While Durthena was on her patrol of the abbey’s chambers and corridors, the abbess, Hildegarth, was sitting at her writing table working on her annual report to her bishop, Higbald of Lindisfarne. The accounting sheets from the past year were stacked in twelve orderly piles in front of her, and the ledger from her first year at Saint Edeth’s was lying open on her lap.
She’d gotten it out to check whether her recollection of that years’ candle tally was correct and that its tripling since then could be justified by the comparing the number of illustrated pages they’d completed that year (seven psalm sheets, three saints’ histories, and a psalter) with this year (one complete bible, seven saints’ histories, and thirty-two prayer sheets). Feeling vindicated that the candles were fully accounted for, Hildegarth relaxed and, in an uncharacteristic loss of concentration, flipped through the pages that recorded the history of her first year as the third abbess of the Abbey of Saint Edeth the Enduring in alms and dowries, bushels of grain and bolts of cloth, blocks of salt and barrels of pickled fish.
At the same time that Durthena was putting out her hand to open the door to Aleswina’s room, the abbess was turning to the page of the ledger that recorded Aleswina’s promissory dowry, written in Hildegarth’s steady and precise hand and dated the twenty-seventh day of June Anno Domini 773.
Hildegarth arrived at the Abbey of Saint Edeth the Enduring at a time of crisis.
Saint Edeth had been an inspiring and charismatic figure. Born to a noble family and on the verge of marriage to a king’s nephew, she’d had a vision of Jesus. He appeared to her in the middle of the night and spoke in a voice of unearthly beauty, saying, “Find My wellsprings and you will find Me!” as he pointed to three stars that changed before her eyes into fountains of water spouting up out of a cloud.
Defying her parents, Edeth set out alone on her mission from God, gathering disciples along the way—enraptured women who left pots burning on the hearth and husbands demanding their dinners to follow her to into the wilderness.
Undaunted by hunger, cold, or the sounds of wolves howling in the night, they’d traveled northward until finally reaching a boggy meadow, where they gathered in prayer around three sluggish springs leaking out of the cracks in half-frozen ground that Edeth proclaimed were the same holy waters she’d seen in her dream. That all but three of them survived the winter huddled in makeshift shelters was the first of Saint Edeth’s many miracles. That she met Theobold, then the Earl of Derthwald, three years later, on her way to beg alms from the closest village, was another.
With the help of God and endowments from Theobold, Edeth saw her holy springs enclosed into wells, the abbey’s major structures raised, and its outer walls completed in the course of five years.
Then she died.
The convent’s second abbess, Freaberga, had been the first apostle to join Edeth’s trek into the wilderness. As abbess, Freaberga imitated Edeth as closely as possible, answering any and all questions by quoting from her predecessor’s extensive list of rules and homilies. Freaberga, however, lacked Edeth’s power of persuasion, and when she died five years later, at the same age and the same day of the year that Edeth died, she left the abbey with an aging generation of nuns no longer able to do the heavier work in the convent’s fields. Despite Saint Edeth’s dictum that God would provide, the community could not feed itself even in good harvest years without Theobold, whose ongoing contributions allowed them to purchase what they could not gather or grow.
Sent by her bishop to revive the convent or close it down, Hildegarth arrived at the abbey’s gate to be greeted by a double row of impassive faces and nervous fingers picking at the folds of threadbare habits. She hardly had time to unpack her reliquaries before the gray-faced prioress, who before this had answered Hildegarth’s spoken questions with abrupt hand signals, rushed into her chambers, wailing that King Theobold had died and, in a despairing moan, adding that the king’s nephew, now the king, cared only for profane earthly pleasures and would never give them the alms the old king had.
Leaving Sister Udella wringing her hands, Hildegarth took the abbey’s only carthorse and went to the palace to offer her condolences and promises of prayers for the departed king’s soul, along with her hope for Lord’s blessings upon the new king’s reign.
She’d returned to the abbey with a miracle of her own—a contract inscribed on royal parchment committing Theobold’s four-year-old daughter to the convent, along with regular endowments that would double when Aleswina entered the convent at the agreed-upon age of thirteen and become permanent on the day she took her final vows.
That had been the turning point for Hildegarth and the abbey both.
As word spread that the king’s own cousin was pledged to the convent, well-endowed entrants began to arrive from as far away as the capital city of Atheldom, swelling both its ranks and its coffers.
When the king’s guards brought Aleswina to the abbey on the appointed day, it was obvious to Hildegarth that the thirteen-year-old princess was not there of her own free will. This did not worry the abbess unduly. She herself had struggled over relinquishing her earthly yearnings and was confident that with the right combination of firmness and patience, Aleswina could be guided along the path to true commitment—maybe not the path she would have chosen for herself, but the highest and best path, nonetheless.
Nodding her head and drawing in a deep breath, Hildegarth closed the ledger. With God’s help, her work had finally paid off. For almost a week now, she had watched with growing confidence as Aleswina had said her prayers with newfound conviction, sung the hymns with inspired passion, and today looked up at Hilde-garth with reverent understanding throughout her elucidation of that most challenging of parables—the return of the prodigal son.
There was no question in Hildegarth’s mind that Aleswina was ready to take her vows, and none too soon. Hildegarth had gotten a cold reception from the king when she went to the palace to convey the abbey’s condolences for the death of his most recent wife. She’d hoped the king would not ask whether Aleswina had made her final commitment—but he had. And when she’d had to admit that after seven years of daily indoctrination, Aleswina was still a novice, she’d had an uneasy feeling that the king might be considering sending his cousin to some other convent.