Chapter 54: The Emanation

Morning started early at the Abbey of Saint Edeth. By the time Stefan and his men were waking up at the Three Ravens, the convent’s nuns and novices had said their prayers, eaten their porridge, and left the table for their assigned labors.

After announcing the day’s assignments, the abbess, a tall, solidly built woman who wore the clerical garments of her order with a magisterial air, told the convent’s elderly prioress that she was going to see what needed to be done to make the vacant room in the dormitory ready for a new occupant. Blinking back tears, Udella murmured that she understood and that she’d come to get the abbess if any need arose.

With a reminder that “God is greater than the burdens we carry,” Hildegarth stiffened her already erect posture and left the dining room to do the task she had set for herself.

The upper floor of the convent’s main building was a long L-shaped hallway lined with sleeping cubicles, all of which were vacant during the day. Striding past the side doors, Hildegarth entered the room she still thought of as Aleswina’s, even knowing that if by some miracle the girl should be found alive, she would return not to the abbey but to the palace, where she would marry the king.

Except for its corner location, the room was no different from the rest. The clothes cupboard held the same number of habits, wimples, and shifts; the narrow cot was spread with a single blanket, with another folded at its foot; and while the crucifix hanging on the wall above the bed was more ornate than most, it had not belonged to Aleswina personally but had been a gift from her father to the convent.

The room, like all the others, had been left in shambles by the king’s guards five weeks earlier, but someone, probably Sister Udella, had put the bed and side table back in place, hung up the clothes, and smoothed the blankets. Someone, again probably Udella, had also been in to open the shutters that morning, and with the sunlight flooding in, the room had a lived-in feel—as if Aleswina had slept there the night before and was now at her work in the convent garden.

For what could have been the hundredth or the five hundredth time, the abbess searched her recollection of the day that the novice vanished for some clue to how she could have been spirited away, leaving no trace behind her except for the prayer book she’d supposedly come to get that was still lying on the side table by her bed.

Heaving a sigh, Hildegarth crossed the room to look out the window. She could see over the gate and into the convent’s garden, where three of the younger nuns were at the work she’d assigned them. Ethrid was on her knees, weeding, and Hedema was drawing a bucket of water from the well, while Aflild stood between the planted rows and the small shrine dedicated to the garden’s patron saint, her head bowed and her hands folded in prayer.

As she gazed down at the scene, the abbess saw Aflild raise her head and turn it from side to side, as if she was looking—or sniffing—for something.

Hildegarth tensed, ready to hurry from the room, but Aflild lowered her head again, and the abbess sighed her relief that whatever had caught the young nun’s attention, it was not the eerie miasma that had haunted the convent’s garden since the day Aleswina disappeared.

Aflild had been the first to notice what had come to be called “the emanation” while she was repairing the damage done to the beds by the king’s guards in their futile search of the convent grounds, and she remained the most sensitive to its presence. Since then, others working in the garden had detected it as well, although their descriptions of what exactly they sensed varied—some agreeing with Aflild that the air around them suddenly became foul, with a stench like “the Devil’s fetid breath” and others describing an aura of impending death.

While Hildegarth had never experienced the presence of the emanation herself, she did not doubt its existence, and she took its occurrence as proof that whatever evil had overtaken Aleswina, it had done so in the convent’s garden. Unable to do without the garden’s produce, Hildegarth now made it her practice to send three nuns to work there together—two to tend the plants and one, usually Aflild, to pray for the Lord’s protection and to give warning if need be.

Standing at the window and looking over at the sunlit garden, Hildegarth could sense nothing except the balmy air of a warm spring day. This did not relieve her apprehension, as it had been a warm, balmy day when Aleswina disappeared, and it was on warm, balmy days when the emanation most often returned.

Resolutely, the abbess turned around to stand with her back to the window.

She’d come to the room to decide what needed to be done to make it ready for a new occupant—presumably the abbey’s under-prioress, whose duties included the supervision of the younger nuns and novices and who clearly expected to move from her cubicle at the far end of the hall to the privileged corner position.

Durthena had her own clothes and prayer book, so Aleswina’s garments could be taken out and washed and put into storage. Her prayer book would be sent to the palace with the abbey’s wishes for her safe return. That left only a solitary sandal poking out from under the bed, left behind when its mate had been taken by the king’s guards to “put the hounds on her scent,” as one of them had said to her before making an awkward sign of the cross and dashing off with it.

All that Hildegarth had to do was to pick up the sandal and the prayer book and give the room to Durthena, who would see to the rest herself.

The abbess, however, stayed where she was, her back to the window, and, without consciously deciding to do so, she took up her rosary and let the beads slide, one after another, between her fingers.

Here within the abbey, protected spiritually by prayer and physically by the compound’s impregnable wall, Aleswina should have been safe. But somehow those barricades had been breached. While the emanation was evidence that the Devil had a hand in what happened to Aleswina that evening, it was Hildegarth’s belief that both the Lord’s goodness and Satan’s evil worked through human intermediaries.

The simplest explanation was that some man, knowing Aleswina’s hereditary right to her mother’s realm, had found a way into the garden and, by seduction or force, taken her off with him.

The week before the disappearance, Durthena had burst into the abbess’s quarters, accusing Aleswina of meeting a demon lover in the garden, Hildegarth had gone at once to investigate, fearing that what Durthena had seen was the naive and unworldly novice caught up in the embrace of an earthly lecher, but had found the garden empty and Aleswina peacefully asleep in her room.

It was not just seeing Aleswina innocently at rest with her crucifix clasped to her breast that had reassured Hildegarth but also her certainty that Aleswina’s sole contact with the outside world was her brief and supervised visits with her former maid when the old woman came to help with the convent’s laundry.

The prayer beads that had been sliding through Hildegarth’s fingers stopped dead. Had she been wrong to dismiss Durthena’s accusations so quickly? Should she have—

Hildegarth’s thoughts were disrupted by the slap of sandals running down the hall and a quivering voice calling her name.

Fearing that Aflild had sensed the emanation, Hildegarth rushed to the door and pulled it open, all but colliding with the abbey’s prioress, who gasped out, “The king’s sheriff is at the gate. What shall we do?”

“We shall calm ourselves! Where is he?”

“Outside the gate! I told him to wait while I came to get you.”

“Go back and admit him—but tell him I ask that he leave his guards outside.”

“He hasn’t any guards. He’s here alone and on foot.”

“Well then, let him in and bring him to my quarters. I will speak with him there.”

Forgetting to pick up Aleswina’s sandal and take the prayer book, Hildegarth followed Udella into the hall, closing the door to the corner room behind her.