Chapter 12 Aleys
Aleys
Cecilia pulls Aleys across the begijnhof courtyard, toward the lowest and longest of the buildings, where the other girls are carding wool, or at least pretending to.
The scritch scratch of the wire brushes pause.
Aleys feels the girls’ eyes upon her back as Cecilia pulls her up a narrow wooden staircase that opens to a dormitory.
Here, the light from the courtyard filters through leaves and reaches into the window, so that the whitewashed walls flicker green and gray as the laundry snaps below.
Within, all is as one might expect: for each woman, a chair, a cot, a stiff prie-dieu with an unpadded kneeler.
Upright furniture, straight edges, no embellishments.
Simple in the extreme. Aleys thinks about Mama’s psalter hidden beneath her robe in its scarlet silk pouch.
How gaudy the little book would look on the sloped shelf of the bare prie-dieu, a gem of temptation.
She glances around. Possessions are few, cloaks on pegs, a comb on a chair.
Despite what she’s heard about beguines’ unholy acts, she doesn’t think they steal.
Besides, there’s nowhere to hide even a pin.
Or pray. Aleys regards the prie-dieu with dismay, jammed between chair and bed, the plainest of crosses nailed to the wall above.
She tries to imagine herself kneeling there, offering her soul amidst chatting, sighing, snoring girls.
Cheek by jowl with breathing beguines, how is she expected to pray?
“Here, next to me,” says Cecilia, patting the empty cot.
The other five are taken. Cecilia is a large girl with dimpled hands and a voice deep as molasses.
“I’ve been here just a few months, you mind, but Sister Katrijn has already said I can come live in her house, once I take the gray dress.
This dormitory’s for the girls as not yet committed.
Some of them leave to get married, the beguines don’t mind.
It’s not so bad, living here. The girls are friendly.
And it’s comfortable enough. I didn’t know much more fancy from home.
You aren’t from the farm, that I can tell.
” She tilts her head, hesitates in the way of people who know better but can’t stay their tongues.
“Miss, if it’s not prying too much, everyone’s wondering.
They say you were about to wed the head of the drapers’ guild.
You’d never have wanted for wool, that’s for certain.
” She looks at the robe. “I suppose you do have that. But silk, you could have had silk dresses and furs on your bed. So, if it’s not too forward, miss, why ever did you do it? ”
I should have gone to the convent, thinks Aleys, at least they keep silence.
Aleys knows there’s no point in trying to explain herself.
How can she say what she seeks? That she has left home to find God, that he cloaks himself in plain sight, that she wants to catch him like children hiding in the apple trees.
It would be like asking someone to help her find the sky.
They all call it blue, but she knows it’s truly gold, if only you look at it the right way.
It is gold and green and shot through with angels.
She looks at Cecilia’s open face and knows the girl could never comprehend.
How can Aleys explain that she already knows she won’t find her beloved in the begijnhof? She parries.
“First, tell me. What brought you here?”
Cecilia colors, looks at her feet. “My parents, they’d had enough of me.”
“What? Why?” It’s hard to believe that Cecilia wasn’t beloved, with her round cheeks and toothy smile.
“Well, I wasn’t so easy for them.”
“They sent you here?”
“I didn’t know where else to go.” She twists her pretty mouth. “My father, he turned me out, miss.”
Oh. Cecilia was probably caught behind the barn with the baker’s son. Or the butcher’s boy. Or a field hand. Why they didn’t just marry her, Aleys wonders, but doesn’t ask.
“Anyway.” Cecilia brightens. “It’s all right here. I like the city.”
They stand there, looking at Aleys’s cot.
She owns nothing beyond the psalter that she can place on the bed or chair to mark it as hers.
Cecilia screws her forehead into a knot.
“And to think you could have had furs.” Then she shakes her head and clears the frown.
“I suppose there’s nothing for it. I’ll have Marte get you some bedding.
” In a nimble move, Cecilia hoists herself onto the chair between their cots, places her hands on the windowsill, and leans out.
“Marte!” she bellows, then looks back at Aleys with a grin.
“At least we have a servant. You can be sure there was none of that where I came from.” She turns back to the window. “Marte! Hurry up!”
Aleys hears the door’s hinges below, and an uneven tread ascends the stairs.
“She’s new,” says Cecilia, as if that explains her slowness.
It takes a long moment for the servant to reach the doorway, but then she is framed in the greenish light, a woman with a plain, weary face, already running to jowl.
Her eyes are unremarkable, a watery hazel, but for the purple bruise across her left cheekbone.
She meets Aleys’s gaze and scowls before she looks away, whether from shame or defiance, Aleys can’t tell.
“Marte!” commands Cecilia. “Get Sister Aleys some proper bedding.”
Marte doesn’t smile. Her face is unreadable. She probably wonders why Sister Cecilia didn’t spare her the climb. The sheets, after all, are hanging in the courtyard. Marte only grunts. As she turns, her foot drags. She leans on the wall as she prepares to descend.
“And bring water!” Cecilia yells after her. She waves her hand at the space vacated by Marte. “From the farm,” she says dismissively, as if she herself were not fresh from the fields. “That is all she knows.”
“She is . . . ?” Aleys intends to ask about the limp. Cecilia answers another question.
“Married.” She points her chin after Marte. “But you see how he treats her. She ran away. Sister Katrijn says we’ll keep her so long as she earns her pottage.”
When Marte returns, she bears a sheet, a blanket, and a small towel. Atop this, a wooden basin filled with water that threatens to spill as Marte lurches to the chair. She lowers her burden carefully, then lifts the bowl for Aleys to wash her hands. She twists her head away, almost painfully.
Aleys dries her hands with the towel. “Thank you,” she says.
Marte sniffs and gives the smallest of nods, then leaves with the basin. Aleys hears the water slosh onto the stairs.
There is an awkward moment as Cecilia and Aleys regard each other, not sure what to say next.
The voices of the girls carding wool drift into the window.
Cecilia dips her head their way. “I best be getting back to my work, miss. When you hear the bell ring, that’s for supper.
I’ll save you a spot next to me, don’t you worry. ”
Aleys imagines her life beside Cecilia, sleeping, waking, eating, praying.
Cecilia’s abundant energy more than fills this close room: It rebounds from wall to wall.
And there are four other girls, in this space alone.
She was better off with just Griete. The thought of Griete is a stab in her side.
She should never have left home. But that wasn’t a choice.
And she will need to recruit some of these women.
After Cecilia clomps down the stairs, the rhythmic sound of wire brushes scraping each other stops for a moment as the others make room for her. Then one of their voices picks up, resuming a story.
Aleys pulls the sheet out from under the blanket. She’ll prepare her bed. Then she’ll pray. It may be her only moment alone all day.
“She loved him,” floats up a voice.
“I don’t understand,” says another. “If she was in the convent . . .”
“There are ways.”
“No,” says the first, “that’s not what I meant. She’d been in love with him since childhood. Since they were twelve. They pledged to each other the night before he left with the Templars.”
She hears Cecilia’s voice. “If I could have married a knight, you can be sure I wouldn’t be carding wool.”
Aleys spreads the sheet over the bed.
“Listen, in the Holy Lands, the knight fights with valor. It’s afterward, on the way home, that he slips from his saddle.
His man at arms rushes to his side, but the knight’s wounds have opened, and he’s bleeding all over the ground.
There is nothing they can do. He tells his comrades to go forward, gives his man a rose to bring to Beatrice, and a message.
‘Remember me, always.’ When his man comes to the house of Beatrice’s father, her heart breaks at the news. What’s she going to do?”
“Take vows, of course.”
“Unless they had a begijnhof in her town.”
“No, they didn’t have any. She went to one of the convents devoted to Saint Mary.”
Aleys folds the blanket over the end of the cot. Then she kneels at the narrow prie-dieu, crosses herself, begins the Lord’s Prayer.
“Anyway, listen,” the voice drifts up, “in four or five years, she’s the bell ringer for the abbey, and she’s perfect, she never once misses the prayers. But then the knight returns . . .”
Aleys tries to concentrate. How is she supposed to hallow his name when she can barely hear herself think?
“I thought he died.”
“That’s what’s so tragic. He survived. And he comes back and she’s just taken her final vows. At evensong, he comes to see her. The mist is rising, and they whisper through the iron grill. ‘Do I dream?’ she asks. ‘Is it you?’
“‘My lady,’ says the knight, ‘day and night, I yearned for you.’”
Aleys rests her forehead on her clasped fists. This is impossible. Will they talk all day?
“‘But, sir, I have made the solemn profession. I am sworn to chastity. For life.’”
Apparently, they will.
“‘Damsel,’ he says to her, ‘you wound me! Better my heart had been quartered by infidels! Now it is condemned to beat as your prisoner, forever.’ Then he reaches through the lattice. Their fingers touch.”
The sounds of carding stop.
“‘Kiss me, lady, for old friendship’s sake.’”
“Ach, he’s a scoundrel,” says the third girl.
“No, he’s not,” says Cecilia. “Keep going.”
The voice resumes. “Sister Beatrice prays to Our Lady. She does penance, she fasts for days. ‘Release me from this temptation!’ she cries. But it doesn’t work.
She loves him still. And then one evening, she’s in the cloister alone, gathering roses to set before the Virgin’s statue, and the knight breaks in.
He seizes her and lays kisses upon her, and her veil falls off at the foot of the Virgin, and then he rips off her habit and covers her in silks and furs and jewels and puts her before him on his horse and rides off with her! ”
“Pffft. This story’s not true. You can’t just tear off a habit.”
“It is true, wait, there’s a miracle in it.
The knight and his lady go to a new town, and there they live happily as man and wife.
Then, at the height of their happiness, the knight is struck down by fever.
In the morning he kisses her. By noon, he’s dead as a doornail. She’s left alone in a strange place.”
“She’ll have to go to the brothel,” says Cecilia.
“Get your mind out of the gutter.”
“Well, what choice does she have? She can’t return home and she can’t go back to the convent. Even if he was a knight.”
“She ends up in the brothel. But through it all, she prays to the Virgin daily, the seven hours of Our Lady.”
“Even Matins? She wakes up for midnight prayers?” Clearly, Matins is the height of piety.
“All of it. Every day. And her carnal sins? No lust. She does it in the brothel without any lust.”
“It’s not mortal if you take no pleasure,” says Cecilia.
“The devil ceases not. Who told you that?”
“The butcher.” Ah, thinks Aleys, it wasn’t the butcher’s son, it was the butcher himself. No wonder he couldn’t marry Cecilia: He already had a wife.
“Finally, after seven years, the lady can’t even remember all the vile acts she’s done or whom she’s done them with. ‘Mother of God,’ she cries, ‘take pity on me for my sins. Let me return home to my sisters.’”
“She expects the convent to take her back? They’d never.”
“Wait. She drags herself back to the town. A widow living beside the convent takes her in out of charity, for the night.
“Beatrice asks the old woman, ‘What news, mevrouw, of the convent?’
“‘Ah,’ says the old woman, ‘the nuns there are pure and stainless, and their rosaries are a blessing for the town. None have given cause for criticism.’
“‘Not even the nun who eloped, seven years ago? The bell ringer. Her name was Beatrice.’
“‘What say you? Sister Beatrice, eloped? No, do not slander that good lady. Listen, there she is now, tolling Vespers. Sister Beatrice, the most devout of sisters.’”
One of the carders gasps. “How is that possible?”
“But it is. That night, Sister Beatrice has a dream. One of those ones that seems as real as waking?”
“Ja, I had one of those the other night, about a pudding.”
“Shhhh. Let her finish.”
“In the dream, Our Lady comes to the sister and says, Faithful Beatrice, I have heard your prayers and I have interceded for thee. Go to the cloister, the door is open. You shall find again your veil, where you dropped it at my feet. And cowl and shoes. And habit.”
“And?”
“And she goes there and discovers that the statue of the Virgin has come alive and has worn her habit and rung the bells every hour of every day for seven years. And none of the other nuns, not one, noticed it wasn’t Beatrice.”
“That is a miracle,” breathes Cecilia.
“I told you.”
And then, in reality, the begijnhof bell rings, and the carding stops and so does the talking and they rise to go to chapel, where they will contemplate Saint Mary or Sister Beatrice, or, quite possibly, the finger touch of a knight at evensong.
Aleys whispers, “Dear God, what have I done? How will I find you here?”