One
TATE
1068
THERE WASno grass greener than graveyard grass.
No matter the season, the weather, the biting wind or the burning sun, the grass in the large abbey graveyard remained a deep, soft emerald.Stubborn and lush.Edwin had always said the verdure was a sign of God’s love, a beautiful thing to gladden the hearts of the mourning.
Mother Ardith had said it was because so many corpses made for good soil.
Tate pressed her hand to Edwin’s name stone.Mother Ardith’s name stone was just to the side—the last name stone they’d been able to make before the mason had left to fight the Normans—and behind Tate was a row of fresh graves, marked with slabs of wood clumsily carved with crosses.
The graveyard would have very good soil indeed before this was through.
“Tate,” a familiar voice said.“There’s something you should see.”
Tate stood and brushed off her habit.She turned to see Wynflaed standing near the row of new graves, pale face drawn under her veil.Tate had already known it couldn’t be good news—there had been no good news since William the Bastard first arrived on their shores nearly two years ago—but if it was enough to upset the typically sweet-natured Wynflaed, it had to be bad even by their new standards.
“Of course,” she told her friend.She gave one last look at Edwin and Mother Ardith’s graves—their chaplain and their abbess, both in the ground far too soon—and took in a steadying breath.“Take me there.”
The smoke on the horizon was no more than a smudge when they climbed out of the valley that sheltered Far Hope Abbey, but it was undeniably smoke.It met a pale, cloudless sky and then faded into the blue.It came from some miles away; the village of Sutreworde if Tate had to guess.
Half a day’s ride away.Less with good horses.
The Normans were coming.And if Tate had prayed the abbey would be spared on account of its remoteness, its isolation from anything to do with politics or war, then her prayers hadn’t been answered.
“It’s because of Gytha’s rebellion in Exeter,” Wynflaed said.“It’s drawn the new king’s ire.”
Gytha Thorkelsdóttir was the mother of the defeated, and now very dead, King Harold, who’d been shot through the eye…or hacked to pieces…or some other manner of horrible death at the Battle of Hastings.The rumor was that Gytha had begun planning her rebellion the minute William had taken the field, sending her grandsons to Ireland to raise an army and then join her here in Devon to defeat the bastard king at last.
And so the Normans who’d been mostly preoccupied with establishing power around London and in the north had turned their gaze to the West Country.And it was a gaze without mercy or quarter.
Tate stood watching the smoke for a minute more, the cold spring wind whipping her veil around her shoulders.“It is death to stay in their path,” she said finally.She turned to Wynflaed.“You need to leave.”
Wynflaed’s pretty face set in a mulish expression.“No.I’m not leaving you.And I’m not leaving Far Hope.”
Tate looked down to the valley where their abbey nestled between the hills.At the site of their holy spring stood several stone buildings with arched windows filled with glass, their insides draped in gold cloth and vibrant hangings.Far Hope Abbey was a wealthy place and therefore a ripe target for plunder.Apparently a century or so of Christianity hadn’t been enough to shake the Normans of their ancestral urge to pillage.It had happened to churches and monasteries all over England since Hastings, and now it was going to happen to Far Hope.
Tate wasn’t giving up Far Hope without a fight.But she also wasn’t going to risk the lives of her sisters and the abbey’s pilgrims; she needed everyone who was physically capable of fleeing to do so.
“Wynflaed,” Tate said as gently as she could, because she wasn’t a gentle person by nature.“Take the rest of the sisters and the pilgrims to my brother’s house.You’re the only one here besides me who knows the way, and Thornchurch will be safe from raids—or suspicion.”
Tate’s brother, Heorot, had already sworn fealty to William, had done it the moment he saw the tide turn at Hastings.He’d gone to Sussex to fight for King Harold and had surrendered on the field instead, pledging his loyalty to William and then staying for the foreign duke’s disastrous coronation in London.William had rewarded Heorot by allowing him to keep his lands.Heorot was one of the few English thegns allowed to do so.
Wynflaed looked southeast, in the direction of Thornchurch and its small village of Thorncombe.“It’s a long way,” she said uncertainly, and Tate gave her a tight smile.
“And it’s a short way to heaven if you don’t leave,” she said.“Only the distance of a Norman arrow.Please, Wynflaed.I’ll lock the gates after you, and it will hold them out for some time.God willing, a few weeks.But I’ll last much longer with less mouths to feed.”
Wynflaed looked troubled but couldn’t argue with Tate.She knew Tate was right.“It just doesn’t seem fair,” she said softly, taking her friend’s hand.“That you have to stay while the rest of us flee to safety.”
“I’m the abbess,” Tate said, and after six months, it still felt strange to say.Wrong to say.Abbesses were supposed to be experienced, good of spirit, well past the bloom of youth.Tate was only twenty-five years old, and not a bit good of spirit.She’d come to Far Hope to atone, after all, to serve the penance she owed God.She hadn’t come to Far Hope because she wanted status or advancement.
But there were only a handful of nuns left now at Far Hope, which had already been a small place before the war, and it had lost too many sisters since the Normans had come.Novices running back home to families that needed them, sickness claiming Mother Ardith, along with so many others…
So when it came time to select a new abbess, Tate was the only fully vowed nun who was also in good enough health for the job.And after being elected by her few remaining sisters, Tate had gone to her room and wept—but she’d also promised herself after her tears had dried that she would never curse her fate again.Her sisters deserved better.Far Hope deserved better.
She didn’t rail or cry now when it meant that she must stay to face the Normans.It was her responsibility, her duty.
