The Prioress’ Tale by Tale Prioress' Page A

what would stay in her mind and what slip away, but she always remembered Father Henry and Reynold seemed to stay more often than not.
    “I want you to go to them and tell them I’m ready for them to come here. To come here now. You understand?”
    Katerin’s nodding increased in eagerness to show she did.
    Alys found she was nodding along with her, and stopped herself before saying, still carefully, “Go on, then. Go find Father Henry and Sir Reynold. Tell them to come here.”
    Katerin curtsied, smiling with gladness for something else to do, and scurried away. Alys, with a sigh for her aching head and weary legs, sank into the tall-backed chair beside the hearth leaned her head back and shut her eyes.
    Because there was occasionally need for the prioress to entertain guests apart or see to business better not dealt with in chapter meetings, her parlor was more richly furnished than anywhere else in the priory, with not only the fireplace and chair but another chair besides, almost as good, and a table covered by a richly woven Spanish cloth, and brightly embroidered cushions on the seat below the long window overlooking the guest halls’ yard.
    And when the evening was done, there was her bedroom. Domina Edith had kept it sparsely furnished, with a plain prie-dieu and a straw-mattressed bed. Alys had been rid of the prie-dieu her first day as prioress, moving in her own that had been kept cramped in her cell until then. Elaborately carved to pleasure the eyes, thickly cushioned to ease the knees, it was to her mind much more the kind of prie-dieu a prioress should have. And the straw mattress had been replaced by a feather one as soon as might be, too.
    Alys opened her eyes, not aware until then that she had closed them. This was not the time for being tired. The flames had good hold on the kindling now, feeding along its slender lengths and up into the larger wood above. Watching them, her elbow on the chair’s arm and her chin leaned into her hand, Alys tried to decide how she should handle Reynold and found she was thinking instead of Domina Edith, sitting here through all those years she had been prioress, watching other fires through other evenings, just as Domina Geretrude had done before her and Domina Hawise before that, back to the priory’s founding; all of them probably in this same chair, just as Alys now was and just as the prioresses who came after her would do.
    Alys had had that thought before, other evenings, sitting here, and mostly took a kind of comfort from it that she never troubled to look at too closely. Looking too closely at things tended to lead to muddled thinking, she had found, and she did not need her thinking muddled. What she needed was a way to deal with Reynold tonight, and find more money for her priory soon.
    They had always understood each other, she and Reynold; had always seen things straight on and from the same angle, with none of this wrongheaded fumbling about that most people called thinking. Most people could not think at all, needed their thinking done for them—or undone for them after they had made a mess of it—but it had never been like that for her or Reynold. They thought their way through to what they wanted and then went after it.
    So why wasn’t he seeing how impossible a thing he was expecting of her about this girl?
    And he wasn’t charming her into changing her mind. He always thought he could manage that whenever they disagreed, but this wasn’t a thing she could be charmed into and that was something she would have to have into his head before they had finished tonight.
    The difficulty lay in doing it without losing him. She could not afford to lose him. She had told him the second or third time he had come to visit her this summer how much in need of him St. Frideswide’s was.
    “Other places have patrons to benefact them. Why shouldn’t St. Frideswide’s?” she had said. “It’s for the good of the givers’ souls, and the better they give,