“They’re jades,” she insists. “People say they lead honest men astray.”
“People say many false things. Have you ever set foot in a begijnhof? You won’t find a single man. Aside from priests.”
“I hear they choose their own.” She waits for that to land. “Priests.”
Hervé laughs and puts a hand on Lukas’s shoulder. “Usually one of us.”
“The bishop doesn’t like them,” she asserts.
“No, he doesn’t,” agrees Hervé. “The women prefer our friars to his church clergy. The beguines, you could say, are rather independent.”
That much is true, thinks Lukas—they are ungoverned. The beguines of Brugge have never accepted a monastic rule, unlike the nunneries regulated by the Church. The beguines write their own rules. They’re not cloistered. But that doesn’t make them loose. On the contrary. Lukas knows many beguines more devout than nuns, and they work much harder, since they have to make their own living. He has great respect for the beguines.
“Sister,” he says. “You do understand you’re on probation.”
“I am?”
“Of course. You’re a novitiate.”
He sees the surprise in her eyes. Did she think she’d proven herself just by running from home? Hadn’t they discussed this? He thinks back and realizes he’d spoken at length about the beauty of thevita apostolica. Not so much about its duties. “You must demonstrate that you’re suitable to join the order.”
“Oh.”
“You will emulate Saint Clare. You’ll draw other women to the Franciscan way.”
“But ... how?”
“Well, Saint Clare asked her sister, then her mother, to join her. Others followed.”
“My mother is dead.”
He winces. He softens his voice. “Then you’ll win women over with your faith. Starting in the begijnhof.”
“She’ll have to work,” says Hervé, “if she joins the beguines.”
Aleys shakes her head.
“You refuse to work?” asks Lukas.
“No. It’s not that.” A bee has landed on her brown sleeve. She looks at it with something like sadness. “I mean, the beguines are not”—she searches for the right word—“that holy.”
“They’re humble,” he says.Unlike you, he thinks.
But her eyes plead with him, and he glimpses again her wild desire. The beguines don’t soar, her eyes seem to say. They can’t teach me to fly.
Lukas understands. He does. But first she must crawl.
He claps his hands. “The swiftest path to God is obedience. You will live among the beguines. I give you two months, until Midsummer, to recruit the first sisters to our order. Consider this your first test.”
Liber Secundus
10
Aleys
The begijnhof turns its brick back to Brugge, facing inward, each house tight against the next. Here and there, windows push open above a canal that swells into a pond before the entrance. An arched footbridge cinches the middle of the pond like a belt. Half a dozen vigilant swans patrol a miniature island. Others stand guard on the bank. Each twists its thick neck to fix Aleys with inked eyes, feathered soldiers defending a moat.
It’s not what she expected. Aleys thought the beguines would live in lopsided, debauched houses, loose beamed and flapping open to the town. Hardly. The cobbled entrance to the begijnhof seems like a drawbridge to a tidy fortress. It’s entirely enclosed. The busy square outside is crammed with the shops of butchers and bakers, a tailor and a chandler, mostly fronted by brick, but some in beam and plaster, and one in ramshackle wood that leans over the canal. Inside the begijnhof, across the bridge and through doors the height of two men, Aleys senses something different.
