Chapter 40 Aleys #2
She lingers over the image of the archer in her psalter who perpetually releases his arrow toward the silver-red doe curled at the foot of a monk in blue.
The monk and doe are surrounded by a golden sky and framed in climbing ivy.
The doe’s face is lifted to the monk, who reads scripture from an open book.
The doe is vulnerable and yearning; she leans in to hear his words.
Aleys traces the path of the archer’s arrow and cannot tell if it will pierce the deer.
She doesn’t know if the doe will live. She closes the psalter and sleeps a dreamless sleep in mystery.
At Matins, she rises for the midnight prayer. At Lauds she celebrates his dawn. Eight times a day she praises him. She feels him drawing near.
Her third night, in the unnamed hours, she hears spirits.
Aleys lies rigid, her cheek against her sleeve, her ears as eyes into the pure darkness.
Then, out of nothing, a whisper. She opens her eyes wide, as if she could see through ink.
Then, again, she hears it, a rustling, quiet as the wings of bees on petals.
Nothing. Then, once more, the sound. She laughs, for she realizes the commotion is her eyelashes brushing her sleeve.
She blinks several times, and it is a flock of mallards taking flight.
She rolls onto her back and laughs, imagining the ducks winging away.
The air in her cell is dense as pudding.
She feels, enfolded within stone, the stillness of the catacomb.
She imagines the stone walls thick as miles, stretching on and on, so that there is nothing under heaven save the rock and this pocket of stillness, which is hers to violate with laughter and prayer and the flight of winged eyelashes.
But other nights, she is most definitely not alone, her cell porous to the world.
Some nights, the echo of incense drifts through the squint like the sighs of angels.
Sometimes, midnight creatures visit, loud as elk crashing through brush.
These do not frighten her; she knows it’s just mice crept in through the squint or dropped from the parlor sill.
They patter the length of the cell, scouting for crumbs, their squeaks like shouts in the marketplace.
She tucks her blanket around her feet. She doesn’t really mind the mice. They’re company in the dark.
That is, until the morning her eyes fall on her prie-dieu and she recoils, hands to her mouth.
For the upper corner of her psalter—its sumptuous calfskin cover, silky to the touch, embossed with vines—is eaten away.
From the once smooth and perfect edge, shredded threads of leather dangle.
Aleys brings herself to touch the defiled leather gently, like she would the mangled ear of a favorite dog.
Tears spring to her eyes; she kisses it.
Oh, Mama, she thinks. How could I have failed to protect our psalter?
I’ve been careless. I should have slept with the prayer book in my hands.
Aleys clutches Mama’s treasure to her breast, looks around for the villain.
When Marte comes, she receives the psalter from Aleys with both hands.
“Miss, your book.” She frowns. “’Tis the rats. They used to chew through our harnesses, at the farm. Once, Dagmar’s boot . . .” She stops. Marte has seen too much of Dagmar’s boot.
It’s not rats, Aleys wants to protest, it’s just mice, but she realizes she doesn’t know that. The thought of rats in her cell, their long bald tails, horrifies her.
“Miss, shall I be taking your book to the saddler, then? I don’t know if he can repair it to what it was, seeing as it’s so fine, but he can round down the corner for you.
” She opens it. “At least your pages are whole, which is a miracle, since rats are like to eat anything.” She turns a page and pauses.
“Oh my. I didn’t know as there’d be pictures.
” She looks up. She’s actually blushing, stoic Marte. “Do all the prayer books have these?”
Aleys nods. “The better ones.” She sees desire flare in Marte’s eyes.
“They go with the stories?”
“Of course. See, there’s the harrowing of hell.” She points at a drawing of Christ, his robes flowing behind him, reaching down into a pit for the hands of Adam and Eve, first to emerge. They look stunned. The sinners in the cauldrons look optimistic.
Marte turns the pages. A hushed reverence falls over her. “And this?” She stops at an image of a woman pouring from a pitcher, while another woman sits at the feet of Christ. “This would be Martha?”
“Your namesake.”
She nods, solemnly. “Martha, as was scolded by Christ for doing her work. I’ll see that the saddler takes right care of your book, miss. But you cannot have such a book as this, alone in your cell, what with rats and all.”
She tucks the psalter into her apron pocket and bangs out the door, and Aleys wants to leap after the book, through the parlor window, but it’s too small. She’s left rubbing the empty silk pouch between her fingers.
When Marte returns, Aleys hears a scuffle in the parlor. “Miss, open your window, quick-like!”
Aleys unbolts the parlor shutter, sweeps aside the curtain. Marte shoves something through, a stiff parcel of caramel fury. It jumps to the ground of the cell and immediately begins to hiss. The orange demon resolves into a cat the color of burnt sugar.
“There, miss. That should be the end of your rats.”
Aleys skeptically eyes the animal, who eyes her back just as warily.
He backs into the far corner, his back arched.
Mama never let cats into the house. She said they were bad luck.
But surely rats are worse luck. The cat’s ears are pressed flat against his skull. His eyes are green unblinking globes.
“Here, give him this.” Marte hands through a cloth with a fish head on it. “A cat’ll never leave you once you give him a cod noddle.” Sure enough, the cat lifts his nose, sniffs the air. “Ah, he’s a hungry one,” says Marte encouragingly.
Aleys places the napkin on the floor near the hearth. The cat hesitates, then walks over, grabs the fish head, and retreats behind Aleys’s prie-dieu. She hears him rip apart the flesh. Perfect. She will pray over fish bones.
“He’ll get in and out your window, miss, if you keep the shutter open. I’ll leave the parlor door ajar. Just give him a fish head for a few nights, and he’ll stay, I’m sure of it.”
“Marte, thank you. It’s a kindness.”
“If he’s a yowler, miss, then you might not thank me for it.”
“As long as he doesn’t chew my psalter.”
“Oh, here, miss.” She pulls the psalter from her pocket. The edge is smoothed. It will never be the same, but nor is it dangling flesh. “I looked at it. Your book. It’s all in Latin language?”
“Yes.”
“The stories, they’re the same as those the beguines read after dinner?”
“The very same.”
“The beguines’ stories don’t have pictures.”
“No.”
“But I could read them? The Dutch ones.”
“If you were taught, you could.”
Marte picks up the broom, begins sweeping the clean parlor with furious strokes. Her frown tightens. Then she stops, gripping the broom in both hands, and turns to Aleys.
“I could read the stories?”
And so the hours between Prime and Terce belong to Marte.
She shuts and bars the parlor door and they ignore the pounding of petitioners.
It is just the two of them and the cat. They begin as all reading lessons ever have, with letters that form sounds, words, a name, another name.
Marte brings a charcoal. They write words on the sill between them and wipe them off, their palms and sleeves dark with dust. Feet, hands, tears, cross, mercy.
Child. Sky. Marte writes peas; Aleys writes porridge.
The Lord eats peas porridge. Marte smiles, a lopsided thing, quickly gone, but truly earned. The words lace them together.
Marte is the only real person in the world to her now.
There is also the cat—whom they call by its three-letter word, Kat—who jumps up to the sill that is both border and slate, so they have to shoo him off to write dog.
Kat eats cod. Kat comes. Kat goes. Kat mostly sleeps.
He claims two sleeping spots. By day, he sleeps on the ledge of the horn window, his orange back to the orange panes, as if all things orange in the world belong against the outside wall.
At night, when he isn’t prowling, he sleeps between Aleys’s shins, his bulk a warm loaf from the oven.
Kat weaves around her as she prays. He has one white paw.
Sometimes he lifts it to her forearm. I’m here, he says. With you.
She cannot believe it sinful to love him, but sometimes she wonders.
Marte brings pages of Katrijn’s Dutch gospel, hidden in her basket.
They read together and Marte copies the text for herself.
Her hand grows more and more steady, the letters take shape.
She even adds some crude flourishes, pictures in the margins, illuminated letters.
“I should ink these words in gold,” she says.
When she stands guard outside the parlor door, Marte recites the alphabet like a prayer, under her breath, over and over.
She has great faith in the written word, does Marte.
Snow blankets the city. The canals freeze, unfreeze, freeze again. Aleys presses her hand to the amber panes. They are cool beneath her fingers, but Aleys is warm within.
She feels the change inside her, deep within, her body the hold within the hold.
She is an ocean. From a distance, she appears calm and unperturbed, reflecting the shadows of birds.
This is how the town imagines her. But it’s far from true.
Aleys feels herself in constant motion, full of swells and tides, insights that crash in sound and froth, then pull back across scoured sands, out of reach, lost. She empties herself of her own weather, waits.
Still, still. Come, my Lord, and stay awhile.
He does come to her, in mysteries. The wave pulls back and back, drawing itself up, grinding across ocean floor, pulling pebble and sand, barnacled rock and bending coral.
The fishes are drawn up into the mountain and all is laid bare beneath, a plain of rubble small and particular, and she but a grain of sand singing to the magnificence.
The peaked wave contains the violence and the compassion, the trinity, and it flickers between him and her and spirit, poised, breath held, and it says you are grain and you are wave, you are mine, I am yours, and it crashes down in a terrible roar and she is crushed and uplifted and swirled into its waters, dissolved and free.
She lifts her head and tastes the brine in her mouth and knows herself grateful for the sheer, terrible beauty. Her prayers hold the fury and depth of oceans.
“Marte, I have received the most wondrous understanding!” She thinks, I must share this vision. It changes everything.
“Have you, miss?” Marte is busying herself with laying a fire in the parlor hearth.
“I have, this very morning. Christ came down and he was a wave, I cannot say, he was a mountain and ocean in one . . .”
“Yes, miss, I’m sure he was.”
“Marte, listen! It was so marvelous.”
“Pass me your pisspot, miss.”
“But Marte.”
“You best get back to your prayers, miss. I don’t know from visions, those things aren’t for my kind. The stories in the book’s enough for me, miss. You tell Friar Lukas, that would be best.”
But she doesn’t want to tell Lukas.
His visits are a scrape of chair and a voice behind the curtain. “You are well, Sister?” He comes to offer advice and take confession.
“Yes, Father, I am well.”
“Your prayers, are they . . .”
“I keep the hours.”
“Yes, but are your prayers answered? Does he visit you?”
No, not him. Not exactly. It’s even more wonderful.
There are no words to explain the tides within her, the waves that crush and cleanse, that she speaks with God but can’t say how or why.
She can’t bring herself to tell Lukas. Something in her resists the tone in his voice.
He’s too eager, prying, like the people who try to peer through the panes of her window.
She remembers too well how he would grasp her wrists to feel them buzz.
Aleys composes her hands in her lap. She knows she shouldn’t fend off her spiritual director.
“I . . . I have been praying,” she says, “to receive him.”
“You must not despair.”
I am quite far from that. “I will not despair.”
“You—have you been healing people?”
“No, Father, I think that gift is gone from me.” She doesn’t tell him what a relief that is.
“It has.” He is silent. “Well, we must not expect his favors always.” Aleys waits. “Well, then.” He sounds resigned. “You are eating?”
“Yes, Father.”
“I will hear your confession. You must not give up hope.”
She keeps the visions to herself. Though Lukas visits from field and flower, market and sky, she feels he sits in the empty cell. How can she confess that to him? It’s too cruel.
She’s not keeping secrets. Not really.