Chapter 9 Friar Lukas
Friar Lukas
Sister Aleys is studying her psalter, her lips moving as she reads.
Her hand slips beneath her veil. He’s seen this before.
The sap of youth rising. The dew on her cheek.
The young are all the same. The novice friars can’t keep their hands off their shaved skulls, as if they’ve discovered a new body part.
They’re blind to their own presence, the way their loud steps announce their arrival, how their cloud of lemon zest assaults everyone around them.
He turns at the end of the path, resumes his pacing.
Friar Lukas feels relieved to be clean of the desires of youth.
His body’s needs were loud once, but his appetites have dried.
When hunger arises in him now, it hovers for a moment, then passes like a wasp from a spent vine.
Through discipline, he has become undistracted, a temple dedicated to spirit.
He rubs his fingers together and the dry flesh does not grab.
He pities the young. Green as weeds, they walk too fast with their begging bowls, duck into alleys to shove a crust of bread into their mouths.
Eventually, they master the body. Eventually, they become free of it.
She will, too. He knows she’s hungry; this is part of the discipline.
He’s asked Brother Hervé to bring food to the church, but not before the sun is high.
Lukas thinks back on his own induction. It feels like yesterday.
The brown friars had no church, so the boys took their vows in a glade.
Lukas was the last in line, his knees pressed into damp soil.
He heard the others’ voices catch, one after another, on the last vow.
The first vow, poverty, was nothing to those who’d never tasted it, a glamorous badge of defiance in a mercantile town.
Chastity seemed, in the moment, a minor inconvenience and lust a twitch that could be ignored.
It was the third vow, obedience, that made a boy’s blood freeze in his veins.
Lukas looked to his right, at the sons of commerce in their velvet tunics, saw their throat apples bob.
Obedience was a futures contract, an unspecified price for goods unseen.
It was hard to imagine obedience, let alone pledge it.
It was bottomless. The first boy tossed his flaxen head, then accepted the yoke.
The second screwed his eyes shut as if jumping from a cliff.
Only Lukas accepted obedience gladly, felt his knees root into the dirt.
It was a test, he knew, a chance to prove himself.
Obedience was the discipline. Obedience was the way. It still is.
Lukas watches the girl stand and stretch, arching her back and looking toward the sun.
It will be harder for Sister Aleys than for his brothers.
Women are easily tempted, prone to deception by demons.
It’s hardly their fault. They’re daughters of Eve.
He passes his hand over his bald pate. Goats are cropping grass at the edge of the garden, the females among the males.
Sister Aleys is an altogether different creature than his brown friars, but he trusts the Lord will show him the way.
He cinches his rope belt. He will guide her.
As if she’s read his thoughts, she starts to follow him through the garden.
This all happened so fast. He’s not sure what to do with her.
He wonders how Saint Francis handled Clare, who, of course, wasn’t a saint when she showed up with more passion than common sense.
What did they do that first day? Where did Clare sleep that night?
Maybe Francis had a sister or a cousin she could stay with.
But he has none. Perhaps he can ask the local convent to house Aleys until he figures it out.
He turns abruptly, and there she is, holding out a sprig of lavender. A piney smell rises from her fingers and pricks the back of his throat. He reaches to accept it, then restrains himself, placing his hands on his belt.
“Give your flower to Christ, not to me.”
“Will we not eat?” she asks.
They are standing there, the two of them, when Brother Hervé enters the garden holding an alms bowl.
He stops short. Lukas steps back, suddenly aware of what this looks like.
He’s mentioned this induction to no one, not even to Hervé, his least impressionable friar, a large man whose silent presence deepens the thoughts of all around him.
But even Hervé can’t hide his alarm. “Lukas?” He raises heavy eyebrows. “What have you—”
Lukas cuts him off. “Brother Hervé, let us step aside.” They move to the end of the garden. Aleys follows them with her eyes.
“You’ve recruited a woman?”
“I wanted to inform the brotherhood, but I had to move quickly.” He sees Hervé swallow a protest. “Listen. The order is pressuring us to expand. And she just appeared, like a”—Lukas’s eyes rise to the sky—“like a gift from God. She can read and write. In Latin! She doesn’t butcher her pater nosters.
She’ll attract followers. She’ll be an ornament to the order. ”
“We need ornaments?”
Lukas sighs and glances over his shoulder. His actions made sense in the night. In daylight, he’s already questioning whether this induction was premature. And here’s the girl coming toward them in one of their own robes. “Well, it’s done, anyway. She’s ours now.”
Lukas turns and announces a bit too brightly, “Sister Aleys, Brother Hervé has brought you food.”
Hervé makes the sign of the cross over the bowl, passes it to her, then stands well back.
Aleys tips the bowl back and drinks avidly. Lukas thinks he should have brought a wimple to cover her throat, but he’s a friar—where is he supposed to find a wimple? When she’s done, she runs her tongue inside the bowl. Hervé looks away.
“Lukas, she can’t join us in the friary.” Hervé says this in a low voice, the voice that gentles horses. “She’ll create a disturbance.”
“I know that.”
“So where will she go?”
“I thought the Benedictines.”
At this, Aleys looks up, licks her lips, and protests. “The nunnery?”
“You can’t expect to live with the men,” says Hervé.
“But I’m not Benedictine.” She grabs a fold of her brown robe and raises it to show them.
“I’m Franciscan.” You can’t do this to me, her eyes declare, you can’t shear off my hair and then pawn me off on nuns from another order.
“They’re not properly poor, the Benedictines.
I’m meant to be with you. With my brothers. ”
She looks from him to Hervé, who’s regarding her like an oddity of nature, a two-headed calf or a fish with ears.
Lukas states what should be obvious: “Aleys, what better place to pray than enclosed with sisters in Christ?”
“No. I won’t go to the nuns. They’re not serious.”
Obedience is going to be more of a challenge than he thought.
“The beguines would take her,” murmurs Hervé.
“What?” cries Aleys. “You can’t do that.” Her blue eyes dart between their faces like a startled moth. “They’re even worse.”
“Sister, have you already forgotten the vows you made last night?”
She bristles. “Which one? Obedience or chastity? Everyone knows the beguines are wanton.”
“The beguines are pious women!” Friar Lukas is their pastor. He’s sick of people slandering good women who seek a Godly life, though they lack either the dowry or the desire to become nuns. They live without men, but the town gossips about the begijnhof like it’s a brothel.
Aleys is staring at them open-mouthed.
“They run a school and a hospital,” offers Hervé, as if virtue and lust were incompatible.
“But their charity’s just a cloak for their sins. They hold strange rites in the begijnhof. Lewd rites. It’s common knowledge.”
Lukas and Hervé exchange exasperated glances.
“They’re jades,” she insists. “People say they lead honest men astray.”
“People say many false things. Have you ever set foot in a begijnhof? You won’t find a single man. Aside from priests.”
“I hear they choose their own.” She waits for that to land. “Priests.”
Hervé laughs and puts a hand on Lukas’s shoulder. “Usually one of us.”
“The bishop doesn’t like them,” she asserts.
“No, he doesn’t,” agrees Hervé. “The women prefer our friars to his church clergy. The beguines, you could say, are rather independent.”
That much is true, thinks Lukas—they are ungoverned.
The beguines of Brugge have never accepted a monastic rule, unlike the nunneries regulated by the Church.
The beguines write their own rules. They’re not cloistered.
But that doesn’t make them loose. On the contrary.
Lukas knows many beguines more devout than nuns, and they work much harder, since they have to make their own living. He has great respect for the beguines.
“Sister,” he says. “You do understand you’re on probation.”
“I am?”
“Of course. You’re a novitiate.”
He sees the surprise in her eyes. Did she think she’d proven herself just by running from home?
Hadn’t they discussed this? He thinks back and realizes he’d spoken at length about the beauty of the vita apostolica.
Not so much about its duties. “You must demonstrate that you’re suitable to join the order. ”
“Oh.”
“You will emulate Saint Clare. You’ll draw other women to the Franciscan way.”
“But . . . how?”
“Well, Saint Clare asked her sister, then her mother, to join her. Others followed.”
“My mother is dead.”
He winces. He softens his voice. “Then you’ll win women over with your faith. Starting in the begijnhof.”
“She’ll have to work,” says Hervé, “if she joins the beguines.”
Aleys shakes her head.
“You refuse to work?” asks Lukas.
“No. It’s not that.” A bee has landed on her brown sleeve. She looks at it with something like sadness. “I mean, the beguines are not”—she searches for the right word—“that holy.”
“They’re humble,” he says. Unlike you, he thinks.
But her eyes plead with him, and he glimpses again her wild desire. The beguines don’t soar, her eyes seem to say. They can’t teach me to fly.
Lukas understands. He does. But first she must crawl.
He claps his hands. “The swiftest path to God is obedience. You will live among the beguines. I give you two months, until Midsummer, to recruit the first sisters to our order. Consider this your first test.”