“I’ve seen the linens. Clean as newly washed.” He shakes his head. “Lukas, when you inducted her, I had doubts. But this. This changes everything.” He looks around like he hardly dares to release his thought into the friary. “Don’t you see? God smiles upon us.”
Hervé, the most steady of friars, is looking at him with the wide eyes of a boy who has glimpsed the ocean for the first time. Lukas wants to reward him, wants to say,Yes, it is she.Yes, we have been blessed.He wants to gift the miracle to Hervé.
“I must go to her,” he says.
Hervé nods, then closes his eyes and tips his head back to the sky.
As Lukas walks through town, he tunes his ear to the chatter, taking the pulse of Brugge. There’s an excited tone he’s not heard before, every voice is raised half a note. People turn and stare as he passes. They stop what they’re doing, catch their neighbor’s eye, point their chins toward him. He pauses on the corner of the Markt, and immediately a group assembles. He hasn’t attracted a crowd like this since he brought the tambourine. And it’s not just the widows. Before he opens his mouth, they are clamoring.
“Is it true, Father? Did she raise the dead?”
“Can she heal my son?” A woman grips the shoulders of a young boy, thrusting him forward. The child lurches, and Lukas sees his twisted foot. He thinks of Simon Peter healing the lame beggar, twisted limbs unbending true. And Paul. Cloth that brushed Paul’s skin had healing powers. Lukas thinks of the clamoring crowds in the dusty marketplace, the half-crazed people waving dishcloths like flags as they pushed to rub them against the apostle’s forearms, his ankles, the back of his neck.
He, Lukas, has preached such miracles. Here, on this very corner. So why doesn’t he believe one could happen now?
“Where is she?” someone shouts from his right. The crowd is growing.
“Can we see her?”
Lukas raises open palms to tamp them down. “Wait. Slow down. It’s all rumor.”
There’s a grumbling. The crowd shrinks back a step. He can’t lose them. Not this fast.
“Father, are you saying it’s not true?”
It would be better if he believed. “We just—we must verify.” He’s making this up. How do you verify a miracle? He has no idea. They would call the authorities, he supposes. From Rome.
“We’ll test her!” shouts a man waving his cap. “Bring her out!”
If Aleys walked through the square right now, the crowd would turn from him. He pictures Aleys, not in the brown wool, but in her maroon cloak. She’d appear in the far corner of the plaza and lift her head and his people would flock to her. Though he’s been preaching to this crowd for decades, they’d forsake him in a moment for a miracle. Why can’t he be enough for them?
“Father, you believe.” The mother with the lame child looks at him closely. “Don’t you?”
Lukas takes a quick inbreath and feels something flare in his chest. Of course he believes. He believes in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. His faith doesn’t require present-day miracles. There is wonder enough without them. But Brugge doesn’t want the truth. He feels tendrils of smoke rise up the back of his throat. Brugge wants cheap miracles.
From the back: “The friars are hiding their saint!” People raise fists. “Show her!”
Lukas feels the heat burst from his chest. “I am not her procurer!”
Even as he says it, he recognizes the half-truth. He remembers the weight of her severed braid in his hand, his pride when he presented her like a sacrificial lamb to God in that church in Damme. He was her eager agent then. He brought her to Christ’s door. That was different, he tells himself. That was for God.
But he never expected God to grace her with miracles.
When Lukas reaches the begijnhof, he shouts to the first beguine he sees: “Get her. Bring her to the church.” The woman is alarmed. The friar has never raised his voice. She drops her linen into a basket and scurries off.
Inside the shadowy cool, he paces the flagstones. This time, he won’t hide in the transept. This time, he’ll face her, he’ll see what God sees in her, he’ll have certainty who she is. Who he is. God will show him, Friar Lukas, the miracle. After all, he brought her to the altar. God owes him that much.
The door opens and a band of yellow light precedes her, striking a path across the floor. He sees her blurry shadow before he sees the girl herself, and he wonders if he’ll be able to tell saint from sinner. He reminds himself how she relished the drama of running from home, back in the spring, not even six months ago. This could all be the playacting of a child.
Aleys leaves the door open and crosses herself as she faces the altar. He shudders. She must not pretend at this. Her eyes are large in her pale face, the black of her pupils nearly eclipsing the blue. “Oh, Father,” she says.
He braces himself. “You’ve heard what they’re saying, in town?”
She is shaking her head. “Father, I need to talk to—”
“Deny it.” Even as he speaks the words, a voice within him whispers,Please don’t.
“I—”
