The apostate's tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

to hear they were safely here.
    “There’s Mistress Lawsell come, too,” Ela went on. “With her daughter. She sent word ahead, remember.”
    “The one who hopes her daughter will be a nun,” Frevisse said.
    “That’s the one, aye.”
    The woman’s letter had come last week, along with a gift of pickled salmon that had made a feast of Palm Sunday’s meal. It had been perhaps too fine a food for Lent, but Domina Elisabeth had ruled it would have been ungrateful to both God and Mistress Lawsell to dishonor such a gift, the more so since Mistress Lawsell was bringing her daughter to St. Frideswide’s for Easter’s high holy days in the hope of stirring the girl’s devotion, and God knew that the priory could do with another novice. Since Dame Emma’s death at Shrovetide, they were a house of only nine now, and that was counting Sister Helen who had not yet taken her vows.
    Their need, though, did not mean they would take whoever came, and Frevisse asked, “Have you seen enough of the girl to think anything about her?”
    Ela sniffed a little. “All I can tell of her so far is she looks healthy enough, nor she wasn’t making moan over the weather and hard riding.”
    That was something, anyway, Frevisse thought. Larger, better-endowed nunneries might be able to take on the burden of nuns unfit to bear a full share of nunnery duties, but St. Frideswide’s was too small, was too constantly near the edge of poverty to be taking on off-casts whose families could find no other use for them.
    “Not that there’s much would count against her if her family offered enough to make Domina Elisabeth think it worth the while of having her,” Ela said glumly, her own thoughts clearly going somewhat the same way as Frevisse’s but not so favorably.
    Because in a small, disquieting corner of her own mind she too fully understood Ela’s doubt, Frevisse asked briskly, as if she had not heard her, “What of little Powlyn? How does he?”
    Ela brightened. “Better than when he came, that’s certain. His parents have begun to smile sometimes.”
    They were a young couple who had come five days ago from Banbury, carrying their only child who had been sick most of the winter, they said, with a harsh cough that was not easing though spring was come. Unable to afford a long pilgrimage, even so far as St. Frideswide’s great shrine and church in Oxford, they had brought their child and their prayers to here, into Dame Claire’s and Dame Johane’s care. To the good, it now seemed.
    “Dame Claire has told them they must stay through Easter,” Ela said, and added with a look at Frevisse as if it were her fault, “That means we’ve seven people to see to and feed tonight and for at least these four days to come. Let be what others may come that the weather has held up. Or are just slow.” Years of seeing to guests had not given Ela a high opinion of mankind.
    All mischievous piety, knowing what Ela would answer, Frevisse said, “We’ll simply have to pray that God will provide. Remember the loaves and fishes.”
    “Which is more than we’ll have left by Monday if God doesn’t provide,” Ela returned.
    It was an old half-jest between them, but only half a jest, since it cut too near a constant truth. The odd thing—or not so odd a thing—was that God always did provide, if not bountifully, at least enough that as yet no guests had ever been turned away unfed or the nuns starved.
    Had gone somewhat hungry sometimes, but never starved.
    Someone began to ring the bell in the cloister’s garth, calling to Vespers, a summoning that enjoined immediate silence as well as immediate obedience. Willing to both, Frevisse nodded her farewell to Ela and left the guesthall. The rain had stopped but the clouds still lowered. Dark would come early this evening, she thought as she crossed the cobbled yard, making her way between puddles. Coming almost dry-footed to the cloister door, she let herself in, shut the door firmly between her