The Wise Woman

Two

In the aftermath of the firing of the abbey there were soldiers and bullyboys chasing the rumours of hidden treasure and golden chalices. They had little joy in Bowes village where the half-dozen families did not take kindly to strangers and where four or five were now out of work with the abbey ruined and no services needed. Morach let it be known that she had a new apprentice, and if anyone remembered the previous girl who had gone four long years ago, no one said. It was not a time for speculation and gossip. There were a dozen vagrants still hanging around the ruins of the abbey – refugees from the nuns' charity with nowhere else to go. The villagers of Bowes locked their doors, refused anyone claiming rights of residence, and chose not to talk about the abbey, or the nuns, or the night of the fire, or the minor thefts and pillaging of the ruined abbey which went on in the later days.

It was said that the firing of the abbey had been a mistake. The soldiers led by the young Lord Hugo were homeward bound from a raid on the moss-troopers, and they stopped at the abbey only to frighten the nuns to do the King's will, and surrender their treasure and their bad popish ways. It had all begun with some wild sport, a bonfire of broken wood and some tar. Once the flames had caught there was nothing that Hugo could do, and besides the nuns had all died in the first minutes. The young lord had been drunk anyway, and could remember little. He confessed and did penance with his own priest – Father Stephen, one of the new faith who saw little sin in stamping out a nest of treasonous papists – and the villagers gleaned over the half-burned building and then started carting the stones away. Within a few weeks of her return to Morach's hovel, Alys could walk where she wished; no one recognized her as the half-starved waif who had gone away four years ago. Even if they had, no one would have taken the risk of reporting her, which would bring Lord Hugh down on the village or – even worse – his son, the mad young lord.

Alys could go freely into the village whenever she wished. But mostly she went up on the moor. Every day, after digging and weeding in the dusty scrape of the vegetable patch, she went down to the river to wash her hands and splash water over her face. In the first few days she stripped and waded into the water with her teeth chattering, to wash herself clean of the smell of sweat and smoke and midden. It was no use. The earth under her fingernails and the grime in the creases of her skin would not come clean in the cold brackish water, and anyway, wading back to the frosty bank with shivery goose-flesh skin, Alys had only dirty clothes to wear. After a few weeks she lost her shudder of repulsion against the odour of her own body, soon she could barely smell even the strong stench of Morach. She still splashed water in her face but she no longer hoped to keep clean.

She rubbed her face dry on the thick wool of her dirty robe and walked upstream along the river-bank till she came to the bridge where the river ran beneath a natural causeway of limestone slabs – wide enough to drive a wagon across, strong enough to carry oxen. She paused there and looked down into the brown peaty water. It flowed so slowly there seemed to be no movement at all, as if the river had died, had given up its life into stagnant, dark ponds.

Alys knew better. When she and Tom had been little children they had explored one of the caves which riddled the river-bank. Squirming like fox cubs they had gone downwards and downwards until the passage had narrowed and they had stuck – but below them, they had heard the loud echoing thunder of flowing water, and they knew they were near the real river, the secret river which flowed all day and all night in eternal darkness, hidden deep beneath the false river bed of dry stones above.

Tom had been scared at the echoing, rushing noise so far below them. 'What if it rose?' he asked her. 'It would come out here!'

'It does come out here,' Alys had replied. The seasons of her young life had been marked by the ebb and flow of the river, a dull drain in summer, a rushing torrent during the autumn storms. The gurgling holes where the sluggish water seeped away in summertime became springs and fountains in winter, whirlpools where the brown water boiled upwards, bubbling from the exploding pressure of the underground streams and underground rivers flooding from their stone cellars.

'Old Hob is down there,' Tom said fearfully, his eyes dark.

Alys had snorted and spat disdainfully, towards the darkness before them. 'I ain't afraid of him!' she said. 'I reckon Morach can deal with him all right!'

Tom had crossed his finger with his thumb in the sign against witchcraft and crawled backwards out of the hole and into the sunshine. Alys would have lingered longer. She had not been boasting to Tom, it was true: raised by Morach she feared nothing.

'Until now,' she said quietly to herself. She looked up at the clear sky above her and the sun impartially burning down. 'Oh, Mother of God…' she started, then she broke off. 'Our Father…' she began again, and again fell silent. Then her mouth opened in a silent scream and she pitched herself forward on the short coarse grass of the moorland. 'God help me!' she said in a grief-stricken whisper. 'I am too afraid to pray!'

It seemed to her that she lay there in despair a long while. When she sat up again and looked around her the sun had moved – it was the middle of the afternoon, time for nones. Alys got to her feet slowly, like an old woman, as if all her bones were aching. She set off with small, slow steps up the hill to where the buds of early heather gleamed like a pale mauve mist on the slopes of the hill. A lapwing called overhead and fluttered down not far from her. Higher again in the blue air a lark circled and climbed, calling and calling, each higher note accompanied by a thrust of the little wings. Bees rolled drunkenly among the early heather flowers, the moor sweated honey. Everything around her was alive and thriving and joyful in the warm roil of the end of summer – everything but Alys, icy Alys, cold to her very bones.

She stumbled a little as she walked, her eyes watching the sheep track beneath her feet. Every now and then she moaned very softly, like an animal in a trap for a long, long night of darkness. 'How shall I ever get back?' she said to herself as she walked. 'How shall I ever get back? How shall I ever learn to bear it here?'

At the edge of the moor, where the land flattened in a curved sweep under the wide, unjudging sky, Alys paused. There was a little heap of stones tossed into a cairn by shepherds marking the path. Alys squatted down on one dry stone and leaned back against the others, closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun, her face locked in a grimace of grief.

After a few moments she narrowed her eyes and looked southward. The moorland was very flat, bending across the skyline in a thousand shades of green, from the dark lushness of moss around a bog, to the pale yellow colour of weak grass growing on stone. The heather roots and old flowers showed pale grey and green, a bleak landscape of subtle beauty, half pasture, half desert. The new heather growth was dark green, the heather flowers pale as a haze. Alys looked more sharply. A man was striding across the moor, his plaid across his shoulder, his step determined. Alys got to her feet quietly, ready to turn and run. As he saw the movement he yelled out, and his voice was whipped away by the steady wind which blew over the top of the moor, even on the calmest of days. Alys hesitated, ready for flight, then he yelled again, faintly: 'Alys! Wait! It's me!'

Her hand went to her pocket where the beads of her rosary were rounded and warm. 'Oh no,' she said. She sat down again on the stones and waited for him to come up to her, watching him as he marched across the moor.

He had filled out in the four years she had been away. When she had left he had been a boy, lanky and awkward but with a fair coltish beauty. Now he was sturdy, thickset. As he came closer she saw that his face was tanned red from sun and wind, marred with red spiders of broken veins. His eyes, still that piercing blue, were fixed on her.

'Alys,' he said. 'I've only just heard you were back. I came at once to see you.'

'Your farm's the other way,' she said drily. He flushed a still deeper red. 'I had to take a lamb over to Trowheads,' he said. 'This is my way back.'

Alys' dark eyes scanned his face. 'You never could lie to me, Tom.'

He hung his head and shuffled his thick boots in the dust. 'It's Liza,' he said. 'She watches me.' 'Liza?' Alys asked, surprised. 'Liza who?' Tom dropped to sit on the heather beside her, his face turned away, looking back over the way he had come. 'Liza's my wife,' he said simply. 'They married me off after you took your vows.'

Alys flinched as if someone had pinched her. 'I didn't know,' she said. 'No one told me.'

Tom shrugged. 'I would have sent word but…' he trailed off and let the silence hang. 'What was the use?' he asked.

Alys looked away, gripping the beads in her pocket so tight that they hurt her fingers. 'I never thought of you married,' she said. 'I suppose I should have known that you would.'

Tom shrugged. 'You've changed,' he said. 'You're taller, I reckon, and plumper. But your eyes are the same. Did they cut your hair?'

Alys nodded, pulling the shawl over her shaven head a little tighter.

'Your lovely golden hair!' Tom said, as if he were bidding it farewell.

A silence fell. Alys stared at him. 'You were married as soon as I left?' she asked. Tom nodded.

'Are your mother and father still alive?' He nodded again. Alys' face softened, seeking sympathy. 'They did a cruel thing to me that day,' she said. 'I was too young to be sent among strangers.'

Tom shrugged. 'They did what they thought was for the best,' he said. 'No way for them to foretell that the abbey would be burned and you would be homeless and husbandless at the end.'

'And in peril,' Alys said. 'If the soldiers come back they might take me. You won't tell anyone that I was at the abbey, will you?'

The look he shot at her was answer enough. 'I'd die rather than see you hurt,' he said with a suppressed anger. 'You know that! You've always known it! There never was anyone else for me and there never will be.'

Alys turned her face away. 'I may not listen to that,' she said.

He sighed, accepting the reproof. 'I'll keep your secret safe,' he said. 'In the village they think only that Morach has a new apprentice. She has said before that she was seeking a girl to do the heavy work. No one has thought of you. You've been forgotten. The word is that all the nuns are dead.'

'Why did you come this way then?' Alys demanded. He shrugged his shoulders, his coarse skin blushing brick-red. 'I thought I'd know,' he said gruffly. 'If you had died I would have known it.' He thumped his chest. 'In here,' he said. 'Where I carry my pain for you. If you had died it would have gone… or changed. I would have known if you were dead.'

Alys nodded, accepting Tom's devotion. 'And what of your marriage?' she asked. 'Are you comfortable? Do you have children?'

'A boy and a girl living,' he said indifferently. '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 to herself. She told her rosary before she went to bed and said the evening prayers of vespers, not knowing the time, far away from the discipline of the chapel bell. One evening she stumbled 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 and slippery with ice in the morning. Every day she heaved a full bucket of water up the hill to the cottage for cooking; she had neither time nor energy to fetch water for washing. Alys' growing hair was crawly with lice, her black nun's robe rancid. She caught fleas between her fingers and cracked their little bodies between her finger and ragged thumbnail without shame. She had become inured to the smell, to the dirt. When she slopped out the cracked chamber-pot on to the midden she no longer had to turn away and struggle not to vomit. Morach's muck and her own, the dirt from the hens and the scraps of waste piled high on the midden and Alys spread it and dug it into the vegetable patch, indifferent to the stench.

The clean white linen and the sweet smell of herbs in the still-room and flowers on the altar of the abbey were like a dream. Sometimes Alys thought that Morach's lie was true and she had never been to the abbey, never known the nuns. But then she would wake in the night and her dirty face would be stiff and salty with tears and she would know that she had been dreaming of her mother again, and of the life that she had lost.

She could forget the pleasure of being clean, but her hungry, growing, young body reminded her daily of the food at the abbey. All autumn Alys and Morach ate thin vegetable broth, sometimes with a rasher of bacon boiled in it and the bacon fat floating in golden globules on the top. Sometimes they had a slice of cheese, always they had black rye bread with the thick, badly milled grains tough in the dough. Sometimes they had the innards of a newly slaughtered pig from a grateful farmer's wife. Sometimes they had rabbit. Morach had a snare and Alys set a net for fish. Morach's pair of hens, which lived underfoot in the house feeding miserably off scraps, laid well for a couple of days and Morach and Alys ate eggs. Most days they had a thin gruel for breakfast and then fasted all day until nightfall when they had broth and bread and perhaps a slice of cheese or meat.

Alys could remember the taste of lightly stewed carp from the abbey ponds. The fast days when they ate salmon and trout or sea fish brought specially for them from the coast. The smell of roast beef with thick fluffy puddings, the warm, nourishing porridge in the early morning after prayers with a blob of abbey honey in the middle and cream as yellow as butter to pour over the top, hot ale at bedtime, the feast-day treats of marchpane, roasted almonds, sugared fruit. She craved for the heavy, warm sweetness of hippocras wine after a feast, venison in port-wine gravy, jugged hare, vegetables roasted in butter, the tang of fresh cherries. Sometimes Morach kicked her awake in the night and said with a sleepy chuckle: 'You're moaning, Alys, you're dreaming of food again. Practise mortifying your flesh, my little angel!' And Alys would find her mouth running wet with saliva at her dreams of dinners in the quiet refectory while a nun read aloud to them, and always at the head of the table was Mother Hildebrande, her arms outstretched, blessing the food and giving thanks for the easy richness of their lives, and sometimes glancing down the table to Alys to make sure that the little girl had plenty. 'Plenty,' Alys said longingly.

At the end of October there was a plague of sickness in Bowes with half a dozen children and some adults vomiting and choking on their vomit. Mothers walked the few miles out to Morach's cottage every day with a gift, a round yellow cheese, or even a penny. Morach burned fennel root over the little fire, set it to dry and then ground it into powder and gave Alys a sheet of good paper, a pen and ink.

'Write a prayer,' she said. 'Any one of the good prayers in Latin.'

Alys' fingers welcomed the touch of a quill. She held it awkwardly in her swollen, callused hands like the key to a kingdom she had lost.

'Write it! Write it!' Morach said impatiently. 'A good prayer against sickness.'

Very carefully Alys dipped her pen and wrote the simple words of the Lord's Prayer, her lips moving in time to the cadence of the Latin. It was the first prayer Mother Hildebrande had ever taught her.

Morach watched inquisitively. 'Is it done?' she asked, and when Alys nodded, silenced by the tightness of her throat, Morach took the paper and tore it into half a dozen little squares, tipped the dusty powder into it and twisted the paper to keep the powder safe. 'What are you doing?' Alys demanded. 'Magic,' Morach replied ironically. 'This is going to keep us fat through the winter.'

She was right. The people in Bowes and the farmers all around bought the black powder wrapped in the special paper for a penny a twist. Morach bought more paper and set Alys to writing again. Alys knew there could be no sin in writing the Lord's Prayer but felt uneasy when Morach tore the smooth vellum into pieces.

'Why do you do it?' Alys asked curiously one day, watching Morach grind the root in a mortar nursed on her lap as she sat by the fire on her stool.

Morach smiled at her. "The powder is strong against stomach sickness,' she said. 'But it is the spell that you write that gives it the power.'

'It's a prayer,' Alys said contemptuously. 'I don't make spells and I would not sell burned fennel and a line of prayer for a penny a twist.'

'It makes people well,' Morach said. 'They take it and they say the spell when the vomiting hits them. Then the attack passes off.'

'How can it?' Alys asked impatiently. 'Why should a torn piece of prayer cure them?'

Morach laughed. 'Listen to the running nun!' she exclaimed to the fire. 'Listen to the girl who worked in the herb garden and the still-room and the nuns' infirmary and yet denies the power of plants! Denies the power of prayer! It cures them, my wench, because there is potency in it. And in order to say the prayer they have to draw breath. It steadies them. I order that the prayer has to be said to the sky so they have to open a window and breathe clean air. All of those that have died from the vomiting are those that were weak and sickly and in a panic of fear in dirty rooms. The spell works because it's powerful. And it helps if they believe it.'

Alys crossed herself in a small gesture between her breasts. Morach would have mocked if she had seen.

'And if they can pay for a spell then they can pay for good food and clean water,' Morach said fairly. 'The chances are that they are stronger before the sickness takes them. The rich are always blessed.' 'What if it fails?' Alys asked.

Morach's face hardened. 'You had better pray to your Lady that it never fails,' she said. 'If it fails then I can say that they have been bewitched by another power, or the spell has failed them because they did not do it right. If it fails I go at once to the heirs and try to buy their friendship. But if they are vengeful and if their cattle die too, then you and I stay away from Bowes, keep our heads down, and keep out of sight until the body is buried and people have forgot.'

'It's wrong,' Alys said positively. 'At the abbey we followed old books, we knew the herbs we grew, we made them into tinctures and we drank them from measured glasses. This is not herbalism but nonsense. Lies dressed up in dog Latin to frighten children!'

'Nonsense is it?' Morach demanded, her quick anger aroused. 'There are people in this village who will swear I can make a woman miscarry by winking at her! There are people in this village who think I can kill a healthy beast by snapping my fingers over its water pail. There are people in this village who think the devil speaks to me in my dreams and I have all his powers at my command!'

'Aren't you afraid?' Alys asked.

Morach laughed, her voice harsh and wild. 'Afraid?' she said. 'Who is not afraid? But I am more afraid of starving this winter, or dying of cold because we have no firewood. Ever since my land was stolen from me I have had no choice. Ever since my land was taken from me I have been afraid. I am a wise woman – of course I am afraid!'

She put the pestle and mortar to one side and then spooned the dust into one scrap of paper and then another, her hands steady.

'Besides,' she said slyly, 'I am less afraid than I was. Much much less afraid than I was.'

'Are you?' Alys asked, recognizing the note of torment in Morach's voice.

'Oh, yes,' Morach said gleefully. 'If they seek for a witch in Bowes now, who do you think they will take first? A little old woman with a few herbs in her purse who has been there for years and never done great harm – or a girl as lovely as sin who will speak with no one, nor court with any man. A girl who is neither maid nor woman, saint nor sinner. A girl who is seen in Bowes very seldom, but always with her cloak around her shoulders and a shawl over her head. A girl who talks to no one, and has no young women friends. A girl who avoids men, who keeps her eyes down when one crosses her path. It is you who should be afraid, Alys. It is you who they see as a strange woman, as someone out of the ordinary. So it is you that they think has the skill to cure the vomiting. It will be you they praise or blame. It should be you who is afraid!'

'They cannot think these are spells!' Alys exclaimed. 'I told you from the start they were prayers! You asked me to write a prayer and I did! They cannot think that I do magic!'

'Go on!' Morach gestured to her impatiently. 'Write some more! Write some more! I need it to wrap these doses. It is your writing, Alys, that makes the powder work. Ever since you came back, the fennel has cured the vomiting. They say you are the cunning woman and I am your servant. They say you have come from the devil. They say that the singed corner of your robe was from the fires of hell – and that you are the bride of the devil.'

'Who says?' Alys demanded stoutly though her voice shook a little. 'I don't believe anyone says anything.'

'Liza – Tom's wife,' Morach said triumphantly. 'She says you've tampered with Tom's sleep. He names you in his sleep – a sure sign of hexing.'

Alys laughed bitterly. 'Oh aye,' she said tartly. 'He is calling me to rescue him from her sharp tongue.'

'Curse her then?' Morach's face was bright in the shadowy cottage. 'Try it! Curse her to death and make Tom a widower, rich with her dowry, so that he can return to you and you can use your roughened hands on his land where you will see the benefit. She's a useless, spiteful woman, no one's friend. No one would miss her.'

'Don't,' Alys said quickly. 'Don't speak of such things. You know I would not do it and I don't have the power.'

'You do have the power,' Morach insisted. 'You know it and I know it! You ran from your power and you hoped your God would keep you safe if you forgot your skills. But here you are, back with me, and it is as if you were never away. There are no safe nunneries left, Alys! There is nowhere for you to go! You will stay with me forever unless you go to a man. Why not Tom? You liked him well enough when you were young and he has never loved another woman. You could kill Liza. You should kill Liza. I can tell you the ways to do it. Hundreds of ways. And then you can live soft in Tom's farmhouse, and wash every day as you long to do, and even say your prayers, and think of how we would eat! A little spell and a great difference. Do it, Alys!'

'I cannot!' Alys said desperately. 'I cannot. And even if I could, I would not do it. I have no power but my learning from the abbey. I will not dabble in your spells. They mean nothing, you know nothing. I shall never use your skills.'

Morach shrugged her shoulders and tied the twists of powder with a thread. 'I think you will,' she said in an undertone. 'And I think you feel your power in your fingertips, and taste it on your tongue. Don't you, my Alys? When you are alone on the moor and the wind is blowing softly, don't you know you can call it? Bid it go where you will? Blow health or sickness? Wealth or poverty? When you were on your knees in the abbey, couldn't you feel the power around you and in you? I can feel the power in me – aye, and I can feel it in you too. The old abbess saw it clearly enough. She wanted it for her God! Well, now your power is freed again and you can use it where you will.'

Alys shook her head. 'No,' she said determinedly. 'I feel nothing. I know nothing. I have no power.'

'Look at the fire,' Morach said instantly. 'Look at the fire.'

Alys looked towards it, the banks of badly cut peat glowing orange, and the burning log lying on the embers.

'Turn it blue,' Morach whispered. Alys felt the thought of blue flames in her mind, paused for a moment with the picture of blue flames before her inner eye. The flames bobbed, flickered, and then they burned a steady bright periwinkle blue. The embers glowed like a summer sky, the ashes were a deep dark violet.

Morach laughed delightedly, Alys snapped her gaze away from the fire and the flame spurted and flared orange again.

Alys crossed herself hastily. 'Stop it, Morach,' she said irritably. 'Stupid tricks for frightening children. As if I would be fooled by them after a childhood with you and your cheating arts.'

Morach shook her head. 'I touched nothing,' she said easily. 'It was your gaze, and your mind, and your power. And you can run and run from it as fast as you ran from your holy life. But the two of them will keep pace with you forever, Alys. In the end you will have to choose.'

'I am a nun,' Alys said through her teeth. 'There will be no magic and dark skills for me. I do not want them. I do not want you. And I do not want Tom. Hear me now, Morach, as soon as I can leave here, I will go. I swear to you that if I could leave this very night, I would be gone. I want none of it. None of it. If I could, I swear that I would ride away from this place now and never come back.'

'Hush!' Morach said suddenly. Alys froze into silence and the two women strained their ears to listen.

'Someone outside the door,' Morach hissed. 'What can you hear?'

'A horse,' Alys whispered. 'No, two horses.' In a quick gesture Morach tipped the pot of water on to the embers of the turf fire. The glow died at once, the room filled with thick smoke. Alys clapped her hand over her mouth so as not to choke.

The banging on the little wooden door was like thunder. The two women shrank together, their eyes fixed on the entrance as if the door would splinter and fall apart. Someone was hammering on it with a sword hilt.

'I'll open it,' Morach said. In the darkness her face was as white as a drowned woman's. 'You get yourself upstairs and hide under my pallet. If it's the witch-taker it'll likely be for me, you might escape. No one will listen to Tom's wife without others to speak against you; and no one has died this week. Go on, wench, it's the only chance I can give you.'

Alys did not hesitate, she fled towards the ladder and upwards like a shadow.

'I'm coming,' Morach said in a harsh grumbling voice. 'Leave an old woman's door on the hinge, can't you?'

She checked that Alys was hidden above, and then swung the wooden latch to open the door.

The two tall men on horseback filled the skyline like giants. Around their shoulders the stars shone and the dark streams of cloud raced past their looming heads.

'We want the young wise woman,' the man said. His face was muffled against the cold, he was armed only with a cudgel and a short stabbing dagger. 'The new young wise woman. Get her.'

'I'm not rightly sure…' Morach started, her voice a plaintive whine. 'She is not…'

The man reached down and grabbed the shawl at Morach's throat and lifted her up till her face was near his. The horse shifted uneasily and Morach gurgled and choked, her feet kicking.

'Lord Hugh at the castle orders it,' he said. 'He is ill. He wants the young wise woman and the spell against the vomiting. Get her, and no harm will come of it. He will pay you. If you hide her I shall burn this stinking shack around your ears with the door nailed up, and you inside.'

He dropped Morach back on her feet, she stumbled back against the door frame, and turned back towards the cottage, half closing the door.

Alys was looking down from the sleeping platform, her eyes huge in her white face. 'I cannot…' she said.

Morach snatched the shawl from her own shoulders, spread it on the hearth and heaped into it handfuls of herbs, a black-backed prayer-book, four of the twists of powder, a shiny lump of quartz tied up with a long scrap of ribbon, and the pestle and mortar.

'You'll have to try or they'll kill us both,' she said bleakly. 'It's a chance, and a good chance. Others have been cured of the sickness. You'll have to take the gamble.'

'I could run,' Alys said. 'I could hide on the moor for the night.'

'And leave me? I'd be dead by dawn,' Morach said. 'You heard him. He'll burn me alive.'

'They don't want you,' Alys said urgently. 'They would not do that. You could tell them I'm spending the night in Bowes. I could hide by the river, in one of the caves, while they're gone to look for me.'

Morach looked at her hard. 'You've a bitter taste,' she said scowling. 'For all your lovely face you've a bitter taste, Alys. You'd run, wouldn't you? And leave me to face them. You'd rather I died than you took a chance.'

Alys opened her mouth to deny it but Morach thrust the shawl into her hands before she could speak.

'You would gamble with my death, but I will not,' Morach said harshly, pushing her towards the door. 'Out you go, my girl, I'll come to the castle when I can, to get news of you. See what you can do. They grow herbs there, and flowers. You may be able to use your nun's arts as well as mine.'

Alys hefted the bundle. Her whole face was trembling. 'I cannot!' she said. 'I have no skills, I know nothing! I grew a few herbs, I did as I was ordered at the abbey. And your arts are lies and nonsense.'

Morach laughed bitterly. The man outside hammered on the door again. 'Come, wench!' he said. 'Or I will smoke you out!'

'Take my lies and nonsense, and your own ignorance, and use it to save your skin,' Morach said. She had to push Alys towards the door. 'Hex him!' she hissed, as she got the girl over the threshold. 'You have the power, I can feel it in you. You turned the flame blue with your thought. Take your powers and use them now, for your own sake! Hex the old lord into health, Alys, or you and I are dead women.'

Alys gave a little moan of terror and then the man on the horse leaned down and gripped her under both arms and hauled her up before him.

'Come!' he said to his companion and they wheeled their horses around, the hooves tearing up the vegetable patch. Then they were gone into the darkness, and the wind whipped away the noise of the gallop.

Morach waited a while at the cottage doorway, ignoring the cold and the smoke from the doused fire swirling thickly behind her, listening to the silence now that Alys had gone.

'She has power,' she said to the night sky, watching the clouds unravelling past the half-moon. 'She swore that she would go, and in that moment the horses came for her and she was gone. What will she wish for next? What will she wish for next?'