Chapter 40 Aleys
Aleys
Aleys wakes to the sound of someone rapping sharply on the window between her room and the parlor.
She pulls back the curtain and unbolts the shutter.
The other curtain is drawn open, but the parlor appears empty.
It reminds her of peering into the decorated egg of Mary in the manger, the parlor plain but for an embroidered cloth on the side table and straw on the floor.
It occurs to her that she’s the one in the egg.
If you looked through this window into her cell, you’d see fireplace, prie-dieu, cot. Anchoress.
The parlor door is half open and she can make out a wedge of cobbled street and, opposite, a wall. They appear oddly flat, like pieces in a puzzle. She dips her knees, craning to glimpse a slice of sky.
Marte appears suddenly in the window, startling and three dimensional. Aleys jumps.
“I’m to be your maid, miss.” Marte does not look cheerful for it. But Marte never looks cheerful.
“I thought it was to be Cecilia. She’s not ill, is she?”
Marte snorts. “Off to be married.”
“To whom?” She recalls the scene at the brewery. “Rolf?”
Marte shakes her head. “No, miss, a Frenchman. She met him at the hospital, on the traveler’s side.” She scowls. “She’ll be off to Paris.”
“It was sudden, then?”
“As a pestilence.”
Aleys laughs. “You think so well of marriage?”
Marte gives a dour grimace. “Head lice were better, miss. Your pottage.” She shoves it through the window. “I’ll just wait here while you eat it.”
“Let us pray together.”
Marte backs up a step. “I’m not taught in church prayer, miss. You pray. I’ll just listen and be the better for it.”
“You attend the evening readings.”
“I like the stories, miss. Doesn’t mean I know to pray like you.”
“You could learn.”
“The beguines’ school is meant for those who will take the gray dress. Or children. One like me”—she shrugs a round shoulder, looks at the bowl on the sill—“I earn my keep.”
“Well, then, I could—”
“That’s kind of you, miss. I thank the Lord for my food and ask him to see me through the night. That’s enough for the likes of me. The Lord needn’t pay me extra attention. That’s for you saints.”
Aleys sighs. “I’m not a saint.”
“Well, you’re something out of the ordinary, miss. Healing them lepers and all.”
“I didn’t heal any lepers.” Not that she knows of, anyway.
“That’s not what the lepers say. Some of them have thrown away their rattles. You can’t hear them coming anymore. Like as to bump into one of them round any corner.” Marte clamps her mouth shut, like she’s used more than her allotted words.
“Miss, you won’t be letting your porridge go cold. I hurried over with it warm.”
At first, the anchoress is a novelty. Crowds gather outside the hold, shove their way into the parlor, whisper plaints through the curtained window.
Aleys might as well be the local apothecary taking orders for simples.
She never sees the people; they speak to her through the dark square, and she must imagine them old or young or hale or infirm from the pitch and rasp of their voices.
The windowsill forms the border between her hold and the disembodied, clamoring need in the parlor.
Those who breach that no-man’s-land, who try to brush the curtains aside, find that the saint in the box won’t hesitate to crush their fingers with a snap of her wooden shutter.
From the street, people peer through the horn window, their silhouettes hovering indistinct against the panes.
Aleys schools herself not to shrink back; she knows they can’t actually see inside.
But sometimes they knock to get her attention.
It’s unsettling. She tells herself that the town’s fascination will wear off.
It’s like a first snow. People come out to gape at December’s flakes, but soon her presence will be February slush, taken for granted.
They come for blessings, they come for kitchen table advice.
“He stole my goose.”
“Her ill temper curdles the milk.”
“There is this small matter of debt to the guild, nothing untoward, but I wondered if he might consider . . . ?”
“I have this carbuncle, see?”
She cannot see, thank heaven. She is protected by the black curtains. Without sight, without touch, the healing tingle comes less and less to her fingers. The people don’t know that. They still believe. She yearns for nighttime, to be left alone with her prayers.
Lukas visits bearing exhortatory tracts regarding the hazards of loneliness.
He warns her, through the curtain, that she must not succumb to the sin of despair.
But her spiritual progress is more endangered by gossips than isolation, and she tells him that.
So Marte is installed as gatekeeper. She is stern and forbidding, fierce, even.
In the street outside the parlor, Marte plants her broom like a Templar plants a pike.
None shall disturb the prayers of the recluse, be they saint’s kin or devil’s.
Marte listens attentively for Aleys’s amen before she admits anyone to the parlor.
She shows them, one at a time, to a chair beneath the window, warns them to get to the point and keep their hands to themselves, then retires to the stool in the street outside the door, wrapping a shawl against the autumn chill.
Marte’s is the only face Aleys sees. Twice a day, Aleys and Marte draw back the curtains.
Marte passes the meal in; Aleys lifts the chamber pot over the sill.
They are practical. Matters are concrete.
Aleys learns every crease of Marte’s brow, the subtle shades of her frown.
The pursed frown, the resigned frown, the scowl that turns up in the corner when she tries not to laugh.
It becomes a small sport, trying to make Marte laugh.
Marte’s plain face becomes the grounded touchstone to Aleys’s reality.
For with each passing week, the voices beyond the curtain become less corporal and the visions she receives more vivid.
Her hours are marked by prayer.
At Matins, in the black of night, Aleys rises to sing of his magnificence, of the sea, which he made, and of the dry land also.
She pictures the swells and the vastness and the shelter of coves and relief of shore.
Stars sing midnight hymns at Matins. His creation is revealed by candlelight, alive in her psalter.
Cascades spill from the margins and pomegranates hang from the letters.
The tiny book of hymn and lapis, psalm and leaf, contains his marvels.
She does not need to have seen waterfalls to believe they exist.
At dawn, the hour of aurora and resurrection: Lord, open my lips so that my mouth may proclaim your praise.
As the sun rises, the horn panes on her window glow, one by one, a ladder of praise.
In her book, her fingers trace the images of spring, the robin’s egg, the May lily.
She is lost in the hour of Lauds, so that when she finally stands from the prie-dieu, her mouth is dry.
The first hour, Prime, holds pleas for strength, for truth, for mercy for the day to come. An enlargement of heart. Hide not thy commandments. Teach me, Lord. She remembers to eat.
At the third hour, as the sun bends toward its zenith, Aleys prays for charity to be poured into her breast, to burn with fire.
To worship with mouth, tongue, mind, sense, action.
She prays for the town, she prays for Sophia, for Lukas, for Marte.
And when people come to her window, as they will at this hour, when they ask for her blessing, she pours unto them the warm milk of morning grace that is Terce.
Sext is the hour of crucifixion, the glory and the horror.
Daylight turned dark as they nailed him to the noontime cross; this hour carries midnight in its soul.
Noon is a trickster in splendid garb: The serpent beguiled Eve in this time without shadow.
But noon is also the death that is victory, the fall that is redeemed.
It is the hour where prayer bears paradox, where logic falters and faith must lead.
At noon, Aleys prays for understanding that does not come.
It is in the ninth hour, Nones, the hour of his death, that the demons descend.
The sun drops toward the sea and the spirit sinks with it.
She prays the Rerum: Grant to this day an unclouded end, an eve untouched by shadows of decay.
Some days her prayers are answered. But sometimes the horned beasts creep from the pages and her heart is unshielded.
The demon, despair, and its servant, fatigue, hover at Nones.
Vespers is sunset. She sings the song of the gratitude that magnifies the Lord.
Aleys sings with all her heart the words of her childhood: Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.
And always, always, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
There is a sweet softness to Vespers. From her cell, she conjures hills turning lavender, the last golden light on the oak.
Her fingers trace the psalter waves as the sun slips beneath them, to where she cannot follow.
Vespers is the hour of simple faith that the light will rise again.
She breathes trust into the last prayer, Compline. Into thy hands, O Lord. You shall not be afraid of any terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day.