Chapter 1 #3
But then, several months ago when she’d left The Sanctuary for a brief trading trip to Birka, she had fallen into her father’s clutches once again. When she’d escaped that final time, it had been from a dungeon in his castle awaiting her marriage to the most vile man imaginable.
“What is amiss now, Lady Britta?” Mother Edwina, the abbess, asked with a long sigh, calling Britta back from her straying thoughts.
Britta—who disdained the royal label to which she was entitled—glanced up from where she’d been kneeling for more than an hour on the stone floor of the chapel. “Penance.”
“Again?”
“Father Caedmon likes to give me penance, as much as he likes hearing my confessions.” She rolled her eyes for emphasis.
“Child, your attempts at humor do not amuse me.”
Child?
The nun was no older than forty winters, but she carried a world-weary, stern demeanor under the strain of her position. She motioned for Britta to join her in sitting on one of the hard wood pews.
“’Tis not my fault that the priest gets pleasure out of hearing me create sexual experiences to confess to him.”
“Create?” Mother Edwina arched an eyebrow.
“Didst think I really know how to ride a man like a horse? Or get pleasure from a fat candle? Or jiggle my breasts apurpose to entice the tinker...yea, the one with rumbling bowels? Or sleep naked in the hay loft so the straw would rub my private places?”
With each of Britta’s fantasies, the good nun’s jaw dropped lower and lower. Finally, she said, “Britta!” The chastisement was belied by a grin tugging at Mother Edwina’s lips. “St. Bridget’s Bones! Why would you confess lewd acts you have not committed?”
“Because Father Caedmon likes me to. And not just me. Ask any of the novices. We have made a game of who can dream up the most outlandish examples of bedsport. Whew! Sister Ignatia wins hands down on that score. Who knew that turkey feathers—”
“Britta! That will be enough.”
Not nearly enough. “Really, Mother Edwina, think how boring my confessions would be otherwise. I am a trained warrior. ’Tis what I do best. But there is naught to defend here at the abbey, other than a wayward bull or angry bees.
Truly, my confessions would go thus: Bless me, Father, for I yawned during compline.
Bless me, Father, for I cursed when the chapel bell rang for the tenth time during the night.
Bless me, Father, for I want to nigh scream if I hear another Kyrie or Sanctus.
Bless me, Father, for laughing at Sister Benedictus when she broke wind hitting the high note of Gloria.
Bless me, Father, for I would rather lop off an enemy’s head than pray for him.
Bless me, Father, for wishing my father and my brothers to the fires of Muspell.
Bless me, Father, for drinking too much of Sister Margaret’s mead. ”
The only income source the abbey had was the sale of Margaret’s mead in the trading stalls of Jorvik. And good mead, it was, too, the secret ingredients passed on by the same Northumbrian family who sent a daughter named Margaret to be a nun each generation from ten decades past.
“You must learn to accept your lot in life.”
“Why?”
“Because it is the way of the Lord.”
“And who is to say that the Lord prefers I be a nun than a warrior? Remember Boudicca, the Celtic queen who led an army against the Romans?”
Mother Edwina made that tsk-ing sound she usually employed when Britta had asked an unanswerable question.
“I grow weary of the tedium,” she complained. “How can you bear the quiet and the same routine every day, month after month, year after year?”
“Inner peace is its own reward.”
Britta, feeling anything but peaceful, grabbed at her own hair with frustration, then pressed her lips together, pondering. “Methinks there may be another way.”
“I will no doubt regret asking, but what other way?”
Britta looped an arm over the Mother Superior’s shoulder and confided, “Returning to my father’s rat’s nest of a keep is impossible. The only way I can leave this nunnery is if I am dead. Or if my father thinks I am dead.”
“Thinks?”
“Yea. I will do naught to jeopardize the nunnery. But I must needs come up with a fake death.”
“And that fake death would be?”
“It must be a death where there would be no body as evidence.”
“Like a fire or a drowning?” Mother Edwina’s face brightened with understanding.
“Yea, but I am not about to risk either of those. How about if I have suddenly gone barmy?”
Mother Edwina muttered something about her already being barmy.
“For the next few sennights I could do some demented things so that word will begin to spread of my mind’s demise. Then when I jump off a cliff—you know, the cliff on the way to Jorvik —everyone will say I committed suicide in the midst of one of my fits.”
Mother Edwina’s jaw gaped with astonishment. “You would truly die if you jumped off that cliff. There is naught but sharp rocks and deep waters below.”
“I would not really jump. I would just pretend. And I would leave pieces of my ripped clothing on the rocks, with a bit of blood doused here and there. Oh, do not look askance at me. ’Twould be chicken blood.”
“May the saints preserve us!” Mother Edwina made the sign of the cross over her ample chest. “Where would you go?”
“That is the best part. I will hide in Sister Margaret’s mead wagon next time she goes to the market stalls in Jorvik. From there, I will arrange passage to Iceland and from there go to that new land called Greenland. Or else I could go to the Rus lands and become one of the Varangian Guard.”
“Have you lost your senses, girl?”
“Mayhap I have, but you must see that I have no choices left. Have you considered that Sister Bernice’s disappearance last sennight might be related?”
“Never!”
“My father has threatened to get me, even if he has to assault the abbey walls.”
“He cannot breach sacred walls. ’Twould be a sacrilege.”
Mother Edwina was so naive. “As if my father would care about that!” Britta muttered.
“Sister Bernice will return. She no doubt went to visit her family in Nottingham.”
Britta shrugged. She was not so sure.
“And for you, prayer, my child. God may yet have a religious vocation in mind for you.”
The next day, a driverless, mule-drawn cart pulled into the abbey courtyard carrying Sister Bernice. So brutally tortured had the young nun been that there was a communal horror and a vast wailing inside the convent walls.
After the funeral, Britta approached Mother Edwina again. “Can you see now that I must leave?”
Mother Edwina nodded, reluctantly. “If there is no other way, I suppose it could work.”
For the next few sennights, Britta did indeed convince more than a few nuns, a lusty priest and several passing travelers that she had gone barmy from her confinement in a nunnery.
Spouting a gibberish sort of language which she made up.
Pulling at her hair. Dancing with Sister Serena’s broom.
Bursting out in ribald song in the midst of mass. Even walking naked in the moonlight.
So, when the day came for her “demise,” her sanity was indeed in question. The only problem was, she needed some fortification as she and Sister Margaret wended their way slowly toward Jorvik. And what better fortification than Margaret’s mead?
By the time Britta stood at the edge of the cliff, she and Sister Margaret were both a bit drukkin.
As a result, she nigh killed herself climbing down the steep incline to place the bloody scraps of fabric.
Instead of helping her or urging caution, Sister Margaret sat in the grass singing a song about farm maids and randy soldiers.
“Well, that should suffice,” she called back to Sister Margaret. “We can be off now.”
“Are you sure?”
Britta jumped, not realizing that Sister Margaret had come up behind her.
Sister Margaret screamed as Britta teetered on the edge, attempting to get her balance.
But her efforts were all in vain, for a high wind came up, she slipped and fell head over tail, finally managing to snag the branch of a bush sticking out of the cliff side.
Her hands were bleeding, as were various other parts of her scratched body, but she was alive, thank the gods.
At least she was no longer under the influence of mead, the fall having shocked the fumes from her brain.
“Have a caution,” Sister Margaret yelled, peeking carefully over the lip of the cliff. “Are you all right?”
Odin’s Breath! Is she blind as well as drukkin? “Nay, I am not all right.”
“Should I pray?”
Oh, that will help! “Can you pray and throw me a rope at the same time?”
“Yea, I can.” Sister Margaret disappeared, then soon returned with a coil of thick rope, then disappeared again.
Britta peered upward carefully but could see nothing. Presumably, Sister Margaret was tying the rope to a rock or a tree.
“Catch,” the good nun said, then tossed out the heavy coil of rope. Unfortunately, the coil of rope did not immediately uncoil. As a result, it knocked Britta in the head, tearing her loose from her hold on the branch. “Yiiiiiiikes!” She went careening downward once again.
Britta screamed her outrage, to her father, her sister, and to the pretty man who’d caused the chain of events which led to this final catastrophe.
For some reason, though, she blamed the pretty man most of all.
Unfair? Possibly. But who could care about fairness now?
If the lout had not laid a burden on her heart, and loins, she would still be at The Sanctuary, safe and sound.
“‘Tis all your fault, you loathsommmmm...”