Fortune Like the Moon Read Online Free PDF

had brought with her from her former life, and, focusing her mind, began to go logically through the whole disturbing question of the life and death of the late Gunnora of Winnowlands.
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    The foundation at Hawkenlye was new, in terms of the construction of a major abbey, so new that it was still a blessed relief to be rid of the carpenters, stonemasons, and the endless crowd of workmen who, so it had seemed, were set on becoming as permanent a feature as the nuns and the monks. Building had begun in 1153, under the direct order of the new Queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and it had been because of a genuine miracle which had happened, right there on the very spot.
    For time out of mind, there had been nothing more to Hawkenlye than a huddle of huts among the thinner tree growth at the edge of the great Wealden Forest. The forest was a lonely place, and many believed it to be haunted; there were tales of strange noises from the ancient iron workings, where men had laboured before history began, and more than one traveller lost down some long-forgotten track spoke of a phantom group of Roman soldiers who appeared to march off right through the trunks of a copse of birch trees …
    Since the Romans had abandoned the old iron workings, little use had been made of the forest other than for the fattening of swine, on the abundant acorns and beech mast which littered the forest floor in autumn. The only time of year that the area could be called busy was the seven-week period between the autumn equinox and the feast of St Martin, when the woodlands were uncharacteristically crowded with people fattening their livestock before slaughtering them for winter provisions.
    Into this strange and deserted place, on a hot day early one summer, came a band of French merchants, who had been on their way from Hastings to London when they were overcome by a mysterious sickness. They had been ill during the crossing from France, but, believing it to be nothing more than mal de mer, had proceeded towards London. By the time the group reached the ridge about the Medway Vale, however, all five were incapable of going any further. Delirious with fever, they were suffering excruciating pains in the limbs, and two of them had developed swellings in the groin. Their companions, terrified of contagion, found them what shelter there was in the primitive settlement at Hawkenlye, then abandoned them.
    The Frenchmen were on the point of giving themselves up into the Almighty’s hands when, to their amazement, they began to recover. They had been drinking from a little spring in a shallow valley near to where they had been left, a spring whose water was reddish, slightly brackish. And the least sick of the merchants, who had undertaken the arduous task of bringing water back to his companions, had a vision. Still burning with fever, head throbbing and sight blurred, he thought he saw a woman standing over him, on the bank out of which the spring flowed. She was dressed in blue, and in her long white hands she carried lilies. She smiled at the merchant, and he seemed to hear her praise him for his devoted care of his friends; giving them the spring water, she said, was the best cure.
    The merchants, naturally, told their story far and wide. The more entrepreneurial of those who heard it set out for Hawkenlye, and soon a brisk trade sprang up in phials of the miracle water. The Church, alarmed both at the lack of reverence being shown in the face of a true miracle, and at the loss of potential revenue to themselves, stepped in and built a shrine over the spring, with a small dwelling nearby to accommodate the monks who were to tend it.
    Rumour of the wonderful appearance of the Virgin Mary, in an obscure glade in the faraway Wealden Forest, reached the great Abbey of Fontevraud, on the Loire close to Queen Eleanor’s home town of Poitiers. The Queen’s strong links with Fontevraud stimulated her ambition to create similar communities