The Prioress' Tale

Chapter 11

The nuns awoke to shivering cold at dawn, their breath in white clouds about them as they hurriedly slipped their outer gowns on over the underdresses they had worn to bed, arranged wimples around their faces, and pinned veils into place with stiff and uncooperative fingers by what little light there was from the lamp kept burning through the night at the head of the stairs.

“She has to give us leave to change to our winter gowns,” Sister Amicia wailed from her sleeping cell. “We’ll all freeze before Allhallows if she doesn’t!”

Frevisse wondered if Sister Amicia would ever grasp, once and for all, that when they had elected Domina Alys prioress, they had given her the right not to have to do anything she did not want to do where the priory was concerned.

Hurried along by the chill, they were all dressed, even Sister Emma, and already going down the stairs in huddled haste, when the bell began to ring to Prime. The lamp threw their shadows past them, tangling the darkness as they went down the stairs, but their feet were too used to the way to be confused. In the cloister, dawn had only just begun to come, a softening at the edges of the dark. They passed along it in a whisper of skirts and soft-soled shoes and entered the deeper shadows of the church, where the altar light beyond the choir was the only brightness as they spread out to their places in the stalls.

They rustled and coughed and settled as Dame Perpetua lighted the rushlights set along the choir stalls’ railing with the small taper she had brought from the lamp by the dorter stairs and carried shielded behind her hand from the draft of her walking until now. As the soft golden light bloomed around them Frevisse found her place in her prayer book for Prime’s familiar beginning. She hardly needed the words in front of her anymore, the complex weave of prayers and daily changing psalms through the circle of the Church’s seasons had become so much a part of her, but the feel of the book was familiar and therefore comforting.

Now all they lacked was their prioress, but they were becoming used to her being late, both at midnight’s prayers and Prime, and Frevisse huddled down over her prayer book, trying to will her body to warmth and quietness instead of shivering while they waited. She wondered how it had gone with Joice last night. And despite her resolve not to think of it until it happened, she wondered how it would go with herself this morning.

She was afraid.

She faced that. She had done what would be seen as wrong and she was very certainly going to suffer for it. Whatever good she had meant by what she had done, she would have to endure the bad that was going to come from it. And not only endure but not let anger and defiance corrode her while she did.

Firmum est cor meum, Deus, firmum est cor meum. Firm is my heart, God, firm is my heart. Cantabo… Excitabo auroram… I will sing… I will rouse the dawn…

She loved the courage of Prime’s prayers. They promised that there had been days before this one and that there would be days after it, and if there was ill, there was also good, and that though the two were inextricably conjoined in this day, in every day, in all of life, it was not the good or ill that mattered but the firm heart that could turn to God and sing.

Today was only this one day. It was not all of her life. She would endure it. Firmum est cor meum, Deus. Firmus est cor meum.

A slump and thump and complaining murmur from Sister Cecely told she had not held firm against the pull of sleep. Someone laughed softly. Sister Cecely whispered, “It’s not fair, our being here in the cold and dark when she isn’t.” Dame Juliana whispered back, “Hush,” and there was quiet again.

Beyond the east window, the darkness was easing into the gray of gathering day as, with a rush and thrust of shadows and heavy footfalls, Domina Alys appeared from the darkness and mounted to the prioress’ stall, sat down, slapped her prayer book open, squinted at the page as if her eyes were not so awake as the rest of her, and said loudly, “Laus tibi, Domine.” Praise to you, Lord.

She sounded more as if she were ordering him to take it than humbly offering it and set a brisk pace afterward, but for once she passed over nothing and slurred very little, and because it was too early, too little light, for the masons to be at work, there were no interruptions. They reached the end with its closing prayer for the souls of the faithful departed. Domina Alys slapped her prayer book shut, rose to her feet, and led the way out of the church.

It was dawn light now and they could see as they crowded shivering at her heels that a heavy rime of frost lay along the stone of the low wall between the cloister walk and the garth, and that in the garth every leaf, petal, stem, the paths, and bare earth were crusted white, with Katerin’s footprints to the bell showing black where she had come and gone. It was the last small corner of summer ended, but Dame Juliana was the only one who paused to look and mourn a little over the year’s last-dead flowers. The rest of the nuns were too eager to be out of the cold.

The day had grown to full light in the short while it took to break their fast with warmed cider and bread. Frevisse was willing to draw out time then, but Father Henry set a cold-hastened pace through Mass, and then there was nothing left between her and chapter meeting but the brief walk from church to warming room. There the others crowded close to the fire, excepting Sister Thomasine, who went, as always, aside to the farthest stool and stood there with bowed heads and hands tucked in opposite sleeves, waiting. Frevisse hesitated and then went to stand by the stool nearest her in like pose if not in like quiet of mind. Sister Thomasine brought humility to everything she did, and in the corner of her mind not taut with apprehension of what was coming, Frevisse knew that if she were able to accept whatever punishment and penance Domina Alys chose to lay on her with humility anything near to Sister Thomasine’s, then the humiliation of it would not be able to touch her.

Domina Alys entered and took her place. Reluctantly leaving the fire, so did the other women. Father Henry came, made his familiar, dogged attack on the Latin and the lesson, and left. Now there was no more time to be ready, no more waiting to be lived through, as Domina Alys asked, according to form, “Are there any faults to be confessed or revealed here today?”

Frevisse, her eyes kept to the floor until then, raised her head to reply-and found Domina Alys looking at her, waiting with open satisfaction and anticipation.

It was the sight of the satisfaction that brought Frevisse to her feet, humiliation and fear forgotten. Confession was to be made with eyes humbly lowered, and Frevisse forced hers down when she was standing, but it was through a seethe of anger-all of this was happening because of Domina Alys and she dared sit there being pleased about it-that she forced out, “I sinned against your word yesterday by speaking to the man Benet in the cloister.”

An excited stir and rustle passed among the nuns. Frevisse raised her eyes to see Domina Alys nodding in satisfaction. So that was what she had been waiting to hear, or else to accuse her of if she had held silent. That meant she did not know the rest, and defiantly, with a satisfaction of her own, Frevisse went on, “More than that, yesterday morning I went alone, without permission and in neglect of my duties, to the outer yard to speak with Master Naylor.”

Domina Alys’ face gave away that she had not known that, and with rousing anger she leaned forward in her chair to demand, “What business did you have with Master Naylor after I’d dismissed him, Dame? What did you have to say to him?”

“I thought it wrong for him to go without so much as a word of well-wishing from any of us after all the years he’s served us. I wanted to bid him farewell. I-”

Domina Alys, her face beginning to suffuse to its familiar red, thrust up out of her chair. “That was not for you to decide or do, Dame. Did you wish him well?”

“I never spoke to him. He was already gone.”

“Less a fool than you, it seems. And now you’re hoping for mercy, I suppose.”

“Not from you,” Frevisse returned, contempt answering contempt.

“That’s to the good at least,” Domina Alys snapped back, moving aside from her chair to reach behind it and bring out a white birch rod. “Because you’re not going to have it. Kneel, Dame.”

Around her, Frevisse heard the gasps and startled shifting of alarm among the other nuns, but she was suddenly in a great stillness far apart from everyone around her.

Penance by prayers, penance by fasting, penance by vigils-made rigorous or light as the prioress determined was necessary for burdening the body while the soul sought cleansing-that was what followed confession in chapter, that was what had always been the way in St. Frideswide’s. Never whipping.

Whipping was allowed by the Rule but only for the worst of offenses, or when nothing else had worked to turn someone from their sin. Even taken together, Frevisse’s offenses were not that grave, and Domina Alys had planned this when she only knew of one. It was not penance she intended. It was humiliation and the end of Frevisse ever daring to challenge her again.

Frevisse saw that in her fierce, pleased smile, and as she saw it, all the possibility of humiliation fell away from her. Whatever was done to her was going to be done not out of justice but out of Domina Alys’ hatred. A hatred Frevisse had not come even close to guessing at until now. A hatred that, in that moment, she was very near to giving her in return.

It scalded up in her, a sickening roil of black desire to hurt as she was going to be hurt, to humiliate the way she was meant to be humiliated, to savage mind and heart and body, even her own, if it meant she could do as much to Domina Alys.

Beside her, Sister Thomasine, seated unmoving until then, reached out a hand and laid it on her arm.

It was the most light of touches, hardly felt through the layers of cloth, but a sickening sense of the black ugliness she was opening her heart and mind to, a clear sight of the corrosion she was asking for her soul wrenched through Frevisse. And deliberately, cold with seeing hatred’s possibilities inside herself, colder with how near she had come to them, she turned her back on Domina Alys, knelt, and leaned forward over the stool on which she had been sitting, lowered her head until her forehead pressed against the wood, and gripped two of its legs to steady herself against what would be coming, submitting not to Domina Alys but to her own guilt in being so near so deep a sin.

When it was over and Domina Alys stepped back, not breathing hard despite the strength she had put into it, Frevisse straightened, careful of the pain across her back, rose slowly to her feet, turned, and sat down without a sound or betraying expression. Head raised, her hands up either sleeve to hide her fingers gripped into her forearms in compensatory pain, she stared steadily at nothing across the room while Domina Alys, seated in her chair again, the white birch rod laid across her lap and satisfaction plain in her voice, said, “That was for a beginning. You’ll also fast on water and no meat from now to Martinmas, and after that have ale again but still no meat until St. Thomas day, and you will, at the end of chapter meetings and when we leave the refectory after meals and the church after offices, go out first and lie down beside the door until we’ve passed you, giving what judgment on you we please. That you will do from now until I say otherwise.”

Judging by the pleasure in Domina Alys’ tight-lipped smile at her, the saying otherwise would be a very long while coming, but Frevisse bowed her head and said, choking only a little on the words, “Yes, my lady.”

Finally done with her, for the moment, Domina Alys took up the chapter meeting where it had broken off. With the white birch rod still laid across her lap and satisfaction strong in her voice, she asked if there were any other confessions or any accusations to be made this morning. When silence met the question, she nodded and went forward to the obedientiaries’ reports. They were given with almost whispered carefulness, in few words and rapidly. Even when Domina Alys at the end of the cellarer’s report informed Dame Juliana that the warmer winter gowns should be given out today after Tierce, there was no stir of response from anyone, even Sister Amicia.

Frevisse, waiting to be called on in her turn, sat motionless, concentrating on wearing down the pain. It had been only twenty strokes, done with only a birch rod and through the layers of her clothing; there would be only swollen welts, no torn flesh or blood. She tried to concentrate on that, on how little it was compared with what it could have been; but Domina Alys had laid the strokes across one another, not side by side, and the deep, crisscrossing pattern of the pain was almost stronger than Frevisse’s will against it. When time came for her report, she stood up, wary of moving too much, said carefully what needed to be said-that there were supplies enough for now but the guest halls were presently overburdened with guests beyond the ordinary-and was about to sit down when Domina Alys ordered, “Stay up, Dame.”

Frevisse stayed, her gaze fixed to the far wall, while Domina Alys said past her to the others, “Since Dame Frevisse has proven untrustworthy in her duties, her place as hosteler is now Sister Amicia’s.”

Sister Amicia gave a small squeak of excitement, and for once Domina Alys did not subdue her with even a look. Instead she said at Frevisse, “You have these two days, Dame, to show her what she needs to know. You will leave the cloister to do that, but for no other reason and always with her. When the two days are done, you will not leave the cloister again for any reason at all without I say so.”

Frevisse drew her gaze aside from the wall to fix it on Domina Alys’ face, her own face and voice utterly expressionless as she answered, “Yes, my lady.”