“There are more?”
“New ones every week, apparently. And they’re being copied.”
This is what comes from whipping up devotion. It’s the fault of men like Lukas who plant radical ideas. He doesn’t think the friars are actually doing the translations—they live literally hand to mouth, they have no means—but they provoke unnatural desires in his people, insinuating that they, themselves, can know God. Good luck with that.
Jan has enough experience of God to know he is absentee, hardly paying attention. His people have been kept safe from any real knowledge of God—until now, happy enough to cross themselves at Mass, never mind they don’t understand the words. Lately devotion has been spreading like wildfire. He shudders. The grotesqueries that people come up with. Now they treat God as their mother or as a maiden in a castle. They’re so full of longing. It horrifies him. It was better when they were full of fear. Not that the bishop fears him. God is, to the bishop, a benevolent uncle who has left a bequest and disappeared; the rituals must be observed, but he has withdrawn his gaze. The bishop imagines an elderly God, nodding asleep at the banquet, his beard in the soup.
But his people want a young God, a handsome God. They demand a courtship with God, they want God to be their lover. They want to read scripture as if psalms were love letters.
Tracts like these could get him in trouble, if Rome were to learn of Dutch scripture circulating in his diocese. He must quash this quickly. He pauses. He’s not the son of a banker for nothing; he can calculate his interests here. Is there a way to flip this to his advantage? He turns back to the window and twists his ring, letting his eyes travel beyond his fluttering flags to theLakenhalle tower. He adds up all the illegal parchment being passed hand to hand. What a spectacular bonfire it would make. No people, mind you. They don’t have to be fanatic about it. Just heresy in print. In Lombardy, they burned pages of Saint Peter in French; in Metz, they burned Saint Paul in German. He heard those bishops were promoted. What’s to stop him from building a bonfire in Brugge large enough to be seen from Rome?
“Willems, gather the Dutch scripture. Quietly. And find out who the translator is.”
12
Aleys
Cecilia pulls Aleys across the begijnhof courtyard, toward the lowest and longest of the buildings, where the other girls are carding wool, or at least pretending to. Thescritch scratchof the wire brushes pause. Aleys feels the girls’ eyes upon her back as Cecilia pulls her up a narrow wooden staircase that opens to a dormitory. Here, the light from the courtyard filters through leaves and reaches into the window, so that the whitewashed walls flicker green and gray as the laundry snaps below. Within, all is as one might expect: for each woman, a chair, a cot, a stiff prie-dieu with an unpadded kneeler. Upright furniture, straight edges, no embellishments. Simple in the extreme. Aleys thinks about Mama’s psalter hidden beneath her robe in its scarlet silk pouch. How gaudy the little book would look on the sloped shelf of the bare prie-dieu, a gem of temptation. She glances around. Possessions are few, cloaks on pegs, a comb on a chair. Despite what she’s heard about beguines’ unholy acts, she doesn’t think they steal. Besides, there’s nowhere to hide even a pin.
Or pray. Aleys regards the prie-dieu with dismay, jammed between chair and bed, the plainest of crosses nailed to the wall above. She tries to imagine herself kneeling there, offering her soul amidst chatting, sighing, snoring girls. Cheek by jowl with breathing beguines, how is she expected to pray?
“Here, next to me,” says Cecilia, patting the empty cot. The other five are taken. Cecilia is a large girl with dimpled hands and a voice deep as molasses. “I’ve been here just a few months, you mind, but Sister Katrijn has already said I can come live in her house, once I take the gray dress. This dormitory’s for the girls as not yet committed. Some of them leave to get married, the beguines don’t mind. It’s not so bad, living here. The girls are friendly. And it’s comfortable enough. I didn’t know much more fancy from home. You aren’t from the farm, that I can tell.” She tilts her head, hesitates in the way of people who know better but can’t stay their tongues. “Miss, if it’s not prying too much, everyone’s wondering. They say you were about to wed the head of the drapers’ guild. You’d never have wanted for wool, that’s for certain.” She looks at the robe. “I suppose you do have that. But silk, you could have had silk dresses and furs on your bed. So, if it’s not too forward, miss, why ever did you do it?”
I should have gone to the convent, thinks Aleys, at least they keep silence. Aleys knows there’s no point in trying to explain herself. How can she say what she seeks? That she has left home to find God, that he cloaks himself in plain sight, that she wants to catch him like children hiding in the apple trees. It would be like asking someone to help her find the sky. They all call it blue, but she knows it’s truly gold, if only you look at it the right way. It is gold and green and shot through with angels. She looks at Cecilia’s open face and knows the girl could never comprehend. How can Aleys explain that she already knows she won’t find her beloved in the begijnhof? She parries.
“First, tell me. What brought you here?”
Cecilia colors, looks at her feet. “My parents, they’d had enough of me.”
“What? Why?” It’s hard to believe that Cecilia wasn’t beloved, with her round cheeks and toothy smile.
“Well, I wasn’t so easy for them.”
“They sent you here?”
“I didn’t know where else to go.” She twists her pretty mouth. “My father, he turned me out, miss.”
Oh. Cecilia was probably caught behind the barn with the baker’s son. Or the butcher’s boy. Or a field hand. Why they didn’t just marry her, Aleys wonders, but doesn’t ask.
“Anyway.” Cecilia brightens. “It’s all right here. I like the city.”
They stand there, looking at Aleys’s cot. She owns nothing beyond the psalter that she can place on the bed or chair to mark it as hers. Cecilia screws her forehead into a knot. “And to think you could have had furs.” Then she shakes her head and clears the frown. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. I’ll have Marte get you some bedding.” In a nimble move, Cecilia hoists herself onto the chair between their cots, places her hands on the windowsill, and leans out. “Marte!” she bellows, then looks back at Aleys with a grin. “At least we have a servant. You can be sure there was none of that where I came from.” She turns back to the window. “Marte! Hurry up!”
Aleys hears the door’s hinges below, and an uneven tread ascends the stairs. “She’s new,” says Cecilia, as if that explains her slowness. It takes a long moment for the servant to reach the doorway, but then she is framed in the greenish light, a woman with a plain, weary face, already running to jowl. Her eyes are unremarkable, a watery hazel, but for the purple bruise across her left cheekbone. She meets Aleys’s gaze and scowls before she looks away, whether from shame or defiance, Aleys can’t tell.
“Marte!” commands Cecilia. “Get Sister Aleys some proper bedding.”
Marte doesn’t smile. Her face is unreadable. She probably wonders why Sister Cecilia didn’t spare her the climb. The sheets, after all, are hanging in the courtyard. Marte only grunts. As she turns, her foot drags. She leans on the wall as she prepares to descend.
“And bring water!” Cecilia yells after her. She waves her hand at the space vacated by Marte. “From the farm,” she says dismissively, as if she herself were not fresh from the fields. “That is all she knows.”
“She is ... ?” Aleys intends to ask about the limp. Cecilia answers another question.
“Married.” She points her chin after Marte. “But you see how he treats her. She ran away. Sister Katrijn says we’ll keep her so long as she earns her pottage.”
When Marte returns, she bears a sheet, a blanket, and a small towel. Atop this, a wooden basin filled with water that threatens to spill as Marte lurches to the chair. She lowers her burden carefully, then lifts the bowl for Aleys to wash her hands. She twists her head away, almost painfully.
Aleys dries her hands with the towel. “Thank you,” she says.
