CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Early October
Amesbury Abbey
It was well and good that she worked in the kitchen, for it gave her access to things most postulates would not have access to.
In this case, it was a tool for her salvation.
Acacia had spent the months since her arrival at Amesbury in torment. Her life was in shambles when she arrived at the abbey, made worse by the fact that Amesbury was a strict order that didn’t believe in much more than praying and sleeping, and even sleeping was considered a sin. Conversation was prohibited unless it was the reading of scripture.
In truth, it had been nothing as Acacia had expected. All she wanted to do was read her bible and walk in the garden but, instead, Amesbury turned into a lesson in the harsh realities of piety. The nuns in charge were old and shriveled, and had no patience for a duke’s daughter who had been pampered her entire life. Acacia slept little, was constantly cold, and she had been assigned to the kitchens to work when she was not praying.
For a woman wrought with depression and insecurities, the hoped-for haven at Amesbury was a fate worse than death.
With little choice in the matter, Acacia worked in the kitchen, cleaning dirty vegetables for an old cook who liked to throw things at her when she didn’t work fast enough. She prayed through chattering teeth and cried herself to sleep nightly. She wanted to go home, but she was quite certain her sisters didn’t want her. She had ruined her relationship with them, and they were against her, so she knew she could not go home.
But her prayers soon became requests for Clayton to come and save her from this hell, and take her someplace where she could be warm and happy again. The postulates were not allowed to write or send missives, so Acacia would have to rely on God to whisper in Clayton’s ear to tell him what she needed.
She was still convinced, even after all of these months, that Clayton needed her. He wanted her – surely he missed her. Therefore, she knew that he must come for her at some point.
But that point never came.
Months passed. In spite of the fact that Acacia was hardly eating anything, her belly began to grow and her menses stopped. It wasn’t until the child in her belly began to move around that she realized she was with child, Clayton’s child, and panic seized her. In the many times Clayton had bedded her, conceiving a child had never occurred to her, either through stupidity or ignorance, or both. But it should have.
God help her, it should have.
After that, her prayers turned to tear-filled pleas to God to kill the child in her womb. She couldn’t stand the shame of bearing a bastard but, more than that, it complicated the situation so terribly. Lily would certainly never forgive her if she returned home with Clayton’s child in her arms, and everyone at Ramsbury would know she had fornicated with a man who was not her husband. Perhaps they wouldn’t know it was Clayton, but they would know she had been bedded by some fool who had left her with his child. It would make any potential marriage impossible unless she lied, and convinced everyone else to lie, that she’d been married before, but her husband had been killed.
Yet… she knew it was impossible.
Acacia had no direction in life, no one to turn to, and returning to Ramsbury was not an option. She had burned her bridges there and, truth be told, she wasn’t sure she wanted to mend them. She wasn’t certain there was any point to it. But seven months away from home, toiling away at Amesbury, had taught her something – she knew she could no longer face what her life had become. She could no longer face what she’d done to herself.
Clayton was never coming for her. She knew that now. He hadn’t needed her as he said he had and, as the days passed, she came to understand she’d been lied to. He’d lied to her about everything and she’d ruined her relationship with her sisters over it.
She couldn’t live with the shame.
Therefore, she took something from the kitchens that night after supper. A small copper knife, very sharp, and one she used to cut vegetables with. Now, this little knife would be her way out of her predicament. After the postulates were sent to bed that evening, Acacia lay on her bed at the end of the dormitory, listening to the sniffling and the snoring of the other postulates, and pulled out her little knife.
The embarrassment, the depression, ate at her until she could no longer think straight. She had to end what she had created. Dragging the sharp part of the blade across both wrists, she cut as deeply as she could.
Blood, bright red, dripped down her flesh and onto the thin woolen cover she was allowed. But through it all, Acacia remarkably kept her mouth shut. No cries of anguish, no gasps. She simply closed her eyes and, as the tears fell onto her musty straw mattress, she imagined better days when she was young and free, and her father was without his madness, and Clayton had yet to marry Lily.
These were the best days of her life, when she and her sisters still loved one another and there wasn’t anything to come between them, not bad judgment nor jealousy nor men. It was just the three of them, and she missed that desperately.
In the end, Acacia knew she’d been wrong, but she simply didn’t know how to fix it. Instead, she clung to old memories, even as a strange buzzing filled her head and she grew progressively weaker. Blood soaked the mattress, spilling out onto the dirt floor. By the time it was discovered before dawn, it was too late.
The Lady Acacia de Vaston had passed on from one purgatory to another.