8
Aleys
In the morning, as Aleys prays before the cross, there is a commotion. She hears hooves outside. The doors to the church burst against the walls. She rises from knees bruised with prayer. Friar Lukas stands wide-eyed as her father and brothers spur their horses up the aisle. The animals jostle each other before the altar; there’s no room for such a snorting cavalcade. Henryk is in front, brandishing the old shield with the lion rampant, as if he’s a knight on crusade. Claus pouts, dragged reluctantly from bed. Papa is behind them. She can’t look at him.
“She is ours!” Henryk shouts. “Aleys is to be married. Today.”
Henryk, she thinks,you’re no knight. Put down the shield.
Friar Lukas is about to speak, but Aleys raises her hand. The moment is hers. She grasps the altar cloth with one hand. With the other, she sweeps off her new woolen veil. She holds both cloths, brown and white, and drops her head. Aleys imagines their shock at seeing her, crucified, the virgin bearing witness. The men fall silent. Henryk lowers his shield and blinks stupidly, as if she’s a stranger. Papa frowns as if he doesn’t recognize her. Claus shudders with revulsion. For Aleys is shorn. She looks, as mournfully as she can, at Friar Lukas. A little late to his role in the pageant, Lukas lifts the thick snake of Aleys’s gleaming braid like the consecrated host and says, “This night, the maid Aleys has vowed poverty, chastity, and obedience. See here her humility.” He waves the braid in the air. It’s a bit much.
“Vows, daughter?” Aleys sees the sadness well in Papa’s eyes. He tips his head back, addressing heaven. “Let her be God’s child, then,” he says. “She’s no longer mine.”
Oh, Papa. If only you’d let me stay. I’d have been yours forever. You gave me no choice. You betrayed me.
Her chest swells with righteousness and cracks in pain. Aleys has never felt so heartbroken. Or powerful.
Later, Aleys sits on a wooden bench in the garden outside the church. Bees buzz about her, not quite a cloud. She ignores them. Her eyes are on Friar Lukas, who’s been pacing for what seems like hours. Aleys rubs her temples. It’s not even noon, and doubt is already beginning to soil the edge of her triumph. She’s not sure what she expected the morning after, but more than this. Maybe a celebration with the brown friars. She feels a twinge of remorse, thinking of her brothers headed home with Papa, outsmarted and defeated. Correction: former brothers. She has an entire order of brothers now, every one of them pledged to God.
Where are they? Shouldn’t there be another ceremony? Or even more prayer? She’s been sitting forever on a bench in hot wool on a spring day that feels as warm as apples in August. The halo on the altar last night, the flame ... well, at noon, you can’t see the halo. She’s not sure it was real. Like the day she prayed the roof from its rafters. The glow fades so fast.
Plus, she’s hungry. She forgot about hunger when she vowed poverty.
One of the bees lands on the back of her hand, a tiny winged tiger. With a free finger Aleys strokes his furry back. He tries to crawl up her sleeve, and she shoos him off.
She watches Friar Lukas bend to pluck a dandelion. For a moment, Aleys thinks he might eat it. Lukas has a starved aspect to him, like an underfed wolf. His hair is graying, but his tonsure is freshly shaved. She’s noticed how it blushes pink when he’s not looking at her and crimson when he does. Friar Lukas should move into the shade.
Aleys runs her fingers beneath her veil, over the damp, bristly hair at the nape of her neck. She imagines the neighbors’ surprise when she appears at their back gate, draped in brown, bowl in hand. She thought they’d ply for alms this morning. But Friar Lukas seems sunk in meditation, beating a path between gravestone and lilac, occasionally raising gray eyes to consult white clouds, as if they bear a message. She wishes the clouds would say something about breaking fast. Her stomach growls. She presses her forearm into her new robe to make it stop.
Last night, when Friar Lukas grasped her braid with one hand and sawed through it with the other, she bowed her head to make it taut. The hairs prickled as they snapped under the knife, each one a release: gone husband, gone mewling children, gone chains of lace and pearls. Gone cooking, gone cleaning, gone ... Her old life fell away as the braid hit the church floor. Aleys lifted her head and savored its cool, light absence, nothing catching, nothing tugging. She felt herself knighted, an honorary male. One with her new brothers.
Papa will have to tell Mertens that his wife has run off with the wandering preachers. She hopes Mertens will let them keep the place in the Lakenhalle, but she knows better. She forces her thoughts elsewhere. She can’t think about them now.
Aleys knows she’ll be the talk of the town. Friar Lukas will expect her to set an example. He said as much last night. “You’ll be like Saint Clare.” The women of Assisi flocked to Clare like doves when she joined Francis. Princesses left their palazzi to bathe the feet of lepers. Though, thinks Aleys, Clare didn’t live in Flanders. The Brugge city wives would sooner sell the lepers’ shoes than wash their feet. It’s not like she’s become the Clare of the North overnight. Just what does he expect of her?
She cracks her psalter. It falls open to the illustration of Gabriel and Mary. Aleys reads the angel’s words in the curling banner that unfurls above him:Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. She sighs. She will have to trust them both, God and Friar Lukas.
9
Friar Lukas
Sister Aleys is studying her psalter, her lips moving as she reads. Her hand slips beneath her veil. He’s seen this before. The sap of youth rising. The dew on her cheek. The young are all the same. The novice friars can’t keep their hands off their shaved skulls, as if they’ve discovered a new body part. They’re blind to their own presence, the way their loud steps announce their arrival, how their cloud of lemon zest assaults everyone around them.
He turns at the end of the path, resumes his pacing.
Friar Lukas feels relieved to be clean of the desires of youth. His body’s needs were loud once, but his appetites have dried. When hunger arises in him now, it hovers for a moment, then passes like a wasp from a spent vine. Through discipline, he has become undistracted, a temple dedicated to spirit. He rubs his fingers together and the dry flesh does not grab. He pities the young. Green as weeds, they walk too fast with their begging bowls, duck into alleys to shove a crust of bread into their mouths. Eventually, they master the body. Eventually, they become free of it. She will, too. He knows she’s hungry; this is part of the discipline. He’s asked Brother Hervé to bring food to the church, but not before the sun is high.
Lukas thinks back on his own induction. It feels like yesterday. The brown friars had no church, so the boys took their vows in a glade. Lukas was the last in line, his knees pressed into damp soil. He heard the others’ voices catch, one after another, on the last vow. The first vow, poverty, was nothing to those who’d never tasted it, a glamorous badge of defiance in a mercantile town. Chastity seemed, in the moment, a minor inconvenience and lust a twitch that could be ignored. It was the third vow, obedience, that made a boy’s blood freeze in his veins. Lukas looked to his right, at the sons of commerce in their velvet tunics, saw their throat apples bob. Obedience was a futures contract, an unspecified price for goods unseen. It was hard to imagine obedience, let alone pledge it. It was bottomless. The first boy tossed his flaxen head, then accepted the yoke. The second screwed his eyes shut as if jumping from a cliff. Only Lukas accepted obedience gladly, felt his knees root into the dirt. It was a test, he knew, a chance to prove himself. Obedience was the discipline. Obedience was the way. It still is.
Lukas watches the girl stand and stretch, arching her back and looking toward the sun.
It will be harder for Sister Aleys than for his brothers. Women are easily tempted, prone to deception by demons. It’s hardly their fault. They’re daughters of Eve. He passes his hand over his bald pate. Goats are cropping grass at the edge of the garden, the females among the males. Sister Aleys is an altogether different creature than his brown friars, but he trusts the Lord will show him the way. He cinches his rope belt. He will guide her.
As if she’s read his thoughts, she starts to follow him through the garden. This all happened so fast. He’s not sure what to do with her. He wonders how Saint Francis handled Clare, who, of course, wasn’t a saint when she showed up with more passion than common sense. What did they do that first day? Where did Clare sleep that night? Maybe Francis had a sister or a cousin she could stay with. But he has none. Perhaps he can ask the local convent to house Aleys until he figures it out.
He turns abruptly, and there she is, holding out a sprig of lavender. A piney smell rises from her fingers and pricks the back of his throat. He reaches to accept it, then restrains himself, placing his hands on his belt.
“Give your flower to Christ, not to me.”
