by Leah Fleming
The night woman was on her rounds, wandering over the rubble, careless and mazed, with another human following anxiously behind her calling softly, ‘Dame Felice! Wake up… ’tis far too cold to be abroad in naught but your shift… Prithee stir thyself and come inside. Why do you search so among the ruins?’
Leah Barnsley shivered in her hempen shift with just a rough woollen shawl to ward off the frost. Each night she was woken by stumblings on the stair and a draught in the passageway as the old woman stalked in her sleep all unaware, puddled and confused by the new building works, tripping over planks and boards. It was a mercy she had done herself no injury.
Baggy’s tools lay scattered. He must not fear any theft but her cousin could be slipshod and careless. Leah would not trust him to make a pig sty when he was full of ale. He cut corners here and there. His wood was never hardened enough, he scrimped on nails and left rough edges. How he had ever made himself builder in charge of the new house she could only guess; some tom foolery, dubious dealings with Squire Salte to keep the costs low, perhaps.
The house was taking shape slowly, built from the nunnery and chapter hall, the old buildings razed to ground level, only the solid oak beams standing firm like the ribs of an ox. There was to be a new chimney piece and bricked stack, a leaded glass window instead of shutters or so it was rumoured, but now was not the time to be roaming over the site to check the truth of such gossip.
‘Come on, madam, it’s ever so late and soon the cock will crow. Mistress Salte will be vexed if I’m late to her washing. You know how she likes me to prepare the wash bucket and see to her linens.’
Leah drew closer to the shrunken figure and stretched out her hand to guide the sleepwalker back towards the Prioress’s lodging house which stood alone at the end of the old buildings, the last remnant of the nunnery with its sloping roof intact. The old woman made no protest. Her grey eyes were filmy and glazed, her shoulders humped and sloping, jaw drooping open for she had few teeth.
‘That’s right, Dame Felice, back to bed… ’Tis all gone now, the nuns and the choir. No night offices for you to sing. Is that why you rise so early? Do you still hear the bell and make for the cloister? Nothing’s left but a heap of bricks for your nephew’s new house. He wastes nothing, all will be changed around into a fine dwelling for you to live in warm and snug. Prithee, come with me back to the lodging. You must to your rest and I to my tasks or I’ll be getting my ears boxed again from Mistress Sarah, if I’m late.’
Leah Barnsley sighed as she led the frail figure back down the little garden path to the open door then up the ten stairs to the old woman’s bed. The lodging was little more than a humble cottage now, all the tapestries and wainscots ripped out and put in store for Mistress Sarah’s new rooms; even the ancient carved chests had been carried off. There was nothing left but the four poster bed on which generations of Salte Prioresses had lain. Indeed this new wife would have whipped that away given half a chance. Her hawk eyes missed nothing of value. How could these pennypinching Saltes so humble an old woman who once held high rank in the Frideswell district; neglect their own aunt who was over seventy years in the world and forty years released from her vows?
Dame Felice had overseen the closure of her Priory with dignity and humility, so Leah’s grandmother had told her many years ago. Barnsley folk had always been in service to the Priory, ever since the terrible pestilence when one of their kin had saved the nuns from the fever or some such tale, and the century oaks were but saplings. But soon even the lodging house would be razed and the old Prioress would be without any place to call her own. It was not right or proper. It turned the order of things upside down.
Sarah Salte was not a woman to be gainsaid, least of all by her servant and menial. The mistress was a stranger to the district, all for the strict new religion and for tearing down the fair statues and carvings in their church. The poor Parson did not know which way to turn. He was quite grey with all the turmoil. First King Hal’s changes and his son’s, then back again in Queen Mary’s terrible times of burnings and Popery when he’d had to hide his new wife away for fear of harm. Squire Timon appeared to turn a deaf ear to it all, especially his wife’s barkings, so the chapel lay untouched. The villagers were agog to see how she ruled him but sad that he failed to honour one of his own family. Leah was utterly powerless to change any of it, being a mere tenant with use of the lodging house only for as long as Dame Felice drew breath.
As she opened the solid oak door, polished to the colour of peat, the old nun seemed at last to recognise where she was and sank with relief on to the feather mattress. She curled into a ball like an infant and Leah gently covered her with the quilted counterpane and drew the fine damask curtains around the bed to seal out the early-morning dampness.
Soon the morning chores would begin but first she warmed the milk in the pan. The fire in the inglenook still had heat enough. Joseph, her new husband, snored on their straw mattress humped under a flock-filled counterpane, their only wedding gift, made by her mother and sisters. Soon he would join the Bagshott brothers in the building works, sawing beams and timber, fixing posts and joists. Bagshotts and Barnsleys were always to be found somewhere in the Frideswell district and the city in the valley where once they were bakers and now were brickmakers. Still bakers of sorts, respectable citizens much in demand with the spate of new buildings springing up from the ruins of old monasteries. How proud she was of Joseph who could turn his hand to any task on the estate. They had been wed for a year now when she had left her mistress’s direct service to look after the old nun.
Leah was expected to keep all the Salte laundry fresh and clean among this building site, for she was considered the best laundress from here to Longhall. Her linens were the whitest and softest, and she could bleach out stains, freshen lacework, frill up caps and ruffs to starched perfection. The secret of her success lay in a special receipt handed down from Bagshott and Barnsley women: instructions for the making of a lye which would soak away stains swiftly and gently from linens when they were tied and laid expertly in the wash barrel. Mistress Sarah had often tried to prise the secret from her but Leah was not going to part with it; not for a bag of downy feathers or a jug of best ale. Not even a new cap. One day she would tell her daughter just how to get the washing white but Leah and Joseph hoped for a son first.
She took the posset of milk up to her charge but found her fast asleep, straggly white hair on the pillow, her night bonnet loosened. She knows not that she wanders abroad, thought Leah. Poor lady, she knows not what year it is or that we have a Queen on the throne. She thinks she is still the Prioress, I fear, and is no longer with us. When I’m old, I hope I’m not abandoned by my children or pushed into some corner to rot.
The girl trailed back down the narrow stairs to the warmth of her man with relief. When a woman did not marry she was left alone, ignored, parcelled around among her kin. Poor Dame Felice was faring little better than the Priory; both of them half-forgotten relics of times past, brought low by neglect.
*
In the warmth of the feather bed Dame Felice Salte was dreaming of grassy cloister paths and the sound of nuns singing like a dawn chorus. Her nest of singing birds, all gone now. There were only six of them at the end, sharing the peace, embroidering altar cloths and vestments with two live-ins to serve their meals and wash their clothes.
The sun always seemed to shine in the Prioress’s pleasance garden with its rows of pale roses, lilies and lavender beds, gillyflowers and bright marigolds flopping over the path’s edge. The neatly clipped yew archways linked one part of the convent to the other like green doorways; herbarium, cellarium, cloister walk, and the steps up to the holy spring of Our Lady of Frideswell… all destroyed now because of her silly mistake.
Was it not she who’d heard that Cardinal Wolsey’s team of inquisitors were on their way to close the convent? Bad news always travels fastest. Felice had told them to scatter into the forest, then it would appear that the nuns were
already departed and no inventory taking would be necessary. So the sisters all hid like robbers, waiting until the visitors passed by. How she prayed to Saint Edith of Polesworth that the strangers would lose their way in the Chase and find themselves another route and another House of Prayer to close.
In her dream Felice cried out: I was too hasty! I thought they were gone. Rejoicing, I rushed to the chapel tower to ring the hammer bell… a sign for all my sisters to return home. But they were the cunning ones, waiting with smiles on their faces, smiling for this was an old trick, smiling for we were now at their mercy… Oh, foolish woman! Lists of tenants and rented land, lists of buildings and endowments, lists of vestments and artifacts. Nothing of any great value to them but our lives lay in ruins. How we wept as we sang the last services. No one wanted to say farewell or leave our chapel. Dame Muriel was sent back to her kin in Newcastle, Dame Elinor to Warwick, Dame Philippa to Brewood. She pleaded to stay with me but her brother insisted, for she was young and of marriageable age. And here I am still, the last Prioress, my own brother, Richard of Longhall, insisting I stay on to guard the site like some Porteress at the gate. He harkened not to my plea to be sent to another order, some quiet cloister, and where after all could I go when there were none left in the land?
Yet in her dreams still she savoured the tastes and scents of youth. The familiar smells of candles and beeswax, fresh fowl roasting with apples. Sometimes she could see young Leah polishing, polishing, as her mother and grandmother had before her. Nothing remains forever. The heart of her Priory was ripped out, the peaceful places despoiled, when these two young Saltes came with their schemes. There was no calm remaining for prayer and contemplation, not with that dreadful Sarah ruling the roost like a puffed up hen, shouting her orders like a fishwife. They would soon have everything stripped but would not lay hands on her secret: the great Seal of the Priory which was never returned to the Bishop. It was thought lost but Felice knew just where it was hidden, safe from the plunderers. Now it would stay here at Frideswell forever. Sometimes she removed it from its leather wrappings to finger the carved effigy of Our Lady with the Holy Child, honour the vision of Dame Ambrosine, her forebear and founder of the Priory.
But then she would awake feeling guilty as she struggled to recall where it lay. Secure in the closet – or had she put it outside somewhere? Her memory was playing its usual tricks again, befuddling her vision. Dame Felice could no longer remember where the seal now lay. She rang the bell by her bedside. She must rise at once and find it.
When she was dressed and fed she would take a stick and slowly pick her way around the building works to the quiet of the holy chapel and the choir stalls of carved oak where she had once sat with her sisters. The walls were damp and stained, the colourful murals already half erased by whitewash. Even the alcoves for the statues of the saints lay bare, for this new mistress insisted there be no effigies to pollute her place of worship with idols. Felice could make nothing of all this fuss. Like a stranger in a foreign country the services were unintelligible to her, being in common English and from a strange Prayer Book not a Missal. The Parson had a wife and children now and consorted with the village as a squire not a humble priest. How could a nun accept such changes? And where had she put the blessed package?
Perhaps if she sat in her stall, adorned with her carved initials, Felice Salte might recall better. How she longed to join Dame Muriel, Dame Elinor, Dame Philippa who had long since gone the way of all flesh. Why would her body not yield up its stubborn spirit but keep clinging on to breath? She could always refuse food, that would surely hasten her end, but her stomach rumbled and protested each morn as she wolfed down her porridge with satisfaction and not a little shame. Food and warmth were her only comforts now, but she must remember just where the great seal was hidden or else it would be lost forever.
*
Cramped upstairs in the old guest hall by the Priory gate, hemmed in by heavy oak furniture and bed hangings, Sarah Salte, new Mistress of Frideswell, poked and stabbed her husband awake.
‘Hurry! It’s past cock crow but still dark… I can’t sleep. Wake up, good Timon, I need to talk.’ The man grunted and snorted, turning his back from this rude awakening. She dug her elbow into him. Wake up! My feet are cold and there are urgent matters to discuss.’
Timon Salte opened one bleary sleep-encrusted eye. At thirty he was still in the full flush of manhood, plump-faced with sandy hair the texture of straw, his features squared off by a fine auburn beard. His cheeks matched the scarlet hue of his nightcap, but being partial to best malmsey wine his tongue always tasted like rough matting and his head was befuddled by such a rude awakening. ‘What now, Mistress Salte?’
‘I can’t put up with it another day!’
‘Put up with what, prithee?’
‘That woman still living in the lodging… It’s time the place came down.’
‘We’ve been through this before. She is my aunt. The place is her home, and it’s solid enough to build alongside. The foundations are sound…’
‘It will spoil the effect to have a higgledy piece stuck on our new house like some lean-to byre.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a perfectly good building. Why pull it down? It makes no sense.’
‘She’ll have to go then. And soon, sire.’
‘Go where? This has been her dwelling for nigh on fifty years, since she went into the nunnery in… let me think…’
‘When our new house is complete, I don’t want that old dodderer wandering about, off to sing Matins with her non-existent nuns. She still does it. I’ve seen her wandering like a will o’ the wisp at two of a morning.’
‘Go back to sleep, woman. She must have rooms here. Where else can she go?’
Timon was feeling thoroughly annoyed by the thought of his aunt being thrown out into the village. Sarah was new to the family and did not yet understand how much the Priory had meant to them all. How closely their wealth had been tied to its success or failure. How lucky they were now to be able to seize the property and claim the right to rebuild a dwelling house.
‘She can go to Longhall Manor and retire there, out of my way.’
‘And just where can they house her? With the servants? They’re full of children, jumping like fleas from a dog, hither and thither, out of each other’s way. Talk sense or shut up!’
‘But you promised my father to build me a house befitting my station in life.’
‘Come on! Your ideas are way above our station, dear heart. More befitting the seat of a nobleman than a country squire’s farmhouse…’
‘We are Saltes and can hold our heads up with any in the shire, especially those dreadful Pagets who seem to be taking over half the county to extend their property.’
‘He has made a fortune while my coffers are almost empty, what with the bad harvest and losing rents and tenants to pay for all this extravagance. The estate is smaller than it was.’
‘And we all know whose fault that was! Which one of your illustrious ancestors was it who chose to sport the wrong colour of rose and nearly beggared you all?’ Sarah knew that the Saltes had taken up the cause of the red rose of Lancaster and lived to regret it.
‘Don’t exaggerate, mistress mine. Be content with all our present plans and generous to those less fortunate.’
‘If I want a sermon, I’ll speak to the Parson. If I can ever find him at home. Felice needs putting away quietly out of sight. She shames us with her wanderings…’
‘She does no harm. She’s old but still has most of her wits.’
‘Oh, aye, wit enough to live no better than her servant wench, digging the garden and picking herbs like a witch. All those animals and other familiars she has make the place smell like a farm yard. She looks like something from a bygone age. Tom laughs at her. Children do at oddities.’
‘If ever I catch him at it, I’ll beat him sore. She’s a good woman, a little lost in these times, but no child of mine will berate her for being old-fashioned
.’
Timon could feel his ire rising. Sarah spoiled their only son, doted on him too much, making a sissy out of him. In truth Timon sometimes wondered how he had ever been ensnared into marriage with such a scold and shrew. Her tongue was always lashing out at someone. She could not bear to be thwarted and it was often hard to keep her under control. Her extravagant schemes would ruin them all one day. In truth he did not always know how to rein in her unruliness. He feared it would come to a beating in the end.
‘She’s still a Papist and a heretic. What an example to the village, that we should harbour recusants! When she’s dead her body should be pickled in a barrel as a warning.’
‘Stop your ranting! Aunt Felice knows no better. Even your parents were Papists in their time, before King Hal took the church for himself. We should protect her, not shame her.’
‘You’re too soft and lily-livered. You always put your family before my needs.’ Sarah was trying a different tack now.
‘I’ll hear no more of this. Goodnight!’
‘Timon, sweetheart, let me comfort you… the special way. I know you like my fingers here…’ He could feel her searching out his body under the bedclothes, feeling under his buttocks.
‘Not now. Go to sleep. You’re becoming a scold and a tease, Sarah Salte.’
‘Then it’s time for my ducking, time for me to be punished and chastened. Subjected to your will.’ The witch knew exactly how to torment him and arouse his senses. That was why he’d married her. For all her pious outward show she could be a wanton. Timon groaned, weakening.
‘Dearest heart,’ she wheedled, ‘don’t you want us to take advantage of the south slope to build me a pretty little knot garden, a green park for our children to frolic in? If we pulled down the hedges and opened the enclosed garden… there, do you like what I’m doing to you?’ Timon moaned again. How did she manage to find such a sensitive spot? Like a strumpet up to her well-practised tricks.