I was set to collect up the poor ravaged bodies. Not that the flesh went to waste. The nuns ate chicken with their bread at noon the following day as they listened to the reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan. My plate saw nothing but bread, and that a day old. Why should I benefit from my sins?

A vocation? God most assuredly had not given me a vocation, if that meant to accept, obey, and be grateful for my lot in life. And yet I knew no other life; nor would I. When I reached my fifteenth year, so I was informed by Sister Goda, I would take my vows and, no longer a novice, be clothed as a nun, thus a seamless transition from one form of servitude to another. I would be a nun forever, until God called me to the heavenly comfort of His bosom—or to answer for my sins. Beginning in my fifteenth year I would not be permitted to speak, except for an hour after the noon meal, when I would be allowed to converse on serious matters. It seemed to me little better than perpetual silence.

Silent for the rest of my life, except for the singing of the offices.

Holy Mother save me! Was this all I could hope for? It was not my choice to take the veil. How could I bear it? It was beyond my understanding that any woman would choose this life enclosed behind walls, the windows shuttered, the doors locked. Why would any woman choose this degree of imprisonment rather than taste the freedom of life outside?

To my mind there was only one door that might open and offer me an escape.

“Who is my father?” I asked Sister Goda. If I had a father, surely he would not be deaf to my entreaties.

“God is your Father.” Sister Goda’s flat response discouraged me from pursuing the matter as she turned the page of a psalter. “Now if you will pay attention, my child, we have here a passage to study.…”

“But who is my father here—out there!” I gestured toward the window that allowed the noise of the town to encroach, its inhabitants gathering vociferously for market.

The novice mistress looked at me, faintly puzzled. “I don’t know, Alice, and that’s the truth.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth as she always did when short of an explanation. “They said that when you were brought here, there was a purse of gold coins.” She shook her head, her veil hanging as limp as a shroud around her seamed face. “But it’s not important. Now if we can…” She shuffled across the room to search in the depths of a coffer for some dusty manuscript.

But it was important! A purse of gold? Suddenly it was very important. I knew nothing other than that I was Alice. Alice—with no family, no dowry. Unlike more fortunate sisters, no one came to visit me at Easter or Christmas. No one brought me gifts. When I took the veil, there would be no one to hold a celebration for me to mark my elevation. Even my habit would be passed down to me from some dead nun who, if fate smiled on me, resembled me in height and girth; if not, my new garment would enclose me in a vast pavilion of cloth, or exhibit my ankles to the world.

Resentment bloomed in me at the enormity of it. Why? The question beat against my mind. Who is my father? What have I done to deserve to be so thoroughly abandoned? It hurt my heart.

“Who brought me here, Sister Goda?” I persisted.

“I don’t recall. How would I?” She was brusque. “You were left in the Abbey porch, I believe. Sister Agnes brought you in—but she’s been dead these last five years. As far as I know, there is no trace of your parentage. At that time it was not uncommon for unwanted infants to be abandoned at a church door, what with the plague.…Although it was always said that…”

“What was said?”

Sister Goda looked down at the old parchment. “Sister Agnes always said it was not what it seemed.…”

“What wasn’t?”

Sister Goda clapped her hands sharply, her gaze once more narrowing on my face. “Mother Abbess said that Sister Agnes was mistaken. She was very old and not always clear in her head. Mother Abbess says you’re most likely the child of some laborer—a maker of tiles—got on a whore of a tavern slut without the blessing of marriage. Now—enough of this! Set your mind on higher things. Let us repeat the paternoster in the very best Latin. No slurring of your consonants.”

So I was a bastard.

As I duly mouthed the words of the paternoster, my mind remained fixed on my parentage or lack of it, and what Sister Agnes might or might not have said about it. I was just one of many unwanted infants and should be grateful that I had not been left to die. But it did not quite ring true, did it? If I was the child of a tavern whore, my parents from the lowest of the common stock, why had I been taken in and given any teaching? Why was I not set to work as one of the conversa, the lay sisters, employed to undertake the heavy toil on the Abbey’s lands or in the kitchens and bake house? True, I was clothed in the most worn garments passed down from the sick and the dead. I was treated with no care or affection; yet I was taught to read and even to write, however poorly I attended to the lessons.

It was meant that I would become a nun. Not a lay sister.

“Sister Goda…” I tried again.

“I have nothing to tell you,” she snapped. “There is nothing to tell! You will learn this Latin text!” Sister Goda, crippled with painful limbs, used her cane across my knuckles but without any real force. Perhaps she had already decided I was a lost cause. “You will stay here until you do! Why do you resist? What else is there for you? Thank God on your knees every day that you are not forced to find your bread in the gutters of London. And by what means I can only guess!” There was no disguising the revulsion that filled her spare frame as she considered the lot of such women. Her voice fell to a harsh whisper. “Do you want to be a whore? A fallen woman?”

I lifted a shoulder in what was undoubtedly vulgar insolence. “I am not made to be a nun,” I stated with misguided courage.

“What choice do you have? Where would you go? Who would take you in?”

I had no answer. But as Sister Goda’s cane thwacked like a thunderclap on the wooden desk, indignation burned hot in my mind, firing the only thought that remained to me: If you do not help yourself, Alice, for certain no one else will.

Even then I had a sharp precocity. Product, no doubt, of a wily laborer who tumbled a sluttish tavern whore after a surfeit of sour ale.

An Event. An Occasion. A disturbance to ruffle the surface of our rigid, rule-bound days. A visitor—a high-blooded lady—came to stay at the Abbey. This was not out of the way, of course. We had frequent visitors to stay for one night or more, ladies of means who came to ease their souls through prayer, or to restore their peace of mind, retiring for a little while from the world. Or a flighty woman placed with us, so it was said, by a husband who was departing overseas and might not trust his wife to live discreetly, and alone, in his absence. Their sojourn with us was usually brief, making little impact on the ordering of our days other than to give us another mouth to feed and another bundle of laundry to wash.

Ah, but this visitor was different. We knew it the moment that her entourage—there could be no other word for it—rattled in fine style into the courtyard of Mother Abbess’s private accommodations. She was also expected. Was not the whole company of sisters marshaled to welcome her, Mother Abbess to the fore? And what a spectacle. A magnificent traveling litter swayed to a halt, marvelous with swags and gilded leather curtains and the softest of soft cushions, the whole pulled by a team of six gleaming horses. Minions and outriders filled the space. And so much luggage in an accompanying wagon to be unloaded. I had never seen such wealth in one place. A heraldic device stamped the curtains of the litter, but I did not then have the knowledge to recognize it. A frisson of excitement moved through our ranks, of overt curiosity, causing the edges of veils to flutter as if in a breeze. Eyes were no longer demurely downcast.

Jeweled fingers emerged; the curtains were twitched back in a grand gesture.

Well! Blessed Virgin!

The sight stopped my breath as a lady, aided by her tire-woman, stepped from her palanquin. There she stood, shaking out her silk damask skirts—a hint of deep patterned blue, of silver thread and luxuriant fur—and smoothing the folds of her mantle, the jewels on her fingers afire with a rainbow of light. She was not a young woman, but nor was she old, and she was breathtakingly beautiful. I could see nothing of her figure, shrouded as she was in the heavy cloak despite the warmth of the summer day, nor of her hair that was hidden beneath a crispinette and black veil, but I could see her face. It was a perfect oval of fair skin and striking features, and she was lovely. Her eyes, framed by the fine linen and undulating silk, were large and lustrous, the color of new beech leaves.

“My lady.” Mother Abbess glided forward, smooth as a skater over ice. “We are honored.”

We curtsied, a rustle of starched linen and woolen cloth, like a flock of dusty-feathered rooks. The lady nodded sharply, looking around her, and at us, without expression. Since her lips were pressed together into a line as thin as the ale we drank, I did not think she was pleased to be here. Her eyes might glow, but like the stars they held no warmth.

Mother Abbess folded her hands at her waist. “Will your stay with us be of long duration?”

“It is undecided.” The lady’s reply was short but uttered in the most melodious of voices. “I trust you have more than a cell to offer me in this place?”

Which proved my suspicions. She was not a willing guest. I watched in appreciation as the lady withdrew her attention from Mother Abbess—whose nose thinned and bosom swelled—and gave it all to the unpacking of her property. From one of the wagons bounded a trio of little dogs that yapped and capered around her skirts. A hawk on a traveling perch eyed us balefully. And an animal such as I had never seen, all bright eyes and poking fingers, the color of a horse chestnut, with a ruff around its face and a long tail, bounded from the litter. Complete with a gold collar and chain, it leapt and clung to the bodice of the lady’s servant, who submitted with resignation.