“Marte, listen! It was so marvelous.”
“Pass me your pisspot, miss.”
“But Marte.”
“You best get back to your prayers, miss. I don’t know from visions, those things aren’t for my kind. The stories in the book’s enough for me, miss. You tell Friar Lukas, that would be best.”
But she doesn’t want to tell Lukas.
His visits are a scrape of chair and a voice behind the curtain. “You are well, Sister?” He comes to offer advice and take confession.
“Yes, Father, I am well.”
“Your prayers, are they ...”
“I keep the hours.”
“Yes, but are your prayers answered? Does he visit you?”
No, not him. Not exactly. It’s even more wonderful.There are no words to explain the tides within her, the waves that crush and cleanse, that she speaks with God but can’t say how or why. She can’t bring herself to tell Lukas. Something in her resists the tone in his voice. He’s too eager, prying, like the people who try to peer through the panes of her window. She remembers too well how he would grasp her wrists to feel them buzz. Aleys composes her hands in her lap. She knows she shouldn’t fend off her spiritual director.
“I ... I have been praying,” she says, “to receive him.”
“You must not despair.”
I am quite far from that. “I will not despair.”
“You—have you been healing people?”
“No, Father, I think that gift is gone from me.” She doesn’t tell him what a relief that is.
“It has.” He is silent. “Well, we must not expect his favors always.” Aleys waits. “Well, then.” He sounds resigned. “You are eating?”
“Yes, Father.”
“I will hear your confession. You must not give up hope.”
She keeps the visions to herself. Though Lukas visits from field and flower, market and sky, she feels he sits in the empty cell. How can she confess that to him? It’s too cruel.
She’s not keeping secrets. Not really.
41
Marte
I can read.
I can write.
I can begin a new tale.
Marte fingers the scrap of parchment in her apron pocket. Throughout the day, in moments snatched from to and fro, between simmer and boil, punch and knead, this is her touchstone. Some keep saints’ medals, some rabbits’ feet. This paper, these words, are Marte’s. She wrote them without even the help of Miss Aleys, and none, not Ida, not Katrijn, and most surely not her cur of a husband, have seen them. She didn’t even copy this. She wrote it herself. At night Marte tucks the scrap between her forehead and upper arm and hugs it there, safe, until dawn, when she slips it back into her apron. She feels a new story, her own, gathering in her pocket. What it will be, she doesn’t know. Sometimes she drops in an acorn, sometimes a coin, a sprig of thyme, to brush up against her first words, to see how they mix.
She has told Miss Ida that she is learning to read, in Dutch, and Ida replied, “That is very good, can you write, too?” Marte nodded. Ida is her favorite of the beguines. Ida doesn’t throw words about like chaff on the wind. Ida asks where others bark. And while Ida doesn’t smile overmuch, neither does she scowl at empty air like Katrijn. Marte is loyal to Miss Aleys, sure, and grateful, but Aleys can be powerful odd, and who can trust a saint? Marte flexes her foot. No, Ida is her favorite. Ida comes from the bottom, like her. Ida remembers the bottom.
Marte shifts her basket from her left hip to her right and blows on her hands to warm them as she steps onto Maria Bridge. There’s just enough time to sweep the beguines’ chapel and trim the wicks in the reading room before setting out supper. She leans over the rail for the fishmonger. He’s on his stool in his flat-bottomed boat, whittling a dolphin from a piece of wood, surrounded by drying husks of saltwater fish.
“How much a mackerel?” she shouts down. The women prefer cod, but Katrijn has put them on a tight budget. Everything about the begijnhof has become tight.
