Sister Hild

The oldest dated voice in the books. In 3671 a Cambridge sister wrote a little book for people who had no priest to send for, and taught them that a spirit is known first by its bounds.

Sister Hild's book is dated 3671 and issued at Cambridge, and nothing older carries a date in the volumes. It was written for lay people: the reeve, the widow, the eldest son, whoever stood nearest the door in a parish the clergy could no longer reach. Its matter is plain and its tone is calm. A spirit is first known by the bounds within which its will abides, it says, and a household that has learned the bounds has learned most of what it can do.

Of her life the books say nothing beyond the name and the year. What the Cambridge house tells is that she was a fen-born sister who had kept doors herself before she wrote about them, in parishes where a priest came twice a year if the roads allowed, and that she wrote the book because the same questions were brought to her every winter by people who walked a day to ask them. She wrote in the plain speech of the fen and would not put it into Latin.

The book outlived her by centuries. St Albans issued it again in 3793 under Sister Mildrith, who added her own lines and kept Hild's, and later copies still go out to remote parishes with both names in the front. A lay exorcist in a fen village today may never have heard of Cambridge, but will have been taught out of Hild's order of questions: where it begins, where it ends, and what it asks.

In person

About forty at the book's issue, small and thin-faced, with a long nose, steady dark eyes and chapped hands. A dark brown woollen habit with wide sleeves, a black veil over a white linen head-rail, a plain wooden cross on a cord; she sits at a sloped desk in a whitewashed cell writing on parchment with a goose quill, a wax tablet of notes beside her.