The boy made to follow his mother as she moved to leave, but she said quickly, “Stay warm there beside the fire, dear-heart. If Domina Elisabeth allows?”
With a short jerk of her head, Domina Elisabeth allowed, and Frevisse turned away to lead the way down the stairs. Behind her Sister Cecely said tenderly, “All will be well, dear-heart. You’ll see,” then followed her. At the stairfoot, Malde, one of the cloister servantwomen, was just coming with a cloth-covered tray that had to be the bread-in-warm-milk that Dame Claire had ordered, and she paused, looking uncertain what to do, meeting them there.
“Take it to my lady’s parlor. It’s for the boy,” Frevisse said. Malde slightly curtsied and stood aside for them to pass. Frevisse thought she heard a small sigh of longing from Sister Cecely behind her, passing by the food, but ignored it. Sister Cecely would be going without more than warm milk in the days to come. Day-old bread and cold well-water were the best she would likely have for most of the time, with just enough of other food sometimes to keep her in health. Frevisse could only guess how long a penance a bishop would give to an apostate nun after nine years of sinning in the world, but penitential fasting would be part of it. Still, for a woman to have sworn herself to Christ for life and then to have abandoned him for an earthly passion, for bodily lust…What penance could ever be enough?
But then outward penance in itself was never going to be enough, Frevisse thought as she led Sister Cecely around the cloister walk to the church. The true cleansing of a soul had to come from within-from the grieving, broken heart and the last crumbling of the mind’s pride into a full and final surrender of its failure. Only then could true healing come and Frevisse suspected that for Sister Cecely the way between here and there would be both hard and long, with much prayer not only by her but by all of them for her.
Frevisse silently admitted her hope that Abbot Gilberd would see fit to take Sister Cecely elsewhere, because Frevisse could see nothing but trouble coming from her being here. Abbot Gilberd had seen to his sister becoming prioress of St. Frideswide’s and, because of that, had shown the priory favor over the years. Surely at Domina Elisabeth’s asking he would take an apostate nun off their hands.
But that could only come later. For now, Sister Cecely was here, and that was very probably far harder for her than for any of them. Or if it was not, it should be, Frevisse thought tartly. How much from the heart had been Sister Cecely’s plea to Domina Elisabeth of her shame and her need for penance? To Frevisse, it had seemed planned and practiced, but as they came to the wide wooden door from the cloister walk into the church, Frevisse made herself ashamed of that thought. Sister Cecely should have been thinking on her shame and need for penance long before now, and so she could well have had those words burned into her and ready.
With a small prayer for forgiveness at her uncharity toward a penitent, Frevisse opened the door into the chill, shadowed silence of the church. There was nothing like Lent for bringing on much praying over every thought and feeling, and here was the place best to pray. Here, in the church, was the nunnery’s heart. All else in the priory existed so that the nuns might come to pray, in the way the Rule required of them each day, the Offices of psalms and prayers that wove through Benedictine life in an ever-changing, ever-returning pattern. For Frevisse those Offices were her life’s core and joy. Or usually they were. Sometimes-there was no point to pretending otherwise-the effort to drag her mind through an Office was as much dull work as scrubbing dishes in the nunnery’s kitchen could be.
In truth, there had been times when she had preferred the scrubbing of dishes, and in her young days in the nunnery she had worried when those times came on her and taken her worry to her then-prioress, Domina Edith, who had been so old when Frevisse first came to St. Frideswide’s that she hardly seemed to grow older through the years that followed. Then with seeming suddenness-but her nuns should have seen it coming long before they did-she had faded away and died, and Frevisse had felt the loss of her ever since.
But long before then there had been the day she had knelt in front of Domina Edith and told of her plight with the Offices, and Domina Edith had laid a hand on the veil of her bent head and said far more kindly than Frevisse had expected, “It comes to all of us, those times when prayer seems a useless thing and our souls a dry place in a comfortless world.”
Because it had seemed impossible it could ever be that way for Domina Edith, Frevisse had echoed doubtfully, “To all of us?”
“To all of us,” Domina Edith had assured her, kindly. “The thing to remember in the midst of that desolation is that, true as it is while it is, its opposite-the joy you’ve had in prayer-is also true. Because you are not in joy does not mean joy does not exist, only that you are not in it. But since joy is a true thing, you can find your way back to it. And you will, and will be the stronger for having gone through the darkness. But remember that you have to go through the darkness, not sit down in it and wail about being there.”
Despite all the years since then, Frevisse could still hear the gentleness of laughter there had been behind Domina Edith’s words. The laughter of someone who had faced that bitter inward battle and won and knew how good the victory is, even while knowing more battles would almost surely come.
Although perhaps, for Domina Edith, they had not. Frevisse was finding her own times of darkness were fewer as the years went by. When they did come, they were as dark as ever, but at least they did not come as often, and she knew now that on the far side of each one of them she would find she was changed to the better, more than she would have been without she had had to find her way through the darkness into light again.
She would have to pray, she supposed, that it would be the same for Sister Cecely.
No, she did not “suppose.” She knew she would have to pray it would be the same.
Still, while she held the door open for Sister Cecely to come past her into the church, she had a brief hope of seeing something of Sister Cecely’s feelings on her face as she returned at last to the place she had so wrongfully abandoned, but Sister Cecely’s head was bowed too low and, unsatisfied, Frevisse closed the door, shutting them into the church.
The priory’s church was a long, narrow, unpillared space under a bare-raftered roof. A carved wooden rood screen separated the choir-the nuns’ part of the church-from the nave where everyone else might worship, and there in the choir was the only place in the nunnery, besides her sleeping cell, that a nun might think of as particularly her own. In the two rows of high-backed seats facing each other longwise up the choir, each nun had her own place all her years in St. Frideswide’s. Only death or becoming prioress would take her from it.
Or flight out of the priory altogether.
Sister Cecely’s place had been kept empty, partly for shameful remembrance of her apostasy, partly because St. Frideswide’s had had only two novices come to it in the years since she had gone and there was no dearth of other seats for them, the priory never having grown as its founding widow had hoped it would. So Sister Cecely would still have her place. Not that she would have need of it immediately, Frevisse supposed. For the time being she would probably not be sitting in the choir but kneeling at the altar, and for more hours than simply those of the Offices.
At least she would not be often alone in her kneeling the next few days. Through these last days before Easter, the nuns set aside as many usual duties as they could, instead making a great cleaning of the nunnery in a glad readying for Christ’s resurrection. Everything that could be swept, scrubbed, polished, or laundered, was. At this end of Lent, with hunger everyone’s constant companion, the work was especially hard and therefore especially a gift to God, with the reward that as each task was ended, a nun was free to go to church and pray until she had to begin another. That made Holy Week a more-than-usual weaving of the work and prayer that St. Benedict had intended in his Rule, and presently there were two nuns kneeling at the altar, heads bowed, hands prayerfully clasped. Sister Helen was easily known by her novice’s white veil, and Frevisse did not need to see the other’s face to know she was Dame Thomasine. Even from the back and despite all the nuns, save Sister Helen, were in matching black gowns and veils, there was no mistaking Dame Thomasine’s thin-boned body nor the way she knelt, not settled back on her heels but staff-straight up from her knees, as if the longing for God and heaven pulled more strongly on her than on anyone else. Perhaps it did. From her first days in St. Frideswide’s-more than twenty years ago now, which Frevisse found startling to think on-she had always been in prayer in the church at almost every chance, not merely at Eastertide.