Alys Clare: Fortune Like the Moon

But it was too soon — far too soon — for solutions.

Deliberately emptying his mind, he turned over and was very soon falling asleep.

The dead nun was named Gunnora. Her body had been taken back to Hawkenlye Abbey, and the infirmarer had done her best to disguise how she had died. With the wimple back in place, the dreadful slit throat was no longer visible, but it would have taken greater skill than the infirmarer possessed to do anything about the dead woman’s terrified expression.

Abbess Helewise, emerging from the abbey church after her third session of kneeling in vigil beside the cadaver, wished the dead girl’s family would hurry up and send word as to what should be done with the body. The coffin lid had been sealed now — thankfully — but, in this hot weather, the whole church, indeed the whole abbey, seemed to be corrupted with the stench of death.

It is not, Helewise said firmly to herself as she crossed the courtyard with brisk steps, good for morale. I shall have to do something about it.

It was all very well treating a grieving family with sympathetic tact — always assuming they were grieving, which was, Helewise had concluded, by no means certain. She had detected some strange attitudes there, in her dealings with them over Gunnora’s admission to the convent. I have refrained from pressing them for a decision, Helewise thought, for possibly they themselves, in shock at this sudden death, do not yet know what they want to do. Whether it would be best to take their daughter home or leave her here with her sisters in God.

But there were others to consider. Helewise had a convent of living nuns in her charge, not to mention the monks in their nearby establishment and all those unfortunates of various stations who, for whatever reason, were temporarily accommodated at Hawkenlye, and she could not go on indefinitely allowing the very air they all breathed to be corrupted by the dead. And, when one looked at it practically — Helewise was very good at looking at things practically — the sooner Gunnora was decently buried, the sooner everyone could get over the horror of her murder and proceed with ordinary life.

Helewise ducked her head and left the bright sunshine of the courtyard, crossing the shady cloister and entering through the door in the corner that led to the small room where she conducted the business of the convent. Of Hawkenlye Abbey in its entirety, for she was not only the superior of her nuns, but also of the small group of monks who lived beside the holy spring a quarter of a mile away, down in the little valley beneath the convent.

She had held the post now for five years. She knew she suited the Abbey — false modesty was not one of Helewise’s character traits — and she also knew that the Abbey suited her.

Frowning, she sat down at the long oak table which, at considerable effort and cost, she had brought with her from her former life, and, focusing her mind, began to go logically through the whole disturbing question of the life and death of the late Gunnora of Winnowlands.

* * *

The foundation at Hawkenlye was new, in terms of the construction of a major abbey, so new that it was still a blessed relief to be rid of the carpenters, stonemasons, and the endless crowd of workmen who, so it had seemed, were set on becoming as permanent a feature as the nuns and the monks. Building had begun in 1153, under the direct order of the new Queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and it had been because of a genuine miracle which had happened, right there on the very spot.

For time out of mind, there had been nothing more to Hawkenlye than a huddle of huts among the thinner tree growth at the edge of the great Wealden Forest. The forest was a lonely place, and many believed it to be haunted; there were tales of strange noises from the ancient iron workings, where men had laboured before history began, and more than one traveller lost down some long-forgotten track spoke of a phantom group of Roman soldiers who appeared to march off right through the trunks of a copse of birch trees …

Since the Romans had abandoned the old iron workings, little use had been made of the forest other than for the fattening of swine, on the abundant acorns and beech mast which littered the forest floor in autumn. The only time of year that the area could be called busy was the seven-week period between the autumn equinox and the feast of St Martin, when the woodlands were uncharacteristically crowded with people fattening their livestock before slaughtering them for winter provisions.

Into this strange and deserted place, on a hot day early one summer, came a band of French merchants, who had been on their way from Hastings to London when they were overcome by a mysterious sickness. They had been ill during the crossing from France, but, believing it to be nothing more than mal de mer, had proceeded towards London. By the time the group reached the ridge about the Medway Vale, however, all five were incapable of going any further. Delirious with fever, they were suffering excruciating pains in the limbs, and two of them had developed swellings in the groin. Their companions, terrified of contagion, found them what shelter there was in the primitive settlement at Hawkenlye, then abandoned them.

The Frenchmen were on the point of giving themselves up into the Almighty’s hands when, to their amazement, they began to recover. They had been drinking from a little spring in a shallow valley near to where they had been left, a spring whose water was reddish, slightly brackish. And the least sick of the merchants, who had undertaken the arduous task of bringing water back to his companions, had a vision. Still burning with fever, head throbbing and sight blurred, he thought he saw a woman standing over him, on the bank out of which the spring flowed. She was dressed in blue, and in her long white hands she carried lilies. She smiled at the merchant, and he seemed to hear her praise him for his devoted care of his friends; giving them the spring water, she said, was the best cure.

The merchants, naturally, told their story far and wide. The more entrepreneurial of those who heard it set out for Hawkenlye, and soon a brisk trade sprang up in phials of the miracle water. The Church, alarmed both at the lack of reverence being shown in the face of a true miracle, and at the loss of potential revenue to themselves, stepped in and built a shrine over the spring, with a small dwelling nearby to accommodate the monks who were to tend it.

Rumour of the wonderful appearance of the Virgin Mary, in an obscure glade in the faraway Wealden Forest, reached the great Abbey of Fontevraud, on the Loire close to Queen Eleanor’s home town of Poitiers. The Queen’s strong links with Fontevraud stimulated her ambition to create similar communities elsewhere, and, at her coronation in May 1152, she was already planning the first English abbey on the Fontevraud model.

Synchronism is a strange phenomenon, with an intrinsic power which often leads to the irresistible belief that certain things are meant. Thus it was for Eleanor, who first received pressure from Fontevraud to adopt this fledgling community at Hawkenlye in the name of the mother house — for was this not most suitable, Fontevraud also being dedicated to the Blessed Virgin? — at the very time when, just crowned Henry II’s Queen, she had the power to do so.

Hawkenlye Abbey was spectacular; both Eleanor and the Fontevraud community saw to that. The abbey church and the nuns’ house, up on top of the ridge, were designed by a French architect and built by French stonemasons; the piece de resistance of the master mason was the tympanum over the church’s main doors. In common with many of his fellow craftsmen, he requested, and was granted, permission to adopt the theme of the Last Judgement; few who gazed upon his creation remained unmoved by its power.