Tate dipped her head in a nod, her voice betraying nothing.“That is true.”
Adelais looked back at Tate.“When was your abbey founded?”
“Almost two hundred years ago, by King Alfred himself,” the abbess replied promptly.
“Was there a holy place here before then?”
Another prompt answer.“Yes.”
“A Christian one?”
The answer came slower this time.“No.”
“So this was one of the very last places in England to convert?”
Tate took a few steps deeper into the space.The firelight gilded her skin, brought out faint notes of gold in her brown hair.“That depends on what you mean by convert,” she said.She tilted her face up to the glittering, starlike ceiling.“The people in this valley were quick to welcome the priests when they came.But slower to forget the old ways.”
Adelais remembered sitting on her grandfather’s knee, tugging on the mjölnir pendant hanging from his robes.She’d loved the idea that they were holding on to something ancient, somethingalmostlost, but not quite.She had the same feeling now.“How old were those ways?”
“In this valley?”Tate shook her head.“Even Mother Ardith didn’t know, but we think long before the Romans.Perhaps the people who erected the standing stone at the entrance to the valley.Whenever it started, it never stopped.And people knew this was a place of healing, and they came far and wide.”
“Because of the spring?”
“Partly,” Tate said.“It’s said that a drink from our holy spring will heal any ailment of the body.It’s also said that a night spent under the stars of Far Hope will heal any ailment of the soul.”She gestured at the ceiling so there could be no mistake as to which stars she meant.
Adelais thought of the sick pilgrims in the abbey.“Is that true?About the spring?”
“They get better here,” Tate said.“But sometimes I can’t be sure if that’s because here they are well tended, with lots of fresh air and good food, or because there is something special in the water.”
“And what about here in the star chamber?What happens to heal the ailments of the soul?”
Tate turned and looked at her, green eyes vivid in the firelight.“I think you can guess.”
Adelais had lots of guesses, and they were all filthy.There were only a few good reasons to have a warm, well-lit cave stocked with soft cushions and goblets for drinking, not to mention theoil, and put together with Tate’s fluency in sex and desire…
“If this room is for what I’m thinking, it’s hard for me to imagine Rome approving.”
“Rome doesn’t,” the abbess said, a small note of displeasure creeping into her otherwise neutral voice.“Which is rather hypocritical given the amount of sinning they get up to.But there are enough bishops—not to mention princes and dukes—who have been to Far Hope and believe in it.Until William, we could count on protection from the king himself, but now…”
She didn’t have to finish.Adelais would hesitate to call William a pious man given how much blood he routinely shed, but he was a rather devoted Christian, if one measured devotion in monasteries founded and money given to the church.He would not like anything as aberrant as Far Hope, and neither would Lanfranc, his presumed pick for the next archbishop of Canterbury.
“Do all the pilgrims come here?”Adelais asked.“Into the cave?”
“No,” Tate said.She adjusted a stoppered cruet of oil; it was as gleaming and clean as anything in a church.“Most come for the spring and have no idea the cave is here.Only the sisters can invite people here.Sometimes they are pilgrims, and sometimes they are known to us as guests we had before or people our guests vouch for.”
“So people come here to fuck, following in the footsteps of the pagans who fucked here before them, and somehow an abbey gets built to help it along?”Adelais had to give dead King Alfred credit: If she were going to shelter a pagan orgy site, that’s exactly how she would do it.
“The abbey was built because King Alfred recognized that this was a holy place,” Tate corrected.“That the way people left here after a night was a gift from God.Perhaps the pagans before the abbey didn’t know it as such, but that’s what it was.What it is.”She paused.“He also knew that Far Hope’s days were waning as a pagan site.But if it was a Christian one…an abbey…it could survive.Especially if the cave and what happens here stayed quiet.A truth known only to a chosen few.”
That was also smart of old Alfred.While it was common enough to find folk beliefs not much changed or liberally mingled with Christianity out in the countryside, eventually all the old practices would die out.Or be extinguished by overeager priests.But to cloak it anew, to hide it in plain sight…
It was maybe the only way a place like Far Hope could survive.
“But surely being an abbey presents some problems.For example, your body being consecrated to God.That makes it rather difficult to lead an orgy, doesn’t it?”
Tate gave Adelais a look like she knew Adelais was being deliberately reductive.“My body is God’s while I’m a nun, yes.That means I use it to bless people, and to heal.”
“I’m fairly certain that consecration means something is to be held apart.For God and for no one else.”
