* * *
—
I awake to a soft knock on the scriptorium door sometime in the afternoon, after sleeping all day.
“It’s me,” says Mason’s careful voice. I get up and open the door. My eyes are still puffy; I blink a few times to unblur Mason’s face.
“You have to come.”
“Where?” I ask, still shaking off my sleep.
“The infirmary. You have to see this.” He takes my hand and we hurry noiselessly down the stairs. I haven’t even put on my shoes.
When we get to the infirmary, it’s bustling and noisy, but not with the death throes of the night before. People are laughing and crying. The couple with the two small children are unapologetically kissing in the middle of the gallery as their children play at their feet. Not a few are kneeling and weeping in loud prayers of gratitude.
They are all alive.
The prioress leaves the woman whose confession she’s hearing and greets me and Mason at the door. Her face is gray and tired, but her smile is euphoric. She grasps me by the shoulders, wanting to say something but not finding the words. She simply nods her head in approval.
“Ave!” she shouts, and claps, turning to the crowd. “Your lives have been restored to you. Now you have a task to do. You must go down to the town and search for those who still live and tell them to come here. You all must leave this place and return to your own homes and towns and begin again. Gather your belongings and go!”
“But the gate—”
“Am I not still prioress here? I will unlock the gate myself. Go home!”
Some of the pilgrims don’t seem to recognize me; they were too close to death, the disease having penetrated too far into their brains. But those who do recall me holding the cup of honeyed water to their lips come and kiss my hand as they leave.
The infirmary clears out. Joan and Cook and the Pri set about changing out the hay and bedclothes. We know what work awaits us tonight.
— 39 —
Autumn’s coming in as dry as summer’s been wet. The peas and beans should have been harvested weeks ago, but the vines lie shriveled in the field, foraged by pigs and goats that have quickly reverted to their feral natures. The nuns in the church refuse to come out to eat, but it’s just as well with food this scarce, the water from the cloister fountain running in a cloudy trickle. Still, they fast, and they cry, and when I visit Alice, I watch them sitting in the sanctuary corners staring in despair.
But the water from the yew’s roots is working, night after night delivering people from their slide into death.
We enter the woods under the curled russet parchments of the great oaks, listening to the acorns beat against one another like seashells, dense and hollowed. Mason lugs a leather sack on his back and a wooden bucket in each hand. I carry the wooden yoke across my shoulders.
“I have a surprise for you,” says Mason as we round the corner to the yew tree.
“Mason!” I gasp. “What’s this?”
Around the pool, Mason’s put in a pavement of smoothly dressed stones, smuggled from the chapel, so we can sit without getting muddy. Four steps lead down into the pool. A small channel collects water in a stone basin for drinking or filling vessels before it runs off into a longer channel away from the spring.
“I took a break from the chapel and worked on this instead,” he says. “And there’s one finishing touch.”
I stand in the water on the second step with my hands on my hips, watching Mason and enjoying the warmth seeping into my bare feet. He slings off the sack and reveals what’s inside.
It is a small memorial stone, a pointed arch framing a carved re-creation of the page from the Gospel book. He slides it into place against the yew tree, opposite the steps where I’m standing.
I get out and embrace him. “You trusted me. Even in all this chaos.”
“To think, this spring was here all along, but who else would have found it in time?”
“I just decided to listen and say yes, that’s all.”
“Maybe you’re actually a saint,” he teases. “Maybe you’ll levitate next. You’ll float up into the stars, and I’ll have to hold your skirts to pull you back down to earth.” We both laugh and trade legends of improbable saintly phenomena. We grow quiet, letting the after-laugh wash over us. We pray. We hold each other close before it’s time to fill our buckets and go back. Here, in this nest on the top of a little Yorkshire mountain, we feel free.
“There’s not much left to do in the chapel,” he says. “Now that I’m not digging as many graves, I’ve been able to put up more wooden scaffolds. Once I’m done with the capitals, I can collect my pay—and probably haggle for the pay of the other builders, who…ah…didn’t make it.”
I turn to him, scandalized. “Mason, that’s awful! You can’t take money from dead people.”
“I did the work of several men, and dug their graves, Edie. A worker’s worth his wages.”
“You’re right,” I admit.
“After I get paid, though,” he continues, “I want to leave. Together.”
“I can’t leave yet, Mason. I have to see this through. Not just the water, but I’ve got to get Alice out, somehow. That hasn’t changed.”
“There’s nothing saying you have to be the one to give the water, though, is there? Can’t you tell someone else where it is? Like Joan? Now that it’s got a marker, they can find it easily.”
“No. Absolutely not. Can you imagine Agnes finding it—or Felisia? If the prioress dies, Agnes will take over, and I don’t know what she’d do with something like miraculous healing water.”
He looks disheartened. I know what he’s thinking—he’s scared that I’ve entrenched myself here, that I won’t leave the priory with him after all.
“Let’s start back,” he says as the shadows turn purple. “We’ve stayed too long.”
We emerge through the last grove of trees, and the priory reappears downhill. Suddenly we hear the leaves shush some distance away.
It’s the Anti-Pri. And there’s nowhere for us to hide.
Agnes has been in the forest, too. She’s thin and pale, her habit dusty and her veil disheveled. She advances quickly toward me and Mason, gripping a basket of long blue flower cuttings in one hand, a pair of shears in the other.
“Sub-Prioress,” I greet her, bowing my head. “We were just—”