Chapter 19 Aleys
Aleys
“There’s fleece on the quay, a shipment of English.” Katrijn stands before Aleys in the refectory, her leather bag slung across her chest. They haven’t even finished breakfast. “I suppose you can grade grease wool? You are a draper’s daughter.”
The reminder of Papa sends an icicle down her back. Aleys swallows the last of her bread. “I was a draper’s daughter.”
“Well, you still have two arms. We need help with the sacks.”
“I—” Aleys wants to protest. She left home to pray, not pick wool.
“I assure you, Sister, God resides as much in the marketplace as he does in the church. Follow me.”
There’s little point in arguing with Katrijn.
Ida waits for them inside the archway, basket on her hip. She recently took the gray dress, which makes her look even smaller, her dark eyes even more intense. Aleys wonders why Ida’s not at the hospital today. It makes no sense for Ida to haul bags of fleece when they could have Cecilia.
Katrijn and Ida walk with purpose, scattering pigeons.
A fishwife squints at them and spits to the side.
Another draws her apron over her child’s head, and Aleys recalls the baker’s wife back home claiming that death hung in the folds of the beguines’ skirts.
Outside the apothecary a group of men watches them pass.
“Mertens’s wife,” someone sniggers. Even though she’s tailored her robe into a brown habit more fit for a woman, people still recognize her.
Sophia was right. They need better stories.
They cross the city toward the loading docks of the canal that runs north to the seaport and the channel to England, where the fleece is sourced.
The poor English have such bad soil, she’s heard, there are more sheep than men.
It’s here in the Low Countries, where people are plentiful and labor is cheap, that the drapers turn filthy fleece into a wool so fine it’s coveted by kings and bishops.
The plaza is loud with horses pulling pallets across cobbles and hawkers shouting the price of eel and herring.
The air is flecked with sheep dust. The familiar grassy scent of fleece spills from burlap sacks that line the plaza.
That smell takes her home. For a month every year, the house smelled like a barnyard until Papa farmed out the last fleece to the professional wulle-breken, who would beat out the sheep shit until it was clean enough to card.
It occurs to her that Papa might be here to meet the English shipment.
If she saw him, what would she say? Part of her shrinks at the thought, but another part yearns to run into his arms. Would Papa even greet her?
He might turn his back. Let her be God’s child.
Her heart twists at the memory. Aleys takes a few steps into the plaza, scanning the fleece stalls on the other side.
Katrijn and Ida are making their way across the crowd, but there’s no sign of her father or brothers.
Aleys turns to check behind her and stops short at the sight of the wharf crane.
She’d walked right by it. The huge wooden structure leans over the canal like a great heron scanning for minnows, but instead of legs it has enormous treadwheels on each side.
A rope with a large hook snakes from the crane’s beak like a strange tongue.
Bobbing below is a barge stacked with barrels.
Workers clamber over the stack, loosening ropes.
A man grasps the swinging hook and fixes it to the topmost cask and yells “Klaar!”
There’s motion within the treadwheels. Aleys squints into the nearest one.
Inside the dark wheel is a pair of boys.
At least, she thinks they’re boys. They appear misshapen, with the thighs of men and the chests of children.
The boys lean forward and begin to trudge up the inside of the wheel, which groans like a donkey.
Slowly, the wheel turns, the rope tightens, and the top barrel rises from the stack.
It’s stamped Gascogne. Fine wine. These barrels journeyed under sail up the coast of France to the Low Countries before they were put on this barge to the center of Brugge.
“Quite the marvel, is it not?” A man beside her is watching the crane. He is pale, with deep-set eyes and dark curls under a black velvet cap. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw it. The ingenuity!”
“The children,” she says. “It seems cruel. Why don’t they use horses?”
“Inside the wheels?”
“Or men?”
“Dwarves, maybe. They pay the boys.”
A carter on the quay uses a hooked pole to fish the rope that holds the barrel, walking back until the strained line is bent in two and the barrel hovers above his wagon.
“Laat los!” he shouts. The rope quivers with tension as the barrel twists in midair.
The pair of boys stops, balances, and turns carefully.
It looks for a moment like the momentum of the load will drive the wheel into a violent backward spin, and the boys with it, but they are precise as they walk in tandem, reversing the direction of the wheel.
The barrel drops into place and the carter scrambles up to release the load.
The children turn again and trot forward quickly as the hook swings up and back over the barge.
One of the boys stumbles; the other catches his shoulder.
Aleys shudders. If God is in the marketplace, he hides himself well.
“Spinning squirrels,” says the man. “That’s what people call them. By any name, the machine is magnificent. The magna rota.”
“The great wheel,” echoes Aleys.
He turns to her and raises a brow. “Latin?”
“Mmmm.” She turns over her shoulder to look for Katrijn and Ida. Ida is clutching her basket as if she fears pickpurses in the jostling crowd. Aleys should rejoin them. They won’t like her idling with a strange man.
“Ah! I know you! You’re that woman in the begijnhof. I should have recognized your friar’s cloth. So what does that make you, exactly? A nun or a beguine?”
“I’m not a nun,” she says wearily. “I’m a Franciscan sister.”
“But where are your brothers?”
“They are—” She falters. She knows only two of them. Lukas and Hervé. She couldn’t even say where the friary is. It’s awkward to claim she’s joined the brotherhood. “They will be teaching me once they secure me my own place.” It sounds absurd, she realizes, the idea of a woman living on her own.
“I see. And what will you do? Preach Latin to the ladies?” He smirks. “You might as well lecture the sparrows. Women can’t possibly understand.” He affects a dramatic shrug. “But then, I suppose Saint Francis preached to birds.”
“You think I’m the only woman in Brugge who’s lettered? There are two others in the begijnhof alone who read Latin.”
He chuckles. “Their psalters, maybe. Nothing more.”
“You find it impossible that a draper and a magistra could be so accomplished? Sophia Vermeulen and Katrijn Janssens are both fluent.”
He raises a single eyebrow. “Ah, well, the world is changing.” He sweeps his palm toward the wharf crane. “Wonders abound.”
“Aleys!” Katrijn’s voice cuts through the crowd.
“It seems you are summoned, Sister Aleys.”
Aleys rises on tiptoe to find Katrijn and Ida huddled together at the far side of the plaza.
They look exposed, two women in gray, surrounded by men.
Aleys feels a prickle of guilt. Maybe she shouldn’t have spoken of begijnhof matters to a stranger.
She was only repeating what Cecilia told her.
When she looks behind her, the man in the black cap has vanished.
Aleys slips sideways through the crowd. Near the stalls, the sour smell of fleece is strong.
Katrijn gives her a scalding look. “You can’t even manage to keep up.
” She gives a huff, then turns to the trader behind a wooden slab erected as a counter.
Ida remains facing the square, watching the crowd, hand clamped over the basket.
“Sister Aleys.” Katrijn snaps her fingers. “Pay attention.”
The trader speaks a graveled jumble of English and Dutch syllables. He leans toward Katrijn, his eyes bright, full of mevrouw and milady as they argue over the cost of long staple. He nods to a group of sacks in front of the stall. Take your pick.
“Aleys, test the cores for britch.”
Some of the Dover packers hide nasty nests of coarse hind clippings in the heart of their sacks.
Aleys sinks her hands deep inside, knowing she’ll come out smelling of pasture.
She’ll have to wash her sleeves out with lye.
Sure enough, buried beneath the soft long staple is a hard ball of short, curly fibers that would be impossible to spin.
She’s withdrawing her hands from the sack to tell Katrijn to find another vendor when she sees Ida step away from the stall.
Katrijn’s hand shoots out to grip Ida’s forearm.
“Ida, no,” murmurs Katrijn. “Look. Over there.”
Aleys’s eyes follow. The man with the velvet cap is across the square talking with a carter, but he’s only half listening, his gaze trailing a third man, a shopkeeper fast approaching the fleece stalls.
Ida quickly turns her back to the square and hugs her basket close.
As Aleys straightens, she sees the shopkeeper frown and veer off.
The pale man tracks where he was heading. His eyes land on Ida. He starts over.
“Aleys, keep your head down,” Katrijn hisses. To Ida, she says, “It’s the man I told you about. Who’s been buying up translations.”
“The bishop’s spy?” Ida goes rigid. She shoots her eyes at Aleys. “You were exchanging words with him. By the wheel.”
Katrijn turns on Aleys. “You spoke with the bishop’s man?”
“I didn’t know who he was!” Aleys protests. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Ida, draw close.” Katrijn slips her left hand into Ida’s basket, extracts something that she slides up her right sleeve. She closes ink-stained fingers around her cuff. Katrijn glances coolly at the English merchant, who studiously looks the other way.
“Can’t trust a friar to judge wool,” Katrijn announces, pushing Aleys aside with her hip.
“I’ll just have to do it myself.” She plunges her hands deep into the bag of fleece, then rises and dusts them off.
“These will do,” she says. “Here, take this.” She lifts the sack and thrusts it at Aleys and grabs another. “Let’s get out of here.”
They walk briskly from the plaza, their gray cloaks sweeping the cobbles.
Aleys follows, her cheek against the burlap, her beating heart only inches from a piece of parchment that she knows is sacred, Dutch, and illegal.
When she looks back, the man in black has paused in front of the crane.
Behind him, the children in the treadwheel change direction.
His eyes never move, trained on the backs of the beguines.