A Cloud of Outrageous Blue

by Vesper Stamper

  “Well then, Alice,” says the sub-prioress, “after prayers, you may show our new conversa the whole of our home. We will have our lessons here after the midday meal. Welcome, Edyth. I hope you’ll find your place here quickly.”

  “Thank you, Sub-Prioress,” says Alice with a bow of the head.

  I manage a shy smile. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  No great fire roars in the middle of this vast hall, yet it’s hot as summer. The clear leaded windows are fogged with steam. A forest of columns lines the room, and vaulted ceilings radiate the wavy heat downward. It feels good.

  “Now I know why my room was so blessed warm,” I say. “But where’s the hearth?”

  Alice laughs. “Don’t need one,” she says, pointing to the floor. “It’s under there. This is a warming room. It’s called the calefactory. We have classes here in winter, because there’s no heat in the church, as you’ll soon find out!”

  I smile. “Well, I could get used to this. I don’t think I’ve ever been this toasty in December.”

  “I’ll show you the rest of the priory after terce. There’s a creepy old chapel that burned down a long time ago. It’s even got saplings growing up through the floor.”

  I like Alice. She doesn’t act like a typical nun, noble and aloof.

  Sisters file out of the calefactory with Agnes, and Alice and I fall to the back. We exit into a covered cloister surrounding a large courtyard. A blast of cold smacks me, and I long to go back inside. Alice talks and moves very fast, pointing out every door along the cloister, every carving…and every person of interest.

  “You want to think that holy places make holy people,” she says under her breath. “But you learn fast here. Whatever was going on at home to make their families dump them at a priory, well, they brought those things with them. We all did.”

  I wince. “My family wasn’t like that.”

  “Well, I can tell you didn’t choose this,” she says. “It’s written all over your face.”

  I feel my cheeks go red, and my heart drops, thinking of Henry’s decision to send me here. “Did you choose? Why are you here instead of some exotic country?”

  “I could go places with Father when I was younger, but things change.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, Edyth, I’m the tithe,” she sighs. “The tenth child. There were six sisters ahead of me in line to get married. But you know what? I would have joined a convent anyway, really. Especially this one. I came for the library—it’s the largest collection of books in Yorkshire. It’s the best-kept secret for a scholar in a dress.”

  “I’m glad it’s going your way,” I laugh.

  “I like it here. You will, too. You’ll see. Keep an open mind.”

  “I’ll try.” The thought of liking it here hadn’t occurred to me.

  We walk the arcade around the cloister, past the brushy heads of spent flowers, stalks of frosted rosemary, stone saints wearing powdery shawls of snow.

  “So you’re a conversa.” Alice adjusts her veil. “What is it, then? Were you born in a brothel or something?”

  I blink away the cold on my eyelids. Where would I begin?

  The outside walls of the church crouch above us like a hulking troll. Before coming here, I’d only seen one building so large—Saint Gabriel’s Abbey, which governs Hartley Cross—and that from a distance. We enter through a dim side vestibule, and the church’s interior reveals itself, as when the dark peel is pared off an apple. My sight is instantly drawn heavenward. Golden spines of stone splash up into peaks on the ceiling, pouring back down pointed arches between impossibly tall windows of colored glass.

  Never have I seen light do this. Colors dance like spirits on the surfaces of the gleaming lime-washed stone, embellished with vivid paintings of ancient stories. I want to grab Alice Palmer and say, Are you seeing this? but I’m afraid it’s just in my head, as always. No, this is different—this is their everyday miracle; in here, the nuns can almost see as I do.

  Alice shows me to a bench with some other simply dressed women who must be conversae like me. I look to the eastern end of this cold, bright forest. The ornately carved rood screen casts a shadow of open doors on the floor, pouring more rainbows through the spaces. I feel it in my skin. I reach into my pocket and touch the stylus. This space is begging to be drawn.

  The nuns are already seated in their facing rows, ready to begin the daily office.

  Gloria, sings one side, and my own colors flit and spark against the others.

  Et nunc et semper, sings the opposite side, and they continue, one row breathing the song into the other.

  Inhale, exhale.

  This is nothing like the plain-folk attempts at song I grew up with in the parish church, nothing like singing around the fire, when Brother Robert would come over from Saint Gabriel’s with his hurdy-gurdy, and we’d dance in circles with the pallets flipped up against the wall.

  Gloria, sings one side.

  Et nunc et semper, sings the other.

  “It’s like another world,” I whisper. And something in me begins to stir.

  — 6 —

  “Ora et labora,” Agnes de Guile begins our afternoon lesson. “Pray and work. It’s the same thing, after all. Work is prayer, and prayer is work.”

  Alice and I and several other girls cluster around Agnes in the calefactory for our class. I’m trying to focus, but I don’t really understand what she’s talking about; it’s not about wool or woad or anything I’m familiar with. And the room is so warm, my stomach so full from the morning meal, my first night’s sleep so spotty. I drowse to the cadence of the magicky Latin.

  “Edyth le Sherman,” Agnes says, sharp but short. I jolt awake and slurp the small reservoir of drool at the corner of my mouth.

  “I’ve been told that you can read. Please, my dear, the first chapter of the Rule.”

  “I, um…I don’t understand Latin.” The other girls stare at me with comical looks on their noble faces. Only Alice seems to see how mortified I am.

  “That’s fine,” says the sub-prioress. “To be expected. Just do the best you can, and I will interpret.”

  I look at the writing. I look at Agnes, and Alice, and the other girls, and sweat erupts on the back of my neck. The letters run together and look almost identical to each other, but I have to try.

  “Caput Primum: De gen-er-ibus mona-cho-rum,” I stumble. “Mona-chorum quattuor esse genera, ma-ni-fes-tum est. Primum c-coeno…”

  “Coenobitarum,” Agnes corrects me.

  “…coenobitarum, hoc est mo-na-ster-i-a-le, militans sub reg-u-la—”

  “Would anyone else like to try?”

  Several hands go up, and the girls take turns reading in fair perfection. I sit and look at my hands, notice a hangnail, pick at it. A tiny trickle of blood comes out.

  “What does this passage tell us?” Agnes asks. “Alice Palmer?”

  “That the best way to live as a consecrated vessel is under the strict guidance of an abbot,” says Alice. “Or in our case, a prioress.”

  “Well done, daughter,” says the sub-prioress. “Mercy has decreed that you will all live out your days here in our priory, serving this community with all of your strength, under our strict and careful oversight.”

  The blessed bell rings for the next office. I am the first to stand to leave, and everyone stares at me again—apparently, this is the wrong thing to do. The others rise slowly.

  “This is Edyth le Sherman,” Agnes introduces me. “Everyone, please make her feel at home. Thank you, girls. Edyth, may I speak with you privately?”

  “Yes, Sub—Your Holi—ma’am?”

  “My dear,” she begins lovingly, “it’s all right if it takes a while. You’ll only be learning the basics. You are not a novice, like the other girls. You are a conversa, a lay sister. Your life
here will be rather more about labora than ora. Do you remember what those words mean?”

  “More about…working than praying?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” She clasps her hands, tips her head to the side and smiles, revealing a row of gleaming teeth with a single yellow tooth in front. “It’s not as though you have Alice’s bright prospects. Do your best and keep at your reading. Now you may go.”

  Her words pinch my skin. She may have been calling me stupid. But what do I know?

  Alice has been waiting for me, and we file into the side door of the church. She sits in a choir stall with the other novices. We conversae sit in the back row. The prayers are long and opaque, and I wish the bench had a back, like the nuns get. It’s better than Saint Andrew’s, though. There were no seats at all there, except for the priest’s.

  I sit at the very end and let my eyes wander, getting lost in this beauty. All the forms, the people carved in stone, the teardrop shapes of their drapery echoing the pointed arches of windows and doors—my fingers itch to draw everything, but I’m nervous to risk taking out my parchment and stylus. I’ll have to memorize it and draw it back in my cell.

  * * *

  —

  One Sunday, Lady Caxton came to see Mam at the house after Mass. They were worlds apart in rank—Mam had grown up at her manor as a servant—but Lady Caxton still knew how to be a friend.

  “I brought something for you to see, Edyth,” she said. “Lord Geoffrey just bought this in Flanders. You may look at it while I visit with your mother.”

  Lady Caxton stretched out her velvet-sleeved arms, and my eyes went wild. It was a book, a leather-covered one. I’d never touched a book before.

  “This is a bestiary,” she said, “a book of animals. Some are familiar, but some are from Elsewhere.” She widened her eyes with a sly smile of intrigue.

  “Thank you, Lady Caxton,” I whispered, bowing. I received the book reverently and sat on the threshold. Inside were wolves and boar, hares and beaver and mice and deer. And creatures from the faraway lands—unicorns and two-headed serpents. I traced the animals with my finger. I couldn’t read then, but the animals told me their own stories. I’d never seen colors like that before—except when they came with sounds.

  Whoever painted those animals must have seen colors like I did.

  When Lady Caxton took that book home with her, I stood in the doorway and wept. Mam shut the wattle gate and caught sight of me wiping my eyes.

  “It was so beautiful, Mam,” I declared. “If I had a book of my own, I’d never put it down.”

  Mam was pensive as she cleared the table from the visit. “Come here, Edyth.” She beckoned, gesturing for me to sit, then took up a piece of charcoal from the ashes and began to draw on the table.

  “I’m sorry I never taught you how to read,” she said, with that sad look she got when she realized her daughter was growing up. “I took it for granted that I learned in the Caxton household. Maybe I thought you wouldn’t need to if you were a weaver, like me. But time got away from us, I guess.

  “This is B, for bird,” she began. She wrote the letter and made its sound, then added short, triangle wings, a beak and feet—and the B became a puffy little robin. She made a lopsided vessel for V, and for girl, a circle-faced G with strands of hair like garlic scapes.

  “Now you try, Edie,” said my mother. “This is D. It’s the first letter of dragon.”

  I made the D into the coiled dragon from the animal book. L became a gaping lion’s mouth.

  “Yes, you have it,” Mam said, surprised at how quickly I grasped it, and how effortlessly I could draw. “Has that been in there this whole time?”

  “I draw things, sometimes,” I said.

  Truth was, I’d been hiding my drawings from Mam for years. When I was little, Da brought home a load of salvaged wood, and we all helped unload it. In the cart was a smooth-planed board, long and wide. I sneaked the board into the barn and hid it behind the cow manger. After my chores were done, I’d grab a cold charcoal nub from the fire’s edge and go out to the barn. I started drawing pictures on the board, and soon I brought life to the images that came to me from daydreams or night dreams.

  Mam borrowed a small prayer book from Lady Caxton. Day after day, she took time from her work to teach me to read. I loved the feeling of the words jumping from the page into my mouth. After we’d been at it a few weeks, Mam had me demonstrate my skills for Lady Caxton.

  “Your reading needs work, but your letters are quite good,” she said. “You should encourage her, Heloise. Reading and writing can help her secure a position in a manor house.”

  “That’s my girl,” said Mam. But before Da came home, she rubbed the drawings off the table when I wasn’t looking.

  Little by little, I filled my drawing board with a world of impossible and imaginary creatures. I discovered that if I made my charcoal from a twig and scuffed the end into a point, I could get finer details. I drew fantastic scenes from my head—battles and horses, stories I heard in church, huge hands coming down from the sky or up from the earth. I drew my family and my dog and cat and the sheep and the fruit trees growing by my house.

  But the black charcoal on the brown board didn’t show up the way I saw in my head. I tried rubbing in the green juice of leaves, but it absorbed and turned brown. The best I could do was draw the shapes of color—concentric circles, starbursts, jelly-like blobs with points of light.

  If only I could make the colors I saw.

  — 7 —

  I don’t want to admit it, but I am starting to like it here. It’s warm and clean, and in a way it feels like a fresh start. I don’t have anything left to lose; there’s a kind of comforting blankness about each predictable day.

  But what if all this beauty, all this routine—what if it’s just making me sedated, like daily doses of theriac? Is that how these women make it for decades without losing their minds—by numbing themselves with minutiae? I may like it now, but a lifetime feels awfully long. There’s nothing for me in Hartley Cross, of course, but I still long for it. I want to sit by a real fire, not just waves of invisible heat. I want to smell fresh-cut hazelwood, dig my hands into oily fleeces. Want to feel Mason’s whiskers on my cheek and inhale the scent of his skin. Saint Christopher’s is nice…but safe.

  The bell rings for the morning meeting. I choose a seat in the farthest corner of the chapter house, the back row, by the door. The novices chatter about the goings-on down in Thornchester. Most of them are from here, and they know city words and city ways. They know how to navigate a town and its alleys. Hartley Cross has no alleys, only one L-shaped street made of muck, and beyond that, fields—and beyond that, the river I was never going to cross, with its mist rising like feathered spirits in a warning dance: It’s all right, it’s all right not to venture past here; we will possess and devour you if you do. You belong here, where it’s small. Here, where you won’t dare to expect more.

  The more I think, the higher the water rises in my eyes. So I take out a piece of parchment from my psalter and draw what I remember of my little village. It’s not that I could ever go back there, but if I’m to be part of this priory, someone will have to pull me in, will have to tell me how it’s supposed to work here, how to never yearn for home. How to forget, for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  —

  I made the mistake—once—of opening my mind to the other children in Hartley Cross. I was eleven years old. We were playing blindman’s buff in the market square, me and my best friend, Methilde. I was it—I was always it—blindfolded and bucktoothed, stumbling about like an idiot with my hands waving in the air. That’s when I saw one of my favorite colors. It was so delicious, I stopped in the middle of the game and grinned.

  “Mmm…Do you see it?” I said. “Coming from Lord Geoffrey’s house—it’s bacon cooking, all violet and scratchy!”


  “What?!” cried Methilde. “Purple bacon!”

  “Bacon’s green, stupid, didn’t you know?” taunted Emma. “With orange spots!”

  “And scratchy, too?” said puny Will. “Maybe the way your mam makes it, with the pig hair still on it!”

  “Edie’s mam makes hairy purple bacon!” Methilde jeered. I blushed, my cheeks like round fireballs, and pulled off the blindfold. My best friend was standing there pointing at me, laughing. They all surrounded me, mocking me and slapping the back of my head and my shoulders and chanting—

  Edyth, Edyth, Round and Red,

  Something’s broken in your head!

  They hit me, harder and harder, until one of them smacked me right in the face and cut my lip. It was like they all smelled blood, and then they were on top of me, and kicking me, too. Not Methilde, though. I could make out the hem of her dress, her bony ankles. At least she wasn’t beating me. But she wasn’t stopping it, either.

  Through the pounding, another hand grabbed mine and lifted me out of the pile. Henry set me on my feet and walked me home, his arm around my shoulder, the cruel laughter of the others disorienting me more than the blows.

  “What was that about, Edie?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said through swollen lips.

  “Was it the colors?”

  I didn’t answer. There was a violence going on inside my ribs.

  “I’ll tell Da. They can’t treat you like that. You can’t help it.”

  “No, Henry, don’t tell. Please. It’ll only make it worse.”

  “Well then, if they give you trouble, you tell me. It’s you and me, Edie. I’m always looking out for you.”