Another cry, more panting. Aleys feels a chill course her limbs, like she’s freezing from the inside out. She braces her hands against the doorframe. Within the chamber are horrors, things she shouldn’t see, things she’s afraid to see. She should be fearless, like Perpetua. She should go to Mama’s aid. But she can’t. She just can’t. The demons. Aleys stands locked in terror outside the door, her feet frozen to the ground. “Mama,” she whispers.
Aleys begins to pray.Please, Lord, hear me. She slides to her knees and presses her forehead into the door. All she wants is her mother. She doesn’t care what happens to the baby.Take it, just spare Mama. She concentrates everything into this one desire, until her need is a hot coal in her belly.Send the angels.She prays to the saints, she prays to Mary. She leans into the door, all her small weight, as if she could push the monsters back to hell. Light breaks around the frame. Is it a sign?Bring more light, Lord, more angels. She prays harder, scarcely breathing, the words in her mind frantic, each one crashing into the next.
Her wishes. If ever there were a time for them, it’s now.Dear Lord, I wish Mama to live.It’s not just her first wish, it’s her every wish.I’ll give them up, she prays,all my wishes.Just not my mother.
Then it grows quiet, so still that Aleys can hear the tumult of her blood in her ears. A flicker of hope kindles within her. She takes a breath, holds it, listens. Then a whimper, long and plaintive, so unlike her mother, so strange, snakes under the door. It’s the worst sound she’s ever heard. She clenches her fists against the noise. There are other murmurs, voices Aleys doesn’t know, a few urgent words in Papa’s familiar voice. And then a terrible silence. There should be a baby crying. There should be sounds of joy, of relief. The quiet is all wrong. Aleys clenches her fists as the knowledge seeds itself. No. No, no. The silence seems to swell, until it is vast and bottomless, until it opens into the dark abyss of the prayer book, and Aleys pictures Mama falling, falling away from her, into the pages of the psalter, forever.Mama. Aleys can’t draw breath, doesn’t want to draw breath.Take me with you. She shuts her eyes and wills herself to leap into the darkness. Farrago releases a howl. Someone opens the door. Aleys falls forward onto her hands and knees. Inside, on the floor by the bed, is a heap of bloody linen. The dog is keening. Her wishes were worthless. Mama is dead.
2
Aleys
Afog descends on their house, curling through the rooms, filling every space with its blank white face. Aleys can barely see through the dank mist. No one speaks. Hours go by and no one speaks. There’s nothing to say.
Aleys is surprised, when she goes outside, at the sun. A group of children run the towpath, children who still have mothers. News has spread. They slow as they pass the grieving house, out of respect or maybe fear that the sorrow is contagious. I didn’t pray hard enough, thinks Aleys.Be careful or you’ll end up like me. Go home to your mothers.The children don’t dare to look at her, and their relieved whoops and shouts trail behind them as they head up the canal.
That afternoon, Papa burns the cradle in the yard. The laundry is still on the line, flapping senselessly. Papa weeps as the wood cracks, but Aleys is glad to see it go.
“We have to eat,” Griete says, and tries to make a meal, though she’s just ten years old. No one eats it, and Aleys takes their plates out back and scrapes them for the pigs. She notices that the friars have not come to the gate, as though they’ve heard that no one eats here, that to hold out their bowls for food would be pointless and cruel.
But there are things that must be done. Claus remembers to feed the chickens. After a few days, Henryk hitches the horses to the wagon. Papa must go to the Lakenhalle, he must go to the dye yard, he must go to the fullers. A draper’s work never stops; wool won’t produce itself. He sends Griete on the rounds to collect the skeins from the spinsters, without Aleys, as if Papa knows she’s the worst affected, can’t look upon other mothers. And so Aleys is left alone at the kitchen table, her hands deep in skeins of wool, dun-colored figure eights that loop endlessly. She weeps as she sorts them, pauses often to put her head on the table. There is something solid, something comforting in the feel of yarn between her fingers, the animal smell of it, that allows her to breathe. Farrago follows her now.
She doesn’t understand why God took Mama. Aleys wanders the empty house, stops in her parents’ bedchamber. Mama was so good. Kind and generous and devout. Aleys eyes the prie-dieu where Mama prayed twice a day, knees on the kneeler, elbows on the sloping shelf, psalter open before her. Aleys grips the frame and shakes it, as if she could force answers to rattle out. It makes no sense. Mama was perfect. Why would he take her when she was so needed on earth?
God should explain himself.
The psalter sits above the prie-dieu on a high shelf, secure in its scarlet pouch, untouchable. Aleys yearns to open it, to search the pages for her mother. “Papa?” she starts to ask. But she can’t. Their grief is a fragile tower. One more stick, one more reminder, and he might collapse. She could lose him, too. So the pouch remains, gathering dust, closed and knotted, as Mama left it.
Summer turns to fall. Aleys sees a white cabbage moth with inky spots and smiles for the first time in weeks. Fall turns to winter. The friars return to the back gate, murmuring blessings as they hold out their bowls. They lean over the fence while Aleys spoons out porridge for them. If no Franciscans happen down the road, she tosses the offering into the slop trough and the pigs feast like preachers.
“It’s always friars. Why don’t priests come begging?” Griete asks Papa one day, as he loads the cart with finished lengths. “Or monks?”
Papa looks over his shoulder. “They’re not hungry.” Griete screws up her face. Papa sighs. “Mama taught you all about the saints in heaven but not about the Church on earth?” He puts his hands on his thighs and crouches to speak to her. “Here’s my lesson. There are three kinds of churchmen. First, the priests in the churches, they’re the bottom rung of the ladder that stretches all the way to the pope’s throne. The higher you climb—your bishops, archbishops, and all that—the richer you get. Too rich, if you ask me. Now, monks”—Papa pauses to rub his beard—“are different. They live in the monasteries, and most of them are well-off. They own fields and livestock and learn Latin and copy manuscripts.”
“Like Mama’s psalter,” says Aleys.
“And they make the best ale,” adds Henryk.
“That, too,” says Papa. “Come on, boys, let’s finish this.” He turns back to the work.
“You forgot the friars,” Griete insists.
“Ah, well, the friars, they’re something new.” Papa leans against the cart. “Those men mean what they say. The Franciscans and Dominicans have taken vows of poverty. Won’t even touch money. They preach on the street corners, though nobody pays them. The friars live on the providence of God and depend on our alms. That’s why they come begging at our gates.”
Aleys likes the friars. If she were a boy, that’s what she’d be. “What about women?” she asks.
“Don’t be stupid,” says Griete. “Women have to be nuns.”
“Be they nun, monk, priest, or friar, they all answer to the pope in Rome,” says Papa, hoisting the last pallet onto the cart. “And we to the guild in Brugge.” He wipes his brow with the back of his hand. “Claus, hitch the horse, and let’s get going.”
A cold wet winter cedes to spring, and Papa says he needs help with the wool—it’s become all too obvious how much the family business relied on Mama. Receipts have faltered. At least he thinks they have. Papa can’t take on all her work negotiating with spinsters and local shopkeepers and keep up the books, too.
“You’ll have to learn to read,” he announces, “and write. All of you.”
Aleys snaps to attention. Read? It’s like getting a wish she never even hoped for. She didn’t think it possible. Girls don’t read unless they’re schooled in a nunnery. She squints at Papa. “Truly?”
“I’ve hired the tutor.” He smiles at her eagerness. “You’ll start tomorrow.”
Aleys remembers the three wishes and frowns. They were nothing but a story for children. She abandoned childish things the night Mama died. But learning to read? It’s like something from a fairy tale.
