St. Teresa arrives at Alba de Tormes too ill for the castle

ALBA DE TORMES, Castile, September 20, 1582 AD — Saint Teresa of Ávila reached Alba de Tormes at six o’clock this evening, after three days in the Duchess of Alba’s carriage with almost nothing to eat. She was too weak to be taken up to the castle, where the duchess was expecting her. The errand she had been brought here for was finished before she was through the gate.

St. Teresa is sixty-seven. In twenty years she has founded seventeen convents of nuns, and she has been on the road since the end of July, coming home from the newest of them at Burgos. For months she has had a violent fever and an open wound in her throat that almost stops her swallowing.

She wanted to get to Ávila. She is prioress of St. Joseph’s there, and her niece Teresita was to take the veil from her hands. The Duchess of Alba, Doña María Enríquez, wanted her at Alba instead. St. Teresa had promised the duchess a visit a year earlier. Now the duchess’s daughter-in-law was about to give birth, and the duchess wanted St. Teresa in the house to bring a blessing on the birth.

Neither woman decided where she went. Father Antonio de Jesús, the first Carmelite friar to join her reform and now the man who governed her friars, was waiting for her at Medina del Campo. His orders were that she go to Alba at once, and she was bound to obey him.

She took it hard. She had obeyed her superiors all her life, and she obeyed this order too.

The duchess sent her own carriage to Medina to fetch her, and forgot to send provisions with it. St. Teresa left on the morning of September 17 without eating. Venerable Anne of St Bartholomew, the lay sister who has nursed her for fourteen years, was travelling with her.

On the last day of the road before Alba, Anne could get her nothing to eat. By nightfall they had reached Peñaranda, and St. Teresa grew faint and asked Anne for something to eat: “Daughter, let me have something to eat, I am fainting!” Anne had nothing but some dried figs. She sent someone out with four reales to buy eggs whatever they cost, and the money came back unspent, because there were no eggs in the village.

St. Teresa looked half dead, and Anne began to cry. St. Teresa comforted her instead: “Don’t cry, daughter; the figs are very good; how many poor people are worse off! God wills that it should be so.” The next day the only food in the village they stopped at was cabbage cooked with onions, and she made her one meal of it.

The carriage came into Alba at about six this evening. They were hardly inside the town when a messenger stopped it with the news that the young duchess had given birth to a son. “Thank God! the ‘Saint’ won’t be wanted now!” St. Teresa said.

She had promised to go straight to the castle, and she could not do it. Father Antonio, who had brought her the whole way from Medina, ruled there at the entrance to the town that she was to go into the convent instead. She had founded that house here eleven years before.

The nuns of the house came to her. St. Teresa blessed them, held out her hand to be kissed and spoke a word to each nun.

Then the prioress, Mother Juana of the Holy Ghost, and the other nuns pressed her to go to bed. She was in a burning fever, and she told them she felt utterly worn out, as though all her bones were broken. They undressed her and laid her on the hard straw mattress. The rule of the house allowed no nun any other bed, however ill she was.

“God help me, daughters, how tired I feel!” St. Teresa said. “I have not gone to bed so early for twenty years! How I thank Him for letting me be with you now that I am taken ill!”