The Wise Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

but with a fair, coltish beauty. Now he was sturdy, thickset. As he came closer she saw that his face was tanned red from sun and wind, marred with red spiders of broken veins. His eyes, still that piercing blue, were fixed on her.
    “Alys,” he said. “I guessed Morach’s new girl was you. I came at once to see you.”
    “Your farm’s the other way,” she said dryly.
    He flushed a still deeper red. “I had to take a lamb over to Trowheads,” he said. “This is my way back.”
    Alys’s dark eyes scanned his face. “You never could lie to me, Tom.”
    He hung his head and shuffled his thick boots in the dust. “It’s Liza,” he said. “She watches me.”
    “Liza?” Alys asked, surprised. “Liza who?”
    Tom dropped to sit on the heather beside her, his face turned away, looking back over the way he had come. “Liza’s my wife,” he said simply. “They married me off after you took your vows.”
    Alys flinched as if someone had pinched her. “I didn’t know,” she said. “No one told me.”
    Tom shrugged. “I would have sent word but…” he trailed off and let the silence hang. “What was the use?” he asked.
    Alys looked away, gripping the beads in her pocket so tight that they hurt her fingers. “I never thought of you married,” she said. “I suppose I should have known that you would. I told you to marry but I never really thought you would.”
    Tom shrugged. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You’re taller, I reckon, and plumper. But your eyes are the same. Did they cut your hair?”
    Alys nodded, pulling the shawl over her shaven head a little tighter.
    “Your lovely golden hair!” Tom said, as if he were bidding it farewell.
    A silence fell. Alys stared at him. “You were married as soon as I professed?” she asked.
    Tom nodded.
    “Are your mother and father still alive?”
    He nodded again.
    Alys’s face softened, seeking sympathy from Tom, hoping that he would help her. “They did a cruel thing to me that day,” she said tentatively. “I was too young to be sent among strangers.”
    Tom’s face was bitter. “They did what they thought was for the best,” he said. “They were determined I should marry a girl with a dowry. There was never any chance for you and me. And they thought they had treated you fairly. There was no way for them to foretell that the abbey would be burned and you would be homeless and husbandless at the end.”
    “And in peril,” Alys said. “If the soldiers come back they might take me. You won’t tell anyone that I was at the abbey, will you?”
    The look he shot at her was answer enough. “I’d
die
rather than see you hurt,” he said with a suppressed anger. “You know that! You’ve always known it! There never was anyone else for me and there never will be.”
    Alys turned her face away. “I may not listen to that,” she said.
    He sighed, accepting the reproof. “I’ll keep your secret safe,” he said. “In the village they think only that Morach has a new apprentice. She has said before that she was seeking a girl to do the heavy work. No one has thought of you. You’ve been forgotten. The word is that all the nuns are dead.”
    “Why did you come this way then?” Alys demanded.
    He shrugged his shoulders, his coarse skin blushing brick-red. “I thought I’d know,” he said gruffly. “If you had died I would have known it.” He thumped his chest. “In here,” he said. “Where I carry my pain for you. If you had died it would have gone…or changed. I would have known if you were dead.”
    Alys nodded, accepting Tom’s devotion. “And what of your marriage?” she asked. “Are you comfortable? Do you have children?”
    “A boy and a girl living,” he said indifferently. “And one dead.” He paused. There were four years of longing in his voice. “The girl looks a little like you sometimes,” he said.
    Alys turned her clear, heart-shaped face toward him. “I have been waiting to see you,” she said. Tom