Chapter 26 Aleys #2
“Papa. After he left you at the church with that friar, he went up to your prie-dieu and stood there, staring at it for hours. When he came down, he said it was the biggest mistake of his life, forcing his child into marriage. He said losing the Lakenhalle was his fault, not yours.”
“Oh.” It feels like a gift. Like more miracle than she deserves. “But why hasn’t he come?”
Griete looks at her likes it’s obvious. “You live in a community of women.”
“I could still see him.”
“I don’t know, Aleys. I think he’s ashamed. It’s been a hard season. We sold the buttons from your wedding sleeves. Henryk traded his green cloak.” Griete rubs her forehead. “But it wasn’t enough. Claus started dicing. Remember those pardons he bought? Miserere mei? He used every one of them.”
“But that’s terrible.”
“Less terrible than starving.” Griete lifts a shoulder. “Turns out Claus has excellent luck. Especially now that you’re so famous.”
“What do you mean?”
“Claus sells your prayers.”
“My what?”
“He took the cross from our altar and charges a guilder to touch it. Marie van der Blein got pregnant off it.” Griete leans in. “So is it true, or not?”
“Is what true?”
“What they say about you.”
“That depends what they’re saying.”
“That you’re raising the dead.” She gestures out the window. “Causing the rain.”
“Griete . . .”
“They say you cure livestock of rinderpest.” In Griete’s voice is an accusation: You never used to heal cattle.
“Then they know more than I do.”
“Aleys,” Griete says, “are you some kind of saint?”
“No!” It comes out sharper than she intends.
“How do you know?”
“That I’m not a saint?” Aleys is momentarily stunned. How would she know? “I’m just not, that’s all.”
“But you can do miracles, anyway? When you want?”
“Griete, no. I mean, it’s hard to explain.” She flails for words. “It’s just that sometimes something comes over me.”
Griete squints. “That sounds like a yes.”
“It’s not my doing. I can’t ask personal favors of God.”
“Why not? Everyone prays for something.”
“Yes, but . . . this is different. It’s God’s will, not mine.”
Griete draws back, disappointment on her face. “I was hoping you could help.”
“With what?” She can’t be sick. Her sister is healthy as a horse.
Griete hesitates, and Aleys wonders if she blushes. “You see, I want . . . I want Pieter Mertens.”
Aleys gasps. The man she jilted for God? “Griete, not him. He denied Papa the license.”
“We broke the contract, Aleys. Besides, you humiliated him. What else was Pieter going to do?”
Pieter? There’s more going on than she’s saying.
“Plus,” Griete continues, “now that you’re, well, all saintlike, he’s glad he didn’t marry you.”
Is he, now? “Griete, be careful.”
“Aleys, don’t you see? I want this. I can do what you couldn’t. It’s my turn to help the family. Plus”—she grins—“he’s quite handsome.”
“Griete, he’s not pious.”
“Aleys, we don’t all want what you want.” She twists her ring. “What you want scares me.”
Griete’s question lingers in the air. Could Aleys request a miracle, personally?
There are moments in chapel, with everyone staring like they expect her to levitate, that Aleys wishes she could fly to the rafters like Christina Mirabilis.
Just for the fun of it, to watch Katrijn’s jaw drop.
There is one healing she really would like to try, though she doesn’t want witnesses.
So on the way to morning prayer, Aleys feigns that she left her rosary beneath her pillow.
Katrijn tsks her impatience, as if to say, Some saint.
Aleys turns back from chapel. The courtyard is empty but for rows of linens.
Water seeps from the hems of the sheets, peppering the dewy grass.
Finally, she finds Marte pinning up the last of the laundry.
Aleys pauses at the head of the alley, watching Marte limp between basket and line. A bee, one of the small hard ones, hovers beside Aleys like a silent chaperone. Another joins, so that Aleys has a bee at each shoulder. She doesn’t brush them away.
Can she do it? Aleys looks around. Except for the bees, they’re alone.
“Marte, come here.”
“Miss.” Marte bobs from a distance. She seems wary.
“It’s all right, Marte. It’s just me.” Marte scratches her shoulder, deciding. “I won’t hurt you.”
Marte approaches reluctantly, one hand on the laundry line, her awkward gait making the line dip and rise.
Aleys doesn’t want to frighten Marte, so she begins the prayer internally.
Aleys feels the bees settle to her shoulders like she’s a winged creature.
Marte’s feet leave uneven green prints behind her in the silvered grass.
She stops before Aleys, her face closed.
When Aleys drops to her knees, Marte starts, but she doesn’t pull away.
Aleys places her hands on Marte’s bad foot.
Marte inhales sharply. Aleys can’t tell if anything is happening.
Then she feels the faintest coolness in her fingertips, followed by a rush of triumph.
She knows it’s God’s will. But this time it also feels like it’s hers.
When Aleys rises, Marte simply nods.
“You won’t want to be late for prayers, miss.”
“Thank you, Marte.”
“Thank you, miss.”
“We won’t speak of this.”
“No.”
She watches as Marte returns to her work. The limp is gone. Or is it? She’s not quite sure.
When she turns back to chapel, Katrijn stands outside, watching.
That night, Katrijn herself takes the reading chair, stained fingers drumming the parchment.
Cecilia tries to coax some vigor from the desultory fire with the hand bellows.
Marte stands guard in the courtyard. Aleys looks toward the window and yearns for the cool of the water’s edge.
Even Sophia seems distracted, fingering a slub in a strand of yarn that will have to be smoothed or sacrificed.
She reaches for scissors, then changes her mind and sits back, clasping the back of her neck.
Katrijn stands to rub Sophia’s shoulders.
The magistra gives Katrijn a grateful glance and a small, pained smile.
Aleys thinks, Only Katrijn can do that. Katrijn won’t allow anyone else to touch Sophia.
The other day, Aleys rounded a corner and found them standing close beneath the eaves, sheltering from a sudden downpour.
They were laughing at their sodden headdresses.
Sophia raised Katrijn’s wet hand to her lips.
Their foreheads touched, and Katrijn whispered something that made Sophia close her eyes and nod. Then they parted.
Now Katrijn moves from Sophia’s shoulders back to the reading chair.
She clears her throat: “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue.” Christ has come home.
Aleys imagines the elders’ eyes following young Jesus as he strides to the front, sandals worn thin with travel and the hem of his robe in need of washing.
Jesus pulls the prayer scarf over his head and reads: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Right here. This is the moment that Christ claims it. The Lord has anointed me.
To the old men of the synagogue, the elders, he claims to be the foretold Messiah. It is so bold. So incredibly bold. They’ve heard crazy rumors—loaves and fishes, healings, walking across a lake—but isn’t this just Joseph’s son? Joseph the carpenter?
“Show us,” they say. “Medice, cura te ipsum.” Physician, heal thyself. Heal us. Raise our dead of Nazareth. Show us these miracles you claim. Prove it.
But that’s not what happens. Jesus refuses to heal them. “‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.’” Will not or cannot heal them? How Aleys wishes she could ask. There’s so much she wants to ask.
Katrijn raises her voice: “The people were furious. They drove him from the town and up the hill to throw him from the cliff.”
Katrijn slaps her hand onto the parchment, and the women look up from their work, startled. Their eyes go first to Katrijn, then to Aleys. They all hear the barely veiled threat: We don’t tolerate fraud.
“But that’s not what happens, is it, Katrijn?” Sophia says quietly. “That’s not what it means.”
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” says Cecilia, puzzling out loud, the bellows dangling from one hand. “If he wasn’t ever going to help them, why did Jesus go home to tell them he wouldn’t? It seems prideful.”
“No,” says Sophia. “I do not think it pride. Christ is telling us that we must be open to wonder if we hope to witness it.” She looks around the room, her gaze skipping over Katrijn.
The magistra brings her fingers to the arches of her eyes, presses hard.
“I’m sorry. I have the headache tonight.
” Sophia draws her hands down her face. When she lifts them, Aleys sees something uneven about her mouth, something broken in her smile.
She’s in pain, thinks Aleys. I should heal her.
Then Sophia seems to recover. Even under duress, she is a teacher. “What, my friends, is the opposite of pride?”
At once, two answers. From Cecilia: “Humility?” From Katrijn: “Shame.”
There is a silence as the women weigh these words. One as plain as bread, the other with the bite of mustard, but they are kin, somehow. Handiwork settles into laps as the women consider. A log collapses into the fire with a murmur of sparks.
Finally, it is Ida who speaks into the quiet: “Neither. The opposite of pride is love.”
An hour later, Katrijn accosts her, storming up the stairs to the landing between their rooms. Aleys is in her chemise, about to turn in to her chamber, bearing a candle. She’s too tired to deal with Katrijn. Tomorrow is another day in the hospital. She turns to face Katrijn. The landing is small.
Katrijn speaks without preamble: “What do you think you were you doing?” The flame on Aleys’s candle rears back from its wick. “To Marte?”
Aleys doesn’t need this. “Sister, I’m going to bed.”
“I saw you.” Katrijn points her finger. “This morning. In the courtyard.”
Aleys feels annoyance flare. “What? I can’t help our own?”
Katrijn scoffs. “If you did.”
If she did. Aleys is so tired. All she wants is sleep.
“It’s bad enough, you exploiting the dying. But this is the begijnhof. We live here. When you’re in our home, you need to keep your holy hands to yourself.”
“If you’re accusing me of something, say it.”
“I see how you profit.”
“From what?”
“Chicanery.” Katrijn doesn’t blink. “Fraud.”
This is outrageous. She’s pursued by believers and attacked by nonbelievers. She can’t win. “Explain to me, exactly, what I gain from this.”
“My free room. The magistra’s attention. Sophia’s hardly sleeping, she’s so concerned about you. Did you know that?” Katrijn slices her palm through the air. “Her hands went numb yesterday, she told me. Her headache is back. She’s worried sick about you.”
“I never wanted this.”
“Didn’t you, though? You come here parading about as a friar, the talk of the town, when you could have just joined as a woman. A regular woman. Like the rest of us. But no. You were too good for the gray dress, weren’t you?”
Aleys is stunned into silence.
“Just say it. You think you’re better than we are.”
“No. No, I don’t.” What comes from Aleys’s mouth surprises her.
“The beguine life is beautiful.” The quiet pleasure of the company of women and the solace of the word of God.
It is beautiful. It’s just not what she’s seeking.
She wants the fast path to God, the shortcut that runs straight up the mountain.
It doesn’t make her better than them, just different. She appreciates their ways.
Katrijn scoffs. “Really? You’ve been a threat to us from the day you arrived. The wool contract canceled. The bishop following us around.”
“You can’t blame me for that.”
“No? What were you doing with his man in the market? By the wheel?”
“Nothing.”
“So it was coincidence that he approached us after speaking with you?”
“I had no idea who he—”
“Tell me this,” says Katrijn, “how do we know you’re not the bishop’s spy?”
Aleys can’t speak. There’s nothing she can say to this woman.
She turns on her heel, slams the chamber door behind her.
The action extinguishes her candle, and she’s left in the dark, the walls ticking.
After a moment, Katrijn storms down the stairs, but not without delivering a parting shot: “If you want to prove yourself, get the bishop off our back.”