“Why?” Elianor burst out. “Why should I be patient when what I want is so very right?”
“Because patience,” Frevisse said, sternly meeting the girl’s gaze, “can make the person you’re being patient at very, very irked.”
She watched as that thought took hold on the girl, first with the beginning of a frown, then with dawning delight and a spreading smile as Elianor began to understand the possibilities.
Having given her that to think on, Frevisse made a slight bow of the head to her and escaped into the choir.
No matter what she had said to Elianor, her true thought was that it would be good to have the girl for novice as soon as might be. She seemed to have the true longing that would readily take deep root if it were carefully tended. The fierceness would need quieting, of course. Not quenched, but quieted before it burned itself out with its very strength. Fierceness in itself was not ill, but there was need to contain and guide it, so that it burned away the dross of body and spirit to leave only the soul’s shining.
Or as much shining as the soul could do while still held in the world by the body.
With surely very little time until the bell would ring for the next Office, she went to her choir stall and knelt there, her forehead resting on her clasped hands. She could remember how carefully, all those years ago, Domina Edith had guided her fierceness, so that instead of blazing up and burning out, it had become a banked fire deep inside her, burning onward, strong and mostly steady through the years. Out of that memory, she made a prayer that Elianor, if her calling was true, might be guided as she had been, into the deep, high, wide places of the soul where true love and true freedom were.
Chapter 17
Through Easter Week-the beginning of Paschaltide-the nuns’ ordinary tasks were kept as slight as might be, to give rest from the rigors of Holy Week and Easter and time for their own prayers outside the Offices, but thus far in the week Frevisse had not found much chance for either rest or her own prayers, aside from that brief while before Tierce this morning. So when a pause in her duties came early in the afternoon, she returned to the church, somewhat hurrying in hope she could reach the shelter of her stall in the choir before someone needed her for something.
She succeeded, was a little surprised but nothing more to find no one else there except Sister Helen, huddled down on her knees in front of her own seat. The first sharp stab of wariness only came as the girl looked up at her, face pale and strained, and pleaded, “Please, will you talk with me?”
Frevisse’s first urge was to tell the girl it was to Domina Elisabeth she should talk, that it was the prioress’ place to comfort and guide St. Frideswide’s nuns, but despite an inward quailing, she found herself saying evenly, “Assuredly,” and came to sit in the stall beside her while Sister Helen shifted backward from her knees onto the narrow wooden seat of her own stall.
There, she seemed to lose whatever she had wanted to say. She sat looking down at her hands twisting together in her lap, bit her lower lip for a moment, looked sideways to Frevisse, looked back to her hands, and only finally brought herself to whisper, “I’m frightened.”
That was so far from anything Frevisse had thought to hear that she said blankly, “What?”
“It’s Sister Cecely,” Sister Helen said desperately.
It would be, thought Frevisse.
“What if…” Sister Helen faltered. “She took her final vows and yet she…What if I…”
“Become as faithless as she did?” Frevisse said bluntly. “That you’ve the good sense to fear it gives good hope you won’t.”
“But what if…” Sister Helen turned her head and looked full at Frevisse, despair naked on her face, and desperately and in a rush, she said, “It’s not her. Not really. It’s that I don’t feel what I felt when I first came here. Not always. Sometimes I don’t feel it at all. Sometimes there’s no joy in anything. Sometimes I have to drag myself to Offices, they’re such a drudge. Sometimes I can hardly pray at all. I have to force myself. That can’t be right!”
“Right or not, it comes to all of us,” Frevisse said.
Sister Helen’s eyes widened. “Even to you? Even now?”
Frevisse did not understand the “even to you” and let it pass, answering instead, very firmly, “Even now. The only difference between what you’re suffering and what I sometimes suffer is that now I know that sooner or later I’ll come out the far side of it, into the joy again.”
“You do? Will I?” Sister Helen asked with mingled hope and hopelessness.
“You will if you have the courage to go on despite the darkness and even despair that comes,” Frevisse said steadily, hoping to steady her. “They do come. The darkness and the despair. And more than once, I promise you. But it’s not what you’re feeling at the moment that will make the difference. The difference lies in your willingness to go on despite of it.”
“What if I can’t go on?”
“The only thing that can stop you going on is your choice to turn aside. Or else death. If it’s Sister Cecely you’re thinking of, she turned aside. That will be the great difference between you. Or the great likeness,” she added in all fairness.
Sister Helen stared at her. Frevisse stared back, not knowing what else to say, until finally Sister Helen said, “Thank you,” looked away, slipped forward onto her knees again, and bowed her head onto her clasped hands resting on the breviary there.
Frevisse’s own urge to pray was gone, but she rose and went quietly to her place, sat, closed her eyes, bowed her head over her hands resting together on her lap, and wondered whether she had done well. By rights she should have sent the girl to Domina Elisabeth with her doubts and fears. She knew that. Sister Helen had turned to her simply because she was there, and she had answered the girl’s fear simply because she had an answer, that was all. But why hadn’t Sister Helen gone to Domina Elisabeth with her doubts? Why hadn’t Frevisse sent her there?
And yesterday there had been Dame Johane, equally worried and questioning, again someone Frevisse should maybe have sent to Domina Elisabeth.
This was Sister Cecely’s doing, Frevisse thought bitterly. Had the woman ever been anything but troublesome? That’s what she had been when trying to be a nun here, had made more trouble by running off, then had been a troubling-but fading-memory.
That had been Sister Cecely at her best-as a fading memory. Now, by returning, she was making trouble all over again, not least by this stirring of doubts and unease among the younger nuns. Not that unease and doubts need be bad. Frevisse had had her full share of both over the years and knew now that, fairly faced and fully dealt with, they had strengthened her in ways she would not have been without them. Her unease and doubts and the need to deal with them had deepened and widened her faith.
Unfortunately, knowing that did not necessarily make either unease or doubts any easier to bear when they came.
And not everyone came out the far side of them. However passing the trouble of Sister Cecely was-and it would pass-there was no knowing yet what would come of the unease, the doubts, the fears she had stirred up-unease, doubts, and fears that might have come at one time or another, but instead were all come at once. And at a time when Domina Elisabeth seemed least ready to take on their burden and steady her nuns.
Frevisse shied from that last thought, then made herself look at it straightly because it had to be faced. In some unclear way, Domina Elisabeth had become remote of late. Lent’s necessities seemed to have worn beyond the usual on her, leaving her deeply weary. To burden her just now with troubles beyond those come with Sister Cecely seemed unnecessarily unkind. Yet she had to be told. She was as bound by her vows as any of her nuns. It was her place, not Frevisse’s, to comfort and guide them, and sooner or later Frevisse would have to answer for the wrong of usurping her place if she went on doing so.