Aleys laughs in surprise. “Well, they never liked me either. We have that in common.”
“Unlovable women.”
“Who loved Sophia.”
There’s a moment as the older woman takes in her meaning, then adds, “Who will always love Sophia.”
Aleys reaches her hand into the dense weave between them, which holds their past and present troubles and, somehow, Sophia’s grace. The women’s palms find each other. It’s too much to meet each other’s gaze, but it’s enough.
“Sister,” says Aleys.
Katrijn nods. They rest there in truce, in memory of Sophia. Then, as if overwhelmed, Katrijn releases Aleys’s hand. “To business,” she says. “I have a nephew on a farm outside Groenendael, over the border in Brabant, beyond the bishop’s reach. If we move quickly, we can get you there.”
Aleys shakes her head. “No. I want to see their eyes when they excommunicate me.”
Another surprise, late morning. Griete breaks into the room, breathless. “Aleys!” Griete grabs her into a hug so hungry, so motherly, that Aleys can’t help but think of Mama. “Are you all right?”
“I am.” Aleys lifts her head from Griete’s green velvet shoulder. “Really, I am.”
Griete frowns like she’s not sure Aleys is altogether sane, but twists to wrestle something from the pouch on her belt. “Look what I rescued for you!” She extracts the psalter and presses it into Aleys’s hands.
“Oh, Griete.” Aleys traces the vines and finds that feeling has returned to her fingers. Her sister has restored a piece of her heart. Aleys touches the rounded, chewed corner. “You entered the anchorhold?” Most people wouldn’t dare.
Griete shrugs. “I had to. It was Mama’s book.” She looks wistfully at the psalter. “I loved the pictures so much.”
Aleys cracks open the book. “Shall I read you Ursula?”
They curl into each other in the bed and Aleys reads the story of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand maidens who defied the Huns. And then she reads Perpetua yielding her child to her brother and facing down an emperor. When she’s done, Aleys murmurs, “Never could I leave you.”
“Not even for God,” finishes Griete.
Aleys closes the psalter. “You know they’ll excommunicate me for leaving the hold.”
“You’ll stay with us. I don’t care what people say.”
“It would ruin you.” Harboring an excommunicate would destroy her reputation, their business, her new family. “I can’t do that to you. Or Pieter,” she adds. Aleys hasn’t even asked. “Griete, your marriage. How is it?” What she means is:Did it hurt?
Griete answers a different question. She closes her eyes and smiles, and when she opens them again, they shine with a light unlike any Aleys has seen from her sister. “I love him,” she says. “I do. I love him like Mama loved Papa.”
There’s a third and final surprise. At noon, just before the bishop’s men surround the begijnhof, a courier delivers a scroll tied with twine. Marte brings it upstairs to Aleys, who unrolls the parchment and knows immediately. The hand is trained, the verse familiar.Rise up, my love, advance. For winter has now passed. The flowers have appeared in our land. At the bottom, in the margin, hastily scrawled:Come away with me.
Aleys opens the psalter to the doe at the foot of the monk, the archer strained, the arrow in mid-flight. And all around them, the gold.
60
Aleys
When they come for her, there’s little time. The beguines procure what is at hand: a brown dress, a gray tunic. No one can find shoes. Aleys wraps a shawl over her head and throws the end over her shoulder. She clamps together trembling hands. The hour is Sext, the sun high and starting its descent into shadow. The guards lead Aleys across the bridge, through the streets, over worn cobblestones that had gleamed like cool opals in the night. Now they’re warm, almost hot, beneath her bare feet. Her thoughts flick back to Christ crossing dark flinted ground, the kiss of Judas to come.
The priests are blind, the pillars crumble.
The Church will excommunicate her today for—for what?—for running to God.
The guards prod her through the streets, reluctant to touch her. People stop and stare. A murmur follows in her wake: “The anchoress is out of the hold.” Those who have not already heard the rumors wonder why. Shopkeepers come to their doors. A fishwife drops the herring and swears, then crosses herself. These people nearly tore her apart when she was a saint. What will they do when the Church expels her from human society? Turn their backs? Spit on her? She wonders which is worse—to be idolized or despised.
The guards steer Aleys toward the court, a slim building behind the cloth hall, wedged between wool warehouses, as if criminals were less concern to the city than moths.
Aleys remembers how Papa teased that God stopped work when the Lakenhalle tolled, how Mama swatted his arm playfully. Aleys swallows, finds her throat dry. She won’t go to her family. She nearly destroyed them once; she won’t do it again. The court will release her into the Markt to beg or throw her in a cart and dump her outside city walls.
