disagreed, but this wasn’t a thing she could be charmed into and that was something she would have to have into his head before they had finished tonight.

The difficulty lay in doing it without losing him. She could not afford to lose him. She had told him the second or third time he had come to visit her this summer how much in need of him St. Frideswide’s was.

“Other places have patrons to benefact them. Why shouldn’t St. Frideswide’s?” she had said. “It’s for the good of the givers’ souls, and the better they give, the better for their souls.”

Reynold had laughed. “And next you’ll tell me that my soul needs all the bettering I can buy it.”

“You know about that better than I do,” she had answered austerely and he had laughed at her again, but he was the only person in the world who could laugh at her without rousing her anger and she had simply pressed on. “But yes, for the good of your soul, among other things, it wouldn’t harm you to help us.”

He could afford it. He had been a younger son without much to inherit, but he had found an heiress to marry and through her had come into property enough that he could lord it over the dozen or so knights and squires he liked for company. Alys, being a third daughter in a large family, had not had his chances, but she had won the gamble she had made in choosing St. Frideswide’s instead of marriage—she was prioress. But that was not going to be the end of it. There was more she wanted and she needed help to see her ambitions through to the end. Reynold’s help.

“But there won’t be an end to your ambitions,” Reynold had pointed out. “A tower now. A tiled floor later. A fountain for the garden after that. I know how it goes.”

She had not thought of a fountain until then, but all she had said was, “And is that so much when set against your soul safe in heaven instead of sent to hell?”

He had made her talk a great deal more, teasing her along, but come around to admitting she was right, that he needed heaven’s favor as much as she needed his help.

Not that it had come to much so far. So far he and his men had cost her more than he had brought in, and now he had saddled her with the problem of this girl; but at least he had brought food in today, too, as he had promised. He had done it last week, too, and once before that. It was a beginning. All she had to do was be patient at him.

She heard his laughter from below and Father Henry saying something and Katerin’s quick footfalls on the stairs as she hurried ahead to open the parlor door. Alys straightened in her chair. She would have preferred to deal with Reynold alone, but for decency’s sake Father Henry and Katerin would have to be here. By rights so should at least one of her nuns, but Dame Frevisse was undoubtedly telling them enough of what had happened in the yard this afternoon to keep their tattling tongues busy without one of them here to gather more for them.

Katerin came in smiling and stood aside to hold the door open. She did not need to but it was a skill she was proud to have and Alys let her. Reynold followed her, concentrating on carrying a fat, green-glazed pitcher with a linen towel laid over it.

“Spiced wine, cousin mine,” he said cheerfully. “To take the chill off both the evening and your humor.” He set it down on the table, crossed to her, and took her hand to kiss.

Trying to be gracious in return—you caught more flies with honey than vinegar—Alys let him and found as he stepped back with a grin, freeing her hand, that he had left a small leather purse in it.

“To show I’m sorry I’ve upset things for you,” he said.

She could feel the coins through the leather. A lot of them and goodly sized. Not gold surely?

“Only some of them,” Reynold said, as sure of her mind as if she had asked it aloud. “But some is better than none!” He swung away to the table. With Father Henry safely in, Katerin had left the door and was hurrying to fetch three of the priory’s six silver goblets from the carved aumbry against the far wall. She reached the table with them as Reynold did and he rewarded her with a smile that she returned, round-eyed and gazing up at him in a way that told Alys that even an idiot could go more idiot for a man’s smile. Why did women do that? Pleasurable it might be to have a man smile on you, but it was hardly worth giving up your wits for, though women did—even when they had no wits to give, like Katerin.

Reynold poured the wine with the same deft-wristed skill he had shown as a squire serving at her father’s table, raising and lowering the pitcher so the wine fell in long curves, ruby-glinting in the firelight. The goblets filled, he set down the pitcher, and taking up two of them, turned to Alys, asking as he held one out to her, “Will you drink with me, cousin? Despite you’re angry with me?”

She knew what he was doing—trying to buy her off with gold and charm. It would not work, she knew him too well. But that did not mean she would turn down the coins or good wine either, and she held out her hand, saying grudgingly, to show she was not giving ground, “I’ll drink with you.”

“There’s my girl!” said Reynold. “Angry but not unforgiving.” He came to hand her a goblet, and she took it, saying at Father Henry, “Take yours and go sit at the window, Father. Katerin, you stand by the door.” They were here for propriety’s sake, but they did not need to be near enough to hear what passed between her and Reynold. Father Henry understood as much and went where he was told. Katerin had no thought about it at all and obeyed as simply. Reynold pulled up the other chair to hers and the fire but did not sit, instead raised his goblet to her and declared, “To us, whatever comes of it!”