“ ‘And so the blessed maiden Katherine went crowned to Christ,”“ Dame Perpetua read reverently, ” ’in the month of November, on the twenty-fifth day, a Friday, near the hour our Lord gave up his life on the cross for her and for us all. Amen.“”
That was the familiar end. Dame Perpetua fell silent, then sighed, closed the book, and rose from her place with it clasped to her breast, to curtsy to Alys and then go away to the kitchen for her own meal. Alys, having contained impatience that long, rose to her own feet, the rest of the nuns with her. She ran them through grace, then stood eyeing them unfavorably, knowing what they wanted.
There was an hour’s recreation now, between supper and the day’s last prayers at Compline, and they were all eager to be off to make the most of it, to crowd around the fire in the warming room and let their tongues run away from their wits over everything they thought they knew about this afternoon, with Dame Frevisse to lead them on.
Briefly, bitterly, Alys considered ordering them to silence for the evening-or forbidding them their fire. That would curb their ways a little, give them something else to think on.
But suddenly they were not worth the bother. What she really wanted, besides to be rid of her throbbing head, was to not be looking at their foolish faces anymore and that was easily managed.
“Tell Dame Perpetua she’s to lead you in prayers at Compline,” she said curtly, and ignoring everything but the need to hide how much her head was hurting, left them with stiff dignity.
Outside, in the almost dark of the cloister walk, she let her shoulders slump and increased her stride so that she was well away toward her rooms before they came out of the refectory behind her, heading the other way for the warming room, already in low-voiced, eager talk.
Alys paused at the foot of her stairs, listening but not able to make out the words across the darkening cloister. She supposed she did not need to. They would be on about her and none of it to the good, likely.
Discouraged by the thought, she climbed the stairs to her rooms with heavy-legged weariness and the relief of escape.
She had not known when she became prioress how greatly she would come to depend on her rooms. The other women-just as she had all her years after coming to the nunnery, until she became prioress-slept in the dormitory across the cloister, each in her own cell, closed in by thin wooden walls and a curtain for a door, with a bed and not much else, but the prioress had two rooms for herself- bedroom and parlor all her own-and even a fireplace, the only one in the cloister except for those in the kitchen and the warming room. It gave her somewhere all of her own, somewhere away from all the endless demands and needs and envies turned on her for being prioress.
Envy. That was the sin that drove Dame Claire and Dame Frevisse on and on against her. They had both wanted to be prioress, had been counting on it being one of them when Domina Edith died, and could not forgive that the election had gone against them, that God had chosen her instead.
That was the thing she clung to at the end of days like this one. God had chosen her.
Standing in her darkened doorway, peering into the parlor’s gloom, where there should have been at least lamplight and, better yet, a fire on the hearth and wine set out, she demanded, “Katerin!”
A scrabbling near the fireplace showed Katerin was there. Alys took a step into the room.
“Katerin, where’s my fire?”
“Nearly,” Katerin piped a little desperately from the darkness. “Nearly.” The scrabbling went on, steel struck flint, and there were sparks and then small flames in dry tinder on the hearth, with Katerin’s earnest face leaning over them, red-cast in the dark as she blew gently on the flames, urging them alive, with a hand poised to the side with more tinder for when they were strong enough.
Alys had stayed where she was but now went forward to stand beside her, near the warmth that would soon reach out as the fire grew. Katerin glanced up with a pleased smile. Alys nodded back reassuringly. Katerin’s brain had been burned out by a fever when she was a child; she had spent much of her nearly thirty years following her mother around the village like a toddling infant, until, when the woman came to die, she begged, by way of Father Henry, the nuns to take Katerin into the priory.
“She’s cleanly kept and good at simple tasks. She’ll earn her keep,” Father Henry had said on Katerin’s behalf. “And it would be a mercy to her mother to know what’s going to become of her.”
For no good reason that Alys remembered now, except maybe to spite the distaste some of her nuns had shown at the thought of having a half-wit among them, she had agreed. As it had turned out, although Katerin had little to work with in the way of wits, what little she had was given over entirely to trying to please. Finding that if only an order was simple enough for Katerin to grasp, she never questioned or hesitated over it, Alys had very shortly made her entirely into her own servant. The only troubles were that an order had to be very simple, and that if Katerin felt she had failed or someone was angry at her, she panicked into complete incompetence. On the whole, it was easiest not to panic her by showing any anger, so Alys said nothing about her being late with the fire, only nodded to show it was all right and waited until Katerin had nursed the fire past kindling into flames licking along logs before saying, “That’s a good fire, Katerin. Very good.”
Katerin stood up, wiping her hands on her apron, smiling widely, and made a curtsy with much of the gladness a puppy would have shown for being patted.
“There’s something else I want you to do for me,” Alys said. Katerin bobbed her head eagerly, to show she was ready. She rarely spoke unless she had to, but she was always ready to do whatever was asked of her, if only she could understand it.
“I need you to go to Father Henry and Sir Reynold,” Alys said with careful slowness, giving time for the names to take hold in Katerin’s head. “You remember Sir Reynold?”
Katerin nodded willingly. It was a chancy thing what would stay in her mind and what slip away, but she always remembered Father Henry and Reynold seemed to stay more often than not.
“I want you to go to them and tell them I’m ready for them to come here. To come here now. You understand?”
Katerin’s nodding increased in eagerness to show she did.
Alys found she was nodding along with her, and stopped herself before saying, still carefully, “Go on, then. Go find Father Henry and Sir Reynold. Tell them to come here.”
Katerin curtsied, smiling with gladness for something else to do, and scurried away. Alys, with a sigh for her aching head and weary legs, sank into the tall-backed chair beside the hearth leaned her head back and shut her eyes.
Because there was occasionally need for the prioress to entertain guests apart or see to business better not dealt with in chapter meetings, her parlor was more richly furnished than anywhere else in the priory, with not only the fireplace and chair but another chair besides, almost as good, and a table covered by a richly woven Spanish cloth, and brightly embroidered cushions on the seat below the long window overlooking the guest halls’ yard.
And when the evening was done, there was her bedroom. Domina Edith had kept it sparsely furnished, with a plain prie-dieu and a straw-mattressed bed. Alys had been rid of the prie-dieu her first day as prioress, moving in her own that had been kept cramped in her cell until then. Elaborately carved to pleasure the eyes, thickly cushioned to ease the knees, it was to her mind much more the kind of prie-dieu a prioress should have. And the straw mattress had been replaced by a feather one as soon as might be, too.
Alys opened her eyes, not aware until then that she had closed them. This was not the time for being tired. The flames had good hold on the kindling now, feeding along its slender lengths and up into the larger wood above. Watching them, her elbow on the chair’s arm and her chin leaned into her hand, Alys tried to decide how she should handle Reynold and found she was thinking instead of Domina Edith, sitting here through all those years she had been prioress, watching other fires through other evenings, just as Domina Geretrude had done before her and Domina Hawise before that, back to the priory’s founding; all of them probably in this same chair, just as Alys now was and just as the prioresses who came after her would do.