“That’s a trick.” He’s looking at her like she’s just blown flame from her mouth. “Girls don’t read Latin.”
“Nuns do. If I had a tutor, I’d speak Latin like you.” It dawns on her that he has the opposite problem she does. She reads the words but can’t understand them. He speaks Latin but can’t read it. She gestures at the page in his hand. “So how do you know what that says?”
“I memorize it.”
“Don’t the monks teach you to read?”
“They will, once we’re fluent. And after we master copying. That’s what they mostly care about, getting the manuscripts done for their patrons.”
“But you want to read what you’re copying.”
“Of course I do. I’m not just some monkey with a quill.” Suddenly, he’s up on his feet, thrusting the page at her. “Show me how you do it.”
She steps back. “Why should I?”
“If you do, I can read the text that the monks set us to copy.” He looks at her from the corner of his eye. “Plus the scripture they don’t want us to read. I can get that.”
Well, good for him. “But why shouldIteachyou?”
“Because I understand Latin and you don’t.”
A path opens before Aleys. He’s proposed aquid pro quo. If she shows him how to sound out the Latin words, he’ll be able to read whatever he wants. And if he teaches her what the Latin words mean, she’ll be able to understand everything in Mama’s psalter.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
He doffs his hat like he’s a courtier, not a dyer’s son. “Finn,” he replies. “They call me Finn.”
Aleys becomes Finn’s reading tutor, and he becomes her Latin tutor. Finn has a donkey he can bribe with stale turnips to make the trip to Damme, so they meet in the root cellar after her family is abed. Shoulder to shoulder, they learn like wildfire. He sneaks out the manuscripts he’s supposed to be copying for the monks. By spring, Finn can sound out words and Aleys can tell him what they mean. By summer, they trample down a nest for themselves in a nearby field, the wheat turning from green to gold, stars emerging above. He curves his lanky body over the parchment, his sandy hair falling over his gray eyes. She brings a leather cord and plaits it for him. “There,” she says. “Now you can read.”
She finds she’s happy. She has a friend. She thinks Finn would go on pilgrimage with her if she asked. He’s as curious about God as she is.
“When you grow up in a dyer’s yard,” he says, “you don’t need to be told what hell is. But there’s supposed to be a kingdom of heaven on earth, too.” Finn’s been getting worked up since he can read for himself. “So where is it? The priests are hiding something. Why won’t they let people read for themselves?”
“We have our prayer books.”
“But there’s so much more, Aleys, than is in your mother’s psalter.”
For now, Aleys is happy to decipher the prayers for the hours in the psalter. The words, to her surprise, are as beautiful as the illuminations. The prayers seem to pare her senses, leaving her raw and open. And closer to Mama. How she’d have loved to have been able to read. Aleys tries to pray as Mama would have. She tries to listen for both of them.
In chapel, when all necks are bowed and the priest raises the host to the cross, Aleys lifts her head. She sees, just over the field of downcast heads, in shafts of sunlight, and everywhere, really, dust motes winking, heedless of prayers. No one sees them, unless there’s a shift in the light. They’re everywhere, buffeted by the breeze, in the sap of the pines, in the crunch of leaves underfoot, in the way the bread tears in the hand, the way the bread knows to tear in the hand just so. The treaded path, the burst of grape on the tongue, the sudden flood, it is all thus, and there is a hand behind it, a design, a pattern so diverse and particular that it seems no pattern, but it is, she knows it is. The air, the stone, the pearl, the cry of jay, the smell of moss, all of it, all of it, sings with joyful, dancing bits of God. It is there, just beyond reach. She knows it. Something is waiting for her.
Finn understands. Finn feels something coming, too.
Her brothers are playing chess in the kitchen and Griete is fumbling with the pots, having promised to do the cooking, for once. “Just today,” asks Aleys. “Please.”
“So you can pray?” Griete is incredulous. “More?” They share a little altar in the corner of their bedchamber. After he gave her the psalter, Papa let Aleys move the prie-dieu upstairs. Griete has scant use of it. She veers wide of the shrine, performs a knee bob from a safe distance, crosses herself as if in protection from all virgins, and runs to the sunshine.
“Please, just do it.” Aleys doesn’t say that last night she dreamed of Mama. It was so real, Mama looking up from the kitchen table, her hands deep in yarn. “What is it?” Aleys had asked. Mama had said nothing, but Aleys could read her eyes.Come meet me, they said, in your prayers.
Domine labia mea aperies. Thou O Lord wilt open my lips.
Rain spatters the windowsill, making little pools. Aleys positions herself on the prie-dieu. She places the psalter before her and opens it to the illustration of the Virgin receiving astonishing news from the angel. She’s pregnant. Mary looks strangely happy about it, almost like she saw it coming. Aleys chose this page because Gabriel seems like the best messenger between heaven and earth.
On the page, God shines down from a disc of gold and Gabriel has just alighted before Mary, his wings rigid and high.Come to me,Gabriel, Aleys prays.Let me see you. Just once. Mary has been praying at her prie-dieu, just as Aleys is. Though it’s sunny in the psalter and cloudy on earth, Aleys knows that God’s favorite angel wouldn’t be deterred by rain. She recites the first line of Mary’s prayer over and over again:Ave Maria, gratia plena. Dominus tecum.Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.In the repetition, the words begin to blur and lose their meaning. Her head swims a little. She can no longer feel her feet. She repeats the verse until it seems the words might thin the veil between this world and the next. She wants to reach out and test it, but she keeps her hands clasped tight. Send the angel, she prays. Bring Mama to me.
And then it happens. The roof lifts away. Aleys grips the stand and looks up to an open sky, where the sun hangs swollen and beating like an enormous heart. Clouds flee in all directions as if frightened, until there’s nothing but gold above her. She has entered the psalter. All falls silent and an unbearable sweetness fills her limbs. She doesn’t exactly see the angel, but she feels him behind her shoulder. She wants to turn and look but fears he will disappear. Or that he might tell her she’s pregnant.
Time stops on a pinpoint of glory. She feels herself breathe, but all else is still. One breath, two, three. Then the angel speaks. She can’t say what language it’s in, or whether Gabriel speaks aloud. She will remember only one word:Seek.
