I slipped out of my chamber, navigating the dark corridors from memory. Ten years I’d lived within these walls, and the stones knew my footsteps by now, worn smooth beneath the paths I traveled as I completed my daily chores.
First, I made my way to the small field behind our stone building. Already I heard Leibchen, the convent’s single dairy cow, making quite a fuss.
“Yes, yes, I’m here,” I said, stroking her side as I set the tin pail beneath her.
In some ways, Leibchen was my oldest friend. She had been pregnant with her first calf when I arrived at the convent at thirteen, freshly orphaned and still smelling of smoke from my mother’s pyre. The sisters hadn’t known what to do with me. I was too old to be raised properly, too young to take vows, and carried the taint of witchcraft in my very blood. So, they’d given me the work no one else wanted: mucking stalls, hauling water, and milkingLeibchen twice a day, every day, my back bent and aching before I’d even finished growing.
“You saved me, you know,” I murmured to her as my hands found their familiar rhythm. “Though you nearly killed me first.”
She lowed softly. Three months after I’d started milking her, cowpox had come—angry pustules covering my hands and arms, fever that made me delirious for days. Mother Agnes had tended me with her usual grim detachment, muttering that perhaps God was claiming the witch’s daughter after all. But I’d survived, scarred but stronger.
Then, two winters later, smallpox had swept through Bamberg like God’s own wrath. It took the young and old without discrimination—except for me. I’d moved amongst the dying, bringing water and tending wounds when the priests were too afraid to enter the convent’s sick house, the nuns succumbing left and right. Not a single pustule touched my skin.
“That’s when the whispers really started,” I told Leibchen, who flicked her tail in what I chose to interpret as sympathy. “The witch’s daughter who couldn’t be killed by disease. Even Sister Margareta looked at me differently after that.” Sister Margareta, who had taught me to tend the sick, whose hands bore the same scars as mine.
The milk rang against the sides of the pail, a comfortable, familiar sound. Leibchen was old now, older than any dairy cow had a right to be. Twelve years at least, when most were sent to slaughter after eight or nine. Her milk had thinned, came slower each season. Last week, I’d overheard Mother Agnes discussing her fate with the butcher.
“But you’re still here, aren’t you, old friend?” I stroked her flank, feeling the prominent bones beneath her hide. “Still useful enough to avoid the knife. Though barely.”
She turned her broad head to look at me, and I saw my own future in her patient brown eyes. How quickly the world disposed of women who outlived their utility.
Help those who cannot help themselves.
I leaned over, feeding her a handful of oats laced with fenugreek I made just for her.
“We’ll keep going, won’t we?” I whispered, pressing my forehead against her warm side. “You’ll keep producing milk, even if it’s just a trickle. And I’ll keep healing—the work Mother left for me. We will survive.”
The pail was only half full when she ran dry. It used to fill completely, sometimes requiring a second container. But I patted her neck gratefully anyway.
“Every drop is rebellion,” I told her. “Every day you survive past your usefulness is a small victory against a world that measures our worth in what we can provide—milk, babies…silence.”
I carried the pail back toward the convent, depositing it in the kitchen where many of the sisters toiled, covered in flour and sweat. One grabbed the bucket without ceremony and prepared the milk for cheese-making. I swept out of the kitchen, equally silent. On to my next use.
The convent’s garden gate creaked on ancient hinges, the only gap in the stone walls separating it from the cloisters. The plants stretched before me as dawn broke, rows of herbs and early-season vegetables I had tended into a garden fruitful enough to provide for the convent. The wind stirred as I entered, and it was as if all the flowers turned toward me, their fragrance a familiar comfort.
Here, the tightness in my chest loosened. The soil beneath my feet was dark and rich, and I knew every inch of it. I knew which patches drained well and which held moisture, where the mint spread too eagerly and had to be cut back each spring. This was the one place in Bamberg where no one watched me. The plants did not care whose blood ran in my veins. They only cared that I watered them, weeded them, spoke to them in the early morning when no one else was awake, as my mother had taught me.
Talk to them. The plants listen, and what they hear, they tell the bees. What the bees know, they share with the wind, and the windcarries secrets to all who know how to listen. This is how we pray to the earth that our Lord God made for us.
The bees were early this morning. Two landed on the back of my hand; their tiny feet moving over the scars on my hand as they danced in tandem.
“Good morning, any news for me today?” I asked, lifting my hand in front of my face.
They continued to circle before they rose in unison, spiraling into the air and flying off. But before they headed back to their home, they paused on the petals of the purple flowers that grew in nodes along the tall stems hidden in the shade. So, there was news for the day…
For there were other plants in this garden, ones that grew in the shadows between the approved herbs, tucked behind the sage and rosemary where only knowing eyes would spot them.
The purple flowers of the pennyroyal crept along the north wall, innocent enough to those who didn’t know their purpose, perhaps even mistaken for lavender. Tansy grew wild by the well, its yellow buttons bright even in dim light. Blue cohosh hid beneath the apple trees, and rue thrived in a corner where most never ventured. I hadn’t planted them. They’d been here when I first began my quiet work, as if the garden itself knew what the women of Bamberg needed and had provided.
Sister Margareta had found me here once, three summers past, gathering rue in the small hours before Matins. I had frozen, certain she would raise the alarm, would drag me before the Witch Bishop himself. Instead, she’d knelt beside me in the damp earth and shown me how to harvest the leaves without damaging the plant’s ability to regenerate.
“God’s creation serves many purposes,” she’d said quietly, her weathered hands gentle on the stems. “Very few written in the herbals the priests approve.”
She never spoke of it again, but sometimes I found fresh herbs bundled and dried in the garden shed—plants I hadn’t harvested myself—tied with a particular knot. Perhaps they were meant forthe priests to sprinkle holy water, but I didn’t think so. A secret Sister Margareta had shared, unspoken, for nearly a decade.
Mist rose from the earth like incense with each of my steps as I made my way to the far corner where the rue grew thickest, guided by the ghost of my mother’s hand…and the knowledge she had left with me before her passing.
“Good morning, grandmother rue,” I whispered, my fingers gentle on the silvered leaves. “I need your bitter wisdom today. A girl comes seeking help. Her father arranged a marriage to a man who already buried two wives in childbirth. She has barely seen fifteen summers, and her monthly blood has only just begun its rhythm. He seems to have a taste for girls far too young.”
