The Wise Woman Read Free Page B

Hildebrande listened to the childish high voice and the unchildish authority. “This one is meadowsweet,” Alys said certainly. “Good for sickness in the belly when there is much soiling. This one looks like rue: herb-grace.” She nodded solemnly. “A very powerful herb against sweating sickness when it is seethed with marygold, feverfew, burnet sorrel, and dragons.” She looked up at Mother Hildebrande. “As a vinegar it can prevent the sickness, did you know? And this one I don’t know.” She touched it, bent her little head and sniffed at it. “It smells like a good herb for strewing,” she said. “It has a clear, clean smell. But I don’t know what powers it has. I have never seen it before.”
    Mother Hildebrande nodded, never taking her eyes from the small face, and showed Alys flowers she had never seen, herbs from faraway countries whose names she had never even heard.
    “You shall come to my study and see them on a map,” Mother Hildebrande promised. Alys’s heart-shaped face looked up at her. “And perhaps you could stay here. I could teach you to read and write,” the old abbess said. “I need a little clerk, a clever little clerk.”
    Alys smiled the puzzled smile of a child who has rarely heard kind words, for Morach’s blows came quicker than her caresses. “I’d work for you,” she said hesitantly. “I can dig, and draw water, and find and pick the herbs you want. If I worked for you, could I stay here?”
    Mother Hildebrande put a hand out to Alys’s pale curved cheek. “Would you want to do that?” she asked. “Would you take holy orders and leave the world you know far behind you? It’s a big step, especially for a little girl. And you surely have kin who love you? You surely have friends and family that you love?”
    “I’ve no kin,” Alys said, with the easy betrayal of childhood. “I live with old Morach, she took me in twelve years ago, when I was a baby. She does not need me, she is no kin of mine. I am alone in the world.”
    The old woman raised her eyebrows. “And no one you love?” she asked. “No one whose happiness depends on you?”
    Alys’s deep blue eyes opened wide. “No one,” she said firmly.
    The abbess nodded. “You want to stay.”
    “Yes,” Alys said. As soon as she had seen the large quiet rooms with the dark wood floors she had set her heart on staying. She had a great longing for the cleanness of the bare white cells, for the silence and order of the library, for the cool light of the refectory where the nuns ate in silence and listened to a clear voice reading holy words. She wanted to become a woman like Mother Hildebrande, old and respected. She wanted a chair to sit on and a silver plate for her dinner. She wanted a cup made of glass, not of tin or bone. And she longed, as only the hungry and the dirty passionately long, for clean linen and good food. “I want to stay,” she said.
    “Why?” Mother Hildebrande asked.
    Alys frowned as she tried to form the idea in her child’s mind. “If I came here there would be a chance for me,” she said slowly. “A chance of a proper life. I might learn to be good, I might get clean. You’d feed me—” She shot a frightened look at the abbess but she was still smiling sympathetically. “You would feed me,” Alys said. “I’m often hungry at home. And if you beat me—” She glanced upward again. “I don’t think you’d beat me very often,” she said hopefully.
    The abbess who had seen so many of the sights and sounds of poverty in the world was moved to tears by the small child’s speech. “Do you get beaten very often?”
    Alys nodded. “Often,” she said simply. “I am Morach’s apprentice; she is training me as a wise woman. If I get things wrong she beats me to teach me to do better. But I’d rather live here and work for you.”
    Mother Hildebrande rested her hand on the child’s warm dirty head. “And what of your little sweetheart?” she asked. “You will have to