A Cloud of Outrageous Blue

by Vesper Stamper

  “Sub-Prioress,” someone greets her plainly.

  “This is the conversa Edyth le Sherman,” says Agnes. “Edyth, this is the scriptorium, where the priory produces very precious books. Do not touch anything, or disturb those at work. Remember that they also are at prayer.”

  “Ora et labora,” someone else mutters. Felisia reaches out to touch a stack of pages on a shelf. Agnes slaps her hand away.

  There are mostly women here, but a man, too—the wizened old monk I traveled with in the cart. Each desk has a side table with inks, jars of quills and a globe-shaped flask of water on a metal stand. There are bowls and seashell halves full of different-colored paint, corked jars of various liquids. Light streams in from the windows, aided by candles, and I even glimpse occasional glints of gold jumping off the pages.

  “This is Muriel,” says Agnes, leading me to the desk of a tall nun with a sharp nose. “She specializes in fine line work. See what she’s working on here?” I hesitate, but Agnes urges me over. I lean forward until I can see all the detail clearly. The rich clothes of the painted figures hang in neat, sharp folds. The lines are web-thin. I think of my own drawings, so clumsy in comparison, and blush.

  “Anne next,” Agnes diverts me. “She came to us from York Minster. She doesn’t paint, but she’s the best scribe we have here. Just look at the control, each letter so perfectly vertical. I am always awed by you, Anne. What do you think, Edyth?”

  “It’s perfect” is all I can say. But how could I possibly express the sensations coming at me, through me, from everywhere? This room is full of artists.

  “I’m experimenting with a bastarda of Anglicana and Textualis,” the scribe says incomprehensibly. I can only give a polite nod.

  The old monk is last. “I’m Brother Timothy,” he says with a jocular, grandfatherly smile. “I’m pleased to meet you in more…comfortable circumstances, Edyth.”

  “Timothy is a fixture here,” says the sub-prioress.

  “He’s been here since God was a boy,” calls a thick Scottish voice from another room. Everyone laughs, except Agnes.

  “Brother Timothy was a young monk here when this priory was a double monastery, men and women living together,” Agnes resumes. “Joan the Physician has also been here since that time, and so have I. It’s not as common now as it once was.”

  “I am working on a botanical for Joan, as a matter of fact,” says Timothy. “I hear she will be assisted by a promising young sister named…ah…Palmer? A friend of yours?”

  “Yes, Brother Timothy! That’s Alice.” My attention is drawn, however, to one empty desk by the window. “Who sits here?”

  “Well, now…,” says Anne. “We don’t really…”

  “That was mine,” says Agnes curtly, ending the conversation. “A long time ago. Thank you all. I know you will help Edyth to be precise in her training.”

  The sub-prioress ushers me into a side room. We go through two doors, with a muslin sheet hung between them. I sneeze in the intensely dusty air. A rainbow shines in the shaft of sunlight, made of colored particles, not light. Without this veil between rooms, the dust would cover all of the pristine parchments the scribes are laboring over.

  A long, rough table occupies most of the room, scattered completely with bowls of different sizes. On the right-hand wall is a bureau full of small, labeled drawers: Azurite. Minium. Lapis. Arabica.

  A woman is working there, her linen veil tied up and tucked under. She’s not wearing a nun’s habit, but a deep madder-red gown with a linen apron over it. Her sleeves are rolled past the elbow, her hands rainbows like the dust.

  “Edyth,” says Agnes, “this is Bridgit.”

  The woman turns and her eyes glint at me. “You’re very welcome here, Edyth,” she says in her brogue. “We’re like a wee family up here, away from all the noise and fray.”

  “You will apprentice to Bridgit,” Agnes instructs me. “She is a conversa, like you.”

  Agnes pulls Felisia’s hand out of a bowl of colored powder, and the girl sticks her finger in her mouth, pigment spilling on her chin. Without another word, Agnes grabs her hand and exits the double doors with her assistant.

  Bridgit shakes her head and beckons me over to the bureau.

  “They’re all in Latin,” she says. “Do you read?”

  “A little…,” I say sheepishly. “I’m learning.”

  “Sound this out, then.” Bridgit points to a drawer.

  “Terre Verte, Prason.”

  “Good, child. Open that one and see what you find.”

  It’s nothing special, just a drawer full of brown, dust-covered rocks. Bridgit takes a small stone mortar and pestle down from a shelf and wipes them off with her apron. “Bring one here. I’m going to show you something.”

  I put the little egg-shaped rock into the bowl. Down Bridgit’s pestle strikes, and the stone cracks in half. Inside is not the earthy color, but a bright olive green, and the taste of the oil that would have come from such a fruit floods over my tongue.

  “What do you think of that?” asks Bridgit.

  “That was inside the stone?”

  “The earth yields its treasures if you know where to dig,” says the woman. “These you find in the river, just a mile downstream.”

  A flood of awe rushes through me. Who could have guessed? The whole time I lived in Hartley Cross, I had wanted colors for my drawings, and they had probably been right under my feet.

  Bridgit seems eager to have a protégé. She leans closer to me with a sparkle in her eye. “Now, the painters don’t use this only for drab, green things. If their red is too bright, they’ll tone it down with this. I’ve even seen them laying this underneath the color of flesh. Whoever heard of green flesh, eh? But it works.”

  “This is what they paint with in there?” I marvel. “Rocks?”

  “Yes, Edyth. Watch.” She pounds the rock into smaller and smaller bits. “Then you grind the pieces against the sides of the mortar. Do you see?” She dips her fingertip in the bowl and rubs the pigment between her fingers. Then she pounds again for a long time—it might be ten minutes. But at last, the powder is so fine, it no longer resembles sand crushed from a stone, but costly flour.

  “How do you get it to…um…stick?” I ask.

  “To the parchment? Good question. With a binder. That’s next.” She reaches into a basket full of eggs. She separates an egg into two bowls, yolk and white, picks up the yolk by its invisible membrane and breaks it into another bowl.

  Bridgit pours the powder onto a slab of marble. She adds the yolk a drop at a time, and a little water, too, and keeps mixing with a glass muller until it’s smooth, until it becomes paint, the consistency of fresh cream.

  “It looks delicious,” I say, the taste of olive oil still on my tongue.

  “Don’t try to eat this, child,” Bridgit laughs. She keeps mixing, longer than seems reasonable. Under her breath, she mutters, “Beautiful poisons, the lot of them.”

  I think of the chilly reception Agnes got here in the scriptorium, and for a moment, I don’t know whether Bridgit’s talking about pigments or people.

  — 10 —

  In the afternoons, I like to take the long way around from the refectory to the scriptorium. The river encircling the priory wall seizes, the sound of the water heaving underneath the ice. The cold squeezes my ribs, too, and I have to remind myself that it must come to an end someday.

  The basic rhythms of the priory are ingrained by now. I’ve almost memorized the entire Rule, which seems to have mollified the sub-prioress, and I fairly well embody the order of the day. There isn’t much else I need to know, now that I spend most of my time in the scriptorium.

  Once upstairs, I settle at the table and review the list of pigments that the illuminators need prepared, nibble on a pilfered oatcake and attempt to study a bit of my Rule befo
re everyone else arrives. Instead, I wind up with my head on my arm, drowsily doodling in the book with my brass stylus, embellishing the simple drop-capital letters at the beginning of each paragraph with flourishes. If only you could see me now, Mam, reading Latin, surrounded by scribes and artists. This is more than “B is for bird.”

  * * *

  —

  One day Da drew me aside and, without a word, pressed a small bundle into my hand. I unwrapped the cloth. Inside was a stack of small parchments and a brass stylus.

  “You think I haven’t seen you, Edie, your drawings on that board in the barn. But I do see.” He winked at me, planted a big Da kiss on my cheek and went whistling back to his work. He called over his shoulder, a finger pointing in the air, “A real artist deserves some real tools!”

  That was the night I sat my family down and drew their portraits, one by one. But this time, my drawings were as fine and precise as I saw them in my mind, and I could look each of my family members in the eye when I did it, without hiding a thing.

  * * *

  —

  In the warm shaft of sunlight across my table, I jolt awake, my mouth open and dry, the last of a snore answering the sound that rouses me.

  PING. Pt-ping. Pt-ping.

  I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep. The terce bell rings. I rub my face, confused and annoyed at the disjointed, angular patterns of the sound—

  Pt-ping. Pt-ping. Pt-ping.

  I look out the window and see the source of the noise. On the side of the ruined chapel, a makeshift shelter’s been erected. Some men are under the canvas roof, mixing yellow mortar, hammering wood. One’s chiseling white limestone; another sledges a dark dull rock. The sound does not stop.

  Pt-ping. Pt-ping. Pt-ping.

  Red. Red. Red. Like the tip of a blade plunging downward between my eyes, unending, flashing. Red. Red. Red.

  Once I’m in the church for terce, the pounding hushes to tiny red dots instead of daggers. I can deal with that. But even under the women’s song, there’s the sound of men’s hammers.

  After prayers, the novices exit through the back door of the church, trying their best to get a peek without turning their heads in the direction of the workers. Most of the builders are old geezers, but some are young, strong and broad, and the girls recite: We must prepare our hearts and bodies for the battle of holy obedience. I head back toward the grinding room. That’s over for me, anyway. I can’t care about stonemasons anymore.

  But still, I know that’s a lie. If it wasn’t, Mason’s stone cross wouldn’t be in my pocket. I cradle it in my hand. Just thinking of him feels like someone’s writing stories under my skin. I sit on the steps outside the scriptorium and draw columns and arches.

  Pt-ping. Pt-ping. Pt-ping.

  Red. Red. Red.

  * * *

  —

  Next morning at the beginning of chapter, Agnes takes the floor for an announcement.

  “Many of you will remember when the chapel of Saint Eustace was partially destroyed by fire. Its blight has always been an embarrassment to us. Unfortunately, we have had no choice but to keep the relics of Holy Eustace tightly locked in the church crypt, and we are unable to properly serve our pilgrims without them.”

  The older sisters murmur in agreement.

  “Now, every year at Lent, as you know, our lord baron pledges a tenth of his estate to the rebuilding, but he has been late on his promise…these twenty years.” Sardonic laughter rises from the nuns.

  “Around Christmas, though,” Agnes continues, “a surprise benefactor stepped in with a large donation. Saint Gabriel’s Abbey in Dorsetshire has provided the funds for the project. No doubt you have seen—or heard—the laborers,” she says with a chortle. “Please do not interfere with their work, nor let them interfere with yours. And let us pray for the new pilgrims who will come through our gates to worship in the restored chapel of Saint Eustace!”

  The room reverberates with applause, clashing with the construction outside. I reach into my fitchet pocket and touch the little stone cross, its smoothness balancing the sharp red flashes of noise.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Alice puts in a good word with the sub-prioress and asks for my help preparing seedlings for the medicine garden. After all, there’s much to do getting ready for early planting in a few weeks. Thank God, I can put away my studies and get into the fresh air.

  The garden shed’s a three-sided stone extension on the back of the infirmary, with roll-down linen curtains to let in light and keep out frost. All sorts of baskets, spades, forks and rope hang on the wall, with clay pots stacked up tall, and a wooden bin of soil in the corner. Alice takes a shallow box off the windowsill. It’s full of tangled seedlings, with sticks labeled in chalk.

  “Prick out the seedlings by kind, and pot them on, Edyth. Like this.” She scoops some loose dirt from the bin into a pot and makes a hole in the center with a sharp stick. Then she inserts the stick into the corner of the seedling box, lifts out a group of white-rooted shoots, separates them carefully and puts one seedling into the pot, packing it in tightly.

  “Understand?”

  “I think so.” I nod, trying to conceal a smirk. I know how to pot seedlings, for goodness’ sake. I’m not some soft-handed nobleman’s daughter. Setting seeds is a toddler’s job.

  “And water them in when you’re done,” says Alice, taking off her apron. “I’ve got to go ask Joan what she wants planted next.”

  I’m at this for a long while, alone in the shed, when I sense someone come into the room behind me.

  “Well, isn’t this a surprise!” says a male voice, a swirl of golden ochre. I jump and turn to see a boy’s form standing in the doorway.

  “God be with you, sister,” he says, bowing his head to me, the waves of messy, sandy hair tumbling over his hood. The arch of his upper lip. And the familiar flash of midnight-blue eyes…

  “Mason—”

  I have to keep myself from shouting it as I knock a pot on the bench, but right it just in time. I gawk at him, feeling the blush rise, my scalp tingle, this irresistible force pulling me to him. I want, like instinct, to throw my arms around him, to bury myself in him. I reach a hand toward him and just as quickly draw it back.

  “What are you doing here?” I whisper, then, suddenly conscious of my overbite, cover my mouth with both dirty hands. “Here? Of anywhere in the whole country?”

  “It’s…ah…a few reasons….” He looks down and wipes the stone dust from his hands onto his leather apron. “Work in Hartley Cross slowed down, and Brother Robert said Saint Gabriel’s was sending stoneworkers up north to rebuild an old chapel, and…here I am.”

  I simply can’t believe it. This isn’t a dream—I can see the color of his voice. He’s got on the same green tunic covered in fine limestone powder. We just stare at each other, not speaking. I haven’t looked another person in the eye in months, let alone him.

  “Your da?” I manage, fingernailing a crease in my apron. “Is he well?”

  “No,” says Mason. “That’s the other reason. I said goodbye when I left.”

  “God rest him,” I offer, my heart falling.

  And something unlocks in me. For months, since Mam and Da died, I’ve been stopping up my heart, like I might pour out of myself if I let go even a little bit, not wanting to admit that people die, and they don’t come back. That my parents, and now Mason’s father, aren’t traveling somewhere, aren’t on pilgrimage, but are in the ground; not growing like these seedlings, but decaying, back into soil, back into time. But here stands Mason, alive, familiar, like a pillow placed under that grief. It’s all I can do not to grab onto him and never let go.

  “It was that cough, you know, from the stone dust,” he explains. He touches a pot of earth and runs his finger along its rim, a resigned smile revealing how so
rrow has slightly aged his eyes. “We all knew it would come. I expect it will for me, too, the same way. Death comes for all of us sometime.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re here.” I look at his hands, callused and huge and full of cuts and scrapes, like they should be. Those hands, rough and gentle, the memory of their touch going through me even now.

  “You’re right. It’s good to see you, Edie.” His is a thinner smile, with a new sadness.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” I say, biting my bottom lip.

  Mason gingerly picks up a bunch of seedlings and teases them apart. I make holes in the soil and hand him the pots to plant in.

  “No. Nor I,” he says. “But I imagine you’re not going anywhere for a while, and this chapel here will take a long time to rebuild, don’t you think?”

  I blush and try to hide my smile, looking down at my work. “I’m glad you’re here,” I say plainly.

  “Me too.” He inches his hand over to mine and brushes my dirty fingers.

  “Edyth, it’s your turn to— Oh! Hello!” Alice stops suddenly as she rounds the corner into the shed. Instant dizziness spins a web of blue around my vision, and Mason pulls his hand away in a flash.

  “I’m sorry,” he says to both of us with a polite smile. “I’ll go.”

  “No, wait—Alice, this is my friend, John Mason. He’s from Hartley Cross, can you believe it? I didn’t know that he was on the chapel crew this whole time.”

  Alice draws breath to say something, but nods and smiles instead. “Alice Palmer,” she introduces herself. “Edyth, it’s time to wash up.”

  “God give you grace, sisters,” say Mason humbly, exiting with a bow. I feel Alice’s prying gaze, but I put the box of seedlings back on the windowsill and hang up my apron, backing out of the shed, trying not to burst.