“But Brother John told Ralf nothing of this.”
“John is an honorable man, my lady. To do so would have meant saying why he was where he had been and thus betraying Eadmund’s confession. He could not do so, even if it meant his own life. The boy had to be the one to tell you about Simeon first.”
And he was almost a very dead, honorable man, Eleanor thought. “Your husband is a brave man,” she said aloud. “You must have loved him well before you both gave up the world.”
Anne flushed.
“And you still do, do you not?” Eleanor said quietly. “Perhaps not always as a sister does her brother?”
Anne stood up and walked over to the tapestry. “I pray that you are right in saying there is no sin in love, my lady, and I swear to you that I sin only in my thoughts while John sins not at all in his feelings for me. We once had a son together, you see, a much-adored boy who sickened and died before his tenth summer. Each of us grieved but John’s pain was darkest. He believed God had taken our son to punish John for his lust in the marriage bed. Since then, his love for me has been chaste. I long to follow his example, but I sometimes fail.”
Thus your grief is doubled, Eleanor thought, the loss of an adored child begetting the loss of a beloved husband.
Anne reached out and gently touched the embroidery in the face of Mary Magdalene. Her fingers slipped down the cheek of the saint. “It has been said by some that Prioress Felicia and Brother Rupert were closer than nun and priest should be. Knowing both, I never believed there was any impropriety. Yet when I first saw this tapestry, I wondered if our former prioress had once been tempted by lust, perhaps for her good priest, and had this made to remind herself that we can choose to let love either transform or destroy us. I found strength in that thought.”
Eleanor looked up sharply and studied the sad, but almost peaceful expression on Anne’s face. “Thus you teach me once again, Anne,” she said and reached out to touch the nun’s hand. “Are we not two sisters together, equal in so many ways before God? Anne and Eleanor, not sub-infirmarian and prioress? Indeed, I need a sister to be my conscience and I have none, either here or in the world. Will you act as that for me?”
“A woman of lowly birth such as I, and a sinful one, conscience to the prioress of Tyndal, the daughter of one of King Henry’s most favored barons?”
“Remember that entrance to Heaven is harder for me than it is for a camel to slip through the eye of a needle. Thus it is arrogant of me, a most lowly creature in the eyes of God, to ask you to act as my companion and conscience. If for no other reason, would you take on the task as a kindness to one of such mean rank in God’s eyes? You have perceptions and nobility of heart that I lack, and I ask with genuine humility for your friendship, unworthy as I may be.”
Anne smiled and gently took Eleanor’s hand in hers. “I am grateful you came to us, Eleanor. I was so very lonely.”
***
Many years later, some of the nuns and monks of Tyndal would swear that they saw a skeletally thin horseman on a very pale horse ride away from the monastery grounds into the forest beyond as the church bells rang for prayer that first evening after Simeon’s death. There were many more that claimed the bells had never sounded quite as sweet as they did the following morning when the first day of true peace dawned over Tyndal Priory.