Chapter 2 Aleys #2
Aleys wipes her hands on her skirt. “That’s Mama’s.” Her fingers itch to grab the book.
“Just so.” Papa’s smile is rueful. “The first time I saw her psalter was at our wedding. I was almost jealous, she loved it so much.”
Aleys thinks of Mama, not much older than she is now, clutching her book at the altar.
What painting illuminated her mind in that moment?
Was she picturing an angel alighting before her or the pits of hell?
Did she know death was waiting, not so many years off?
Of course not, Aleys tells herself. No one expects that.
“Mama meant to give this to you on your wedding day.”
Aleys retracts her fingers as if Papa’s offered her live coals.
What’s he saying? They’ve never discussed this.
Surely, he doesn’t expect her to marry. He knows she belongs at home, with him, with them, with Farrago and the wool and the garden and the chickens.
Aleys looks down. She’s standing where the midwife dropped the soiled linens. She backs away.
“Papa, no.” The words come out fast. “Who’d run our home?
And the business—you can’t manage without me.
” She can sort the strong yarn from the weak, can weigh a skein with her eyes and select a dye for a monk or a marquise.
He needs her. Doesn’t he? Her throat clenches.
“I don’t want a husband.” Papa is smiling like there’s a joke only he knows.
She feels panic rise. She’s only fourteen years old. “This is my home.”
He nods and assesses the book in his hand.
When he looks up, his eyes are bright. “You know, when your mother prayed, there was something so sure about her.” Papa regards the prie-dieu beside their bed, as if Mama were right there, and Aleys realizes that, for him, she still is.
“So intimate.” He shrugs. “Most people pray because the priests tell them to, like they’re checking off a list. Your brothers, for one.
Or they’re afraid of the hell the priests whip up.
” Papa shakes his head. He doesn’t much care for priests, agrees with those who complain the Church has grown corrupt.
“And then there are those,” he says, “like Griete, who get down on their knees to deliver God their list of demands. But your mother was different.” He looks out the window at the fading light on the field.
“When she prayed, she raised her head as if she were listening. Like she was trying to catch a melody just beyond reach.”
Aleys imagines Mama in prayer, the house asleep, the candles flickering. “She prayed from love.”
“More like curiosity, I think. She wanted to know God.” He smiles.
“She used to take my hand and reach it out like she was pressing against an invisible cloth. She’d say, ‘It’s here, husband.
Right here. God’s will. If we could just see the weave.
’ Sometimes I thought she missed her vocation. She would have made a happy nun.”
“Mama, a nun?” Enclosed within the walls of an abbey? Aleys doesn’t agree. Mama loved the world, loved her neighbors, loved Papa. She loved the waves of the North Sea. She wouldn’t have wanted to be a nun.
“Your mother had a talent for prayer,” says Papa. He shifts the pouch from one hand to the other. “Aleys . . . you have no idea how like her you are. So I have to ask. Do you want to join the convent?”
Aleys shakes her chin rapidly, almost a shiver. She has no more desire to live behind walls than Mama did. “I’d never see you again.”
“And you don’t want to marry?”
“No! I told you. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m happy here.”
“But you’d never have children.”
She shudders. “Papa, I don’t . . .”
“I know,” he says, putting out his hand. He won’t make her say it. “No one’s going to force you.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.” He nods. “Then, if you have no intention of leaving, this should be yours.” He puts the pouch into her hands and holds them for a moment. “From Mama.”
Aleys can hardly breathe. She gently loosens the drawstring and eases out the prayer book. It’s exactly as she remembers. The psalter fills her hand the way it once filled Mama’s. She traces her fingers over the vine that runs around the edge of the supple green leather. “I can open it?”
“Of course. It’s yours.”
Aleys opens the book at random, to a painting of an enormous oak.
Her breath catches. She remembers this, how the tree spreads across the page, how every branch holds a different bird.
The leaves are light green and dark green, and the birds’ wings are tipped with gold.
Mama’s voice comes to her. The blackbird.
And the cardinal. You see the sparrow? Below the tree, auburn foxes poke their noses from dens in the earth.
Aleys can’t read the words of the psalm, but she knows every single bird on every single branch.
“Oh, Papa.” She holds the book to her heart. She can say no more.
One hunger begets another. At night, while the others sleep, Aleys sets a taper on the kitchen table.
She washes her hands thoroughly in the bucket and rubs them on her dress until they chafe, and only then does she loosen the drawstring on the pouch and extract the psalter.
She pauses with her hands on the cover, and she swears she can feel the imprint of Mama’s fingers.
Then she opens the book like she’s raising the lid of a treasure chest. Each illuminated psalm is vibrant as a sunrise.
She pictures the monk who copied the verse and decorated the margins, but instead of ink, she imagines him dipping his quill in the colors of bluebirds and holly berries and bright spring moss.
Look, Mama had said. How the wind stirs the trees.
The vivid images wake something in Aleys, as if her own senses are tipped with monk’s gold.
The sun in the psalter lights the fields outside her window.
She pours water from the ewer and stands still, hearing cascades from the hills.
A hawk’s cry becomes the call of an angel.
The world of the psalter and the world around her begin to merge, and she wonders how much she’s failed to see, right in front of her.
The marvels Mama spoke of, the beauty of God’s world.
It comes back to her. Aleys tips her tongue to the grapes and tastes wine.
It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not.
If she could read the verse, Aleys feels, she could understand.
She aches to understand. She wants more.
She reaches her hand out to touch God’s fabric and thinks she feels him pushing back.
As the fire settles in the hearth and the pewter ticks with the night chill, Aleys works to decipher the Latin.
She starts with the Ave Maria, the song of Matins, the first hour, which even a milkmaid can recite.
Everyone knows at least a few Latin words from the prayers they chant by rote in church.
It’s just that there are so many words. Aleys starts by translating the handful she recognizes.
Ave means hail, mater is mother, benedicta is blessed.
She teases apart the Lord’s Prayer, too, figures out that terra means earth, deduces bread from panem.
But she can get only so far without a tutor.
She’ll never read the psalms or the saints unless she learns Latin.
And then, out of nowhere, from the least likely of places, Aleys receives her third wish.
It’s January and frigid, ice slicking the roadways.
Henryk is sick and Papa needs help delivering fabric to the dyers.
Aleys thinks Henryk is perfectly fine. He’s just afraid the fumes from the dye yard will stink up his cloak.
Recently, Henryk has become a bit of a dandy.
His loss. She’s glad of the chance to ride out with Papa.
He piles the bench of their cart with sheepskin and Aleys draws over their knees a heavy blanket made from coarse cast-off yarn.
She wraps her hands twice in the wool, but the chill finds its way through the weave.
She doesn’t mind. The sky above is so pure blue it looks like it could crack with the cold.
They smell the yard before they see the enormous cauldrons that emit great plumes of steam like the devil’s vats in her psalter.
The yard smells like hell, too, but at least it’s warm, with fires stoked high.
Papa gets down to negotiate with a large man and his sons, a matched set of hulking twins, one whose hands are blue with woad dye, the other’s scarlet with madder.
Aleys unloads the bolts of wool onto a wooden pallet.
They’re talking about the drapers’ guild and whether the head of it, a man named Mertens, will ever grant Papa a license to sell in the Lakenhalle.
“Our best fabric dyed in your royal blue? How could he refuse?” asks Papa.
They’ll be bargaining over the price of that blue for a while.
Aleys wanders off among the steaming vats.
Men in leather aprons wield long wooden paddles, stirring lengths of wool through the dye.
Boys scurry like squirrels, adding wood to the fires.
Aleys lifts her skirt above puddles streaked with purple and red.
Colored vapor lifts from the vats and drifts off like carnival smoke.
Aleys turns the corner of a shed and nearly trips over a boy.
“Oh. Hallo.” The boy is seated on a low crate, hunched over a hornbook.
She peers at the tablet. A sheet of finely shaved translucent horn traps and protects a piece of parchment.
Aleys starts to ask why he’s studying outside, then stops.
“You’re reading Latin.” The surprise in her voice comes out before she can disguise it. A dyer reading Latin?