LITMIR.BIZ

       Two

      In the aftermath of the firing of the abbey there were soldiers and bullyboys chasing the rumours of hidden treasure and golden chalices. They had little joy in Bowes village where the half-dozen families did not take kindly to strangers and where four or five were now out of work with the abbey ruined and no services needed. Morach let it be known that she had a new apprentice, and if anyone remembered the previous girl who had gone four long years ago, no one said. It was not a time for speculation and gossip. There were a dozen vagrants still hanging around the ruins of the abbey – refugees from the nuns’ charity with nowhere else to go. The villagers of Bowes locked their doors, refused anyone claiming rights of residence, and chose not to talk about the abbey, or the nuns, or the night of the fire, or the minor thefts and pillaging of the ruined abbey which went on in the later days.

      It was said that the firing of the abbey had been a mistake. The soldiers led by the young Lord Hugo were homeward bound from a raid on the mosstroopers, and they stopped at the abbey only to frighten the nuns to do the King’s will, and surrender their treasure and their bad popish ways. It had all begun with some wild sport, a bonfire of broken wood and some tar. Once the flames had caught there was nothing that Hugo could do, and besides the nuns had all died in the first minutes. The young lord had been drunk anyway, and could remember little. He confessed and did penance with his own priest – Father Stephen, one of the new faith who saw little sin in stamping out a nest of treasonous papists – and the villagers gleaned over the half-burned building and then started carting the stones away. Within a few weeks of her return to Morach’s hovel, Alys could walk where she wished; no one recognized her as the half-starved waif who had gone away four years ago. Even if they had, no one would have taken the risk of reporting her, which would bring Lord Hugh down on the village or – even worse – his son, the mad young lord.

      Alys could go freely into the village whenever she wished. But mostly she went up on the moor. Every day, after digging and weeding in the dusty scrape of the vegetable patch, she went down to the river to wash her hands and splash water over her face. In the first few days she stripped and waded into the water with her teeth chattering, to wash herself clean of the smell of sweat and smoke and midden. It was no use. The earth under her fingernails and the grime in the creases of her skin would not come clean in the cold brackish water, and anyway, wading back to the frosty bank with shivery goose-flesh skin, Alys had only dirty clothes to wear. After a few weeks she lost her shudder of repulsion against the odour of her own body, soon she could barely smell even the strong stench of Morach. She still splashed water in her face but she no longer hoped to keep clean.

      She rubbed her face dry on the thick wool of her dirty robe and walked upstream along the river-bank till she came to the bridge where the river ran beneath a natural causeway of limestone slabs – wide enough to drive a wagon across, strong enough to carry oxen. She paused there and looked down into the brown peaty water. It flowed so slowly there seemed to be no movement at all, as if the river had died, had given up its life into stagnant, dark ponds.

      Alys knew better. When she and Tom had been little children they had explored one of the caves which riddled the river-bank. Squirming like fox cubs they had gone downwards and downwards until the passage had narrowed and they had stuck – but below them, they had heard the loud echoing thunder of flowing water, and they knew they were near the real river, the secret river which flowed all day and all night in eternal darkness, hidden deep beneath the false river bed of dry stones above.

      Tom had been scared at the echoing, rushing noise so far below them. ‘What if it rose?’ he asked her. ‘It would come out here!’

      ‘It does come out here,’ Alys had replied. The seasons of her young life had been marked by the ebb and flow of the river, a dull drain in summer, a rushing torrent during the autumn storms. The gurgling holes where the sluggish water seeped away in summertime became springs and fountains in winter, whirlpools where the brown water boiled upwards, bubbling from the exploding pressure of the underground streams and underground rivers flooding from their stone cellars.

      ‘Old Hob is down there,’ Tom said fearfully, his eyes dark.

      Alys had snorted and spat disdainfully towards the darkness before them. ‘I ain’t afraid of him!’ she said. ‘I reckon Morach can deal with him all right!’

      Tom had crossed his finger with his thumb in the sign against witchcraft and crawled backwards out of the hole and into the sunshine. Alys would have lingered longer. She had not been boasting to Tom, it was true: raised by Morach she feared nothing.

      ‘Until now,’ she said quietly to herself. She looked up at the clear sky above her and the sun impartially burning down. ‘Oh, Mother of God …’ she started, then she broke off. ‘Our Father …’ she began again, and again fell silent. Then her mouth opened in a silent scream and she pitched herself forward on the short coarse grass of the moorland. ‘God help me!’ she said in a grief-stricken whisper. ‘I am too afraid to pray!’

      It seemed to her that she lay there in despair a long while. When she sat up again and looked around her the sun had moved – it was the middle of the afternoon, time for nones. Alys got to her feet slowly, like an old woman, as if all her bones were aching. She set off with small, slow steps up the hill to where the buds of early heather gleamed like a pale mauve mist on the slopes of the hill. A lapwing called overhead and fluttered down not far from her. Higher again in the blue air a lark circled and climbed, calling and calling, each higher note accompanied by a thrust of the little wings. Bees rolled drunkenly among the early heather flowers, the moor sweated honey. Everything around her was alive and thriving and joyful in the warm roil of the end of summer – everything but Alys, icy Alys, cold to her very bones.

      She stumbled a little as she walked, her eyes watching the sheep track beneath her feet. Every now and then she moaned very softly, like an animal in a trap for a long, long night of darkness. ‘How shall I ever get back?’ she said to herself as she walked. ‘How shall I ever get back? How shall I ever learn to bear it here?’

      At the edge of the moor, where the land flattened in a curved sweep under the wide, unjudging sky, Alys paused. There was a little heap of stones tossed into a cairn by shepherds marking the path. Alys squatted down on one dry stone and leaned back against the others, closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun, her face locked in a grimace of grief.

      After a few moments she narrowed her eyes and looked southward. The moorland was very flat, bending across the skyline in a thousand shades of green, from the dark lushness of moss around a bog, to the pale yellow colour of weak grass growing on stone. The heather roots and old flowers showed pale grey and green, a bleak landscape of subtle beauty, half pasture, half desert. The new heather growth was dark green, the heather flowers pale as a haze. Alys looked more sharply. A man was striding across the moor, his plaid across his shoulder, his step determined. Alys got to her feet quietly, ready to turn and run. As he saw the movement he yelled out, and his voice was whipped away by the steady wind which blew over the top of the moor, even on the calmest of days. Alys hesitated, ready for flight, then he yelled again, faintly:

      ‘Alys! Wait! It’s me!’

      Her hand went to her pocket where the beads of her rosary were rounded and warm. ‘Oh no,’ she said. She sat down again on the stones and waited for him to come up to her, watching him as he marched across the moor.

      He had filled out in the four years she had been away. When she had left he had been a boy, lanky

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