The apostate's tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

blank nothing in nun’s clothing.
    So she had watched for her chance and it had come on his second morning there, when she had come on him sitting idly in the sunlight on the guesthall steps, watching the doves strut and flutter around the well across the yard. It had been bold of her to speak to him when no one else was there, but she had found he was as willing to talk as she was. More than that, they had talked again later in the day, when she made another reason to be out of the cloister. That had been when they planned for a true time alone together, and when the hour came for recreation, between supper and Compline, she had told the other nuns she would spend the time in the church. She had not said “in prayer” but of course that had been what they thought, making her laugh to herself while she refused Johane’s offer to come with her. They were cousins, but she had not been about to trust Johane with her secret. It was only a little secret. She had meant to keep it all to herself for the little while she would have it.
    That God was not against her having this little pleasure was assured when even dreary Sister Thomasine had gone to the garden with the others. With the church to themselves, she and Guy had talked in a shadowed corner, worried every moment that someone would come in, would see them, and truly she had meant only to talk. She would give oath even today that that was all she had meant to do. But somehow talk had become not enough. She had wanted to touch Guy and she had. Had laid her hand on his arm. Very lightly. That was all. Then he had touched her. Had just laid his warm fingers against her cheek. That was all. But it was the first time a man had touched her since she had taken her nun-vows, and fire like she had never known had blazed up hot and fierce in her, and she had wanted more than his touch on her cheek and had found the same blaze of desire was in him, too, and when he rode away from St. Frideswide’s the next morning, she had gone with him.
    Not openly, of course, but quietly, between Tierce and Sext. Had gone by the back path along the garden and into the orchard instead of to the kitchen to cut vegetables for the nuns’ midday dinner, and in the orchard she had bundled her skirts to her knees and gone over the earthen bank around the orchard. After that had been the most perilous part, because anyone seeing her would have known she should not be where she was. But Guy had been waiting, and no one saw them. He had put his cloak around her to hide her nun’s habit and lifted her up behind his saddle and ridden away with her.
    They had ridden a long way that day, avoiding anywhere they might be seen and remembered if there was hunt for her afterward. Only that night, blessed miles away from cloister walls, on the grass in the shelter of a hedge, had they finally, fully made love for the first time, and the joy of giving way to her desire and his had been everything and more than she had ever dreamed of. It was as if all the dross of her nunnery days fell away from her like a dirty gown that she had never meant to put on again.
    Yet here she was, and despite she had thought she was braced and ready for the sudden shrinking of the world into this little place where everything was walls, she was finding more and more by every moment that she was not ready after all. Was not ready at all.

Chapter 4
     
    T he rule of silence that had held when Frevisse first came to St. Frideswide’s had slipped from use over the years. The quiet she had so valued was now only sometimes part of nunnery life, but should have been most especially part of this week, when Lent’s solemnity and silence should be deepening toward the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the better to be ready for Easter Sunday’s joy.
    Instead, in these few hours that Sister Cecely had been here, the cloister was a-seethe with talk among the nuns and the servants, too, and if Frevisse had been so simple as to think the