“As our Lord chose to die on the cross out of his love for us, so each of us who make our holy vows to Him choose to live loving only him, leaving behind all lesser loves and desires.”
Hildegarth had spent nearly an hour working and reworking that sentence until she felt satisfied that it smoothed the transition from Saint Luke’s account of the dying Christ’s last words to her announcement: “It is with heartfelt joy that I tell you that Sister Aleswina will be pledging herself to Him in body and spirit on Sunday.”
Managing to escape from her well-wishers with the excuse that she had to finish her day’s planting or lose a week’s harvest, Aleswina made her way to the garden, where she set her tray of starts close enough to Caelym’s bush to talk as she worked. Keeping her head down, she told him what Anna and she had decided—that she would go with him to Anna’s cottage after the late-night prayers, and also about the plan for him to travel disguised as a monk.
Caelym had woken from his nap refreshed and ready to leave. He wanted to go as soon as it was dark, and he wanted to go alone, but when he said so, Aleswina’s tears dripped onto the freshly turned earth and, reluctantly, he agreed to wait for her. It was generous of him in view of the pressing need he had to be on his way, but instead of thanking him she just went on working with her back to the bushes.
He endured her silence for a while, then wondered aloud whether there was anything “a person should know about being a monk?”
Aleswina answered without looking up, “Anna says you’ll have to keep quiet and let her do the talking because you don’t know any Christian prayers.”
“Dominus regit me; et nihil mihi deerit—”
At the first words of the twenty-third psalm, Aleswina dropped her trowel and turned around, her mouth open in surprise.
“. . . in loco pascuae ibi me conlocavit. Super aquam refectionis educavit me, animam meam convertit. Deduxit me super semitam iustitiae propter nomen suum . . .” Caelym went on chanting, his legs crossed in front of him, his hands, palm-side up, resting on his knees, his back straight and his eyes half closed, coming to a resonating conclusion on the last syllables, “in perpetuum.” Opening his eyes to see Aleswina gaping at him in what he assumed to be reproof, he said, stiffly, that he had only heard her say the incantation twice and had been, as she might recall, quite ill at the time. “So now if you will tell me how I have been in error, I will correct my mistakes and will speak these words as they should be spoken.”
“But you made no mistakes! You said the whole psalm exactly as it should be said! It took me weeks and weeks to learn it!” The awe and admiration in Aleswina’s voice were unmistakable.
His confidence restored, Caelym acknowledged her tribute. “Well, of course, I am both a bard and a healer, trained since youngest boyhood in careful memorization and in the precise recitation of poems, sagas, and spells.” Returning to the issue at hand, he continued, “So now you will teach me what else I must know to be a monk, and I will prove myself as good as or better than a real one, betraying neither myself nor Annwr—no matter what she may have said to the contrary!”
Caught between Anna’s warning and Caelym’s command, Aleswina started to stammer that she’d never met a monk when the garden gate slammed open and Caelym drew back into the depths of the bushes. From the noise of the footsteps rushing towards her, Aleswina guessed—to her dismay—that the intruder was Sister Idwolda.
Idwolda, the newest of the abbey’s novices, was known for three things: her humble peasant background, her sunny good nature, and her clumsiness. It had been a challenge from the first for Hildegarth to know where to safely assign her—sent to wash dishes, the pottery bowls would break almost before she touched them; sweeping the floors, her broom handle would knock icons from their niches and saints’ pictures off the walls; and it was taken as fact that she had only to walk past the door of the scriptorium for ink pots to tip over and spill on just-finished parchments. Mostly now, she worked in the laundry on the assumption that even she couldn’t do too much damage there.
It was an open secret that Idwolda had been admitted to the convent just as her mother was about to sell yet another one of her numerous children to help feed the rest—and that it was Aleswina who’d supplied her dowry and pleaded with the abbess to take her in.
Overwhelmingly grateful for finding herself in the safety and the comparative luxury of the convent, Idwolda wanted more than anything to be Aleswina’s friend. She always managed to sit next to Aleswina in the chapel, at the dining table, and in the common room, where, under the guise of talking about how better to serve God, she’d whisper gossip about the other nuns and novices or tell rambling stories of her life before coming to the convent, happily unaware that Aleswina had only rescued her because Anna asked her to and had never guessed that she would take it so personally.
Now Idwolda, rosy-cheeked and beaming, wisps of nut-brown hair curling out from under her wimple, came crashing around the end of the hawberry hedge. Skidding to a stop in the middle of the row that Aleswina had just finished planting, she began, “The abbess sent me to—”
Seeing Aleswina staring downwards, Idwolda looked down too, and, seeing the bent and battered seedlings crushed beneath her feet, she launched into a flood of apologies and promises to repair the damage, squashing another half-row and knocking over the water bucket as she reached for the nearest hoe.
“No, please don’t! It’s all right! I . . . I . . . need you to . . .” Desperate to save the rest of her plants, Aleswina said the first thing that came into her mind: “I need you to tell me about monks.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Aleswina’s newfound ability to make things up at the spur of the moment come to her rescue once again. “Because now that I am going to take my final vows, I want to learn all about our brothers in Christ and what they do to serve the Lord! And you, dear Sister Idwolda, you know so much about life outside our walls, you must tell me what monks do.”
Eager to be helpful, Idwolda launched into a vivid depiction of monks—how some were good folk, not with the grandness of priests, but kind and caring, while others were no better than beggars and layabouts in brown cloaks.
Spending most of her time under Saint Edeth’s rule of silence left Idwolda, a naturally talkative girl, with a build-up of words wanting to be said. Now, given the chance to break out, they got away from her, following one tangent after another, until, entirely lost and without any idea of how to find her way back to the original question, she ended up telling Aleswina not only about monks in general but about the particular monk (one of the kind and caring ones) who had stayed with her family to give comfort to her mother in those sad weeks after her father’s death, and finishing with the somewhat out-of-context remark that her dear little brother, Codric, who’d come ten months after her mother was widowed, was thought by some to favor that very monk.
In a more just life, Idwolda would have been an actress on a larger stage. Still, the private performance she gave, playing the varied parts of her dying father, her grieving mother, and the solicitous monk—even emulating Brother Egred’s deep bass voice singing a ballad about the Christ-child working miracles from His mother’s womb—did not go unappreciated by the small but highly select audience watching it from his hiding place in the bushes. It ended abruptly, however, when she suddenly remembered what she’d been sent by the abbess to tell Aleswina.
“You need to go to the sewing room right away! They’re waiting to get started on your getting-married-to-Jesus habit!”
With that, she picked up her skirts and dashed out of the garden, leaving the last stand of bean shoots crushed in her wake.
The massacre of her baby plants, so soon after seeing the devastation at Annwr’s cottage, was almost more than Aleswina could bear. She got up and left through the gate Idwolda had left swinging open behind her, too downhearted to put her trowels away or remind Caelym to wait until she came to get him after the late-night prayers.