Novels 03 The Wise Woman

by Philippa Gregory

  Alys waited until he had left the chapel and then tapped Ruth on the shoulder. “Give me them,” she said abruptly, pointing to the rosary beads. “You will have us all questioned for our beliefs by Father Stephen. You are a fool to be so open. Give me them or hide them where they cannot be found.”

  Ruth’s white face was twisted with grief. “It is all I can do for her now!” she said wildly. “All there is for me to do. She disgusted me with her talk and I left her to drown. She died in sin, I must pray for her soul. I must light candles for her and have masses sung for her. She died in deep sin, I must save her soul if I can.”

  “No one believes that stuff anymore,” Alys said tightly. There was something about Ruth’s outstretched hand on the coffin with the rosary clasped so tightly which was inescapably moving. “Father Stephen says none of it is true.” Alys remembered the darkness of the chapel and the long nights of vigil which followed a nun’s death. The long, sweet cadences of a Requiem Mass and the spellbinding holiness of the incense. The candlelight and Mother Hildebrande’s face smiling and serene in the certainty of eternal life.

  Alys snatched at the rosary and pulled it from Ruth’s hand. “No one believes that now,” she said brutally. “Pray in silence or you will endanger us all!”

  Ruth tugged back. “I will pray for my lady as it should be done! I will keep my loyalty to her. I will give her her dues,” she cried.

  Alys pulled, the string biting into the palm of her hand. Then with a sudden snap, the string of the rosary broke and the beads spilled on to the stone-flagged floor of the chapel, bouncing and dancing in every direction, scattering and rolling out of sight, under the pews, into the gratings, in a great explosion of destruction. There was a gasp from the other women and a loud cry from Ruth, who dropped to her hands and knees and scrabbled frantically, trying to gather them up as they rolled away from her.

  “Oh God!” Alys said desperately.

  She marched from the chapel, clutching the string and the remaining beads and the dangling cross, before Ruth could protest. Her footsteps echoed on the little stones of the aisle and her gown swished from side to side as she strode away. Alys walked with her head up, her fingers gripping the broken rosary so tight that the mark of the string was as red as a weal around her fingers when she stopped in the porch of the chapel and looked at the little wooden cross. It seemed a lifetime since she had counted beads through her fingers and said her prayers and kissed the cross. Now she snatched them from a praying woman to hand to a man who was an enemy of the faith of her childhood and the inquisitor of her mother. Alys’s face was bleak as she held out the rosary to one of the soldiers at the gate.

  “Take this to Father Stephen,” she said. “Tell him there is no heresy here! I have taken the rosary away from the praying woman.”

  He nodded and turned away.

  “He will be with the old lord,” Alys said.

  The man shook his head. “He has gone to the prison tower,” he said. “He told me I could find him there. There is an old woman coming for trial this afternoon and he has gone to question her and persuade her to repent of her error.”

  Alys went whiter still and swayed a little where she stood. “Yes,” she said. “In this shock of my lady’s death I had forgotten. Is the old woman still to be tried? Will they not delay the trials to mourn Lady Catherine?”

  The man shook his head. “There are too many people come into town for the trials to be delayed,” he said. “The old lord said they would go ahead. Father Stephen thinks he can bring the old woman to repentance, please God.”

  Alys nodded and turned away. “Please God,” she said under her breath. The words were meaningless. She had robbed them of meaning every day since the night when the flickering light of the burning abbey had woken her. “Please God,” Alys said, knowing that she no longer had a god to trust. Knowing that the gods she now served were fearfully swift and reliable in their responses—but that nothing could please them.

  In the ladies’ gallery they had to share their clothes to find dark gowns with dark sleeves, dark petticoats, and dark hoods. Alys’s navy blue gown had gone to Mother Hildebrande in the kitchen-lad’s bundle; it seemed like years ago. She went to Catherine’s chest of clothes and found a gown of deep pine green, so dark that it was almost a black. She wore it with a black underskirt, and a high old-fashioned gable hood. As she closed the chest she saw Catherine’s rose and cream gown which Catherine thought would regain Hugo’s weathercock desire; the gown Alys had dreamed she would wear in a garden, walking on the arm of the young lord. Alys dropped the lid of the chest with a bang.

  Father Stephen led a prayer for Catherine’s soul before he said grace at dinner. He spoke in English. Alys listened to the strange, informal chatter between Father Stephen and his God. It did not sound holy. It did not sound as if it would save Catherine’s soul from hell. Alys kept her head down and said “Amen” with the rest.

  She had chosen to sit at the women’s table, behind the lords, for dinner. She did not want to sit at the high table, between the old lord and Father Stephen, she did not want to take Catherine’s place at table while Catherine lay, blue and icy, in the little chapel, inadequately watched by four soldiers and Ruth in awkward silence. She did not want to look at the old lord and see his shielded, smiling face while he calculated how to make this new turn of events serve him. She did not want to see Hugo’s careless joy at his freedom.

  The women were silent at dinner. They were served with broth and half a dozen meat dishes and salads. None of them ate well. Alys, watching the back of Hugo’s head and shoulders from her old place, saw that he ate heartily after his morning’s ride. He had not seen Catherine, half in, half out of her bath, with her blue lips open underwater. He had not yet gone to the chapel to pray for her soul. He had not even changed his clothes, so that he was still wearing a red doublet, slashed, with white shirt showing at the slashes, a heavy red cape at his shoulders, and red breeches with black leather riding boots. When one of the serving-lads dropped a plate in the center of the hall Hugo laughed, unaffected by gloom.

  The old lord, sitting in his seat, smiled quietly. Hugo was a widower, the dowry lands were his without contest. The manor farm he would have given Catherine was his still. The marriage with the nine-year-old girl was well in hand but with Catherine’s wealth and Hugo’s improved status as a widower the terms could undoubtedly be improved.

  The pages set hippocras and fruit and wafers on the tables. Alys took a small glass of hippocras and felt the sweet wine warm her through.

  “It doesn’t seem right, eating and drinking with my lady dead this hour,” Eliza said.

  Alys shrugged. “You can join Ruth in her vigil if you wish,” she said. “But the castle will run as my lord commands. It seems right to him—I shall not argue.”

  Eliza nodded. “As you say,” she said, dropping her eyes away from Alys’s cold face.

  Lord Hugh looked behind him. “Alys!” he said peremptorily.

  Alys rose up from the table and stood behind his chair, leaning forward.

  “Father Stephen is engaged in the arrangements for Catherine’s funeral and questioning the old woman, so you shall be my clerk for the trials. Come to my room within an hour and we can prepare the papers. The trials start here at two.”

  “I shall not know what to write,” Alys said unhelpfully. “Could not David serve you better? Or even my Lord Hugo?”

  “I’ll tell you what to write,” Lord Hugh said firmly. “It is all done by rote. We have a book to enter the charge and the sentence. Any fool could do it. Come to my room before two and you shall see.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Alys said unenthusiastically.

  “You can leave now,” he said. He shot a quick glance at her pale face. “Not sick are you?” he asked. “The baby is well? Catherine’s death did not shock you, damage the child?”

  “No,” Alys said coldly. She thought of claiming illness and avoiding the trials but she knew she could not again wait
in her room knowing nothing. Mary’s account of Mother Hildebrande’s trial for witchcraft had been so sparse as to be worse than hearing nothing. Alys thought she would sit at the women’s table at the rear of the dais with her head down, writing what Lord Hugh commanded, and then at least she would hear all that was said.

  “I am well enough to be there,” Alys said. “It is my wish to serve you.”

  Lord Hugh nodded, noting the whiteness of Alys’s face, the strain which showed in dark shadows around her eyes and the hard set of her mouth. “Rest afterward,” he said gruffly. “You look dreadful.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” Alys said steadily. “I will.”

  The great hall was packed with people. They had been waiting outside the castle gates from noon while the lords finished their dinner and sat over their wine. The trestle-tables had been dragged back against the wall as soon as dinner was finished, the fire which had burned since Alys had first come to the castle was doused and the ashes swept away so that people could sit side by side in the whole body of the room. The benches and stools were arranged in concentric rings around the high table and crowded with people sitting too close. Behind them, and pressing continually forward, was a mob of people—some of them servants in the castle, many of them from Castleton. At the rear of the hall were more benches and people standing on them in unsteady lines, leaning forward to overlook the others.

  Alys sat with the women, behind the high table at the rear of the dais, shrinking back against the wall. The fine weather of yesterday and the morning had gone, the sun turned gray, shrouded in mists. The hall was dark though it was only two in the afternoon. Alys leaned back into the shadows. She had the book which recorded Lord Hugh’s quarterly sessions of justice, and two pens and a pot of ink spread on the table before her. The other women sat facing the high table leaving Alys room to write.

  The door behind the tapestry opened and Lord Hugh’s trumpeter, stationed high in the minstrel gallery over the hall at the far end, played a flat blast on the horn. Everyone in the hall rose to their feet and a bench overturned and crashed backward onto someone’s toes, making him cry out and swear. Lord Hugh walked into the hall, wearing his best gown with the fur-lined collar, and took his seat at the high table. Hugo followed him, and sat on his right, in his usual dinnertime seat.

  “Bring in the accused,” Lord Hugh said quietly.

  The man was already waiting. He stepped forward: “John Timms, my lord,” he said respectfully.

  Lord Hugh looked around. “Alys!” he said irritably. “I can’t see what you are doing back there in the shadows. Bring your book up here so I can see the entries.”

  Alys hesitated. “I prefer…” she started.

  “Come on,” Lord Hugh said abruptly. “We don’t have all day. The sooner this is done the sooner we can have this rabble out of the castle and back to their work.”

  Alys picked up her book and went to Catherine’s seat on the left hand of the old lord. Eliza followed her with the ink-pot and pens. Alys seated herself and bent her head low over the page. In her dark gown and the large black gable hood she thought that she might pass unnoticed, melting into the background as a lowly, unimportant clerk.

  “Write ‘John Timms,’” Lord Hugh said, pointing one finger to a column.

  Alys obediently wrote. There was a long column of names, then the occupation and age, then the charge, then the verdict, and then the sentence. Most of the verdicts read guilty. Lord Hugh was not a man to offer anyone the benefit of the doubt.

  “Failure to practice archery,” Lord Hugh read from a crumpled piece of paper in a pile before him.

  John Timms nodded. “Guilty,” he said. “I am sorry. The business was doing badly and I had no time and my son and the apprentices had no time either.”

  Lord Hugh glared at him. “And if I have no time to keep a pack of soldiers and the Scots come down on us, or the French make war on us, or the damned Spanish choose to call on us—what then?” he demanded. “Fine three shillings. And don’t neglect it again.”

  Alys scribbled quickly.

  The next case was a stolen pig, as the old lord had predicted. The accused, Elizabeth Shore, alleged that the pig had strayed into her yard and eaten the hens’ feed and had thus been fed by her for free all the summer. Her accuser claimed she had tempted it away. Lord Hugh gave them some moments to squabble before slapping his hand on the table and ordering them to jointly feed the pig up, kill it, and share it: three-quarters of the pig to the owner and one leg and some lights to the accused.

  Next was a man accused of failing to maintain roads, then a man accused of theft, a woman accused of slander, a merchant accused of shoddy goods, a man charged with assault. Alys wrote the names and the charges and the people came and went, dispatched with speed and sometimes justice by Lord Hugh.

  “Is that it?” he asked, when there was a lull in the proceedings.

  An officer stepped up to the table. “That is all the common cases, my lord,” he said. “I have not heard if Father Stephen wished to charge the old woman from Bowes Moor.”

  Alys looked up from her page.

  “Send to him and ask him,” Lord Hugh said irritably. “If he is unsure, the old woman can be released. I don’t want her persecuted over some bookish detail.”

  Alys bent her head down to the page again. The paper seemed very white, the letters on the page very black and spiky. She swallowed on her hope and pressed her lips together so that they would not move in a silent prayer to whatever gods might listen.

  Hildebrande might be set free. If she were turned out of the castle into Castleton it would be easy to send her money and clothes and set her on her way. Southward perhaps, or even east to the coast and to France. She would have learned now what danger she was running with her plans to work and pray in the rules of the order. She would have been frightened, Alys told herself, and perhaps treated a little roughly. That would have warned her that the world had changed, that there was now no room for piety and devotion to the old religion. Alys pulled at the feather of the quill. Hildebrande would have learned that the old ways were truly gone. She might now be prepared to live out her days quietly, in a little farm somewhere. Alys might find her some people who would house her and treat her kindly. She might be content to be an old lady sitting at the back door in the sunshine. Now she might have learned the wisdom to take the easy way.

  Alys raised her head, she could hear the guards shouting outside the double doors of the great hall. Father Stephen came in, walking slowly, his face grave, a ledger tucked under his arm.

  Alys felt her heart speed. She scanned Stephen’s face. Surely he was slow and thoughtful because he had to report that there was no case to answer. He had failed to incriminate Mother Hildebrande. Her learning and her old skillful wit had been too much for him. Perhaps she had even shaken his reforming zeal. Alys hid a little smile.

  “Please call the old woman to account for herself,” Stephen said. He slid the ledger across the table toward Alys and motioned her to open it. “There is the charge.”

  Dumbly Alys opened the book where a dark ribbon marked the place. The old lord leaned forward to see. Father Stephen went around to the back of the dais, mounted the steps, and took a stool beside Alys at the foot of the table.

  Alys looked at the bishop’s court records in the heavy black ledger. There was a column for the date, and for the name, and for the occupation. There was a space for the charge. There was a space for the verdict. There was a space for the punishment. Alys looked along the page. There were rows after rows of names arraigned for all sorts of crimes, from adultery to heresy. Wherever it said “Heresy,” along the line it said “Guilty,” and then further on it said “Burned.”

  “Burned,” Alys whispered incredulously.

  “Do you see how to write it?” Stephen whispered encouragingly. “And this other paper, the roll, is a record of what is said here this afternoon. I will nod to you when you need to make a note of something. You can write i
n English, we can copy it fair into Latin later.”

  “Make way for the old woman of Bowes Moor,” Lord Hugh said impatiently. He waved at the people in the center of the hall. “Let her through, for God’s sake,” he said irritably. “We don’t have all day to spend on this.”

  Alys leaned toward Lord Hugh. “I don’t want to do this,” she said urgently. “I must ask to be excused.”

  He glanced down at her white face. “Not now, not now,” he said. “Let’s get this over and done with. It’s a messy business. I like it not.”

  “Please,” Alys hissed.

  Lord Hugh shook his head, he was not listening. “Do your work, Alys,” he said roughly. “This is the last case. I am weary myself.”

  Alys bowed her head over the ledger, writing the date with exquisite care. She was aware of the commotion in the hall, of the sound of the soldiers coming in slowly, out of step, not marching as they usually did, but delayed by a limping pace.

  “Give her a stool,” Lord Hugh said impatiently. “Give her a seat, the old woman can’t stand. And give her some wine.”

  Alys kept her head down. She had an insane thought that if she never looked up, if she never raised her eyes, then she would never see Mother Hildebrande sitting on a stool in the center of the great hall surrounded by staring people. If she kept her head down and never looked, then it would not be Mother Hildebrande. It would be someone else entirely. On a different charge. A different charge entirely. Another person.

  “Your name?” Stephen rose to his feet. Alys did not look up.

  “Hildebrande of the Priory of Egglestone.” The voice was different, it rasped as if the speaker’s throat was scraped. It was deeper, hoarser. And the speech was different too. This old woman could not speak clearly, could not form her words, lisped on her “s” and gargled the other words in her throat. Alys copied “Hildebrande” in the space in the book for the name of the accused; and told herself that since it was not Mother Hildebrande’s clear voice, not Mother Hildebrande’s pure speech—it could not be her.