The Apostate's Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  Cecely bowed her head lower to show she heard and was suitably sorry for it.

  “From now through Easter,” Domina Elisabeth said, “our duty of prayer is heavier than ordinary. These are high holy days. You will not be allowed to distract us from them. You will be more fully seen to after Easter, the more so because no word can come from our abbot until then, surely. In the meanwhile, you are the least among us. Even Sister Helen, young to the cloister though she is, is above you in all things. You will remember this and, remembering it, you will behave with deep humility at every moment of every day, thanking God for the mercy of your return. For your better governance, you will each day have a nun to oversee and direct you. From now until Vespers tomorrow, it will still be Dame Juliana. You will obey her, and the others after her, while you’re in their charge. You will be given a nun’s gown to wear, but in open token of your shame you will go without wimple and veil.”

  Cecely almost raised her head in protest at that. Would they force the unseemliness of going bare-headed on her? Surely there were limits even to shame.

  But Domina Elisabeth went on. “You will be allowed your coif but only your coif, and you are to mind it covers your hair well. The cutting off of your hair we will leave for now. The abbot may want a public shearing as part of your penance.”

  At least she was spared it for now, Cecely thought and, despite herself, shuddered with a silent sigh of relief that she hoped Domina Elisabeth took merely for outward sign of inward grief.

  Whether the prioress did or not, her voice stayed flat as she continued, “You will have your place in the choir as you had it at Vespers today. You will sleep in the dorter. You will dine in the refectory, standing as you did tonight apart from your sisters. You will keep silence at all times unless there is absolute need to speak. All of this is for our sake as much as yours, that you trouble us as little as may be through these high holy days. When they are over, we will take other counsel concerning you. Do you understand?”

  Was she supposed to be stupid? The woman had made it plain enough. Lips tightly together and head still low, Cecely nodded.

  “If you have any question, you have our permission to ask it now,” Domina Elisabeth said.

  “My son?” Cecely said.

  “He is being cared for here in the cloister. You will be allowed time with him once a day. For his well-being, not yours.”

  “Will I be able to speak to him?”

  “You will. Briefly. Again, for his sake, not yours, lest he grieve more than need be.”

  “Thank you,” Cecely whispered, trying to sound sufficiently grateful for that “mercy.”

  “Now Dame Juliana will see you to your place in the dorter. You will change into the gown waiting for you there, and she will bring away your other clothing. You are to stay there, praying on your knees until your sisters come to bed. Then you may also lie down to your rest. Go now.”

  Cecely stood up and curtsied to her, letting herself waver on her tired legs.

  Unsoftened by that, Domina Elisabeth ordered, “And to your sisters.”

  Teeth set, Cecely did. Despite they were all looking at her, not one head bowed even slightly back at her. That was to show to her how undeserving she was of even their smallest courtesy, but she did not care. It was what she had expected. What they did not know was that she did not in the least care what any of them thought or did or did not do. She had had what she had had, while they had nothing except this place and this death-in-life. Let them have their bitter disapproval. It was probably the closest thing to inward warmth they still had in them. She had been dreading the narrow, thin-mattressed bed that would be hers in the cold dorter, but even the cold dorter would be better than their eyes upon her, and she willingly followed Dame Juliana out of the room into the darkened cloister walk.

  She had had and dared in her life what every one of them was afraid to have or do. Whatever their scorn, whatever Domina Elisabeth chose to give her by way of punishment, she would endure it until this was done.

  If I don’t first run out of here screaming, she thought.

  Not that these women meant to give her any chance at running.

  In the darkness, with Dame Juliana’s back to her and no one else to see her, Cecely gave way to a small, taut smile at that thought, because what she was given and what she chose to take could be two very different things.

  Chapter 6

  There was silence in the warming room after Dame Juliana and Sister Cecely left. Domina Elisabeth sat down, head bowed. The rest went on sitting, some with prayer-bowed heads, others looking for something to say.

  It was Dame Amicia who found words first, turning to Dame Johane to ask, “There then. What do you think of it? Of seeing your cousin again and all?”

  In the white circle of her wimple, Dame Johane’s face turned a deep red that was probably distress rather than anger as she answered miserably, “I don’t know. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. I didn’t want to see her again. Then to see her this way. See her…” She groped for the words she wanted.

  “Penitent?” Dame Perpetua said, not as if that was the word she wanted to use.

  “Yes?” Dame Johane agreed uncertainly. She looked to Domina Elisabeth. “Is she penitent? Or…or…” Dame Johane made a helpless gesture, as if to lay hold on the words she wanted.

  Domina Elisabeth stood up. “We can only pray she’s truly penitent. We’ll pray for her, keep watch over her lest she waver, and await Abbot Gilberd’s answer. Now I suggest you use what time remains before Compline for other than Sister Cecely.”

  She made plain that she was done with the matter by leaving, letting in yet another draught of chill evening air as she went out. Almost as one, her nuns left their stools to cluster to the fire’s warmth, only Sister Thomasine remaining where she was, probably drawn too far into whatever prayer-filled place she lived to take heed of whether she was cold or not, Frevisse supposed. Dame Juliana hurried in, bringing another draught, slammed the door shut on it, and hurried to join the others beside the hearth. Frevisse moved back to make place for her, shifting to stand beside Dame Claire and taking the chance to ask how Mistress Petham did. Dame Claire paused before saying, “I’m not certain. I somewhat think that, rather than ill, she’s simply worn out in body and mind. That what she needs more than medicine is rest.”

  “Has her life been that hard?” Frevisse asked, not quite keeping a slight mockery out of the question. A well-off merchant’s wife did not have to deal as rawly with life and its rigors as many women did, and she surely had servants to come between her and the heaviest work.

  But Dame Claire said, “I gather two of her daughters had babies this past year and were both unwell for a time afterward, so she was tending to them as well as seeing the babies were well-cared for. And a son and his family have come back from Gascony.”

  “Oh,” Frevisse said, understanding. The year before last, the French had finished retaking Normandy from English hands. Then they had turned and retaken Gascony with almost the same ease, sending a new flood of fleeing English into England with everything lost behind them.

  “They’ve been living with her and her husband while they settle what they’ll do here,” Dame Claire was going on. “The son and his wife and their three children all suddenly on her hands at once, while she had two ill daughters to worry over, too.”

  Frevisse had no trouble seeing how, yes, a woman could be worn thin in body and mind by all of that coming at once.

  “Besides that,” Dame Claire went on, “we tire more easily as the years go by, and she’s no longer so young a woman.”

  Since Frevisse thought Mistress Petham was much about her own age, she slipped past any comment on that and said, “Is she in need of bleeding, do you think?”

  “I think rest and the end of Lent’s fasting will do her the most good at present. She could have dispensation from the fasting but she’s refused. As soon as there’s other meat than fish to be had, I’ll see to her having stro
ng broths.”

  “There will be the ham Father Henry’s ladies brought.”

  “That will be a start,” Dame Claire said. “Bless Father Henry’s ladies.”

  Yet again the door opened, this time to let in Alson carrying a tray with wooden cups and a towel-covered pottery pitcher. While Sister Helen hurried to close the door behind her, she said cheerily, coming to set the tray on one of the stools, “Spiced hot cider, my ladies. Domina Elisabeth said you’re to have it.”

  With pleased exclaims, they gathered around her as she took the cloth off the pitcher, letting out a plume of cinnamon-scented steam that was answered with sighs of delight all around. Lent’s long fasting was wearing badly on everyone. With meat, eggs, milk, and anything made from milk forbidden in the weeks between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, the one full meal allowed most days came mostly down to bread, vegetable pottages, and dried or salted fish cooked various ways. That fasting was part piety, part necessity; through the latter weeks of winter into spring, food was too often scarce for most folk. Lent helped stretch what there was until the time when cows and sheep came into milk and chickens began their laying again—making a virtue of necessity, as Frevisse’s uncle had been wont to say dryly.

  With a cup now clasped warmly between her hands, Frevisse sipped at the cider and smiled at the thought of her well-loved uncle, dead these seventeen years now. She paused on that thought. Could it be that long? It hardly seemed so, he was sometimes so immediate to her. Hard as it was sometimes to believe that it was forty years since her father’s death, thirty-eight since her mother’s.

  That was among Lent’s purposes—to bring the mind to pause from its usual forward course into remembrance, and by way of deprivation make awareness of what blessings there were in life and thereby grow the gratitude for them that was too often otherwise lost under life’s daily busyness. Then at the weary end of Lent came Holy Week and finally Easter with its bounty of hope, with souls meant to be as refreshed by their Lenten journey as bodies were refreshed by the end of Lent’s fasting, and the fields and pastures with spring’s new life.

  Meanwhile, mercifully, Sundays in Lent were not fast days, but while through the rest of a week each midday’s dinner might be sufficient to quiet stomachs for a while, suppers were never enough, and when time came in the darkest hour of the night to leave bed and go to the church for Matins, Frevisse too often found her hunger threatening to come between her and her prayers. She mostly tried to offer up her hunger as her sacrifice in humble return for Christ’s sacrifice of himself and sometimes she succeeded, but all too often it was a close-run thing and sometimes she failed completely, her body’s need too much for any intent she tried to have. They were all suffering that way, she knew, and Domina Elisabeth, mindful that they were going to cold beds, often allowed a final warm drink before Compline, the day’s last Office. Tonight especially the warm, spiced cider was a needed mercy because at Matins, Tenebrae began, the shadowed last days of Holy Week, when the dark passions of sacrifice and death were sorrowed through all over again before the joys of Easter morning. Through these coming three days the Offices were longer, their prayers and psalms more densely woven, asking much of fast-wearied bodies and minds. Mindful that the hours given to sleep before Matins were always too few, the nuns did not linger over their cider, partly because it would go cold if they did, partly to be done with it before time for Compline, when everything but prayers had to cease for the day.

  Yet Tenebrae was one of her favorite times of the year, Frevisse thought a few hours later in the church, as she shifted from her knees to slide backward into her choir seat and resisted the urge to hold her cold-stiffened fingers out to the warmth of the candle burning in its holder between her place and Dame Amicia’s. She tried thinking downward at her stomach, hoping to soothe it to quiet while she joined her voice to the others in, “Nam zelus domus tuae comedit me, et opprobria exprobrantium tibi ceciderunt super me.”—For zeal for your house consumes me, and the taunts of reproach at you fall on me.

  It was a bracing beginning and much needed this middle of the night. Matins could sometimes be the hardest Office, even at the best of times, with the nuns dragged from sleep and their beds for it, but it had an especial beauty with its weave of words and candlelight in a world otherwise silent and in darkness. Beyond their island of light and prayers there were only the night and its silences. No other duties hovered interrupted and waiting beyond the choirstalls. At this hour there was only prayer.

  And a sneeze from Dame Perpetua at the end of the antiphon.

  And a long, straining yawn from Dame Amicia.

  And Dame Margrett jerking her head up from a deep nod toward sleep at the beginning of the first psalm.

  And a shuffle of her own feet as Frevisse found she was thinking more of her cold toes than anything she should have been and brought herself sharply back to, “Laudabo nomen Dei cum cantico”—I will praise the name of God with song.

  Perfection, alas, was never of this world.

  But the first psalm ended and the wonder began.

  Because this was Tenebrae, the days of Shadow and Darkness, a tall triangular stand with fifteen burning candles stood in front of the black-covered altar, between it and the nuns, throwing out a halo of warm light across the altar and the choir stalls. Now, at the first psalm’s end, Father Henry, who had been kneeling on the altar steps since before the nuns came into the church, rose to his feet. He had been so deeply still that Frevisse had ceased to heed his unusual presence at the Office, until now, surely stiff with his long stillness, he turned to the fifteen Tenebrae candles and with great care put one of them out.

  The darkness beyond the altar, under the roof, behind the choir stalls crept a little closer, and the shiver down Frevisse’s spine was not from cold this time.

  Father Henry returned to his knees, facing the altar again, and the Office went on, until at the end of the next psalm, he rose and put out another candle and the darkness crept nearer.

  And on it went through Matins and into Lauds. One by one the candles went out and the darkness closed around the altar and the nuns in their stalls; and Frevisse, whether she would or not, was aware on one side of her mind of Sister Cecely kneeling, rising, sitting along with them all but silent, forbidden by the Rule, in her disgrace, to say any Office with them until she was purged and cleansed of her fault and sins. Yesterday Sister Cecely’s presence had irritated and irked, and surely it would again, but in this while, just now, Frevisse felt only pity for her, cut off as she was from sharing aloud in the wonder.

  Now only one of the Tenebrae candles and the candles on the altar were still a-light. And in the Benedictus, his voice now joining them, Father Henry with great care put out the candles on the altar one by one until as the nuns chanted softly, “…ut illuminer eos, qui in tenebris et in umbra mortis sedent, ut dirigat pedes nostros in viam pacis.”—…to light those, who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace—he put out the last altar candle. Only the one Tenebrae candle on its stand and the ones lighting the nuns’ prayerbooks still burned and the darkness seemed very near.

  But not as near as it would be.

  Having said the antiphon that closed the Benedictus, the nuns almost as one leaned to blow out their own candles and slipped forward onto their knees, finishing Lauds while Father Henry took the last Tenebrae candle and set it with great care on the altar, to show that one Light still burned in all the Darkness. Then, while the nuns said the last prayer of Lauds in silence, each to herself, he took that last candle and hid it, still a-light, behind the altar.

  Only a faint glow in the darkness showed it still burned for a hope and promise that light would come again beyond the darkness of Christ’s dying. All else was lost in shadow.

  Returning to the front of the altar again, Father Henry made the sign of blessing over them, and still in silence and with bowed heads they rose to their feet and made their way from their stalls and the choir
, out of the church into the cloister walk and night.

  In the normal way of things, they would have returned to their beds now, but after the long effort of Matins and Lauds, there was hardly time enough before Prime to make that worth their while, and instead of toward the dorter, they hurried in a whispering of skirts and soft-shoed feet around the cold cloister walk to the kitchen where two sleepy servants had the fire built up on the cooking hearth and cups set out on the broad, scrubbed worktable. Allowed no talk among themselves, the nuns crowded around the table, each taking a cup and holding it out for one of the women to fill with warm cider, then taking it to the hearth, crowding in haste to the warmth there.

  Sister Cecely was still with them. Humbly coming last from the table, she made to stand beside Dame Johane at one end of the hearth. Dame Johane drew aside more than was needed to make place for her, as if Sister Cecely were someone too unclean to be too near, unpurged of her sin as she yet was. Frevisse averted her eyes, knowing she would not want to be looked at if she were in like case. Besides, she would rather give all her heed to the pleasure of warmth and drink while she had them, knowing the respite would be brief.

  It was, and she found it hard, when Domina Elisabeth made sign they were done here, to move away from the hearth’s warmth. Nor was she the last to give up and leave the kitchen for the cloister walk’s chill dark. Shivering as she went, she thought wryly of how strongly the body fought to prevail over the mind’s soul-longing. Whatever her mind’s intent, her body did not want the cold church and more prayer; it wanted the warm kitchen and more sleep, wanted them very badly, and there was no comfort in knowing it must be the same for everyone. Only for a saint, she supposed, would the desire for God be so great they could not only forgo but even forget the body’s desires.

  She also thought, equally wryly, that if that were the way of it, she was assuredly very far from sainthood.

  The day went its particular way. With the Offices lasting longer, there was less time for the nuns’ other duties, which were therefore done with haste and sometimes, by such of the nuns as did poorly on too-little sleep, with ill grace. Frevisse was able, through practiced effort, to avoid at least the ill grace. Her downfall came during the morning time given over, during Lent, to reading. At Lent’s beginning, each nun was given one of the nunnery’s books that she was to read at that set time each day. This year Frevisse’s turn had come around again to Dame Julian of Norwich’s Showings, and that had pleased her. She had brought the book to St. Frideswide’s herself, given to her by her uncle to be part of her dowry. She had read it some several times over the years since taking her vows, and so knew the work and valued it, but maybe knew it too well because this morning she found herself nodding over it, more asleep than awake and not helped by the fact that not only had the rain stopped but the sun was come out. Thinly, yes, and somewhat watery, but sun nonetheless and just warm enough to lull her toward sleep where she sat on the low wall between the cloister walk and the square garth where spring showed in the young green of herbs and someday-flowers. More than once her head falling forward into sleep jerked her awake, nor was hers the only head nodding over books elsewhere around the wall and she doubted she was the only one relieved when the cloister’s quiet was broken by Domina Elisabeth at the foot of the stairs to her rooms slapping the wooden halves of the clapper together, the sharp clack-clack-clack-clack-clack making more than one of the almost-dozing nuns jump.