She mumbles into Sophia’s shoulder. “I didn’t ask to be chosen.”
But she did. She asked for a big gift.
Sophia shakes her head. “We’re all chosen, child. Some are chosen to the cross and some to feed the chickens. There’s no second-guessing God’s intentions. You know that.”
She does. Sometimes.
“Well, at least we should give you the day off from the hospital.” Sophia gives a weak smile. “I think you should pray.”
Aleys positions herself on her knees before the altar. She starts a prayer. She stops. She begins again, stops again. Here in the nave where the women sang and danced at Midsummer just months ago, where their voices wove music from verse, she can find no rhythm, no beauty. She wants to prepare. She wants to lose herself, as she has before, in the twilight of poem prayers that curl through her like smoke until her spine is made of whispers. She wants to disappear.
But that doesn’t happen. The light ticks across the stones.
Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.
She can’t manage the words that follow:Thy will, not mine. She wants too much. She wants to save the begijnhof. She wants to save Sophia, Ida, even Katrijn. Herself. What if that’s not his will? Can she pray for that?
Please, she beseeches,just make this go away.
She tries harder. She sends her prayers to heaven, but they fall to ground, their wings bare assemblages of bone without feather, useless.
At noon, she gives up. She’s too angry to pray. “Why?” she asks. “Why are you doing this to me? To us?” If she could reach out and touch God’s fabric, she would rip it.
She needs to calm herself. Aleys fumbles for her psalter. It’s there, as always, under her dress, the pouch smooth against her skin. She slips out the book and opens it to Saint Ursula. There’s the miniature Ursula in a blue dress, russet hair loose around her shoulders, a soldier’s arrow pointed at her breast. Around her lie eleven thousand slain maidens. What is in Ursula’s heart? Her expression is placid, but so is that of the archer and of the virgins bleeding to death at her feet. Did she rage against God for sending an assault on the women he’d commanded her to lead? Or did Ursula still call him beloved? It seems to Aleys, now, that the tale couldn’t possibly be true. Or maybe that’s what makes you a saint: the ability to face the worst and pray,Thy will be done.
I don’t understand you, she thinks.When I was a child, you hid messages in the clouds and love notes in the psalms. But I’m a woman now, and I see your cruelty and wonder what you are. You create, you destroy. You plague, you heal. You’ve made me your fickle instrument and I don’t understand your mind. Show me, face-to-face. I want to know you.
This is her prayer.Show me where to find you.
She collapses back on her heels and opens her palms. Show me.
She feels it come on this time. A blurring of her edges, a fuzziness in the light, the smell of charred rosemary. The light on the floor ticks backward. Aleys lurches like she’s leaned into the wind only to feel it slacken. She opens eyes that were already open and sees before her a windswept vista of hard-packed sand. It is a solitary place. A single tree stands in the center of this plain; its shadow is precise in the glare. She walks toward the tree and halts. She has found him. She knows this. He is the sun and the shadow, the perfect solitude. The beautiful, perfect solitude. She knows she will find him if only she can stay here. She doesn’t know whether she’s calling him or he’s calling her.
Let me stay with you, she says to this Christ.I will dwell in the desert, if only you will let me find you. Forty days, forty nights, forty years.
Then the Lakenhalle bell tolls and Aleys is pulled back into a world that makes no sense.You have broken my heart, she thinks.
30
Aleys
As the bell echoes, Aleys walks through the twilight courtyard. The laundry hasn’t been taken in. No lamps shine in the windows, except for the reading room. By this, she understands her sisters have spent the day together, in prayer. They fear, too. But will they not walk with her? No one has come to see her to the carriage. Not Ida. Not Sophia. It’s a long way through the courtyard, alone. She passes under the archway and steps onto the bridge. The bishop’s carriage waits on the cobble, its black door open. The swans twist their necks to follow her. As she steps up into the carriage, Aleys hears raised voices from the courtyard behind her and turns to look. But the footman has shut the door. There’s no escape.
Inside is Lukas with a friar she’s never met and Brother Hervé, whom she hasn’t seen since the day of her induction. How odd it feels to be surrounded by her order at this moment, how little they understand what’s at stake. Hervé reaches out the window to slap the carriage roof. It begins to roll.
“Sister Aleys,” Lukas says, smiling, “are you ready for this day?” He looks overexcited, slightly demented. “Our day of victory?”
“Father?” Surely, he understands the risk of this? He has witnessed the limbs that didn’t heal, the wounds that festered, the babies who died. He knows her gift can fail.
“You’re nervous,” he explains. “It’s only to be expected.”
“I’m more than nervous! How can you be so sure of miracles?”
“Have you prayed today?”
“Of course!” And he sent me a vision I can’t interpret.
“Good, good. All will be fine.”
