“Oh, Papa.” She holds the book to her heart. She can say no more.
One hunger begets another. At night, while the others sleep, Aleys sets a taper on the kitchen table. She washes her hands thoroughly in the bucket and rubs them on her dress until they chafe, and only then does she loosen the drawstring on the pouch and extract the psalter. She pauses with her hands on the cover, and she swears she can feel the imprint of Mama’s fingers. Then she opens the book like she’s raising the lid of a treasure chest. Each illuminated psalm is vibrant as a sunrise. She pictures the monk who copied the verse and decorated the margins, but instead of ink, she imagines him dipping his quill in the colors of bluebirds and holly berries and bright spring moss.
Look, Mama had said.How the wind stirs the trees.
The vivid images wake something in Aleys, as if her own senses are tipped with monk’s gold. The sun in the psalter lights the fields outside her window. She pours water from the ewer and stands still, hearing cascades from the hills. A hawk’s cry becomes the call of an angel. The world of the psalter and the world around her begin to merge, and she wonders how much she’s failed to see, right in front of her. The marvels Mama spoke of, the beauty of God’s world. It comes back to her. Aleys tips her tongue to the grapes and tastes wine. It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not. If she could read the verse, Aleys feels, she could understand. She aches to understand. She wants more. She reaches her hand out to touch God’s fabric and thinks she feels him pushing back.
As the fire settles in the hearth and the pewter ticks with the night chill, Aleys works to decipher the Latin. She starts with theAve Maria, the song of Matins, the first hour, which even a milkmaid can recite. Everyone knows at least a few Latin words from the prayers they chant by rote in church. It’s just that there are so many words. Aleys starts by translating the handful she recognizes.Avemeanshail,materismother,benedictaisblessed. She teases apart the Lord’s Prayer, too, figures out thatterrameans earth, deduces bread frompanem. But she can get only so far without a tutor. She’ll never read the psalms or the saints unless she learns Latin.
And then, out of nowhere, from the least likely of places, Aleys receives her third wish. It’s January and frigid, ice slicking the roadways. Henryk is sick and Papa needs help delivering fabric to the dyers. Aleys thinks Henryk is perfectly fine. He’s just afraid the fumes from the dye yard will stink up his cloak. Recently, Henryk has become a bit of a dandy. His loss. She’s glad of the chance to ride out with Papa. He piles the bench of their cart with sheepskin and Aleys draws over their knees a heavy blanket made from coarse cast-off yarn. She wraps her hands twice in the wool, but the chill finds its way through the weave. She doesn’t mind. The sky above is so pure blue it looks like it could crack with the cold.
They smell the yard before they see the enormous cauldrons that emit great plumes of steam like the devil’s vats in her psalter. The yard smells like hell, too, but at least it’s warm, with fires stoked high. Papa gets down to negotiate with a large man and his sons, a matched set of hulking twins, one whose hands are blue with woad dye, the other’s scarlet with madder. Aleys unloads the bolts of wool onto a wooden pallet. They’re talking about the drapers’ guild and whether the head of it, a man named Mertens, will ever grant Papa a license to sell in the Lakenhalle. “Our best fabric dyed in your royal blue? How could he refuse?” asks Papa. They’ll be bargaining over the price of that blue for a while. Aleys wanders off among the steaming vats.
Men in leather aprons wield long wooden paddles, stirring lengths of wool through the dye. Boys scurry like squirrels, adding wood to the fires. Aleys lifts her skirt above puddles streaked with purple and red. Colored vapor lifts from the vats and drifts off like carnival smoke. Aleys turns the corner of a shed and nearly trips over a boy.
“Oh. Hallo.” The boy is seated on a low crate, hunched over a hornbook. She peers at the tablet. A sheet of finely shaved translucent horn traps and protects a piece of parchment. Aleys starts to ask why he’s studying outside, then stops. “You’re reading Latin.” The surprise in her voice comes out before she can disguise it. A dyer reading Latin?
“What of it?” The boy is skinny, but he’d be taller than her if he stood up. He shows no sign of doing so. He places his forearm over the hornbook to shield it from her eyes, but his arm is too thin to hide what he’s reading. He looks like a younger version of the dyer’s twins, with large gray eyes and long fingers. But his are clean. She wonders why he’s not stirring a vat. Maybe he has more brothers than there are colors.
“You’re reading that?” she asks.
“Obviously.” He doesn’t move his arm.
“You must go to the monks’ school.” The monks teach boys whose families can’t afford tutors. Girls aren’t welcome. She leans over him. “Can I see?”
The boy tilts his head at her, not quite smirking. “You wouldn’t like it. There aren’t any pictures.”
“I can read.”
“Latin?”
“Yes.” It’s a bold claim. Sure, she’s worked out some words from prayers she knows by heart: give, day, bread, kingdom, power, glory. She can map out the sounds of the other words, too, but she has no idea what they mean. It’s just gibberish to her, even if she can pronounce them. Might as well be Portuguese or English. She doesn’t understand those languages, either.
“Prove it.” He shoves the tablet at her.
Aleys shakes her sleeves from her wrists and takes the paddle and presses her hand down on the horn sheet so she can see through it. She recognizesgivefrom the Lord’s Prayer. It’s enough of an anchor to decipher the first sentence. “Give, and it will be given to you.” She hands the hornbook back to him. “See?”
The boy squints skeptically at the tablet. It dawns on her that he can’t read it. So she makes up the rest. “Take, and it will be taken from you.” Sounds about right. “Teach, and you will be taught.”
He looks at it dubiously. “It says that? Exactly?”
“That’s the general idea.”
He turns to a leather bag at his side and pulls out another sheet of parchment. “I know this one.” He doesn’t bother to slip it under the horn sheet. He doesn’t even look at it. The Latin flows off his tongue: “Numquid potest caecus caecum ducere nonne ambo in foveam cadent.” He’s clearly memorized the passage. Showing off, he repeats it in Dutch for her benefit. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they both not fall into the pit?” She bristles at his condescension. So the boy is fluent in Latin and can commit passages to memory. It doesn’t mean he can read.
“Show me where it sayspit,” she demands.
The boy points, but his finger wavers between words. He’s guessing.
Aleys squints at the sentence. By process of elimination, she should be able to get it. She knowsfall into temptation;fall into the pitcan’t be that different. She picks one of the words from the end of the sentence where she knowspitought to be. “Fo-ve-am.”
“Pit,” he says.
“Pit,” she agrees. She points at the word.
“How can you tell?”
“I figure it out.”
