Leominster
She was early enough along that a simple brew of certain herbs would accomplish it. But they were low in stock in the abbey dispensary—enough for one heavy dosing only. There were new supplies drying to dull-hued crispness from the rafters of the workshop. But Audry would notice the depletion, and she could not lie to her own acolyte about where the stores had gone. Also, the side effects would not be pleasant—and Audry would recognize those side effects.
She would have to take Audry into her confidence.
No, she could not do that. For so many reasons. Her own distress would distress Audry, for one thing, but that was not her main concern. Audry believed Edgiva to be impeccably incapable of error or duplicity. Edgiva took no pride in that; in fact she found the responsibility of it quietly burdensome. She had often wondered how Audry would respond the day Edgiva inevitably toppled from the pedestal. If this was the event to do it, the result might be catastrophe. Better Audry hear Mother curse, or fall asleep in Lauds, or mutter heretically when Rome sent ever more laws that disempowered nuns. Let it not be wanton sluttishness.
Nobody here could ever know.
She was still mired in that uncomfortable moral swamp between the tactic of keeping secrets and the sin of lying.
But at least she had the means to make the problem disappear.
There were scattered huts in the fields around Leominster. Herders had built them to have shelter while moving their flocks. Some were still in fields, some now in woodland, where the sheep had not cared for the taste of the grass and so the shepherds had allowed the cleared land to revert to wood. These had become, as well, squatters’ homes for herbalists and mystics, some of them entirely Christian, most of them not; some were the occasional lairs of robber bands, usually Welsh. But there were a number that were—so small and derelict—left empty most of the time. Here lovers sometimes met clandestinely; sometimes, rarely, a sister or a brother from the abbey would receive a message in a dream that they were to subject themselves to nature’s forces for a period of a day or a week or longer, and meditate within a hut.
Edgiva decided she would take the herbs, a skin of water, a brewing pot, and means to light a fire, and sequester herself in such a hut for three days. She could spend time foraging for early-spring herbs that the dispensary needed, so that her absence from the abbey was not entirely selfish.
She departed one cool, sunny morning after Prime. She left through the gatehouse, exchanging blessings with the lay brother who guarded it. She walked through the eastern half of the small village, turned north, then bore east again, and without fear or fanfare wandered into the excellent grazing lands that surrounded Leominster for miles. Shocks of violets and daffodils peppered the ground with purple and yellow; the hazel and primroses and pussy willows offered their flowers as well. She made a note to herself to come back and harvest the celandine roots within the month.
The first mud-walled shack she encountered, some two miles away, was harboring a shepherd family, moving their flocks; the next two, just a few hundred paces apart, each hosted frightening-looking fellows in them, passed out drunk; the fourth, protected from view by a screen of witch hazel, contained a handful of naked people all entwined. Spring brought out every imaginable strain of lechery, Edgiva thought, glad that she was not the one who would eventually be hearing their confessions. She kept walking, hearing the bells of the abbey fading behind her at each service. By noon she had found an empty hut, on the edge of a glade of young oaks, still dormant, and hawthorn, whose tips were budding green. She laid her meager supplies outside the opening, beside a patch of violets; she wanted to stay in the sun for a while.
She lit a fire outside the hut. She poured water from the skin into the pot, and levered the pot over the fire on a branch. When the water was hot, she added the herbs. The delicately dusky scent of the dried herbs—half air, half earth—transformed into something syrupy and green, as the passivity of earth and air yielded to the active energy of fire and water.
When the decoction was full brewed, she removed it from the flames and set it on the dirt. As it steeped and then cooled enough to drink, she prepared what she needed for the aftermath: a bundle of clean rags outside the hut and a comfortable sleeping-sack with an extra blanket inside it, with more rags in ready reach; the rest of the water; a bag of dried apples. She knew this brew would ruin her appetite, but she would have to eat something.
When the pot had cooled enough for her to hold it, she sat cross-legged on her cloak by the dying fire, picked up the pot, and stared into the murky liquid. She said a few prayers for comfort. She thought for a moment about Sweyn, and what life might be like if, under different circumstances, there was some way that she could keep this child. She already suspected it was a boy, which made no difference to her but would probably have pleased him. She apologized to the spirit hovering near her that was waiting for the moment, months from now, when it could inhabit what was, as yet, not human. She promised it that there were many more babes due for birth. It would find a vessel soon.
She crossed herself, raised the pot to her lips, and felt the heat of the iron radiantly warm the inside of her mouth. She breathed in the acrid smell of the brew.
And then she set it down on the ground beside her.
It was an attack of nerves, that was all. She was not used to taking her own medicine—she was rarely in need of healing—and so she was nervous about the side effects, because she knew they’d be uncomfortable. That was all.
There was a rustle in the woods behind her. A mousy, dark-haired woman from the village, the blacksmith’s wife—in a dull, ill-fitting tunic, torn stockings, no girdle—hesitatingly emerged from the scrub-oak glade. She was in tears. And when she saw Mother Edgiva, she looked frightened. She stopped short, was briefly rigid, and then turned, as if she would flee into the underbrush again.
“It’s all right,” Edgiva called to her in a gentle voice. “I know why you’re sobbing.”
And suddenly, she did know.
The woman looked even more frightened, even more rigid. But Edgiva, almost trancelike, held out her hand in a welcoming gesture, and slowly the weeping woman moved toward her.
“I fought him off, I swear I did, Mother,” she said. She was cringing with fear, her shoulders hunched up to her ears and forward almost to her breastbone. “But he’s a lot stronger than me. Always has been, since we were wee. Mother used a shovel to get him off me. I know t’aint natural, but I swear I ne’er provoked him.”
“I believe you,” Edgiva said with almost eerie serenity.
“But my husband, he dinna believe me, he says if there be child—”
“There will not be,” Edgiva said. “Here. I have prepared this for you. Drink it.”