When she mentioned the weather and the imminence of a great flood at the equinox caused by simultaneous torrential rains and a massive spring tide the warning was met with derision, a response Hildegard tended to share.
Josiana was held in respect because of her facility with arithmetic, geometry and other natural sciences, but they judged that this time she had miscalculated, no matter what she said about the old astronomer at Haltemprice agreeing with her.
‘Look around you! Look at the skies!’
After the recent rain the sky was the colour of a blackbird’s egg. A light breeze almost like early summer rustled through the leaves. The beech trees were a breathtaking shade of gold and were surrounded by a huge crop of beech nuts with swarms of red squirrels busily gathering the harvest before winter. You could not hope for a milder autumn. Even the novices, chores done, were sitting on the outside of the cloister walls to catch the warming rays of the sun and nobody even bothered to reprove them.
Others, more circumspect, went about their allotted chores without complaint, building up the priory’s defences, checking and rechecking the food stores down to the last detail.
The drainage ditches were now able to cope with all but the worst imaginable floods. The moat was cleared. The bridge was in good order.
The sheep, far too many to bring under shelter, were herded to higher pasture up beyond the manor lands on the other side of Cottingham and the cattle had already been removed to a couple of distant granges on land never before affected by floods.
Later that week, however, when officials wearing impressive City livery rode in from Wyke, the king’s town on the Hull, to make sure the nuns were as safe as they could be, even the naysayers began to take the warnings more seriously. If Hull expected to flood, they themselves, on the Holderness plain, would be right in its path.
The mood began to change again. It became a question of when would the heavens open, not if. The novices were discovered talking worriedly about it among themselves; the nuns, maintaining silence on the matter, walked about with increasing alertness. Over the next few days the atmosphere became febrile.