The Wise Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

no one would have taken the risk of reporting her, which would bring Lord Hugh down on the village—or even worse—his son, the mad young lord. It was not a time for speculation and gossip. There were a dozen vagrants still hanging around the ruins of the abbey—refugees from the nuns’ charity with nowhere else to go. The villagers of Bowes locked their doors, resisted any attempt by anyone to claim rights of residence, and chose not to talk about the abbey, or the nuns, or the night of the fire, or the minor thefts and pillaging of the ruined abbey which went on in the later days.
    It was said that the firing of the abbey had been a mistake. The soldiers led by the young Lord Hugo were homeward bound from a raid on the moss-troopers, and they stopped at the abbey only to frighten the nuns into doing the king’s will and surrender their treasure and their bad popish ways. It had all begun with some wild sport, a bonfire of broken wood and some tar. Once the flames had caught there was nothing that Hugo could do, and besides the nuns had all died in the first minutes. The young lord had been drunk anyway, and could remember little. He confessed and did penance with his own priest—Father Stephen, one of the new faith who saw little sin in stamping out a nest of treasonous papists—and the villagers gleaned over the half-burned building and then started carting the stones away. Within a few weeks of her return to Morach’s hovel, Alys could walk where she wished unnoticed.
    Mostly she went up on the moor. Every day, after digging and weeding in the dusty scrape of the vegetable patch, she went down to the river to wash her hands and splash water over her face. In the first few days she had stripped and waded into the water with her teeth chattering, to wash herself clean of the smell of sweat and smoke and midden. It was no use. The earth under her fingernails and the grime in the creases of her skin would not come clean in the cold brackish water, and anyway, wading back to the frosty bank with shivery gooseflesh skin Alys had only dirty clothes to wear. She scraped the body lice off the seams of her robe but within a day they were back; she felt them crawling in the growing stubble of her hair. Her fair skin was soon scarred with insect bites, some red and bloody and fresh, some scaly and old. After a few weeks Alys despaired of keeping herself clean. There was no soap or oil, there was no hot water. She could wash herself in the peaty brown river water but she knew that as it became colder it would be unbearable. In the first weeks Alys wept with self-disgust at the fleas and lice on her body. She still splashed water in her face but she no longer hoped to keep clean.
    She rubbed her face dry on the thick wool of her dirty robe and walked upstream along the riverbank till she came to the bridge where the river ran beneath a natural causeway of limestone slabs—wide enough to drive a wagon across, strong enough to carry oxen. She paused there and looked down into the brown peaty water. It flowed so slowly there seemed to be no movement at all, as if the river had died, had given up its life into stagnant, dark ponds.
    Alys knew better. When she and Tom had been little children they had explored one of the caves which riddled the riverbank. Squirming like fox cubs they had gone downward and downward until the passage had narrowed and they had stuck—but below them, they had heard the loud echoing thunder of flowing water, and they knew they were near the real river, the secret river which flowed all day and all night in eternal darkness, hidden deep beneath the false riverbed of dry stones above.
    Tom had been scared at the echoing, rushing noise so far below them. “What if it rose?” he asked her. “It would come out here!”
    “It does come out here,” Alys had replied. The seasons of her young life had been marked by the ebb and flow of the river, a dull drain in summer, a rushing torrent during the autumn