The Rose of the World by Alys Clare Read Free Book Online Page A

now the demands she was making on herself were extreme. To take her mind off the pain, she thought about where she was going.
    The abbey was out of bounds to her, for the reasons that dear Josse had so eloquently given. It was not that the community would not have welcomed her, and that included Abbess Caliste, for there was a great depth of understanding and love between the former abbess and the present one. It was that the abbey would not be best served by Helewise’s return, since, despite their best efforts not to do so, the nuns and the monks would not be able to help a very understandable tendency to remember – and undoubtedly talk at length about – how life used to be in Helewise’s day. Were there to be some emergency, there could very well be a few of the older ones who turned to Helewise and not Abbess Caliste for guidance. That would not do.
    Helewise did not feel that she could take up her abode in the little cell next to St Edmund’s Chapel, no matter how much she longed to, for much the same reasons. The chapel and its attendant accommodation were outside the abbey walls but, all the same, everyone would know she was there. You just couldn’t help that sort of news spreading in a place like the abbey.
    No. What she had in mind was somewhere a great deal more remote from the Hawkenlye community. It depended on two things: whether she succeeded in finding it, and whether the person who had very recently been living there would permit her to stay.
    She found the place quite easily, only missing her way once. The question of whether or not she would be allowed to stay did not arise, for there was nobody there.
    As Helewise unfastened the intricately-twisted knot of rope that fastened the door of the little hut, she wondered where Meggie was and when she would be back. Then she put aside her speculation and set about the tasks she had to do. She collected water from the stream and several loads of kindling and dead wood from the surrounding woodland. She got a fire going in the hearth inside the hut, for it would be cold that night. She checked on Meggie’s food supplies, relieved to discover that, although she would very soon be hungry unless she foraged for more, she would not starve. Once she had seen to the practicalities, she went outside into the little clearing and turned her mind to the reason that she had come.
    Being much closer to the abbey than the House in the Woods, the hut made a more convenient base for her task. But there was more to her choice than that; much more. She needed an intermediary who could slip in and out of the abbey without arousing interested comment, someone who did it all the time and who people were used to seeing coming and going, and this was the best place to find her. The person she had in mind had once lived mostly within the abbey walls as a nun, although it had been common knowledge that she had close allegiances with the strange forest people who had once frequented the area. Now they were gone, or so it was said, or perhaps they had become better at remaining hidden. The wildwood was steadily shrinking as the population grew and men nibbled away at its fringes, bringing more and more land under cultivation. In addition, the old tolerance of those who lived a different life and worshipped God in another guise was fast becoming nothing but a memory. In lands far away to the south, the church had taken up arms against those it accused of heresy, and it was only a matter of time before the same harsh and narrow rule was applied everywhere.
    It was no wonder they had gone, Helewise mused.
    Yet she was one of the few people who suspected that they had not all deserted the Hawkenlye wildwood. She knew for certain of two who remained. One stayed out of love for Hawkenlye’s abbess, for she was her sister. The other had her own unfathomable reasons, and it was she whom Helewise was waiting for.
    She stood quite still in the centre of the clearing.