“Yes, Alice was with her at the end. It was Alice that dug the grave; Alice rings the knell; Alice laid her out in her Sacrist’s chamber, and she has placed two white roses on the dead woman’s breast.”
“Roses?” said Elizabeth Daveys; “roses are not for dead nuns. Whence got she roses?”
“That I can tell you,” said the novice, glad to take her part in the conversation, “for Alice told me herself. She got them from the churchyard of St Peter’s on the hill.”
The office for the dead was said, the empty grave was filled, and Alice the Portress was closeted with the Prioress.
“To you, lady Prioress—not to the Nuns in Chapter—I confess the sin of my youth; not to them, nor yet to you while sister Margery lived. She is gone, and why should I remain? Forty years we shared the secret. She is past censure or forgiveness. On me let the blame rest. I ask no pardon, but only to be dismissed from the house of St Radegund, that I have so unworthily served.
Entrance to Chapter House.
“There is none but myself and poor sister Emma that remembers St Radegund’s before the pestilence year. I was but a child then, and my mother was Portress before me. My mother often brought me to the lodge, and I used to play with the novices, or sit at the gate when my mother was away. Margery had but lately come to St Radegund’s—seventeen, perhaps, or eighteen years of age she was. Hers was a proud family—the Caillys of Trumpington, and they were rich, and good to St Radegund’s. They are gone and forgotten now, but often have I heard old Thomas Key tell of them, for he was a Trumpington man, and he knew the De Freviles of Shelford too. There are De Freviles at Shelford yet, but I think that none there remembers young Nicholas De Frevile that was Sir Robert’s son.
“I had a child’s thought—that Margery was the most beautiful creature in the wide world—most beautiful and best. And because she was young and fair and gracious in speech even our hard sisters loved her, and thought it pity of the world when her fair tresses were shorn and she took the ugly veil. For Margery was not religious. God pardon me for my sinful words, but I think she was meant for better things than religion and a cloister. And though she was good and kind to all, Margery did not take to our sisters. There was some trouble—I know not what, for she never told—and for some family reason she was sent to St Radegund’s, and ill she liked it. So she went about her work in cloister and church, grieving; and there was talk of her among the sisters. Some thought, some said, that they knew, but Margery said nothing.