The Wise Woman Read Free Page A

stories.
    Her favorite time was when his parents were working in Lord Hugh’s fields and he could take her to the farm and show her the cow and the calf, the pig, the linen chest, the pewter, and the big wooden bed with the thick old curtains. Alys would smile then, her dark eyes as warm as a stroked cat.
    “Soon we’ll be together,” Tom would murmur.
    “Here,” Alys said.
    “I will love you every day of my life,” Tom would promise.
    “And we’ll live here,” she said. “I so want a home, Tom; a home of my own.”
    When Morach lost her fields and did not get them back, Tom’s parents looked higher for him than a girl who would bring nothing but a tumbledown shack and a patch of ground all around it. Alys might know more about flowers and herbs than anyone in the village, but Tom’s parents did not need a daughter-in-law who knew twenty different poisons, forty different cures. They wanted a jolly, round-faced girl who would bring a fat dowry of fields and perhaps a grazing cow with a weaned calf. They wanted a girl with broad hips and strong shoulders who could work all day in their fields and have a good supper ready for them at night. One who would give birth without fuss so that there would be another Tom in the farmhouse to inherit when they had gone.
    Alys, with her ripple of golden-brown unbraided hair, her basket of leaves, and her pale reserved face, was not their choice. They told Tom frankly to put her out of his mind; and he told them that he would marry where he willed, and that if they forced him to it he would take Alys away—even as far as Darneton itself—he would do it and go into service if needs be.
    It could not be done. Lord Hugh would not let two young people up and off his land without his say-so. But Lord Hugh was a bad man to invoke in a domestic dispute. He would come and give fair enough judgment, but he would take a fancy to a pewter pint-pot on his way out, or he saw a horse he must have, cost what it may. And however generous he claimed to be, he would pay less than the Castleton butter-market price. Lord Hugh was a sharp man with a hard eye. It was best to solve any problems well away from him.
    They ignored Tom. They went in secret to the abbess at the abbey and they offered her Alys. They claimed that the child had the holy gift of healing, that she was an herbalist in her own right, but dreadfully endangered by living with her guardian—old Morach. They offered the abbey a plump dowry to take her and keep her behind the walls, as a gift from themselves.
    Mother Hildebrande, who could hear a lie even from a stranger—and forgive it—asked them why they were so anxious to get the little girl out of the way. Then Tom’s mother cried and told her that Tom was mad for the girl and that she would not do for them. She was too strange and unlike them. She had turned Tom’s head, perhaps with a potion—for whoever heard of a lad wanting to marry for love? He would recover but while the madness was on him they should be parted.
    “I’ll see her,” Mother Hildebrande had said.
    They sent Alys up to the abbey with a false message and she was shown through the kitchen, through the adjoining refectory, and out of the little door to where Mother Hildebrande was sitting in the physic garden at the smiling western side of the abbey, looking down the hill to the river, deep here, and well stocked with fish. Alys had approached her through the garden in a daze of evening sunshine and her golden-brown hair had shone: like the halo of a saint, Mother Hildebrande had thought. She listened to Alys’s message and smiled at the little girl and then walked with her around the raised flower- and herb-beds. She asked her if she recognized any of the flowers and how she would use them. Alys looked around the walled warm garden as if she had come home after a long journey, and touched everything she saw, her little brown hands darting like harvest mice from one leaf to another. Mother