The Prioress’ Tale by Tale Prioress'

she laid the fat, dull-bound book on the table in front of her. Then, seeing the set look of loathing on Lady Adela’s face as she looked at the book, she thought that possibly her sympathy should go to Dame Perpetua because the girl’s narrow-eyed look did not bode well for her dealings with St. Augustine and the other church fathers, or anyone who tried to force them on her. Lady Adela was a sweetly featured, rose-and-cream-fair child who rarely gave overt trouble. She was mostly biddable but only, Frevisse had discovered in the past, to a point, and it seemed that Dame Perpetua might have reached that point.
    Happily oblivious, Dame Perpetua directed, “Say thank you to Dame Frevisse.”
    “Thank you, Dame Frevisse,” Lady Adela obligingly echoed but her eyes strayed to the door, betraying what interested her more as she said wistfully, “I wouldn’t mind being carried off by him.”
    “Yes, you would,” Dame Perpetua corrected her.
    Frevisse left them to it.
    During Sext she nearly managed to escape the troubled turning of her thoughts, losing herself in the lovely complexity of the prayers and psalms that even Domina Alys seemed almost concentrating on for once; but as they neared the end there was a wild shout of men’s voices from above and then the thunderous crash of stone falling inside the tower and shattering as it hit bottom close behind the boarded doorway.
    With screams and exclaims, all of the nuns except Sister Thomasine sprang to their feet. Sister Emma began to sob and Domina Alys slammed her prayer book shut. “That’s it for them! I’m not paying them to smash my stone to bits. Sit down!” she directed as she lunged out of her own choir stall and toward the boarded doorway. With both fists she pounded on its reverberating wood and yelled upward, “You come down and meet me in the orchard, Master Porter, and I mean now! Don’t think you’ll hide by perching up there on your undone, worthless, miserable tower like some broody-minded bird! You come down
now!
To the orchard!”
    Without so much as a glance back at her nuns, she stormed down the church toward the shortest way around into the orchard. Overhead men’s shouting still mixed with curses but without the desperate yelling there would have been if anyone had been hurt. In the choir, no one had sat down at her command. Sister Emma’s sobbing was straggling away to silence, but Sister Amicia and Sister Cecely were tentatively beginning to giggle.
    Sister Thomasine, unmoving until then, stood up and in her clear, light voice took up the office where it had been broken off.
“Domine, exaudi orationem meam.”
Lord, hear my prayer.
    She should have been answered then by the nuns across the choir from her with the next line of the prayer. Instead Sister Emma hiccuped on a final sob and began to giggle, too.
    Frevisse, staring across at Sister Amicia and Sister Cecely and belatedly following Sister Thomasine’s lead, declared forcibly,
“Et clamor meus ad te veniat.”
And let my cry come to you.
    Sister Thomasine promptly answered; and unevenly Dame Claire, Dame Perpetua, Dame Juliana, and even, at the last, Sister Johane joined in, carrying the office through the short way to its end, over the other nuns’ now smothered but unstoppable laughter. They had reached, “…
per miseri-cordiam Dei requiescant in pace.
Amen”—through the mercy of God rest in peace—when shouting that was unmistakably Domina Alys’ and certainly Master Porter’s erupted from somewhere near outside. Mercifully, the words were incomprehensible, but Sister Emma, Sister Amicia, and Sister Cecely lost their little remaining control over their laughter. It pealed out despite their hands over their mouths, and hastily Dame Juliana, exercising her duty in the prioress’ absence, closed the office, exclaiming rapidly,
“Et ne nos inducas in tentationem.”
And do not lead us into temptation.
    Dame Claire, Dame Perpetua, Frevisse, Sister Thomasine, and Sister