Drawing in a deep breath of the bright autumn air, Frevisse closed her eyes, both to shut out sight of her prioress and the better to feel the sunlight on her face. She had learned in these three years under Domina Alys’ rule to take and enjoy when they came such small pleasures as a moment in the sunlight and a quiet pause among the daily troubles. There was probably no being rid of Domina Alys this side of the grave: prioresses, like priors and abbots, were elected for life. And the harvest had been bad again this year; there would be hunger among the villagers and likely in the nunnery, too, by spring. And the daily offices of prayer were increasingly badly done, increasingly uncomforting, between the builders’ noise and the prioress’ inattention. It seemed that day by day there was less and less peace to be had anywhere in St. Frideswide’s, but for this moment, here, just now, there was sunlight and quietness; and brief though they both would be, Frevisse had learned that momentary pleasures enjoyed as fully as she could were far better than no pleasures at all. She had come to see them as God’s gift given in God’s way, to be accepted when nothing else seemed being given and nothing else could be understood.
Time had been when the offices with their beauty of prayers and psalms had been, day in and day out, Frevisse’s greatest pleasure, a sanctuary and sure refuge from the small, unceasing troubles of every day, a time when she could let go of the world and give her mind over entirely toward eternity and God. Now, mangled as they daily were by Domina Alys’ stupidity-
Frevisse cut the bitter thought short. She had gone that way too many times, never to any use. In the election for a new prioress after Domina Edith’s death, too many of the nuns had separately thought to soothe then-Dame Alys’ temper and ambition by giving her a single vote in the first round of voting and instead they had unwittingly given her the election. Fit retribution for their cowardice, Frevisse thought. Except that the rest of them, the few who had not bent to fear of Dame Alys, were now forced to live under Domina Alys along with the rest.
The moment of quiet ended. The few lay servants of the priory who still bothered to come to services had slipped out of the church past her and away while she stood there, and now Lady Eleanor, who always lingered a little longer for private prayers of her own, said quietly beside her, “Dame Frevisse.”
Frevisse, opening her eyes, turned to her with a smile. The Rule of silence that should have confined all idle conversation in the cloister to the hour of recreation at day’s end had long since gone slack under Domina Alys, and because it was difficult to keep to hand gestures when everyone else was chattering on like jays through a day, Frevisse had let it go, too, and now answered easily, “My lady. How is it with you?”
Lady Eleanor must always have been a small woman and now in her years beyond middle age she was smaller still, but rather than have dried and wrinkled and wearied with her years, she had faded gently to softness and rose, given as much to laughter as to prayers. As usual, she was smiling now, and equally as usual an insistent wisp of white hair had escaped from her careful wimple to curl against her cheek. Since coming to St. Frideswide’s last spring, she made a quiet, constant effort to be what she called a “shadow nun,” always dressing in simple gray gowns and plain white wimples and veils, but she admitted freely that she had no intention of ever taking a nun’s vows, and she had kept her vanity of unshorn hair, as that curl gave away more often than not. She was pushing it back into her wimple as she answered Frevisse’s courtesy, “Very well, thank you, my lady.”
“An arthritic attack in the night,” her maid Margrete muttered from behind her.
“Which has passed off and gone,” Lady Eleanor responded, not turning her head. Most conversations between herself and Margrete were carried on that way, with Margrete usually the correct three paces behind her lady but joining in the talk whenever she felt it necessary and Lady Eleanor answering her without looking back. They had been together most of their lives-“Longer than I was with either of my husbands,” Lady Eleanor had once said-and silence could go on between them comfortably for hours, or their conversations could be, like now, a mere sharp exchange that barely distracted Lady Eleanor from asking Frevisse lightly, “Standing here with your eyes closed praying for patience with my niece?”
Frevisse’s smile twisted to wryness. “Nothing so pious, I fear. I was simply enjoying the sunlight.”
“That can be piety, too, I think. Enjoying God’s gifts. Better than being rude about them, even ignoring them, surely.”
“Surely,” Frevisse agreed. She enjoyed Lady Eleanor’s directness with life and equally her kindness toward it. Had she always been so, or was it something that came with years and living? Whichever it was, it was in strong contrast to the ways of Domina Alys, her niece. That Lady Eleanor was another Godfrey had been among the reasons Frevisse had so strongly protested against her coming when her offer of a corrody had first been raised.
Accepting a set sum of money in return for keeping a lady in comfort for the rest of her life was a gamble nunneries sometimes took for the sake of having much money in hand all at once, but it was a gamble St. Frideswide’s had always, with good cause, avoided until now. Too many stories from other nunneries that had succumbed to the temptation of corrodies through need or even misplaced kindness made fearfully clear how often a lady would leave behind her worldly responsibilities but bring with her into the cloister too many servants, comforts, pets, and even quantities of visiting relatives, all disrupting what was supposed to be the cloister’s peace.
Besides that very immediate risk, there was the chance that the lady might live too long. A corrody was a set sum of money, paid when she first came. If her life ran out before her money did, then the nunnery had a profit; if she lived on, the nunnery faced uncompensated expenses that could eventually, disastrously, far outweigh any advantages there might have been in having her money at the beginning.
All that and the fact that Lady Eleanor was Domina Alys’ father’s sister had been reason enough to Frevisse’s mind for refusing her. There had even been others among the nuns who not only agreed but dared to say so. The argument over it in chapter meeting had gone on more mornings than one, but anyone who dared go against Domina Alys always found she had more ways than a few to make them feel her displeasure. She did not give in to opposition, nor forget or forgive it, and at the last, driven and drawn by that reality and by Domina Alys’ insistence that, “She’s too old to live long enough to be a trouble to us and we need the money,” most of the nuns had given way.
In truth, the need had indeed been real enough; was still real enough. Replacing the wooden bell pentise in the garth with one of carved stone had only seemed to enlarge Domina Alys’ ambitions for St. Frideswide’s. Last year she had persuaded the nuns to the bell pentise; this summer she had simply announced that she had hired men to build a tower and that Lady Eleanor’s corrody would pay for it. By then, worn down by the arguments over the corrody to begin with, almost no one had dared rouse her temper by challenging her on anything else if they could help it, even so great a matter as this. Only Frevisse had dared start a question against it, and been given a week on bread and water and one hundred aves every day of that week-“That you may learn a like humility to blessed Mary’s,” Domina Alys had snapped-for her presumption.
That had sufficed to silence the rest of the nuns, except those who enthusiastically supported whatever their prioress chose to do. Now there was nothing for it but to hope that Domina Alys was right, that Lady Eleanor’s corrody would cover the costs of stone and masons and lead for the roof when it reached that high. But that did not change the fact that the corrody should have been husbanded for the priory’s use over years, not spent all at once on a thing for which there was no need at all.