Travels Through The Wind (New England Book 3) by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-07T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Good Friday 24th March

Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción

Melody Danson had begun to lose track of time, of days passing and even though she knew that today was Good Friday if felt as if she had been at the monastery weeks rather than just five long, cold miserable days.

On the first morning after she and Henrietta De L’Isle had arrived two nuns – ‘sisters’ or whatever – had roused her from her bed, a straw palliasse on the stone floor of her ‘cell’, more a dungeon, that would have had any right thinking-colonist up in arms back home had it been located in say, a New England police station or prison, ordered her to strip naked and then cut her hair. Well ‘cut’ was being a little generous, it had seemed to her that they were ‘shearing’ her with a lot less care and attention than they would have paid had she been a sheep!

Thereafter she had been dunked in a very cold bath – one of her ‘helpers’ had pushed her head under the water several times while muttering an angry prayer in what she later decided was a demotic, or at least a very rural, Asturian dialect – and left to stand naked and shivering uncontrollably for some minutes before being allowed to dry herself with a towel so coarse it actually scratched her, before being instructed to get dressed. Thereupon, she had been required to don a white linen surplus tailored to fit a woman of twice her breadth, and a faded brown, horribly itchy – it might have been horsehair – habit with a hood that she was specifically commanded to always employ to cover her head when she was ‘outside’.

With her teeth still chattering, feeling literally like death warmed up she had been frog-marched barefoot to a small, damp chapel and forced to kneel on the floor, just frigid flagstones, for an interminable period while all manner of chanting, praying of the silent and communal kind and various incantations were, it seemed – she was feeling so ill by then she did not care – directed at her.

Next, she had found herself back in her cell.

‘Found herself’ because she must have fainted or passed out at some stage because a different nun with none of the righteous hutzpah of her former ‘escorts’ had sat her up and was trying to get her to eat what looked like lumpy vomit dripping from a rudimentary wooden spoon.

Actually, to be fair, ‘the food’ turned out to be some kind of watery gruel made from crushed maize which only tasted like vomit.

‘Our ways will be strange to start with,’ the other woman, who might have been Melody’s age but it was hard to tell when she could only see a part of her face in the gloom of the cell, assured her without malice.

Melody had been so hungry she did her best to keep her ‘breakfast’ down, notwithstanding how just the smell of it made her gag.

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