The Anchoress of Shere

• Chapter 1 The Rite of the Living Dead
• Chapter 2 Mortar and Mist
• Chapter 3 The Squint in the Chancel
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Wall
• Chapter 5 The King’s Assessor
• Chapter 6 Penance in Ashes
• Chapter 7 Tithes and Torment
• Chapter 8 Bread and Cold Water
• Chapter 9 The Sins of the Curate
• Chapter 10 Shadows in the Churchyard
• Chapter 11 The Ledger of Wrongs
• Chapter 12 Midnight Confessions
• Chapter 13 The Bailiff’s Shadow
• Chapter 14 The Seal of the Cell
• Chapter 15 A Vow Tested by Fire
• Chapter 16 The Toll of the Parish Bell
• Chapter 17 Wolves at the Sanctuary
• Chapter 18 Scraps of Vellum
• Chapter 19 Blood on the Flagstones
• Chapter 20 An Unholy Siege
• Chapter 21 The Weight of Hidden Truths
• Chapter 22 The Darkest Vigil
• Chapter 23 The Bishop’s Emissary
• Chapter 24 A Reckoning of Graces
• Chapter 25 Light Through the Grate
• Chapter 26 The Eternal Anchor

The incense hung heavy in the nave of St James’ Church, thick enough to coat the tongue with the taste of myrrh and cold ash. Outside, the autumn wind whipped down from the North Downs, rattling the oak doors and driving dead leaves against the stone walls of Shere. Inside, however, the air belonged to the dead.

Christine stood before the altar, her feet bare against the frigid flagstones. She wore a simple tunic of undyed wool, rough as nettles against her skin, bound at the waist by a plain cord. Before her lay a wooden bier, drape-covered in a black pall, precisely as though a corpse rested upon it. Beside it, a small heap of loose earth had been piled onto the flagstones, freshly dug from the churchyard by the sexton’s spade.

The choir boys, their voices cracking with cold and age, sang the In paradisum. Their notes drifted up toward the high, timbered rafters, sweet and mournful, carrying the weight of a funeral. But there was no corpse upon the bier. The funeral was hers.

"Deliver me, O Lord, from everlasting death in that awful day," chanted Father Thomas, his voice booming through the chancel. He swung the silver censer, sending gray clouds drifting around Christine’s head. He did not look into her eyes. To Father Thomas, and to the church canon law of 1329, she had already ceased to belong to the world of men.

Christine kept her hands folded into her sleeves to hide their trembling. She was twenty-four years old, full of blood and pulse, yet every soul gathered in the church had come to watch her die. Her mother wept silently in the second pew, comforted by her elder brother, whose jaw was set like iron. Farther back, near the arched doorway, stood the village bailiff, his leather coat grease-stained, his small eyes watching her not with sorrow, but with a cold, calculating scrutiny that made her neck prickle.

"Earth to earth," Father Thomas intoned, stepping forward with a small wooden paddle. He dipped it into the pile of churchyard dirt and dropped a dust of soil over Christine’s bare feet.

The dirt was cold and damp. She felt the sharp bite of grit between her toes, the dampness seeping into the wool of her hem. A collective gasp rippled through the congregation—a sound half-frightened, half-pious. In the eyes of Shere, this was the moment the veil parted. She was no longer Christine, the carpenter’s daughter who had run through the meadows by the River Tillingbourne and helped her father plane oak timbers for the church roof. She was to be an anchoress, an anchorite bound to the stone, a living saint—or a living corpse—anchored to the church wall until her final breath.

The Bishop’s official, a grave man named Archdeacon Robert who had traveled from Winchester for the consecration, stepped forward holding the holy oil. His robes were silk, heavy with gold thread that caught the tallow candlelight, contrasting sharply with the bleak, whitewashed walls of the village church.

"Do you, Christine Carpenter, of your own free and uncompelled will, desire to enter this holy enclosure, to die to the world and live henceforth only unto God?" the Archdeacon asked. His voice was flat, practiced, an echo of hundreds of such inquiries made across the diocese.

"I do," Christine said. Her voice sounded thin to her own ears, like glass stretched to breaking, yet it carried into every corner of the silent church.

"And do you vow obedience, chastity, and stability of place, swearing never to pass beyond the walls of your cell, nor to suffer your feet to touch the earth outside, so long as life remains within your body?"

"I so vow," she said, raising her chin.

She caught the bailiff’s gaze once more. Master Corbet did not blink. He knew why she was going into the wall, even if the Archdeacon did not. He knew the burden of the secrets she carried—secrets scribbled on scraps of parchment, whispered in confidence under the seal of the confessional, and locked behind her teeth. The bailiff wanted those secrets. He needed the ledgers and the names of the men who had hidden their grain from the King’s tax collectors during the great famine, and the truth behind the stolen silver chalice that had vanished from the rector's chest three winters ago. He thought that inside four stone walls, isolation would break her. He thought she would speak.

She resolved then, with a fierce spike of stubbornness that warmed her frozen blood, that she would rot before she gave him a single word.

The Archdeacon raised his hand in blessing, tracing the sign of the cross above her head. "Receive the dust of mortality, sister. Let the world forget thee, as thou hast forgotten the world."

The congregation rose with a rustle of heavy wool and linen. The procession formed. At the head walked the acolyte bearing the processional cross, its brass surface dull in the dim light. Behind him came Father Thomas, swinging the censer so that the smoke rolled down the aisle like fog off the river. Then came Christine, walking slowly, her bare feet numb against the stone. Behind her followed the villagers—the smith, the baker, the women who had nursed her through the sweating sickness when she was a girl, and the children who looked at her with wide, terrified eyes as if she were already a ghost.

They exited the chancel, walking out through the small north door into the damp autumn chill of the churchyard. The air smelled of woodsmoke, rotting leaves, and the sharp, iron tang of approaching rain. Shere lay cradled in the valley, surrounded by the dark, rising flanks of the hills. Down in the village, a dog barked. A cart rumbled over the wooden bridge. Life was moving on, mundane and indifferent, just yards away from where Christine’s life was to be sealed shut.

Attached to the north wall of the church stood her cell.

It was a small, lean-to structure of rough-hewn flint and mortar, no larger than twelve feet by eight, built directly against the ancient stone of the chancel. Its roof sloped sharply downward from the main eaves of the church. To the casual passerby, it looked like little more than a tool shed or a vestry, but it had no outer door.

Instead, there was only a tall, narrow opening in the stone where a door should be, framed by freshly mixed mortar and piles of dressed ashlar blocks. Master Mason Walter stood beside the gap, his apron powdered with lime, his trowel resting in his calloused hand. He looked down at the ground, unable to meet Christine’s eyes. He had worked alongside her father for twenty years; he had built this tomb with his own hands.

"The place is ready, my Lord," Father Thomas murmured to the Archdeacon.

The Archdeacon stepped to the threshold of the narrow opening, peering into the gloom within. "Let the cell be sprinkled with holy water, that no evil spirit may abide where the bride of Christ makes her bed."

Father Thomas stepped forward with the aspergillum, showering the dark interior with droplets of blessed water. Christine caught a glimpse of the cell’s interior as the candlelight flickered through the gap: a flagstone floor covered in clean straw, a low stone bench built into the corner, a small hearth with a narrow chimney flue, and two tiny openings in the heavy walls.

One opening, the outer squint, was covered by a black curtain and faced the churchyard, through which she would receive her thin rations of bread and water and speak to those who sought her counsel. The other, the inner squint, cut diagonally through the thick stone wall of the church, looking directly down upon the high altar, allowing her to view the elevation of the Host during Mass.

"Step forward, daughter," the Archdeacon commanded.

Christine took a deep breath. The air smelled of Surrey earth and cold rain—the last unfettered breath she would ever take beneath the open sky. She looked up at the grey clouds scudding across the sky, at the ancient yew tree standing sentinel in the churchyard, its red berries glistening like drops of blood. She looked at her mother, whose tears were now silent, streaming down her lined cheeks into her linen veil.

"God be with you, Christine," her mother whispered, her voice barely audible above the wind.

"And with thy spirit, Mother," Christine replied softly.

She turned back to the dark opening in the wall. She lifted her woolen skirt slightly so as not to trip, raised her foot, and stepped over the high stone threshold into the cell.

The air inside was cold, damp, and smelled heavily of damp mortar, lime, and fresh straw. The moment her feet touched the straw, a strange quiet descended upon her. The sounds of the churchyard—the wind, the murmuring crowd, the distant barking dog—became muffled, filtered through the thick flint walls.

Father Thomas stepped up to the opening. He held out a small wooden crucifix. Christine took it in both hands, pressing the cold carved wood to her lips.

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," Father Thomas said, his voice echoing strangely in the narrow space. "May the Lord seal thee in His peace."

He stepped back. Master Mason Walter moved into his place, accompanied by his young apprentice, who carried a wooden tub of wet mortar.

Walter took an ashlar block, heavy and gray, and set it into the base of the doorway. The scrape of stone against stone echoed through the cell like a clap of thunder. He took his trowel, slapped a thick layer of pale, wet mortar across the top of the block, and placed the second stone.

Clack.

Christine stood in the middle of the small cell, holding the crucifix to her chest, watching the wall rise.

Clack.

With every stone, the gray autumn light from the churchyard was carved away. First, her feet were hidden from the crowd outside. Then her waist. The apprentice worked quickly, handing stones to the master mason, his young face pale with awe and dread.

Through the narrowing gap, Christine could see the faces of the villagers. She saw her brother turn away, unable to watch. She saw Father Thomas holding his prayer book, his lips moving in silent Latin supplications. And she saw Master Corbet, the bailiff, leaning on his staff, his eyes locked onto hers through the fading square of light. He raised one finger to his lips—a silent warning, a reminder of the threat that hung over her family if she kept her silence regarding the parish ledgers.

She stared back at him without blinking, her face a mask of pale composure.

Clack.

The stones reached her shoulders. The light in the cell turned dim and amber, filtered only through the tiny churchyard squint and the stone-walled squints toward the altar.

"Benedicta tu in mulieribus," whispered Walter, his hands trembling as he lifted the heavy header stone that would bridge the top of the opening. His eyes met hers through the final, narrow gap—a space no wider than a man’s palm.

"Thank you, Walter," Christine murmured. "Build it strong."

The mason swallowed hard, wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve, and lifted the final stone into place. He laid it into the mortar, slapped a fresh trowel-full of lime over the joints, and smoothed it flat.

Thump.

The last block settled. The churchyard disappeared.

Complete, suffocating darkness fell over the cell.

Outside, Christine heard the muted muffled sound of the mason’s trowel scraping away the excess mortar, followed by the heavy, rhythmic thud of the Archdeacon’s staff striking the fresh stone wall three times.

"Let no man open what God hath shut," the Archdeacon’s voice came, faint and hollow through the masonry. "Henceforth, she is dead to the world, and her life is hid with Christ in God. Amen."

"Amen," echoed the crowd outside, their voices sounding like the rustle of dry leaves driven by the wind.

Footsteps began to recede. The heavy boots of the bailiff, the soft leather slippers of the clergy, the wooden clogs of the villagers—all moved away across the gravel of the churchyard. The funeral was over. The mourners were returning to their warm hearths, their pots of ale, and their daily labor.

Christine stood rooted to the straw in the pitch blackness. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. For a long, terrifying moment, the reality of what she had done crushed down upon her chest, making it impossible to breathe. Four walls. No doors. No escape. Not tomorrow, not next year, not in forty years. The stone would be her clothes, her bed, her skin, and ultimately her tomb.

She squeezed her eyes shut, though it made no difference in the blackness, and forced herself to inhale slowly through her nose. The air was cold, smelling of lime and wet earth.

"God is my rock," she whispered into the dark, her voice shaking. "God is my fortress."

Gradually, as her eyes adjusted, the cell ceased to be absolute black.

To her left, a pale, dim shaft of gray light filtered through the small squint cut through the outer wall. It was covered by a heavy black cloth, suspended by a iron hook, but light bled around its edges. To her right, through the long, narrow tunnel of the interior squint cut diagonally through four feet of ancient church masonry, she could see a tiny, glowing square of amber light: the sanctuary lamp hanging before the high altar of St James.

She took a slow step forward, the straw crunching beneath her bare feet. She reached out with a trembling hand until her fingertips brushed the damp, rough stone of the newly built wall. The mortar was still warm to the touch from the chemical reaction of the lime and water.

She was buried alive.

Yet, as she pressed her forehead against the cold stone wall, Christine felt a strange, razor-sharp clarity settle over her spirit. The bailiff thought he had trapped her. The clergy thought they had sanctified her. The villagers thought they had lost her.

They were all mistaken. She had not entered this cell to die; she had entered it to survive. Beneath the flagstones of this tiny room lay the locked iron box containing the true records of the manor—the records that proved the bailiff’s embezzlements, the curate’s treasons, and the names of every family in Shere who had bled to feed the King’s insatiable war chest.

Christine smoothed her rough woolen tunic, walked over to the low stone bench, and sat down in the quiet dark to wait.

The lime took its time curing, breathing out a sour, alkaline heat that tasted like swallowed chalk. Christine sat on the edge of the stone bench, her knees drawn to her chest, listening to the small, deliberate sounds of a world setting into place. Wet mortar hissed faintly as it lost its water to the cold air. Outside, the North Downs mist had rolled down into the valley of the Tillingbourne, dampening the village dogs into miserable silence and wrapping the churchyard in woolly gray.

She did not light the single tallow dip left on the hearth. Tallow was dear, and the dark was free. Besides, an anchoress burning through her fat on her very first night would set the gossips clacking before Prime. Instead, she let her eyes drink the meager seepage of twilight that crept past the black baize curtain hung across the churchyard squint. It was enough to trace the angles of her kingdom.

Twelve paces in circumference, if she counted with small, modest steps. Four corners of rough-dressed sandstone and knapped black flint. To her right, the stone shelf built into the foundation of the chancel wall served as her bed; it had no bolster, only a thin pallet of dried bracken that rustled whenever she shifted her weight. To her left, the hearth sat cold, its flue running up through the south-facing slant of the roof. Opposite the sealed doorway was the outer squint, a narrow slit cut at an angle through three feet of flint so that an inquisitive peasant outside could see neither her bed nor her hearth, only a sliver of wall and her veiled face when she chose to stand before it.

The silence was not empty; it had ribs. The parish church of St James was an ancient creature, built of green sandstone that groaned whenever the wind veered into the west. Through the wall behind her back, she could feel the dull resonance of the timbers high above the chancel, the ancient rafters adjusting to the drop in temperature.

She stood, the rough wool of her tunic dragging across the straw, and walked to the outer squint. Her fingers found the coarse black fabric of the curtain. Canon law required the cloth to be heavy, dark, and pinned across the aperture day and night, lest the sight of the world disturb the contemplative mind, or worse, the contemplative face tempt some wandering carter into unholy thoughts. Christine drew the edge back half an inch.

The churchyard was swallowed in the fog. The great yew tree was only a bruised smudge against the white drift. Through the mist, perhaps forty yards away across the lane, the square outline of the parsonage loomed, its shutters closed against the raw evening. A faint prick of yellow light burned in the upper window—Father Thomas, no doubt counting the funeral pennies or warming his shins over a brazier of Surrey charcoal bought with her family’s mortuary fees.

Her knees were already stiff from the kneeling. She bent down, brushing aside the layer of fresh straw Walter had scattered over the floor before he picked up his trowel. The flagstones beneath were uneven, salvaged from some older, forgotten foundation when the cell was raised. She ran her fingers across the joints until she found the broad, rectangular slab of Horsham stone near the hearth.

The mortar around this stone was different. Walter had mixed it with lard and ash instead of quicklime, a mason’s trick her father had taught him years ago when they worked together on the manor mill. With a heavy iron bodkin, it could be scraped out in half an hour. Underneath lay three feet of sand, and beneath that, an oak box banded in hoop-iron.

She did not touch it tonight. The earth was still too watchful; the stones were too wet. To disturb the floor while the parish still smelled of her funeral would be sheer idiocy. Master Corbet would have men watching the outside wall from the lane, waiting to see if smoke rose from her chimney at odd hours, or if someone crept to her squint under cover of the mist to whisper an account of where the books had gone.

A soft scraping sound near the base of the new wall made her freeze.

It was not Corbet, nor was it the Archdeacon’s holy ghosts. A tiny, whiskered nose poked through a gap between two foundation stones near the floor where the mortar had crumbled during Walter’s hasty work. A field mouse, slick with mist, squeezed its plump body into the cell, paused, and twitched its nose at the smell of fresh straw.

"Welcome to the grave, little brother," Christine whispered, her voice rustling like dry grass. It was the first time she had spoken since Walter had sealed the lintel, and the sound of her own voice startled her. It was too small for the room, yet too loud for the silence.

The mouse gave her a flat, bead-eyed look, unimpressed by the solemnity of the enclosure, and vanished under the bracken pallet in search of stray grain.

A bell began to toll. It was the curfew bell from the squat tower above the nave, its iron hammer striking the bronze with a flat, wet thud that vibrated through the stones into the soles of her feet. Eight strokes. In the village, hearth fires would be raked over with turf, doors barred with heavy ash planks, and the sheep folded against the foxes coming down from the ridge.

For twenty-four years, that bell had measured her work. It meant putting down the distaff, blowing out the tallow, and climbing the loft ladder beside her mother while her father grumbled about the price of iron nails. Now, it was only a sound that passed through her without demanding anything at all. She did not have to fetch water from the Tillingbourne. She did not have to milk the brindle cow. She had no father to feed; the fever had taken him two winters back, leaving only debts and the dangerous knowledge of how the village books were kept.

When the last vibration of the curfew died away, another sound took its place: footsteps on the gravel of the churchyard path.

They were not the confident, heavy strides of the bailiff, nor the shuffling, slippered drag of Father Thomas. They were light, hurried, and accompanied by the wet squelch of cheap wooden pattens in the mud. The steps approached the north wall and paused outside the squint.

Christine did not move from the center of the cell. The Rule of Saint Aelred, which Archdeacon Robert had left on her stone shelf bound in greasy calfskin, was explicit: an anchoress must not leap to the window like a tavern maid at the sound of every traveler. She must wait, let the visitor knock, and inquire of their spiritual need with gravity and restraint.

A hand tapped softly on the wooden sill of the squint.

"Christine?" a voice hissed. It was a girl's voice, thin and cracked with cold. "Christine, are ye in there?"

Christine recognized the tone before she recognized the name. It was Avice, the blacksmith’s sister, whose simple wits made her the errand-runner for every busybody between Shere and Gomshall.

Christine moved to the squint, keeping the black cloth firmly between her face and the outside air. "I am here, Avice. But thou must not call me Christine. That name is buried in the churchyard."

"Aye, well, Father Thomas says you’re Sister Christine now, but my brother says you’re still John Carpenter’s girl with a wall round her," the girl replied through the cloth. Her breath smelled of onions and stale small beer, filtering through the wool. "Your mother sent me. She couldn’t come herself. Master Corbet was down at her cottage before the mist even thicked, leaning on her doorpost and asking after your father’s chest."

Christine’s fingers tightened on her woolen sleeve. "What did she tell him?"

"She told him John burned his papers before the priest gave him the oil. Said there was naught left but shavings and ash." Avice shifted her feet, her wooden pattens clattering against the foundation stones. "Corbet didn't believe her. He spat on the floor and said if she didn't find the tally sticks for the wool tax before the King’s Assessor comes next week, he’d seize the cow and the joiner’s bench for the lord’s arrears."

"The cow is my mother’s sustenance," Christine said, keeping her voice level, though the cold in her stomach had nothing to do with the night air. "The bailiff cannot take a widow’s only beast without the steward’s warrant."

"Corbet said he is the warrant," Avice whispered. "He’s got three men from Guildford staying at the tavern, big fellows with boiled-leather jacks and bills. They’re drinking his cider and boasting about how they handle the Surrey churls."

Christine was silent for a breath. It was beginning sooner than she had anticipated. Corbet was desperate. The King, Edward the Third, was barely seventeen, but his mother’s paramour, Mortimer, was squeezing every shire in England for coin to pay for the disastrous Scottish campaigns. An assessor was coming—a royal clerk with the authority to demand the parchment rolls from every manor in the hundred of Blackheath. If Corbet could not produce the tallies showing where the silver had gone, his neck would be in the halter, not John Carpenter’s widow’s.

"Listen to me, Avice," Christine said, leaning closer to the curtain. "Go back to my mother. Tell her to take the cow tonight, before the moon breaks through the mist, and drive her up to the charcoal burner’s hut in the Hurtwood. Old Martin owes my father three days’ work; he will hide the beast among the heath."

"The Hurtwood?" Avice squeaked. "In the dark? There’s boggarts up there, Christine! And the bailiff’s men—"

"The bailiff’s men are in the tavern, filling their bellies with Corbet’s ale," Christine cut in sharply. "Tell her to go through the water-meadows, not by the lane. The grass will deaden the hoofs. And Avice?"

"Aye?"

"Tell her not to weep for me. The stone is thick, but it keeps the wind off."

A small snuffle came from behind the cloth. "She wept all through the funeral, Christine. When Walter put that last stone in, she went down on her knees in the wet dirt like she’d been struck with a butcher’s pole."

"Go now," Christine urged gently. "Before the watchman walks the ditch."

"I brought you this," the girl muttered. A soft thud sounded on the narrow stone ledge set into the bottom of the squint. "Your mother baked it on the hearth-stones before Corbet came. It’s rye, but she put a bit of honey in the crust."

The girl’s wooden shoes scraped against the flint, and then her footsteps hurried away into the damp dark, swallowed instantly by the fog.

Christine reached down to the ledge. Between the bottom of the black cloth and the stone sill was an opening barely four inches wide—the squint through which she would receive her parish bread and pass her water vessels to the old woman appointed by the churchwardens to attend her needs. Her fingers found the loaf. It was still faintly warm in its linen wrapper.

She held the bread to her face, breathing in the smell of her mother’s kitchen: woodsmoke, dried pennyroyal, and the sharp sweetness of forest honey. For a moment, the walls pressed in on her with such sudden, crushing weight that she had to put her shoulder against the damp stone to keep from falling. A great sob rose in her throat, thick and bitter as gall, but she swallowed it down. The walls were not her enemies. The walls were her armor. If she were out there, in the cottage by the river, Corbet would have had her by the wrists by now, twisting until the bone cracked to make her show him where her father had hidden the second set of books.

Here, he could not touch her. To lay a hand on an enclosed anchoress was sacrilege of the highest order, an offense that carried the greater excommunication and the wrath of the Bishop of Winchester. Even a brute like Corbet, with the Earl of Arundel’s distant favor behind him, dared not bring a sledgehammer to an altar-wall blessed with the holy chrism.

She broke a piece of the rye bread and chewed it slowly, letting the honey dissolve on her tongue. The mouse reappeared, sitting upright on its haunches three feet away, its black eyes fixed on her fingers.

"Patience," she told the beast. She pinched off a crumb of crust and tossed it. The mouse snatched it with the speed of a falling leaf and darted back into the dark under the pallet.

Christine wiped her fingers on her tunic and walked across the cell to the inner squint.

This opening was different. It did not look out onto the muddy dirt of the world, but pierced the south-east angle of the church wall, slicing through four feet of solid masonry to emerge just above the sedilia in the chancel. It was angled so sharply that she could see only the high altar, the flickering red glow of the hanging pyx where the consecrated Host was kept, and the wooden legs of the altar table.

The church was entirely dark save for that single ruby eye. The air that drifted through the narrow tunnel smelled of cold incense, damp floorboards, and old boxwood. As she watched, a dark shape drifted across the light.

It was Father Thomas.

He was not wearing his vestments; he had stripped down to a grubby woolen cassock that had seen too many grease fires. He held a small horn lantern in one hand and a bunch of iron keys in the other. He stopped before the altar, made a perfunctory genuflection that looked more like an attack of the gravel, and set the lantern down upon the fair linen cloth.

Christine leaned forward, resting her cheek against the cold, smooth stone of the opening. The squint was her ear to the church, an acoustic horn carved through the limestone. If a man spoke at the altar rail, she could hear the click of his teeth.

Thomas was not praying. He picked up his lantern and moved to the north wall of the chancel, right where the great iron-bound parish chest stood beneath the image of Saint James. He selected a heavy key from his ring, inserted it into the center lock, and turned it.

The lock groaned. Thomas lifted the heavy lid, propping it against the wall with his shoulder. He reached inside, his lantern casting long, demonic shadows up into the oak ceiling, and began lifting out the parchment rolls.

Christine watched him with cold amusement. The parish chest was where the official records were kept: the tithe lists, the parish register of deaths, and the Bishop’s licenses for brewing and marriages. But Father Thomas was not looking for the names of the dead. He was searching for the small, calfskin-bound memorandum book that John Carpenter had kept when he served as churchwarden during the year of the Great Murrain.

He would not find it.

Thomas rummaged through the chest, his breath coming in short, irritated wheezes that carried clearly through the stone. He tossed aside the churchwardens' accounts from the previous reign, muttering curses under his breath that were far from canonical.

"Sodden old knave," the priest hissed, pulling out a handful of parchment and holding it to the lantern. "Where did he put the wool receipts? Saint Jude rot his bones, he knew the Archdeacon was coming."

He dropped the parchment back into the chest with an angry thud and kicked the base of the wood. The iron fittings rattled.

"Looking for the account of the sheep-dip, Father?" Christine murmured into the stone, keeping her voice so low it was little more than a draft of air.

Through the squint, she saw Thomas freeze. His head snapped toward the small opening high on the chancel wall. In the dim lantern light, his face was pasty, glistening with cold sweat.

"Who’s there?" he demanded, his voice trembling slightly.

Christine did not answer. She stepped back into the shadow of her cell, letting the stone swallow her.

"Sister?" Thomas called, taking two hesitant steps toward the wall. He stood beneath the squint, craning his neck, but from his angle, he could see only the absolute blackness of her enclosure. "Sister Christine? Was that you?"

Silence was her first weapon. The Rule said an anchoress should speak seldom, and then only with great purpose. In the village, she had been quick-tongued, perhaps too quick for a carpenter’s daughter dealing with clerics and manorial bailiffs who thought a woman’s mind was made of curds and whey. But here, within four walls of flint, silence had teeth. A woman who did not answer was a woman who could not be caught.

"You should be at your prayers," Thomas muttered, though his voice lacked conviction. He made a hurried sign of the cross in the direction of her wall—whether to bless her or to keep her at bay, she could not tell. "The office of Compline is past. Pray for the souls in Purgatory, girl. That is what you were put in there for."

He turned back to the chest, closed the lid with a resounding bang that echoed like a cannon-shot through the empty nave, and turned the key. He picked up his lantern, his slippers shuffling quickly across the chancel flagstones, and disappeared through the south door into the mist. The heavy oak door thudded shut, and the iron bolt fell into place from the outside.

Christine let out her breath. The church was empty again, left to the ruby light of the pyx and the cold stones.

She returned to her bench and sat down.