Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [205]
“Though who’ll want to marry such a tomboy, the Lord knows,” he complained laughingly to his wife.
Now the trial was over, he was going personally to conduct his man back to his farm where Port’s wife and two sons were waiting; and that night he had invited Port and all his other dependants to a feast in his spacious hall in the valley.
But first they must pay the visit that was causing Port so much secret anguish.
Together the party moved along the main street of Wilton.
It was a small, sheltered town, pleasantly situated in the angle where the rivers Wylye and Nadder ran together. The stout wooden wall around its west side, despite the fact that a Danish force had briefly overrun the place seven years before, was still only half finished, and the palisades and banks that completed the circuit had been left in some disrepair for the winter. The little river Nadder wandered along the southern edge of the town; trees flanked the river, and magnificent oaks and beeches stood on the slopes that led quietly up towards the great chalk plateau on the northern side. The two central features of the place were the small market square, surrounded by modest wooden buildings, and a large building in stone that lay just east of it. This was the Kingsbury, the royal palace, for although King Alfred was now lavishing more attention on the larger town of Winchester, Wilton was still the second most important royal town in his kingdom.
Today the palace was empty: the king was hunting in the west; but the party’s destination was a third entity, that lay just beside it: a small group of buildings within their own walled enclosure, through the gate of which they now entered quietly. For this was the abbey: and it was here, in the small but distinguished group of twelve nuns, that Port’s sister led her life.
There were several buildings – the nuns’ house, a wooden church, a refectory; but it was to a small, stone chapel with two side aisles and a steep wooden roof that they were now led by one of the nuns. It was a single structure with small windows and triangular pointed arches, but it was not without a certain quiet elegance. The nuns’ greatest pride were the beautifully carved pillars on each side of the west door, whose sides were covered with a wonderful pattern of interlocking knots and whose square capitals depicted a similarly intricate design of interwoven dragons – Saxon workmanship at its best. There was a delicate smell of incense in the church, and everywhere there was evidence of its rich endowments in the gold and silver ornaments, the splendid hangings, and the finely woven altar cloth.
Aelfwald the thane often visited the abbey; he liked to pay his respects to the abbess, who was a distant kinswoman of the king himself, and to admire the stone church, which was by far the finest building in the area. And Port had come to see his sister. The abbess entered almost immediately, accompanied by Edith. The two nuns exchanged polite greetings with their guests; then Port and Edith drew to one side.
She was not an attractive woman. Thin like her brother, though ten years younger, she had a face over which the pale skin was drawn tightly, so that her appearance was skeletal, an impression made worse by yellowish eyes and pale lips which often turned blue in the winter months. She was lucky to have been accepted in the abbey, for most of the nuns were high born, and their families had given endowments far beyond the means of Port. Indeed, it was only thanks to the support of Aelfwald that she had been accepted. But she had come to the abbey with high ambitions. Several of the nuns there, including the abbess, had been trained in the great double minster of Wimborne, twenty miles to the south west, where two large, though carefully segregated communities, one of monks, the other of nuns, were ruled over by a single abbess. In previous centuries, great missionaries like Boniface, who had set out from the newly converted Anglo-Saxon island to convert the heathen tribes