Oh, she thinks. Oh. I eavesdrop on angels.
Then she corrects herself. Not angels. This is the song of women.
Aleys presses the heels of her palms to her eyes to quell her tears. She wants more than anything to be with them. Not on the outside, looking in. Neither above nor below, but within. A strand in the weave. She thinks of Marte in the midst of the beguines. Plain, trustworthy Marte. A woman who will take the gray as her own. Who’s been at her side every morning, every evening.
Aleys sees it now. She should have told Marte about Lukas. Marte would have helped her, would have raised an alarm that Aleys’s spiritual advisor had become erratic. Dangerous. Aleys didn’t ask for her help. Why? Was it some stubborn pride, some smug sense that God would raise her up through channels dug by men? That’s crazy. It’s like a sailor trying to discover new lands by canal when the ocean is beyond. Hadn’t she been shown otherwise?
She had missed it. God was there, all along. In the hand of Marte.
As women sing into the darkness, Aleys slides her back down the locked gate and hugs her knees to her chest and grieves. She weeps for the hold. For Mama’s psalter, left behind. For Kat. She weeps for the lost, unsung hours. She weeps that she couldn’t keep her every vow. That she thought herself invulnerable within stone walls. Aleys cries until she empties herself and there is nowhere to go but sleep.
Through the night she dreams a dense forest, oak and evergreen, damp with leaf rot. Owls call through the dusk. She must find the doe. Aleys squints into the woods, looking for the rust amidst green and brown. Swans glide among the trees. She walks quickly, alert to the shift in the matrix of leaf and trunk that will reveal the deer. The forest grows only closer and more impenetrable. She begins to run through the gathering dark. She turns a corner to find her way blocked by a fallen tree, a gnarled and twisted trunk across the path, its majestic crown tumbled into the woods. A voice comes to her.Build me a cathedral of broken limbs.And so she gathers up the branches and leans them, one by one, against the fallen trunk. She drags thick boughs across the forest floor and fits slim branches between them. She weaves the wood together with green saplings.The beams of our house are cedars, and its rafters are firs.The sap of wounded limbs coats her palms. Fragments of leaf adorn her fingertips. And when the limbs are knit tight in shelter against the great trunk, she arches evergreen over the entrance and scatters golden needles to make a floor. It is a cathedral of balsam.None shall see it but those who seek.She crawls inside and falls asleep on a bed of thick fragrant needles within the hidden church. His voice, from the dream within the dream:Thou shalt raise a tent of your failures, so that pilgrims may rest.
58
The Bishop
The bishop is horrified. “I can’t believe you entered her cell.”
Lukas doesn’t answer. He cradles his head in his palms.
“How could you? Do you realize what this does to the Church? To your order? If word gets to Rome, your friars will be disbanded.” Lukas closes his eyes.That’s right, thinks Jan.Close your eyes. Close them to reality the way you always have. The way you have since we were children.“How could you be so stupid?”
Not only did his brother break into the hold and set the girl loose, but he ran without covering his tracks. Like any sane man would. Like any man of the Church. One of his Franciscans helped to bandage his ribs, but that’s not the worst of the damage. To himself, to his brotherhood of friars. And to all Jan’s carefully laid program. He has no contingency for a missing saint. The sun is rising, and the bishop has no plan.
Willems reports that gossip is already flooding the town, coursing through the market, over the wharf, through the Lakenhalle. Jan pictures the dawn scene, as it’s been reported to him: misty light, the streets filling with people, the smoldering remains of bonfires. The maid entering the parlor of the anchorhold to find the window bolted. She knocks. She knocks again. No answer. The woman drops the porridge and runs from the parlor, around to the cathedral entrance. Even from the nave, down the long aisle, anyone can see that the door to the cell is gaping wide. A small crowd gathers. The hold is vacant but for a thrice-knotted belt curled on the floor. The maid holds the rope away from her with loathing, like Eve throttling the serpent, as she marches from the church and yells for a hammer. With the fury of an avenging angel, she pounds nails into his brother’s belt, anchoring it to the cathedral door.
I pay that woman’s wages, he thinks.
The cat is out of the bag, he thinks.
“How could you be so careless?” Jan brandishes the belt that Willems pulled off his cathedral. Even Willems had been unable to mask his disgust when he tossed it on the manor table. “There are a thousand other women I could get you, and you pick the anchoress. Why, why would you do this?”
Lukas mumbles something into his hands.
“What? Speak up, man.”
Lukas raises his head. “I thought she would save me.”
Jan stops in his tracks. “Save you? You’re her confessor! How could she save you?”
“She is with God.”
Jan scoffs. “She is excommunicated.” Or she will be. He has to work quickly. The legate will be rising soon, expecting the trial of miracles to begin. Jan’s anchoress has vanished from her cell and his brother’s belt has been seen dangling like a noose on the cathedral door. It’s bad.
Lukas moans. “I thought she would bring me to him.”
The woman has ruined his brother. “She bewitched you.”
Lukas looks up. “No.”
Jan is nodding, pacing the length of the room. “It’s not unknown.”
“Aleys is no demon,” says Lukas.
“One of you is. And, Brother, I pray it isn’t you.”
59
