Chapter 2 Aleys #3
“What of it?” The boy is skinny, but he’d be taller than her if he stood up.
He shows no sign of doing so. He places his forearm over the hornbook to shield it from her eyes, but his arm is too thin to hide what he’s reading.
He looks like a younger version of the dyer’s twins, with large gray eyes and long fingers.
But his are clean. She wonders why he’s not stirring a vat.
Maybe he has more brothers than there are colors.
“You’re reading that?” she asks.
“Obviously.” He doesn’t move his arm.
“You must go to the monks’ school.” The monks teach boys whose families can’t afford tutors. Girls aren’t welcome. She leans over him. “Can I see?”
The boy tilts his head at her, not quite smirking. “You wouldn’t like it. There aren’t any pictures.”
“I can read.”
“Latin?”
“Yes.” It’s a bold claim. Sure, she’s worked out some words from prayers she knows by heart: give, day, bread, kingdom, power, glory.
She can map out the sounds of the other words, too, but she has no idea what they mean.
It’s just gibberish to her, even if she can pronounce them.
Might as well be Portuguese or English. She doesn’t understand those languages, either.
“Prove it.” He shoves the tablet at her.
Aleys shakes her sleeves from her wrists and takes the paddle and presses her hand down on the horn sheet so she can see through it.
She recognizes give from the Lord’s Prayer.
It’s enough of an anchor to decipher the first sentence.
“Give, and it will be given to you.” She hands the hornbook back to him. “See?”
The boy squints skeptically at the tablet. It dawns on her that he can’t read it. So she makes up the rest. “Take, and it will be taken from you.” Sounds about right. “Teach, and you will be taught.”
He looks at it dubiously. “It says that? Exactly?”
“That’s the general idea.”
He turns to a leather bag at his side and pulls out another sheet of parchment.
“I know this one.” He doesn’t bother to slip it under the horn sheet.
He doesn’t even look at it. The Latin flows off his tongue: “Numquid potest caecus caecum ducere nonne ambo in foveam cadent.” He’s clearly memorized the passage.
Showing off, he repeats it in Dutch for her benefit.
“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they both not fall into the pit?” She bristles at his condescension.
So the boy is fluent in Latin and can commit passages to memory. It doesn’t mean he can read.
“Show me where it says pit,” she demands.
The boy points, but his finger wavers between words. He’s guessing.
Aleys squints at the sentence. By process of elimination, she should be able to get it. She knows fall into temptation; fall into the pit can’t be that different. She picks one of the words from the end of the sentence where she knows pit ought to be. “Fo-ve-am.”
“Pit,” he says.
“Pit,” she agrees. She points at the word.
“How can you tell?”
“I figure it out.”
“That’s a trick.” He’s looking at her like she’s just blown flame from her mouth. “Girls don’t read Latin.”
“Nuns do. If I had a tutor, I’d speak Latin like you.” It dawns on her that he has the opposite problem she does. She reads the words but can’t understand them. He speaks Latin but can’t read it. She gestures at the page in his hand. “So how do you know what that says?”
“I memorize it.”
“Don’t the monks teach you to read?”
“They will, once we’re fluent. And after we master copying. That’s what they mostly care about, getting the manuscripts done for their patrons.”
“But you want to read what you’re copying.”
“Of course I do. I’m not just some monkey with a quill.” Suddenly, he’s up on his feet, thrusting the page at her. “Show me how you do it.”
She steps back. “Why should I?”
“If you do, I can read the text that the monks set us to copy.” He looks at her from the corner of his eye. “Plus the scripture they don’t want us to read. I can get that.”
Well, good for him. “But why should I teach you?”
“Because I understand Latin and you don’t.”
A path opens before Aleys. He’s proposed a quid pro quo. If she shows him how to sound out the Latin words, he’ll be able to read whatever he wants. And if he teaches her what the Latin words mean, she’ll be able to understand everything in Mama’s psalter.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
He doffs his hat like he’s a courtier, not a dyer’s son. “Finn,” he replies. “They call me Finn.”
Aleys becomes Finn’s reading tutor, and he becomes her Latin tutor.
Finn has a donkey he can bribe with stale turnips to make the trip to Damme, so they meet in the root cellar after her family is abed.
Shoulder to shoulder, they learn like wildfire.
He sneaks out the manuscripts he’s supposed to be copying for the monks.
By spring, Finn can sound out words and Aleys can tell him what they mean.
By summer, they trample down a nest for themselves in a nearby field, the wheat turning from green to gold, stars emerging above.
He curves his lanky body over the parchment, his sandy hair falling over his gray eyes.
She brings a leather cord and plaits it for him. “There,” she says. “Now you can read.”
She finds she’s happy. She has a friend. She thinks Finn would go on pilgrimage with her if she asked. He’s as curious about God as she is.
“When you grow up in a dyer’s yard,” he says, “you don’t need to be told what hell is.
But there’s supposed to be a kingdom of heaven on earth, too.
” Finn’s been getting worked up since he can read for himself.
“So where is it? The priests are hiding something. Why won’t they let people read for themselves? ”
“We have our prayer books.”
“But there’s so much more, Aleys, than is in your mother’s psalter.”
For now, Aleys is happy to decipher the prayers for the hours in the psalter.
The words, to her surprise, are as beautiful as the illuminations.
The prayers seem to pare her senses, leaving her raw and open.
And closer to Mama. How she’d have loved to have been able to read.
Aleys tries to pray as Mama would have. She tries to listen for both of them.
In chapel, when all necks are bowed and the priest raises the host to the cross, Aleys lifts her head.
She sees, just over the field of downcast heads, in shafts of sunlight, and everywhere, really, dust motes winking, heedless of prayers.
No one sees them, unless there’s a shift in the light.
They’re everywhere, buffeted by the breeze, in the sap of the pines, in the crunch of leaves underfoot, in the way the bread tears in the hand, the way the bread knows to tear in the hand just so.
The treaded path, the burst of grape on the tongue, the sudden flood, it is all thus, and there is a hand behind it, a design, a pattern so diverse and particular that it seems no pattern, but it is, she knows it is.
The air, the stone, the pearl, the cry of jay, the smell of moss, all of it, all of it, sings with joyful, dancing bits of God.
It is there, just beyond reach. She knows it. Something is waiting for her.
Finn understands. Finn feels something coming, too.
Her brothers are playing chess in the kitchen and Griete is fumbling with the pots, having promised to do the cooking, for once. “Just today,” asks Aleys. “Please.”
“So you can pray?” Griete is incredulous.
“More?” They share a little altar in the corner of their bedchamber.
After he gave her the psalter, Papa let Aleys move the prie-dieu upstairs.
Griete has scant use of it. She veers wide of the shrine, performs a knee bob from a safe distance, crosses herself as if in protection from all virgins, and runs to the sunshine.
“Please, just do it.” Aleys doesn’t say that last night she dreamed of Mama. It was so real, Mama looking up from the kitchen table, her hands deep in yarn. “What is it?” Aleys had asked. Mama had said nothing, but Aleys could read her eyes. Come meet me, they said, in your prayers.
Domine labia mea aperies. Thou O Lord wilt open my lips.
Rain spatters the windowsill, making little pools.
Aleys positions herself on the prie-dieu.
She places the psalter before her and opens it to the illustration of the Virgin receiving astonishing news from the angel.
She’s pregnant. Mary looks strangely happy about it, almost like she saw it coming.
Aleys chose this page because Gabriel seems like the best messenger between heaven and earth.
On the page, God shines down from a disc of gold and Gabriel has just alighted before Mary, his wings rigid and high.
Come to me, Gabriel, Aleys prays. Let me see you.
Just once. Mary has been praying at her prie-dieu, just as Aleys is.
Though it’s sunny in the psalter and cloudy on earth, Aleys knows that God’s favorite angel wouldn’t be deterred by rain.
She recites the first line of Mary’s prayer over and over again: Ave Maria, gratia plena.
Dominus tecum. Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee. In the repetition, the words begin to blur and lose their meaning.
Her head swims a little. She can no longer feel her feet.
She repeats the verse until it seems the words might thin the veil between this world and the next.
She wants to reach out and test it, but she keeps her hands clasped tight.
Send the angel, she prays. Bring Mama to me.
And then it happens. The roof lifts away.
Aleys grips the stand and looks up to an open sky, where the sun hangs swollen and beating like an enormous heart.
Clouds flee in all directions as if frightened, until there’s nothing but gold above her.
She has entered the psalter. All falls silent and an unbearable sweetness fills her limbs.
She doesn’t exactly see the angel, but she feels him behind her shoulder.
She wants to turn and look but fears he will disappear.
Or that he might tell her she’s pregnant.
Time stops on a pinpoint of glory. She feels herself breathe, but all else is still. One breath, two, three. Then the angel speaks. She can’t say what language it’s in, or whether Gabriel speaks aloud. She will remember only one word: Seek.
It’s a message from Mama.
When the door bangs open and it is Griete, Aleys whispers, “Behold!” But when her eyes return to the ceiling, she sees only rafters.
“Supper is ready,” says her sister. “We’re all waiting for you.”
Aleys goes down in a daze, can barely lift her spoon. The pewter gleams like silver, for hours, until it fades. But her heart holds the glow.
Until it doesn’t. For she can’t seem to bring the angel back. She prays at the same time, with the same words, in the sun and in the rain. It never happens again, and there is a corner of her that wonders whether maybe, just maybe, she dreamed it.