The Wise Woman Read Free

blood.
    “Get the water!” Morach shouted from her bed.
    She pushed her cold feet into her damp boots and went outside.
    The cottage stood alone, a few miles west of the village of Bowes. In front of it was the dull silver of the River Greta, slowly moving without a ripple. The river rose and sank through great limestone slabs at this stretch, deep and dangerous in winter, patchy in drought. The cottage had been built beside one of the deeper pools, which was always filled, even in the driest of summers. When Sister Ann had been a little girl, and everyone had used her given name of Alys, and Morach had been Widow Morach and well-respected, the children from the village used to come out here to splash and swim. Alys played with them, with Tom, and with half a dozen of the others. Then Morach had lost her land to a farmer who claimed that he owned it. Morach—no man’s woman, sharp-tempered and independent—had fought him before the parish and before the church court. When she lost (as everyone knew she would, since the farmer was a pious man and wealthy), she swore a curse against him in the hearing of the whole village of Bowes. He had fallen sick that very night and later died. Everyone knew that Morach had killed him with her snake-eyed glare.
    If he had not been so thoroughly hated in the village it would have gone badly for Morach after that. But his widow was a pleasant woman, glad to be free of him, and she made no complaint. She called Morach up to the farmhouse and asked her for a poultice to ease her backache, and overpaid her many times to ensure that Morach bore no dangerous grudge. The old farmer’s death was explained easily enough by his family’s history of weak hearts. Morach took care not to boast.
    She never got her land back. And after that day the village children did not come to play in the deep pool outside her door. Those visitors who dared the lonely road and the darkness came huddled in their cloaks, under cover of night. They left with small bunches of herbs, or little scraps of writing on paper to be worn next to the skin, sometimes heads full of dreams and unlikely promises. And the village remembered a tradition that there had always been a cunning woman in the cottage by the river. A cunning woman, a wise woman, an indispensable friend, a dangerous enemy. Morach—with no land to support her, and no man to defend her, nurtured the superstitions, took credit and high payment for cures, and blamed deaths on the other local wizards.
    No one cared that, stripped of her land, Morach was no better than a pauper; nor that she and the little girl in her care might starve to death from hunger or freeze from the cold in winter. They were hard times in the year of our Lord 1535, and County Durham at the extreme north of England was a hard country. Morach’s long embittering struggle to survive soured her, and overshadowed Alys’s childhood. They had no open enemies, but they had no friends either.
    Only Tom still came openly up the road from Bowes, and everyone knew he was courting Morach’s little foundling-girl, Alys, and that they would be wed as soon as his parents gave their consent.
    For one long summer they courted, sitting by the river which ran so smoothly and so mysteriously down the deep crevices of the riverbed. For one long summer they met every morning before Tom went to work in his father’s fields and Morach called Alys to walk out over the moor and find some leaf or some weed she wanted, or dig in the stony garden.
    They were very tender together, respectful. On greeting and at parting they would kiss, gently, on the mouth. When they walked they would hold hands and sometimes he would put his arm around her waist, and she would lean her golden-brown head on his shoulder. He never caught at her, or pulled her about, or thrust his hands inside her brown shawl or up her gray skirt. He liked best to sit beside her on the riverbank and listen to her telling tales and inventing