The Apostate's Tale

Chapter 3

The boy made to follow his mother as she moved to leave, but she said quickly, “Stay warm there beside the fire, dear-heart. If Domina Elisabeth allows?”

With a short jerk of her head, Domina Elisabeth allowed, and Frevisse turned away to lead the way down the stairs. Behind her Sister Cecely said tenderly, “All will be well, dear-heart. You’ll see,” then followed her. At the stairfoot, Malde, one of the cloister servantwomen, was just coming with a cloth-covered tray that had to be the bread-in-warm-milk that Dame Claire had ordered, and she paused, looking uncertain what to do, meeting them there.

“Take it to my lady’s parlor. It’s for the boy,” Frevisse said. Malde slightly curtsied and stood aside for them to pass. Frevisse thought she heard a small sigh of longing from Sister Cecely behind her, passing by the food, but ignored it. Sister Cecely would be going without more than warm milk in the days to come. Day-old bread and cold well-water were the best she would likely have for most of the time, with just enough of other food sometimes to keep her in health. Frevisse could only guess how long a penance a bishop would give to an apostate nun after nine years of sinning in the world, but penitential fasting would be part of it. Still, for a woman to have sworn herself to Christ for life and then to have abandoned him for an earthly passion, for bodily lust…What penance could ever be enough?

But then outward penance in itself was never going to be enough, Frevisse thought as she led Sister Cecely around the cloister walk to the church. The true cleansing of a soul had to come from within-from the grieving, broken heart and the last crumbling of the mind’s pride into a full and final surrender of its failure. Only then could true healing come and Frevisse suspected that for Sister Cecely the way between here and there would be both hard and long, with much prayer not only by her but by all of them for her.

Frevisse silently admitted her hope that Abbot Gilberd would see fit to take Sister Cecely elsewhere, because Frevisse could see nothing but trouble coming from her being here. Abbot Gilberd had seen to his sister becoming prioress of St. Frideswide’s and, because of that, had shown the priory favor over the years. Surely at Domina Elisabeth’s asking he would take an apostate nun off their hands.

But that could only come later. For now, Sister Cecely was here, and that was very probably far harder for her than for any of them. Or if it was not, it should be, Frevisse thought tartly. How much from the heart had been Sister Cecely’s plea to Domina Elisabeth of her shame and her need for penance? To Frevisse, it had seemed planned and practiced, but as they came to the wide wooden door from the cloister walk into the church, Frevisse made herself ashamed of that thought. Sister Cecely should have been thinking on her shame and need for penance long before now, and so she could well have had those words burned into her and ready.

With a small prayer for forgiveness at her uncharity toward a penitent, Frevisse opened the door into the chill, shadowed silence of the church. There was nothing like Lent for bringing on much praying over every thought and feeling, and here was the place best to pray. Here, in the church, was the nunnery’s heart. All else in the priory existed so that the nuns might come to pray, in the way the Rule required of them each day, the Offices of psalms and prayers that wove through Benedictine life in an ever-changing, ever-returning pattern. For Frevisse those Offices were her life’s core and joy. Or usually they were. Sometimes-there was no point to pretending otherwise-the effort to drag her mind through an Office was as much dull work as scrubbing dishes in the nunnery’s kitchen could be.

In truth, there had been times when she had preferred the scrubbing of dishes, and in her young days in the nunnery she had worried when those times came on her and taken her worry to her then-prioress, Domina Edith, who had been so old when Frevisse first came to St. Frideswide’s that she hardly seemed to grow older through the years that followed. Then with seeming suddenness-but her nuns should have seen it coming long before they did-she had faded away and died, and Frevisse had felt the loss of her ever since.

But long before then there had been the day she had knelt in front of Domina Edith and told of her plight with the Offices, and Domina Edith had laid a hand on the veil of her bent head and said far more kindly than Frevisse had expected, “It comes to all of us, those times when prayer seems a useless thing and our souls a dry place in a comfortless world.”

Because it had seemed impossible it could ever be that way for Domina Edith, Frevisse had echoed doubtfully, “To all of us?”

“To all of us,” Domina Edith had assured her, kindly. “The thing to remember in the midst of that desolation is that, true as it is while it is, its opposite-the joy you’ve had in prayer-is also true. Because you are not in joy does not mean joy does not exist, only that you are not in it. But since joy is a true thing, you can find your way back to it. And you will, and will be the stronger for having gone through the darkness. But remember that you have to go through the darkness, not sit down in it and wail about being there.”

Despite all the years since then, Frevisse could still hear the gentleness of laughter there had been behind Domina Edith’s words. The laughter of someone who had faced that bitter inward battle and won and knew how good the victory is, even while knowing more battles would almost surely come.

Although perhaps, for Domina Edith, they had not. Frevisse was finding her own times of darkness were fewer as the years went by. When they did come, they were as dark as ever, but at least they did not come as often, and she knew now that on the far side of each one of them she would find she was changed to the better, more than she would have been without she had had to find her way through the darkness into light again.

She would have to pray, she supposed, that it would be the same for Sister Cecely.

No, she did not “suppose.” She knew she would have to pray it would be the same.

Still, while she held the door open for Sister Cecely to come past her into the church, she had a brief hope of seeing something of Sister Cecely’s feelings on her face as she returned at last to the place she had so wrongfully abandoned, but Sister Cecely’s head was bowed too low and, unsatisfied, Frevisse closed the door, shutting them into the church.

The priory’s church was a long, narrow, unpillared space under a bare-raftered roof. A carved wooden rood screen separated the choir-the nuns’ part of the church-from the nave where everyone else might worship, and there in the choir was the only place in the nunnery, besides her sleeping cell, that a nun might think of as particularly her own. In the two rows of high-backed seats facing each other longwise up the choir, each nun had her own place all her years in St. Frideswide’s. Only death or becoming prioress would take her from it.

Or flight out of the priory altogether.

Sister Cecely’s place had been kept empty, partly for shameful remembrance of her apostasy, partly because St. Frideswide’s had had only two novices come to it in the years since she had gone and there was no dearth of other seats for them, the priory never having grown as its founding widow had hoped it would. So Sister Cecely would still have her place. Not that she would have need of it immediately, Frevisse supposed. For the time being she would probably not be sitting in the choir but kneeling at the altar, and for more hours than simply those of the Offices.

At least she would not be often alone in her kneeling the next few days. Through these last days before Easter, the nuns set aside as many usual duties as they could, instead making a great cleaning of the nunnery in a glad readying for Christ’s resurrection. Everything that could be swept, scrubbed, polished, or laundered, was. At this end of Lent, with hunger everyone’s constant companion, the work was especially hard and therefore especially a gift to God, with the reward that as each task was ended, a nun was free to go to church and pray until she had to begin another. That made Holy Week a more-than-usual weaving of the work and prayer that St. Benedict had intended in his Rule, and presently there were two nuns kneeling at the altar, heads bowed, hands prayerfully clasped. Sister Helen was easily known by her novice’s white veil, and Frevisse did not need to see the other’s face to know she was Dame Thomasine. Even from the back and despite all the nuns, save Sister Helen, were in matching black gowns and veils, there was no mistaking Dame Thomasine’s thin-boned body nor the way she knelt, not settled back on her heels but staff-straight up from her knees, as if the longing for God and heaven pulled more strongly on her than on anyone else. Perhaps it did. From her first days in St. Frideswide’s-more than twenty years ago now, which Frevisse found startling to think on-she had always been in prayer in the church at almost every chance, not merely at Eastertide.

Frevisse stopped a few yards behind the two of them, looked at Sister Cecely who had finally raised her head, and pointed at the floor. Sister Cecely opened her mouth toward saying something, then must have understood that Frevisse was keeping silence here and so should she, because she closed her mouth and knelt where Frevisse had pointed. Frevisse watched while she settled back on her heels, grasped her hands together, and stiffly bowed her head over them. It was all the outward seeming of prayer, and all Frevisse could presently do was hope it went deeper than seeming.

They had not even let her dry her cloak, Cecely thought bitterly. They could at least have let her dry her cloak and warm herself before putting her here. Was Domina Elisabeth hoping she would die of cold and lung sickness? If that was what the woman wanted, she would have to go on wanting it, because Cecely did not intend to oblige her.

But, lord, try though she had through the years to forget this place, everything about it was just and too much the way she remembered it, and with its familiarity her old sick outrage at it all was come back on her. She had not known how terrible it would be to come into the cloister again, to pass through that doorway into that low, dark passage, knowing what was at its end-the church and cloister buildings closed in their tight square around the square cloister walk around the square cloister garth that was the only place there was to see the sky in here, except for narrow glimpses through little slits of windows high in walls in one cold, bare room or another. Yes, there were the garden and the orchard where the nuns could sometimes walk, but only with permission, and no nun ever supposed to go beyond them, so nowhere to go from them but back into the cloister. How did these women endure it year after year, their lives withering away?

How was she going to endure it?

Heaven was said to be changeless, but why would anyone want to live their lives that way, the way these women did? Oh, certainly she knew how it was supposed to be: better to live in Hell on Earth so you could live for Eternity in Heaven. But the priests insisted that repentance and the last rites washed the soul clean at the moment of death, so what was the point of all this misery while alive?

Certain Dame Frevisse had truly gone, was not spying on her from behind, Cecely unclasped her hands and, moving carefully so the nuns in front of her would not know what she was doing, made a pad of her cloak’s long hem under her knees that were already beginning to ache on the unforgiving stone floor. She had to ease them, even at risk of “disturbing” the nun and the novice so they tattled to Domina Elisabeth. She remembered how she and Johane had been good at tattling on other nuns. Until lately it had been years since she had thought of Johane. The two of them had been sent to become nuns here because their aunt had then been prioress, and while their aunt was prioress they had made the best they could of the bad business. Only when Domina Elisabeth took her place had everything become past bearing.

Then Guy had come.

Dame Perpetua had been teaching her the hosteler’s duties that summer. Tedious though the lessons had been, they had at least taken her out of the cloister every day, and that was how she met him. Guy Rowcliffe. Tall and well-featured. Carrying himself like a young prince among the general dross of travelers that sometimes claimed Benedictine hospitality for a night or two.

Because his horse had picked up a stone in its hoof and lamed itself a little, he had stayed three nights, and that had made all the difference in what had happened then. Afterward, she knew that he had caught her heart from the first moment she saw him, but at the time all she had wanted was more chance to look at him and so she had found reasons to go to the guesthall without Dame Perpetua. Then seeing him had not been enough. She had needed to talk with him. Just to talk-that was all she had meant to do. Have him look at her, see her-see her instead of 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.