Free The Hunter’s Tale by Margaret Frazer

without a mother-in-law at her back, watching her every move. I have my dower lands to go to and I will.“ Her smile deepened. ”I can find you a wife and husbands for Lucy and Ursula from there as well as from here, probably. Unless you want to find your own?“
     
    Hugh made a sound that admitted to nothing.
     
    Lady Anneys laughed at him, squeezed his arm again, and let him go. “There’s no hurry, though. And after all, Ursula may choose the nunnery.”
     
    ‘Do you think she will?“
     
    ‘I don’t know.“
     
    Hugh tried to think of Ursula grown up and shut away into a nunnery but couldn’t. Not that she’d be any more lost to them in the nunnery than married, he supposed. And a nunnery might be easier to visit than a brother-in-law, he half-jestingly supposed to himself, ready to let go of thought about what might come and be simply at peace in the summer-warm quiet, waiting to be called to supper.
     
    But quietly, hardly louder than the bees humming in the beebalm in the garden bed behind her, Lady Anneys said, “I think, when you return Ursula to St. Frideswide’s, I’ll go with her and stay, too, for a time.”
     
    Startled, Hugh demanded, “Why?” More roughly than he might have if she had not taken him so much by surprise.
     
    For a long moment she did not answer; then said only, still quietly, “It would be best, I think,” in a way that somehow stopped him asking more.
     
    Chapter 5
     
    Although dawn’s cobweb-gray shadows were barely gone from the cloister walk, the day was already warm and promised to be warmer and Frevisse made no more haste than the other nuns as they left the cool inside of the church after Mass to go the short way along the roofed walk to their morning chapter meeting.
     
    St. Frideswide’s was neither a large nor wealthy nunnery. It maintained itself but barely more and the room used in the mornings for the daily chapter meeting, where a chapter of St. Benedict’s Rule was read and matters of business and discipline were discussed, was a plain place, like nearly everywhere in the nunnery, with plastered but unpainted walls, a chair for Domina Elisabeth, stools for her nuns, a small wooden worktable, and nothing more. In wet or cold weather it served for the nuns’ evening hour of recreation before Compline’s prayers and bed, and in winter it was their warming room, having the nunnery’s only fireplace save for those in the kitchen and the prioress’ parlor.
     
    Presently, though, the hour of recreation was a long summer’s day away and there was most definitely no need for warming. Instead, the door stood open and someone had already lowered the shutter from the window, letting in the soft-scented morning air and a long-slanted shaft of richly golden light from the newly risen sun. Nuns whose joint stools were in its way shifted aside and turned their backs to it with a scrape of wooden legs on stone, except Sister Thomasine went to stand directly in its brightness, her eyes shut, her face held up to the light. Sister Thomasine had always lived her nun’s life more intently than most did. Given her choice, she would have been in the church praying on her knees at the altar more hours of the day and night than not. There was even sometimes whispered hope among some of the nuns that she might prove to be a saint, and Frevisse—who only slowly over the years had come to accept her as other than merely annoying—granted to herself that for Sister Thomasine the touch of the sunlight was probably like the touch of God’s hand in blessing on her.
     
    But then it
was
God’s blessing, Frevisse thought. All of life was God’s blessing, forget it though mankind might and ill-use it as mankind surely did. Sister Thomasine’s skill—or gift—was that she did not forget but lived her life in certainty of the blessing.
     
    It made her very hard to endure sometimes.
     
    ‘Sister Thomasine, sit, please,“ Domina Elisabeth said. Already seated herself in