Chapter 59 Omnes - All
OMNES
All
It is Marte who discovers Aleys crouched and shivering on the delivery dock, clad only in her shift.
“Help!” Beguines come running from every corner through the dew-slick yard.
Marte had roused them to search for Aleys, sure that the girl would return to the begijnhof.
Where else could she go? It took them only minutes to find her.
Katrijn follows the commotion, her stride cutting a path straight to the dock.
“What happened?” the women ask. Aleys can’t speak, but Marte knows. She nailed the belt to the door. She never trusted that man.
Katrijn stands back as they crowd around Aleys.
When she speaks, her voice is grave; for once, her hands do not slice the air.
“The Church will want to excommunicate her,” Katrijn says quietly.
For a moment, Marte wonders if Katrijn will shove Aleys from the dock.
The enmity between them is no secret. Then the magistra bends to gather the girl in her arms and carries her through the courtyard, up the stairs to the bed in Sophia’s room.
A hush descends on the begijnhof, a crouched waiting.
There is debate. Should they hide her here?
Should they spirit her away to the countryside?
As long as she’s alive, the Church will hunt her.
They will cut her off. Afterward, she’ll be a pariah, worse than any leper.
No one will take her in. No one will feed her, not even pig scraps.
Someone speaks up. “Why did she leave her hold?”
Marte stares. “Friar Lukas broke in. I found his belt on her floor. What do you think happened?”
Their own friar. It seems impossible that the man to whom they confess would . . .
“We need to ask her,” says another.
“No,” says Katrijn. “Sister Aleys will have trials soon enough.”
Willems confirms the girl is in the begijnhof.
The bishop orders him to marshal a group of armed men.
They’ll surround the place, put the women under house arrest, rotate guards at the door.
Then they’ll begin the trial. Jan can pluck the beguines away, one by one, for questioning.
He wonders if he’ll be able to tell them apart, all those women in gray.
It doesn’t matter. He has plenty to work with.
When Willems reports back, he says he can find no men for hire.
“What? Have they beaten all their swords into ploughshares?” That’s what comes of friars preaching peace and forgiveness on every street corner.
“That’s not it, sir.” Willems raises a subtle eyebrow. “It’s the wives. They’re angry.”
At what? the bishop is about to ask. Then he remembers the belt. So word has spread. He thinks of the tongue-lashing the brown friars will receive when they hold out their begging bowls to the women of Flanders. Those men should fast for a few days.
He also thinks, Now I will have to defend Lukas.
Jan sends Willems back out to find men without wives, the sort no one wants, the type too eager to invade women’s homes. In any town, there are always men willing to threaten women.
Lukas sits on the bed hung round by curtains.
He hasn’t slept since Jan turned the key in the lock.
“For your own good,” his brother said. Lukas hardly notices the wound in his side.
He’s focused on his fingertips, raw with splinters of hemp.
He’s spent the hours, Lauds and Prime, humming and picking apart the knots of his vows.
The rope frays out from obedience, in a thousand directions, spread like a sun on the bed.
Aleys wakes in the chamber with mustard-colored walls. She thinks of Sophia’s spirit rising through the window to the heavens. She gets up and pushes open the shutters, blinking. Too bright. Below, women cross the courtyard. She shrinks back. So many people. She closes the window, retreats to bed.
Midmorning, Marte brings a bowl of barley and milk. Sophia once put such a mug in her hands and from the window they’d watched Marte feed a cat from kindness.
When Marte sets the bowl on the table, Aleys catches her hand and brings it to her lips. Marte starts, pulls back.
“You were there for me. Always.”
“Of course.” Marte frowns.
“Every day, and I never—”
Marte interrupts, “Miss Aleys, are you . . . ? I know he entered your cell.”
Aleys turns toward the window. The Midsummer sun rims the shutter like the devil’s torch outlined her parlor window.
Is she all right? She shakes her head, though whether she means yes or no, she’s not sure.
He didn’t . . . but she feels his key in the lock, his hands on her skin, his hot breath in her face.
The man forced her to abandon her home. She was violated the moment he entered the anchorhold.
“I want to wash,” she says.
Marte brings water and a towel. The water is warmed. Marte cracks the shutter, allowing a beam of light to strike the basin.
Alone, Aleys strokes her cheekbones, presses her fingers into her jaw.
It’s easiest to touch the hard parts first, those backed by bones, the dependable ones.
Her wrists. Her elbows. She wraps her hands about her upper arms and holds herself, still.
Then she squats before the basin and reaches into it to fill her palms. The pooled water sparkles.
She raises her hands to her temple and breaks the water over her head in baptism.
The water trickles down her face, her throat, leaving rivulets of cool in its wake.
She chants the cleansing words of Job to herself.
Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.
God tested her. She doesn’t know if she succeeded; the choice was no choice. She has a moment of pity for Abraham. His impossible, terrible test. How do you know whether you’ve passed God’s trial? But maybe that’s the wrong question.
Raise a tent of your failures. They came to her in the night. She knows it. That was no mere dream. It was a message.
What matters is now. It’s what she chooses next.
She opens the shutters fully. When her hair dries, Aleys braids the strands and finds them softer than wool. When she rests, she sleeps on the balsam of hidden cathedral.
They have not abandoned me, she thinks. In my failure, they came. In my night.
Before the sun will set, this very day, the authorities will sever her from the Church. They will try to shame her.
She laughs. She remembers Sophia’s voice. What is the opposite of shame?
And Ida’s response. The opposite of shame is love.
She no longer seeks absolution from the hand of man. She has all the love she needs.
The first surprise is Katrijn. The new magistra, for Aleys can hardly bear to think of anyone but Sophia as magistra, appears in the doorway later that morning.
The year has aged her. She looks, Aleys realizes, careworn.
There’s a slump to her shoulders and shadows under her hazel eyes, as though the burdens of leading the begijnhof have been literal weights pulling on her.
And of course, Sophia’s death. Katrijn’s has been an angry mourning, not a gentle one, Aleys senses.
When they were last together, it was in this room, over Sophia’s body.
Get out, Katrijn hissed. You are no saint to us. Perhaps Katrijn has come to remind her.
“I never thought to see you again.” Katrijn is direct.
“Nor I.” Aleys sits up in bed.
“Marte has brought you food.” The statement is plain. It’s hard to know what to make of the changes in the woman before her. Aleys might as well be frank.
“You’ve given me refuge. Why? I know you don’t like me.”
“No.” Katrijn folds her arms. “But you’re pursued by the Church.”
“So you offer me shelter.”
“It’s what Sophia would have done. She protected me, and I’ll protect you. You know the bishop threatens to excommunicate her, too.”
“Sophia?”
Katrijn laughs bitterly. “Don’t you understand? They’ll hunt us all. The Church wants to silence difficult women. They’ll use any means at their disposal. The bishop says he’ll charge her with translation.” She looks away. “He’ll have Sophia burn in hell.”
“But the translations are yours.”
“Some of them. There are new ones circulating, too, that aren’t mine.” Katrijn flicks sudden tears from her eyes. “There’s nothing I can do. I can’t stop a bishop.” She sags to the edge of the bed, and a small, frightened sound escapes her. “Sophia will suffer for my faults.”
“Katrijn, no matter what the Church does, God won’t punish her.”
“How do you know that?”
What can she tell Katrijn? A year on her knees in a cell? Her conversations with God? “Trust me. Sophia is safe.”
Katrijn takes a deep breath. “You’ve seen this?”
“Yes.” Sophia has always dwelt in grace.
“I want to believe you.”
“It’s not your fault, Katrijn. None of it is.”
The sounds of industry, the scritch of carding, the clunk of a laundry paddle, come through the window. “They don’t like me,” says Katrijn abruptly. “The women.”
Aleys laughs in surprise. “Well, they never liked me either. We have that in common.”
“Unlovable women.”
“Who loved Sophia.”
There’s a moment as the older woman takes in her meaning, then adds, “Who will always love Sophia.”
Aleys reaches her hand into the dense weave between them, which holds their past and present troubles and, somehow, Sophia’s grace. The women’s palms find each other. It’s too much to meet each other’s gaze, but it’s enough.
“Sister,” says Aleys.
Katrijn nods. They rest there in truce, in memory of Sophia. Then, as if overwhelmed, Katrijn releases Aleys’s hand. “To business,” she says. “I have a nephew on a farm outside Groenendael, over the border in Brabant, beyond the bishop’s reach. If we move quickly, we can get you there.”
Aleys shakes her head. “No. I want to see their eyes when they excommunicate me.”
Another surprise, late morning. Griete breaks into the room, breathless. “Aleys!” Griete grabs her into a hug so hungry, so motherly, that Aleys can’t help but think of Mama. “Are you all right?”
“I am.” Aleys lifts her head from Griete’s green velvet shoulder. “Really, I am.”
Griete frowns like she’s not sure Aleys is altogether sane, but twists to wrestle something from the pouch on her belt. “Look what I rescued for you!” She extracts the psalter and presses it into Aleys’s hands.
“Oh, Griete.” Aleys traces the vines and finds that feeling has returned to her fingers. Her sister has restored a piece of her heart. Aleys touches the rounded, chewed corner. “You entered the anchorhold?” Most people wouldn’t dare.
Griete shrugs. “I had to. It was Mama’s book.” She looks wistfully at the psalter. “I loved the pictures so much.”
Aleys cracks open the book. “Shall I read you Ursula?”
They curl into each other in the bed and Aleys reads the story of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand maidens who defied the Huns. And then she reads Perpetua yielding her child to her brother and facing down an emperor. When she’s done, Aleys murmurs, “Never could I leave you.”
“Not even for God,” finishes Griete.
Aleys closes the psalter. “You know they’ll excommunicate me for leaving the hold.”
“You’ll stay with us. I don’t care what people say.”
“It would ruin you.” Harboring an excommunicate would destroy her reputation, their business, her new family. “I can’t do that to you. Or Pieter,” she adds. Aleys hasn’t even asked. “Griete, your marriage. How is it?” What she means is: Did it hurt?
Griete answers a different question. She closes her eyes and smiles, and when she opens them again, they shine with a light unlike any Aleys has seen from her sister. “I love him,” she says. “I do. I love him like Mama loved Papa.”
There’s a third and final surprise. At noon, just before the bishop’s men surround the begijnhof, a courier delivers a scroll tied with twine.
Marte brings it upstairs to Aleys, who unrolls the parchment and knows immediately.
The hand is trained, the verse familiar.
Rise up, my love, advance. For winter has now passed.
The flowers have appeared in our land. At the bottom, in the margin, hastily scrawled: Come away with me.
Aleys opens the psalter to the doe at the foot of the monk, the archer strained, the arrow in mid-flight. And all around them, the gold.