The tutor comes twice a week and teaches them to read and write ledgers. Aleys learns quickly, faster than her brothers. But it’s dull, even disappointing, all the repetitive words: fleece, bale, skein, bolt, dye. What she longs to read isn’t written in Dutch. It’s not line after line of transactions and weights and expenses and income. She wants to read the psalter. Mama’s voice, even Mama’s face, has begun to dim. If Aleys could open the book, she’s sure that memories of Mama would fly out like birds. If she could learn Latin and read the words, maybe she could bring Mama back.
Aleys begs Papa to bring in a Latin teacher, but there’s no money for that. Her brothers declare church language a waste of their time. They’ll read and write in Dutch to draw up a contract or a bill of sale. “Miserere mei,” says Henryk, swirling the beer in his mug and showing off one of the few phrases he knows. He downs the drink and slams the mug on the table like a grown man. “Forgive me. What more do I need than that?” Mama was right, their religious education is truly lacking.
Aleys strains to recall the saint stories for her siblings, but she can remember only Perpetua and Ursula, and the boys quickly lose interest. Without an audience, Griete does, too. Aleys tries to pray for them all. She prays in the root cellar, with pebbles beneath her knees. It feels like penance, like a cleansing to wash away the stain of the night she failed Mama. She knows she’s not supposed to hold that thought. Papa has said that God took Mama for his own reasons. What those could be, why he would want to fill her with an unfillable hunger, Aleys has no idea.
Eventually, her siblings leave her alone with her saints. Griete discovers the looking glass, Claus deserts martyrs for marbles, and Henryk, growing firm of jaw, decides that virgins are, in fact, interesting. It’s as if they’ve all moved on from Mama and Aleys is stuck behind in the mud, straining for a glimpse, searching.
A year passes before God delivers her second wish.
It’s late afternoon, and Papa has been watching Aleys chop onions into a stew. Onions that she planted and tended in their side garden, as she has every year. Griete is out back skipping rope with her friends. Papa’s in a thoughtful mood. “We should have had a maid,” he says. “You work so hard.” Papa is the fourth son of the third son of a once-noble family. They even have a crest, a lion rampant. Henryk likes to think of it as a kind of glory, but Papa says that family honor doesn’t pay anyone’s wages. Nor will it win him a spot in the Lakenhalle, which would make it easier to sell their wool, and at a premium. Lately, there’s new competition from Florence, where they’ve devised clever mills that render the wool just as dense and soft as handwashing it in old urine. Money’s been getting tight. They may have to sell Claus’s horse that he loves so much. Papa works hard, and it’s clear, in this moment, that he knows Aleys does, too.
“Come,” he says, rising.
Papa leads Aleys to his chamber and reaches to the top shelf. Aleys catches her breath. What’s he doing? Papa retrieves the scarlet pouch and gently turns it in his hands, blowing off the dust. Where his breath brushes the silk, it glints ruby in the afternoon light.
Aleys wipes her hands on her skirt. “That’s Mama’s.” Her fingers itch to grab the book.
“Just so.” Papa’s smile is rueful. “The first time I saw her psalter was at our wedding. I was almost jealous, she loved it so much.”
Aleys thinks of Mama, not much older than she is now, clutching her book at the altar. What painting illuminated her mind in that moment? Was she picturing an angel alighting before her or the pits of hell? Did she know death was waiting, not so many years off? Of course not, Aleys tells herself. No one expects that.
“Mama meant to give this to you on your wedding day.”
Aleys retracts her fingers as if Papa’s offered her live coals. What’s he saying? They’ve never discussed this. Surely, he doesn’t expect her to marry. He knows she belongs at home, with him, with them, with Farrago and the wool and the garden and the chickens. Aleys looks down. She’s standing where the midwife dropped the soiled linens. She backs away.
“Papa, no.” The words come out fast. “Who’d run our home? And the business—you can’t manage without me.” She can sort the strong yarn from the weak, can weigh a skein with her eyes and select a dye for a monk or a marquise. He needs her. Doesn’t he? Her throat clenches. “I don’t want a husband.” Papa is smiling like there’s a joke only he knows. She feels panic rise. She’s only fourteen years old. “This is my home.”
He nods and assesses the book in his hand. When he looks up, his eyes are bright. “You know, when your mother prayed, there was something so sure about her.” Papa regards the prie-dieu beside their bed, as if Mama were right there, and Aleys realizes that, for him, she still is. “So intimate.” He shrugs. “Most people pray because the priests tell them to, like they’re checking off a list. Your brothers, for one. Or they’re afraid of the hell the priests whip up.” Papa shakes his head. He doesn’t much care for priests, agrees with those who complain the Church has grown corrupt. “And then there are those,” he says, “like Griete, who get down on their knees to deliver God their list of demands. But your mother was different.” He looks out the window at the fading light on the field. “When she prayed, she raised her head as if she were listening. Like she was trying to catch a melody just beyond reach.”
Aleys imagines Mama in prayer, the house asleep, the candles flickering. “She prayed from love.”
“More like curiosity, I think. She wanted to know God.” He smiles. “She used to take my hand and reach it out like she was pressing against an invisible cloth. She’d say, ‘It’s here, husband. Right here. God’s will. If we could just see the weave.’ Sometimes I thought she missed her vocation. She would have made a happy nun.”
“Mama, a nun?” Enclosed within the walls of an abbey? Aleys doesn’t agree. Mama loved the world, loved her neighbors, loved Papa. She loved the waves of the North Sea. She wouldn’t have wanted to be a nun.
“Your mother had a talent for prayer,” says Papa. He shifts the pouch from one hand to the other. “Aleys ... you have no idea how like her you are. So I have to ask. Do you want to join the convent?”
Aleys shakes her chin rapidly, almost a shiver. She has no more desire to live behind walls than Mama did. “I’d never see you again.”
“And you don’t want to marry?”
“No! I told you. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m happy here.”
“But you’d never have children.”
She shudders. “Papa, I don’t ...”
“I know,” he says, putting out his hand. He won’t make her say it. “No one’s going to force you.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.” He nods. “Then, if you have no intention of leaving, this should be yours.” He puts the pouch into her hands and holds them for a moment. “From Mama.”
Aleys can hardly breathe. She gently loosens the drawstring and eases out the prayer book. It’s exactly as she remembers. The psalter fills her hand the way it once filled Mama’s. She traces her fingers over the vine that runs around the edge of the supple green leather. “I can open it?”
“Of course. It’s yours.”
Aleys opens the book at random, to a painting of an enormous oak. Her breath catches. She remembers this, how the tree spreads across the page, how every branch holds a different bird. The leaves are light green and dark green, and the birds’ wings are tipped with gold. Mama’s voice comes to her.The blackbird. And the cardinal. You see the sparrow?Below the tree, auburn foxes poke their noses from dens in the earth. Aleys can’t read the words of the psalm, but she knows every single bird on every single branch.
