“Soldiers!” Bronwen said. “They came to the door, and the watchman let them in. The Saxons are coming!”
Dear God. They’d been foolish to think their lone convent could escape the Mercian barbarism that had become so common in recent months. Lord Modred’s soldiers had pushed King Arthur’s forces out of every haven but his last stronghold in Eryri, or Snowdonia as the Saxons called it. They would overrun all Wales if Arthur died as her dream promised. Once upon a time, that moment had resided in the impossibly distant future. Not anymore.
Bronwen made to run, but Nell still held her arm. “Not that way. Did you see Sister Mari?”
“Yes. In the dormitory.”
Nell nodded. “Good. Tell her I said to gather as many of the girls as she can. If we can get to the chapel, we can bar the doors from the inside. Bring them quick as you can. Remember—the chapel, not the church. From the shouts outside, the Saxon soldiers are already there.”
“Yes, sister,” the girl said, Nell’s evident calm easing her fears.
Nell released her, and Bronwen ran back the way she’d come. The Saxons hadn’t penetrated the convent this far as yet. Sister Mari was not only a good friend, but she was reliable. She would come. Meanwhile, Nell needed to discover what had happened to the abbess, who had left her room. Nell hiked up her skirts and trotted down the stairs towards the common areas of the convent. As Nell arrived in the dining hall from a back entrance, having already searched the warming room and the scriptorium, two sisters spoke to one another, alone and in quiet voices, near the main door a dozen yards away. Her abbess’ posture was as if nothing untoward was happening in the courtyard beyond.
“What are you doing here?” Nell ran up to them, heedless of decorum or her dignity. “We must flee!”
“Lord Wulfere told me to wait here for him, and he would explain everything.” Abbess Annis’ eyes were wide and guileless.
“And you believed him?”
“Of course,” she said. “He told me that his soldiers merely needed to commission a quantity of our foodstuffs.”
“Commissio—” Nell broke off the word as a man flung open the door to the dining hall. Tall and dark, with a bushy black beard that obscured his face, Wulfere, the commander of the Saxon forces on Anglesey, strode towards them. He towered over Nell, who was slightly less than middle height for a woman. His heavy boots left a muddy track across the floor, evidence of the unrelenting rain that had fallen over the island during the last week.
Wulfere had set up his camp to the southwest of the convent, in preparation for the moment Modred allowed him to cross the Menai Strait and attack King Arthur’s seat at Garth Celyn. The Traeth Lafan, the Lavan Sands, had served as a crossing point of the Menai Strait for millennia, but the waters in the Strait were unpredictable and treacherous, even to those long accustomed to their moods. To counter that unpredictability, the Saxons had built a bridge of boats, a hundred of them lashed together and anchored at both ends. Wulfere was waiting for Modred’s signal to cross.
Meanwhile, he amused himself the best he could. Apparently, now, with us.
“Madame Abbess.” Wulfere spoke in butchered Welsh and Saxon and gave Annis a slight tip of his head. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
Annis simpered back, the loose flesh around her mouth giving way to a vacant smile. “It is our honor to serve Lord Modred, our rightful king, in whatever way we can.”
Nell bit her lip. King Arthur had no heir, and whispers had begun already that when Arthur died, stability under Modred and his Saxon allies was preferable to the chaos that would inevitably ensue as Welsh stakeholders fought among themselves for Arthur’s crown.
“Are you mad?” Nell kept her voice low and even, so Wulfere wouldn’t react to the tone, if not the words themselves.
“It isn’t just foodstuffs they want!” Sister Ilar chimed in, for once supporting Nell’s position. “They’ve turned Queen Gwenhwyfar’s coffin into a horse trough!”
“It is our duty to bring peace to Anglesey,” Annis said.
“Do you object, sister, to assisting those in need?” Wulfere asked Nell. “Are not my soldiers as much God’s children as any other men?” He gazed at the three women, amusement in his face, and although Nell wanted to stare him down, she didn’t dare defy him. Annis might be blind to what was happening in her convent, but Nell was not. It was time to leave. Annis wouldn’t act, so it was up to Nell to stand in her stead.
“Excuse me.” Nell curtseyed to both Wulfere and Annis and backed away. Just as she turned towards the side door that led to the cloisters, a number of Saxon soldiers came through the door behind Wulfere. Nell didn’t wait to see what they wanted.
I can’t believe she just opened the convent to them! How could she betray us so? But Nell knew how it was possible. In an effort to quell what the Church viewed as a convent of too-independent women, Archbishop Dafydd had appointed an un-ambitious innocent to lead them. For all that Annis was approaching her fiftieth year, she knew nothing of men, the world, or anything in it. Nell was not so naïve.
She closed the door to the dining hall. It had no lock, but since the cloister could be accessed by four other entrances, it would have been futile to try to stop the men from reaching it. They hadn’t found it yet, but perhaps that was because the church and food stores were keeping them occupied. They would ransack them and then turn their attention to the women. The Welsh were hardly more than animals to the Saxons, and they treated them as such.
Nell was relieved to see Bronwen and Mari, a cluster of sisters in their wake, hustling towards the chapel from the dormitory entrance. Nell intercepted them at the chapel door. “Thank the Lord you’ve come!” She grasped Mari’s hand and squeezed it, trying to convey her relief and reassurance.
Mari leaned forward and spoke low, so as not to alarm the other women. “What’s happening, Nell?”
Nell let the rest of her sisters file inside the chapel before replying. “The worst. I must see to those in the infirmary. Some might be well enough to travel with us. Perhaps I can hide the rest.”
“I’ll come with you,” Mari said.
Nell shook her head. Mari’s eyes were too wide, and her hair had come loose around her shoulders, a match in color to Nell’s, although Mari’s red-tinged strands were shot with grey. “No. Stay inside the chapel. Without you, the younger sisters will fall to pieces. Bar the door until I get back. If I don’t return within a count of one hundred, you must go with our sisters into the tunnel beneath the crypt.”
“I can’t leave you!”
“You can and you will.” Nell’s heart pounded in her ears but she fought the rushing sound and the panic, determined to hide her feelings so as not to upset Mari further. Mari was soft-hearted, which is why she mothered the younger novices, but not one to take charge. There was no one else to lead if Nell didn’t. “But I hope you won’t need to.”
Without waiting to see if Mari obeyed her, Nell dashed towards the entrance to the infirmary, situated at the very rear of the complex and isolated from the rest of the living quarters by a narrow passage, in case a quarantine was ever necessary. The sisters could access the room from the herb garden beyond, and Nell had a secondary thought that her sisters could flee that way, if the tunnel proved impassable.
Nell pushed at the thick oak door to the infirmary and froze on the threshold. Hell on earth stared her in the face. Blood ran from the beds to the floor, soaking the undyed wool blankets a deep red. The half dozen sisters who’d lain under her care, along with the elderly sister who watched over them at night, had been murdered as they slept. The far door that led to the outside world bumped against the inner wall, moving in the gusting wind. Beyond, darkness showed. She couldn’t risk escaping with her sisters that way, not with the men who’d done this so close. Nell stared at the carnage, then spun on her heel and fled back to the chapel.
Mari had disobeyed, hovering in the doorway to wait for Nell’s return. “What is it?” Mari asked when Nell reached he
r.
“They’re dead.” Nell pushed Mari into the chapel, even as she looked over her shoulder at the first Saxon soldiers spilling into the cloister, torches blazing in their hands.
“You there!” A soldier said, in Saxon.
“Hurry!” Mari’s voice went high.
Nell slammed the door shut and dropped the bar across it. As more shouts filled the cloister, she faced the other women. Mari stood three paces away, taking in huge gulps of air, her hand to her heart. Nell’s lungs refused to properly fill with air either.
A young voice piped up from the rear of the group. “What about the rest of our sisters?”
Someone thudded a fist on the door. “Open up!”
Nell set her jaw and grabbed a candle from a shrine to St. Tomos before pushing through the small group of women and girls. “We can’t help them.” She led the way down the steps into the crypt, trotting past the ancient tombs, the voices of the soldiers fading behind them the deeper they went.
King Arthur had commissioned Llanfaes Abbey upon the death of his beloved wife, Gwenhwyfar. Her grave lay in the church, which the Saxons were sacking even now. The chapel was older, far smaller, and had served the people of Anglesey since Christianity came to the island, back when the Romans ruled it. Rather than pull the chapel down, King Arthur had constructed his abbey around it—and refurbished the Roman tunnel that ran beneath it, and which matched the one underneath Garth Celyn.
Some might have said that the king was overly cautious to have expended so much effort on the chance that a hidden escape route might one day be needed. As far as Nell knew, none ever had, either here or at Garth Celyn—at least, not until today. Given the actions of the Saxons over the last month, King Arthur was proving not only cautious, but prescient.
Maybe he saw too.
The convent itself sat a hundred yards from the edge of the Menai Strait, so that King Arthur could look across the water to the spot where he’d buried his wife. A current of air bringing the smell of damp and mold wafted over Nell as she approached the entrance to the tunnel. The near constant autumn rain on Anglesey, coupled with having built so close to the sea, meant they couldn’t stop the water from seeping between the stones.
“Here it is.” Nell came to a halt in front of a blank wall.
“Here what is?” Mari peered over Nell’s shoulder at the unadorned stones.
“The entrance,” Nell said. “I need more light.”
Someone raised a torch so it shone at the wall. Nell handed her candle to Mari and then pressed both hands on a rounded stone at waist height. With a scraping sound, the door swung open on its central pin, revealing darkness beyond. The tunnel that led from the crypt stretched north, under the protective wall of the convent and beyond.
“We have to go inside?” Bronwen said. “What if there’s no way out! We’ll die in there!”
“The dark can’t hurt you,” Nell said. “Saxon soldiers most definitely can.”
“But how do we know—”
Nell grabbed Bronwen’s arm. She’d never thought of Bronwen as one of the more outspoken novices, but that was proving the case tonight. “Because all the sisters in the infirmary are dead, slaughtered as they slept. I don’t want that to happen to you!”
“But Lord Modred wouldn’t—”
Nell cut her off again. “It’s time to grow up, Bronwen. All of you.” Nell gazed at the face of each girl in turn. “It doesn’t matter if you support Lord Modred’s claim to the throne, or King Arthur’s resistance. Both sides have committed atrocities in this war. Do you want me to list all the religious houses the men out there—and others like them—have sacked? The villages they’ve destroyed? The women they’ve raped?”
Bronwen shook her head uncertainly.
“If you don’t want to be one of them,” Mari broke in, “I suggest you do as Sister Nell asks.”
“Yes, sister.” Bronwen kept her eyes downcast.
Nell turned away; she didn’t think it was her imagination that her sisters gave her more space now than before. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t know what went on beyond the walls. Many of them had lived at the convent their whole lives. At fifteen and newly married, she’d been as ignorant and innocent as Bronwen. But Nell had come to Llanfaes as an adult, ten years ago at the death of her husband and her two little boys, four year old Llelo and infant Ieuan.
She’d seen—and she’d seen—what men could do.
Once inside the narrow passage, Nell let the others file past her, Mari in the lead still carrying the candle. Nell then pulled at the door and allowed it to close with a gentle click. Her shoulders sagged in relief that they were safe, at least for now. At worst, she was wrong about Wulfere’s men, and Annis could administer to Nell whatever penance she chose for leading her sisters astray and into the wild in the middle of the night. As unpleasant as that might be, Nell wished for it.
But she wasn’t wrong. The scent of smoke, from a source not as far off as she might like, drifted from the chapel through a crack underneath the door, pulled into the tunnel by the open air at the far end. Without further hesitation, Nell hefted her skirts and trotted after Mari.
“Are we almost there?” Mari asked when Nell reached the front of the line of women.
“It isn’t much farther,” Nell said. “Before her death, Abbess Alis entrusted me with the secret of the tunnel. As soon as the Saxons landed on Anglesey, I came here to make sure the tunnel hadn’t collapsed. That was some months ago, of course.”
Mari nodded, and then said, her voice so low Nell could barely make out the words, “Do I smell smoke?”
“I fear they are firing the chapel,” Nell said.
“Why would they do that?” Mari said, and then answered her own question before Nell could, her voice flat and accepting. “Because they couldn’t open the door. They think we’re still inside.”
Nell canted her head, agreeing, though not wanting to give more emphasis to Mari’s guess than that.
But Mari wasn’t finished. “Without this tunnel, our choice would have been to die, or to surrender to the soldiers.”
“Llanfaes is an abbey patronized by King Arthur,” Nell said. “Wulfere sees nothing wrong with leaving no one alive to remember it.”
A hundred steps later, they turned a corner, and the tunnel began to slope upwards. Mari’s torch reflected off the wooden beams that supported the roof and then finally shone on the trap door that led to one of the Abbey’s outlying barns.
“This is it?” Mari said.
“Yes.” The height of the tunnel had shrunk to just above Nell’s head. With the flat of her hand, she pushed up on the square of wood, three feet on a side, which loosened and then popped free with a snap.
Nell froze, but after a count of ten, she couldn’t see or hear anything amiss. She shoved the cover to one side and grasped the edges of the opening. With a boost from Mari and another sister, she pulled herself out of the tunnel and into a sitting position on the floor of the barn.
Hay lay scattered about in the stall in which she found herself. While the hay loft above her head was full, the horse stalls were empty. They used this barn only at harvest time and when the overflow from the Abbey’s visitors was such that there was no more room for equine guests in the Abbey’s stables. Nell got to her feet and walked to the far wall. Hidden in plain sight among the tools and farming implements was a short ladder. She removed it and brought it back to the hole.
“I hope we’ll be safe here for the rest of the night.” Nell looked down on Mari’s upturned face. “Let’s get them into the loft.”
*
It wasn’t quite light when Nell slipped through the barn door. It creaked, and the wind banged it back against the jam, stilling Nell at the noise. Then she reminded herself that the entire barn was a half century old and patched here and there with scraps of wood or wattle and daub, when using wood seemed a waste of resources. A little creaking and banging was a given.
She’d left Mari in charge of
their sleeping sisters, every one exhausted from the events of the night. As the sky lightened, Nell had noted smoke rising from the convent a half-mile away and had felt obliged to discover what had passed there in their absence: to see if the soldiers had left, and if any of her sisters had survived.
Mari had begged her to stay, fearing for her life if she went out, but Nell thought that daylight might bring some measure of security—that the soldiers wouldn’t risk attacking a woman on the open road. To be safer, she’d removed her habit and traded it for a patched-together dress and cloak from one of the younger nuns-to-be who hadn’t yet committed to her vocation.
Nell hadn’t wanted to sleep anyway, although she hadn’t told Mari why. She was afraid that the dream of King Arthur’s death would come again, and she couldn’t cope with seeing it—not with what had happened to her sisters—not with the power of the Saxons so evident. Admittedly, it took far less strength to overpower a convent than to kill a king, but to live through one horror only to dream another immediately after was more than Nell could bear just now. At least with her sisters, she’d taken action. That she could find a way to help King Arthur seemed as out of reach now as it ever had.
A bird chirped to Nell’s left, a cheery counterpoint to the staccato of her heart. She gazed across the brown fields, harvested this autumn to the advantage of the Saxons instead of the Welsh, since the soldiers had captured the island in early September, intending to deprive the mainland of food. The convent continued to smoke, wisps spiraling skyward in the murky dawn. Nell braced herself for the effort—more emotional than physical—and set out towards what had been her home.
A short time later, she circled around to the east of the convent and crouched in the grass, screened from the entrance by a fence and blackberry bramble. The front gate of the convent sat wide open, revealing churned earth and grey stone beyond. From the looks, the Saxons hadn’t fired the church itself, just the inner chapel which Nell couldn’t see from her present position.
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