“Will we not eat?” she asks.
They are standing there, the two of them, when Brother Hervé enters the garden holding an alms bowl. He stops short. Lukas steps back, suddenly aware of what this looks like. He’s mentioned this induction to no one, not even to Hervé, his least impressionable friar, a large man whose silent presence deepens the thoughts of all around him. But even Hervé can’t hide his alarm. “Lukas?” He raises heavy eyebrows. “What have you—”
Lukas cuts him off. “Brother Hervé, let us step aside.” They move to the end of the garden. Aleys follows them with her eyes.
“You’ve recruited a woman?”
“I wanted to inform the brotherhood, but I had to move quickly.” He sees Hervé swallow a protest. “Listen. The order is pressuring us to expand. And she just appeared, like a”—Lukas’s eyes rise to the sky—“like a gift from God. She can read and write. In Latin! She doesn’t butcher herpater nosters. She’ll attract followers. She’ll be an ornament to the order.”
“We need ornaments?”
Lukas sighs and glances over his shoulder. His actions made sense in the night. In daylight, he’s already questioning whether this induction was premature. And here’s the girl coming toward them in one of their own robes. “Well, it’s done, anyway. She’s ours now.”
Lukas turns and announces a bit too brightly, “Sister Aleys, Brother Hervé has brought you food.”
Hervé makes the sign of the cross over the bowl, passes it to her, then stands well back.
Aleys tips the bowl back and drinks avidly. Lukas thinks he should have brought a wimple to cover her throat, but he’s a friar—where is he supposed to find a wimple? When she’s done, she runs her tongue inside the bowl. Hervé looks away.
“Lukas, she can’t join us in the friary.” Hervé says this in a low voice, the voice that gentles horses. “She’ll create a disturbance.”
“I know that.”
“So where will she go?”
“I thought the Benedictines.”
At this, Aleys looks up, licks her lips, and protests. “The nunnery?”
“You can’t expect to live with the men,” says Hervé.
“But I’m not Benedictine.” She grabs a fold of her brown robe and raises it to show them. “I’m Franciscan.” You can’t do this to me, her eyes declare, you can’t shear off my hair and then pawn me off on nuns from another order. “They’re not properly poor, the Benedictines. I’m meant to be with you. With my brothers.”
She looks from him to Hervé, who’s regarding her like an oddity of nature, a two-headed calf or a fish with ears.
Lukas states what should be obvious: “Aleys, what better place to pray than enclosed with sisters in Christ?”
“No. I won’t go to the nuns. They’re not serious.”
Obedience is going to be more of a challenge than he thought.
“The beguines would take her,” murmurs Hervé.
“What?” cries Aleys. “You can’t do that.” Her blue eyes dart between their faces like a startled moth. “They’re even worse.”
“Sister, have you already forgotten the vows you made last night?”
She bristles. “Which one? Obedience or chastity? Everyone knows the beguines are wanton.”
“The beguines are pious women!” Friar Lukas is their pastor. He’s sick of people slandering good women who seek a Godly life, though they lack either the dowry or the desire to become nuns. They live without men, but the town gossips about the begijnhof like it’s a brothel.
Aleys is staring at them open-mouthed.
“They run a school and a hospital,” offers Hervé, as if virtue and lust were incompatible.
“But their charity’s just a cloak for their sins. They hold strange rites in the begijnhof. Lewd rites. It’s common knowledge.”
Lukas and Hervé exchange exasperated glances.
