Aleys skeptically eyes the animal, who eyes her back just as warily. He backs into the far corner, his back arched. Mama never let cats into the house. She said they were bad luck. But surely rats are worse luck. The cat’s ears are pressed flat against his skull. His eyes are green unblinking globes.
“Here, give him this.” Marte hands through a cloth with a fish head on it. “A cat’ll never leave you once you give him a cod noddle.” Sure enough, the cat lifts his nose, sniffs the air. “Ah, he’s a hungry one,” says Marte encouragingly.
Aleys places the napkin on the floor near the hearth. The cat hesitates, then walks over, grabs the fish head, and retreats behind Aleys’s prie-dieu. She hears him rip apart the flesh. Perfect. She will pray over fish bones.
“He’ll get in and out your window, miss, if you keep the shutter open. I’ll leave the parlor door ajar. Just give him a fish head for a few nights, and he’ll stay, I’m sure of it.”
“Marte, thank you. It’s a kindness.”
“If he’s a yowler, miss, then you might not thank me for it.”
“As long as he doesn’t chew my psalter.”
“Oh, here, miss.” She pulls the psalter from her pocket. The edge is smoothed. It will never be the same, but nor is it dangling flesh. “I looked at it. Your book. It’s all in Latin language?”
“Yes.”
“The stories, they’re the same as those the beguines read after dinner?”
“The very same.”
“The beguines’ stories don’t have pictures.”
“No.”
“But I could read them? The Dutch ones.”
“If you were taught, you could.”
Marte picks up the broom, begins sweeping the clean parlor with furious strokes. Her frown tightens. Then she stops, gripping the broom in both hands, and turns to Aleys.
“I could read the stories?”
And so the hours between Prime and Terce belong to Marte. She shuts and bars the parlor door and they ignore the pounding of petitioners. It is just the two of them and the cat. They begin as all reading lessons ever have, with letters that form sounds, words, a name, another name. Marte brings a charcoal. They write words on the sill between them and wipe them off, their palms and sleeves dark with dust.Feet,hands,tears,cross,mercy.Child.Sky. Marte writespeas; Aleys writesporridge.The Lord eats peas porridge.Marte smiles, a lopsided thing, quickly gone, but truly earned. The words lace them together.
Marte is the only real person in the world to her now.
There is also the cat—whom they call by its three-letter word, Kat—who jumps up to the sill that is both border and slate, so they have to shoo him off to writedog. Kat eats cod. Kat comes. Kat goes. Kat mostly sleeps. He claims two sleeping spots. By day, he sleeps on the ledge of the horn window, his orange back to the orange panes, as if all things orange in the world belong against the outside wall. At night, when he isn’t prowling, he sleeps between Aleys’s shins, his bulk a warm loaf from the oven. Kat weaves around her as she prays. He has one white paw. Sometimes he lifts it to her forearm.I’m here, he says.With you.
She cannot believe it sinful to love him, but sometimes she wonders.
Marte brings pages of Katrijn’s Dutch gospel, hidden in her basket. They read together and Marte copies the text for herself. Her hand grows more and more steady, the letters take shape. She even adds some crude flourishes, pictures in the margins, illuminated letters. “I should ink these words in gold,” she says. When she stands guard outside the parlor door, Marte recites the alphabet like a prayer, under her breath, over and over. She has great faith in the written word, does Marte.
Snow blankets the city. The canals freeze, unfreeze, freeze again. Aleys presses her hand to the amber panes. They are cool beneath her fingers, but Aleys is warm within.
She feels the change inside her, deep within, her body the hold within the hold. She is an ocean. From a distance, she appears calm and unperturbed, reflecting the shadows of birds. This is how the town imagines her. But it’s far from true. Aleys feels herself in constant motion, full of swells and tides, insights that crash in sound and froth, then pull back across scoured sands, out of reach, lost. She empties herself of her own weather, waits. Still, still.Come, my Lord, and stay awhile.
He does come to her, in mysteries. The wave pulls back and back, drawing itself up, grinding across ocean floor, pulling pebble and sand, barnacled rock and bending coral. The fishes are drawn up into the mountain and all is laid bare beneath, a plain of rubble small and particular, and she but a grain of sand singing to the magnificence. The peaked wave contains the violence and the compassion, the trinity, and it flickers between him and her and spirit, poised, breath held, and it says you are grain and you are wave, you are mine, I am yours, and it crashes down in a terrible roar and she is crushed and uplifted and swirled into its waters, dissolved and free.
She lifts her head and tastes the brine in her mouth and knows herself grateful for the sheer, terrible beauty. Her prayers hold the fury and depth of oceans.
“Marte, I have received the most wondrous understanding!” She thinks, I must share this vision. It changes everything.
“Have you, miss?” Marte is busying herself with laying a fire in the parlor hearth.
“I have, this very morning. Christ came down and he was a wave, I cannot say, he was a mountain and ocean in one ...”
“Yes, miss, I’m sure he was.”
