Roses in the Tempest Page 7

  My outburst did not seem to startle the shadow that lay in wait. Gradually, as if by her own thought, she emerged from the layers of dark, standing with her hands hidden under a frayed scapular. “I wish nothing of you, Mistress Launder.”

  “The others call me Isabella,” I said. “Why will you not call me so?”

  “I do not desire familiarity.”

  At that, I set the brush down and angled my head up at her young face. Her cheek seemed as soft as powder within the confines of its wimple. I reckoned Cristabell was my own age, but she could easily be older. Within the boundaries of the cloister, the nuns appeared ageless, as if time stopped for them, like flowers pressed in a book. “But surely familiarity is expected of so small a house.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, flicking her eyes away momentarily before piercing my gaze with her own bright green eyes. “But I see no reason in it when you will not be staying.”

  “Not be staying?” Unfolding my legs I stood, standing taller than Cristabell. “Why would I not be staying? It is my sincerest desire to do so. I hope I am working toward the proper humility to be welcomed here.”

  Something of a smirk teased the edge of Cristabell’s mouth. “You cry yourself to sleep.”

  I clenched my teeth. “Why should that surprise you? Is this not a strange place to be a novice?”

  “Only to those who do not wish to be here.”

  “You enjoy your cruelty,” I said plainly, startling from her a look of surprise. “I am a frank woman, Dame Cristabell, and I always speak my mind.”

  “Humility is what’s wanted here, Mistress.”

  “I have seen little by way of humility here, Dame.”

  “You think because you bring pouches of gold that we will conform to your will? Then I am glad of our poverty…if for nothing else than to protect us from the power of greed!”

  “You know nothing of me, Cristabell. And I would tell you if only it would make a difference.”

  “I will not be fooled by your innocent demeanor. You are no highborn lady.”

  “And I never professed to be. Why do you mistrust me so?”

  Cristabell maneuvered away from the puddle as if its reflection could contaminate. “Clearly you do not take this seriously, Mistress.”

  I leaned against a chilled stone arch. I rubbed my reddened hands, chapped from wash water and morning cold. “I do take it all seriously,” I said to the floor. “You must help me, Dame, for I know not how to be a nun. I have only been a daughter and a poor sister to my own siblings. And I am a naïve woman. You must help me.”

  Surprised wariness flickered in Cristabell’s eyes. “Help you? Seek your help in God.”

  “But are you not my sister in Christ? May I not find help in you just as the holy apostles helped one another?”

  “We are not apostles. Only women.” Cristabell turned, but I caught her arm.

  “Surely it was difficult for you when you first came here. How…how long ago was that? Why did you come to Blackladies?”

  Her brow lowered over her eyes. “You are too familiar for your own good, Mistress.” She pulled her arm free of me and moved down the cloister, disappearing behind a door.

  I watched the bubbles form and pop along the edge of the puddle, and my mind wandered, drifting. Was it possible to seal the rift in my heart with God? I thought as much, for else why was I here?

  To run from an arranged marriage by Sir John, I admitted. But what was so wrong with marriage?

  My toe nudged the puddle, touching off rings running to its outer edge. I inhaled Blackladies’ wet stone, its sweetly scented garden, and I felt its enclosing walls hover over me like a schoolmaster’s switch.

  It was Thomas who stood in my way, of course. There was no use denying it. I could not see myself loving anyone but him. No one else but God.

  I cleaned the rest of the floor before going to my other tasks. Each day became a new lesson in the worth of communal life. It seemed I was nothing but a chore to Cristabell, who made it her mission to correct my faults, making mention of them constantly at our daily chapter meetings. I kept to myself, as I was used to, for I never troubled myself with Robert’s acquaintances who were too rough for me, nor Agnes’ silly feminine pursuits and gossip. At home, I happily tended the garden and beehives alone, and so alone I did so at Blackladies.

  “Good morning, Mistress,” greeted Meg Burre, our servant, as she did to me every morning. And every morning it startled me. I was used to solitude and the disregard of the nuns.

  I nodded to her as I affixed my bee bonnet with its netting.

  “Here, let me help you with that.” She straightened it, making certain the veil pooled over my shoulders. “My milking’s done. Shall I help you with the hives?”

  Embarrassed for no reason I could fathom, I glanced swiftly at her in acknowledgement. With buckets and knives, we walked to the meadow near the mill pond where the woven domed skeps soon came into view mid the dying hogweed, nettles, and lavender. We smoked the tiny workers with a piece of smoldering linen wrapped around some straw inside a canister, and I lifted the woven skep while Meg pulled out the combs with a knife, and scraped the precious honey and beeswax into one of the buckets.

  Meg looked up so often toward the barley fields that I could not resist turning my head to look, too. She nodded to a tall figure stepping through the browning September stalks. “That there is Tom Smith,” she said, and then giggled. “He’s a right comely man, but he don’t give me the time o’ day. He can’t fool me, though.” With a hoe angling up over his shoulder, he joined the other men in the field. None looked our way. “Oh!” she thought suddenly. “I shouldn’t be saying aught to the likes of you, Mistress. I reckon it isn’t proper. The Prioress will give me a hiding for that.”

  “Do not fret, Meg,” I said softly. “It matters not to me. I am not made of stone. I am a woman though I wear this livery. You must feel free to speak to me unless it is to gossip.”

  “Now then,” she said surprised. “You’re a different sort than the rest, aren’t you? I seen you scrub the cloister and go off to the kilhouse like all the rest, but I was thinking to myself that this here’s one who knows what a day’s work is. Am I right?”

  Walking to the next hive, I set down my bucket and straightened the netting. “I do not believe my sisters come from a life of ease.”

  “That’s not my meaning.” She removed the next skep, waving away the flitting bees. They moved off as we dispatched the combs. “None of them are highborn, I know that. But they all come with notions.”

  “I had no expectations. Indeed,” I said as I worked, feeling more and more at ease with her, “I did not know the least what to expect.”

  “Why’d you come, then, if it isn’t too forward to ask?”

  We finished with the last hive and I pulled the netting from my face, gazing across the flower-dotted meadow. Dandelion seeds winged around us, vying for updrafts with disgruntled bees. I was tempted to dip a finger into the bucket for a small taste of the dark honey whose fragrant perfume arose in the toasting sun. I resisted the urge, though glancing at Meg, I noted she was not plagued by such restraint. “It seemed the only place for me.”

  “What about a husband?”

  I smiled, shaking my head. “I am unsuited to married life.”

  “Not I!”

  For the first time at Blackladies, I laughed aloud. It encouraged a brisker pace, and Meg followed me down a rutted path beside a fence overgrown with brambles. “You have your eye on Tom Smith?” I asked.

  A spark kindled in her eye. “You’re a one, Mistress. Aren’t you going tell me how my thoughts are sinful?”

  “Are your thoughts sinful?”

  “No. Well…” She laughed. “You’re not like the others, are you?”

  With a frown I pushed through the gate into the main courtyard. “I suppose not.”

  She skipped to keep up with me as we approached the honey house, a small appendage to the bolting house. I opened the door
letting in enough light for me to open the shutter, and we set the buckets down on the table, ready to strain the honey from the wax and dead bees.

  “Do you think I should try to get on with Tom?”

  She reminded me of Agnes, only gentler and less deceitful. Immediately I found I liked her, and smiled. “Is Tom of a mind to ‘get on’ with you, or is marriage not on his mind? That is important, Meg. I would not have you thinking of sin.”

  “It’s true. It’s hard to tell with a man, isn’t it? It’s mostly marriage on a woman’s mind, but never on his.” We scraped the honey into a pot and set the buckets aside. The combs would be heated slowly to melt the wax and release the honey. Cloth-covered honey pots sat on the shelves. Most served other purposes than eating. Honey was useful for wounds, and for making a hand cream for the chapping winter ahead. Thehoney for eating we would take on to the buttery and sell the rest.

  “But take you, Mistress,” she went on. I handed her pots from the shelf and she tucked them close to her large bosom. Her white kerchief was clean. I admired this about the two women workers who served Blackladies, this care they took with their person.

  We left the honey house and made our way across the courtyard again through a crowd of geese, honking in displeasure as we scattered them. I unlatched the buttery door and we entered. It smelled of sweet honey and the fresh earthen aroma of dried peas and beans, of lavender oil and pungent rosemary sprigs hanging upside down from its rafters.

  “You say you are unsuited to marriage,” Meg went on and I nodded to her words. “But how can a body know?”

  “Mayhap you can never truly know,” I said quietly.

  The courtyard swallowed our steps, and the shadow of the porch’s arch cut the fleeting sun with a sudden chill. We did not proceed into the house, but followed the mossy edges to another gate. Encouraged by Meg’s friendship, I raised a hand in greeting to the workmen in the fields. They returned the hail by doffing their caps, including indifferent Tom Smith.

  In the shed, I discarded my shoes and slipped into wooden clogs, trudging along the gravel walk until reaching the vegetable garden.

  Meg watched me from the gate. I knew she had other errands to attend to, but I decided suddenly that I would miss her company. “May I ask you?” she said, leaning against the damp stone wall that always lay in shade.

  “Of course,” I said cheerfully.

  “Why is it I do not see you with the other nuns? They don’t work with you. Is it because you are a novice?”

  The hoe hit the dirt. I tore free a weed and tossed it over my shoulder. “At first I thought so.” I shrugged. “But now…I think it is merely that…they do not like me.”

  “Well that won’t do! Some of them nuns have been here nigh on twenty years. It won’t do to carry on so for twenty years.”

  I straightened and leaned on the hoe. “No. It very much will not do!” Meg was a plump creature, all cheeks and smiles, with hazel eyes peeking out of squinted sockets. Her sleeves were rolled up past chapped elbows, and smudges darkened the outside of one forearm. Her napron, clean only this morning, was now streaked with dirty honey. I suddenly thought of St. Martha, which was quite unusual, because I always viewed the saints as very well to-do people. It suddenly occurred to me, like an unexpected gust of wind, that the Saint Martha who was so hospitable to our Lord must not have been high and dignified like the prioress, but instead more like Meg. The thought gave me courage.

  She watched me with some surprise as I dropped the hoe, exchanged my clogs for shoes again, and entered the cloister.

  I found Dame Cristabell polishing the wainscoting in the hall of the main house. She looked up at me once before returning to her work.

  “Mistress? Do you stand idle while others work?”

  “No, indeed. But I come to ask a favor.”

  “A favor? That is very ill-suited to your position in this house.”

  “It is not that kind of favor, Dame. The favor is to ask for your civility…no. Not merely your civility, but your friendship. It seems a little enough favor to ask.”

  Turning back to her work she said nothing for a long time, until, “This is not the hour for talk. These are the hours for work. You have been here for two months. I would expect that you should know this by now.”

  And there it was again, the sensation that I was on a skiff suddenly cut from the dock to drift. I reached for the line, but no line was there, and the mist was rising.

  “Cristabell.” She turned to me, the same indifference smoothing her face. “I know it is not the hour for talking, but when you have done your sister a hurt, you must go at once to her and make amends.” A hint of movement flickered her brow with just the merest tinge of satisfaction. I read it perfectly well. “No, I have done you no injustice. It is injustice to me of which I speak.”

  She leapt to her feet, the stiff rag clutched in her fist. “Mistress Launder! May Almighty God forgive you your insolence! And look at you!”

  I did, and saw my muddy shoes and mud-dredged hem. The napron I tied over my scapular was also dirty from my day’s work.

  “You come here with your indignation,” she trumpeted, “and your high ways, and your high friends. Did you expect your precious Sir John to make all things smooth for you? And what of us? Shall we serve Isabella instead of God?”

  “Oh Cristabell. You have no idea how mistaken you are. I am no friend of Sir John Giffard. I am only from a farm like any other here, and my family did not want me to cloister myself, yet bowed to my decision.

  Surely you could have known this if only you had asked.”

  “Am I expected to believe you?”

  “Yes, praise God! Cristabell, it is no sin to be friendly, and I have such need of it.”

  Her eyes darted down for a moment, and her face betrayed only a hint of something indistinguishable…and then it was gone, enmasked behind her stiff demeanor. “You come here to hide. I know your kind. You make a fine show of work, but have no virtue behind it. This is not a place to hide from your troubles. And I will be no party to your deceit.”

  “I have not come here to hide.”

  “Have you not?”

  Her immovable tone infuriated, yet something resonated from her words. I took great pains to occupy myself with work and prayer and the obedience to the difficult Rule. So much so that it gave me little time to think of anything—or anyone—else.

  My eyes stung suddenly with tears. Far from Caverswall and Beech, I was cut off from the news of court or of Stafford. I heard of no deaths, no weddings, nothing. No mention of people I knew or how they fared. I suddenly realized how much I longed to hear tidings of Thomas, but was saved from that cruelty by virtue of this cloister.

  I knew from Father William’s sermons that to sin against the Holy Ghost was the unforgivable sin, but I also learned from Cristabell another: that of lying to one’s self.

  “There…is much to what you say,” I surrendered.

  She raised a tentative brow. “And so. I am heeded at last.”

  “Yes. But, I hope you, too, have learned from me. If we are to be sisters to our life’s end, then we must be friends. If I have offended you, then I ask your forgiveness.”

  Her eyes nestled under lowered lids, and her mouth set fiercely, determined to release nothing. “There is still two hours until Vespers, Mistress,” she said sharply. “Make use of your time.”

  Nodding, I turned. Over my shoulder, I said, “We will be friends someday, Cristabell. You will see.”

  She said nothing, as I expected, but I was grieved by her humor. I was not by nature a likable woman, not the friendly, laughing sort like Meg, or the giggling flirt as was Agnes, but neither was I too critical nor facetious. Cristabell was a challenge, but I did not find myself entirely alone. I was fortunate eventually to find some solace in Dame Elizabeth, who warmed from my companionship. Often we sat silently in the warm light of our chamber where we did our mending, and I was surprised when one day she spoke openly to me.

/>   Reaching forward with a bony finger, she touched some of my stitchery. “That is a fine hand, Mistress,” she said, slurping her words behind her buck teeth. I looked up into warm eyes, and smiled.

  “You flatter me, Dame.”

  “Not at all. Flattery has no place here. It is simply that you have a good, solid stitch, and I should like to learn it.”

  “But certainly you have more years training on me, madam.”

  “I was never one for stitchery. See here.”

  She showed me her work, and though it was efficiently done, it lacked smooth competence. “Still, it will hold a seam.”

  “It is artless,” she said, shaking her head.

  “It need not be tapestries,” murmured Prioress Margaret from across the room. She did not look up from her work.

  For the first time, I felt part of this little family, accepted as if I had passed a test. Part of it, surely, was that Cristabell was on her rounds checking the bars and gates, and not amongst us.

  “Is it becoming clearer to you what is expected as a nun?” asked Elizabeth.

  With her wimple hugging her cheeks and her toothy grin, she reminded me of the red squirrels which danced from tree to tree in the cloister garden. “Yes, Dame. It is becoming clearer. Although—”

  “What is it, my dear?”

  “When I first came here, I was treated as if…well…as if I were not liked.” I blushed from my words, for when I uttered them aloud they seemed so foolish. “This is, in fact, the first genuine moment of affection among my sisters I have experienced here.”

  Elizabeth chuckled. “Yes, it can seem so. But you see, there is little reason in getting to know a novice in the first few weeks, for that is when they usually change their minds.”

  Her gentle tone and her explanation was a relief. “I see. Then have you now decided I shall be staying at Blackladies?”

  “It is a fair guess,” she said, glancing once at the prioress. “Unless there is more to occupy your mind.”