A Cloud of Outrageous Blue

by Vesper Stamper

  “Come on,” Alice says discreetly. “We need Joan.”

  * * *

  —

  The infirmary’s large central hall is flanked by open-front cells with heavy drapes instead of doors. In the dim, reddish cast, I can make out wall hangings painted with scenes of the Creation, Crucifixion and Resurrection. There are charts of the four humors—bile, blood, black bile, phlegm; and of the four elements—earth, air, fire, water. Anatomy scrolls and books of physic are strewn on the tables, along with remedies in all stages of concoction. Racks suspended from the large oaken beams are hung with bunches of drying medicinal herbs. Rows of glass bottles line the shelves filled with tinctures and powders. Jars and bowls of all sizes are interspersed with more books, and braziers are lit, with small, three-legged iron pots above them.

  It’s the kind of inventory you take when you’re out of your body.

  Eighteen bottles on the top shelf. Five different sizes of mortar and pestle.

  “You weren’t beaten at home, were you, Edyth?” Joan asks plainly as she examines my bloody back.

  No answer. Not a turn of my head. Silence.

  Forty-two bunches of herbs hanging up. Three insects trapped in that chunk of amber.

  “I can tell most things without words, dear. Skin around the lash marks is like silk. The only rough thing about you is your hands.” Joan unlocks a cabinet and hands me an amber jar. “Have Alice put this on the wounds twice a day until they’re gone. You don’t need much—a drop at a time. Return the jar when you’re done with it.”

  I take the top off of the jar and smell the salve, a burst of warm yellow, the scent going through me, already healing me from the inside, stilling the need to count the contents of the room.

  Joan confines me to my cell under cover of a bad cold. I overhear her whisper to Alice. “Agnes—that woman,” she huffs. “It’s time for Mother Margaret to come home.”

  When Alice escorts me to my cell, it’s been wiped down, but the ghosts of my drawings remain. All I can think of is drawing, and color, and drawing and color, and another tremble begins—but this time, it’s resolve. Agnes can beat me, but as soon as I get the strength to lift my arms, I’m going to do it all again.

  — 20 —

  The rest and quiet are just what I need to really think about all that’s happened to me. My back heals enough in a few days that I can move without my clothes torturing me. I’m still stunned and jumpy and can’t say much more than yes and no. Even the sound of my own voice is abrasive. But defiance grows like a seed within me. This is the last day before I go back to my duties, and I don’t know how, but something is changing. I feel it.

  While everyone else is in the refectory for supper, Alice brings me a simple meal in my cell. I’m not hungry. I sit on the bed, turning the little stone house over in my hand. She tells me the latest news as she applies the salve to my back.

  “I’m to give my first teaching at chapter soon,” she says. “I can recite it for you if you want.”

  I’m not really listening. “Do you think Mason knows?” I ask blankly. “About the beating?”

  “I don’t know. I can try to find out, get him a message,” Alice suggests, “but probably best to keep your distance until things feel normal ag—”

  “Did you ever feel like you’re part of something bigger, Alice?” I interrupt her. “First Mason shows up here, then I see that window with my dream in it. I can’t explain it, but I feel it, like something’s unfolding itself to me.”

  She’s taken aback at my vehemence. “I’ve always known what I wanted, since I was a little girl. There’s not a doubt in my mind that I’m where I’m supposed to be, whether I’m part of something bigger or not.”

  “I’ve never had that certainty a day in my life. But I’m beginning to. And Agnes can’t stop me figuring it out.”

  Alice changes the subject. “Why don’t I see if I can get you some scraps of parchment to draw on? Who knows, if you’re more careful, maybe the scribes will put in a good word and you’ll be allowed to work in the scriptorium again.”

  I nod and smile. She gives me a cautious embrace and leaves me.

  My confinement nearing its end, I go out the rear entrance of the dormitory and head toward the chapel. I’m not sure I want to see Mason after he didn’t even try to get word to me. But there he is, standing in the doorway, his figure sculpted by the fading afternoon light.

  “Edyth!” Mason whispers. “Come inside?”

  And should I? I stand stock-still, staring at him. Saint John’s Eve seems so long ago. For a few days, I was mad at myself. Now I resent him. For getting my hopes up about leaving, then never mentioning it again. For leading me on in the firelight, then ditching me in the morning. For not fighting for me when I needed him. Still, something makes me step over the threshold into Saint Eustace’s chapel for the first time.

  I’ve never been inside an unfinished church before, and its roughness takes me by surprise. It’s far bigger than Saint Andrew’s, but not majestic like the priory church, either—more like a lord’s hall than a sanctuary. A thick coating of stone dust lifts from the floor and floats in the air. Wooden scaffolding lines the walls, and rafters await a covering. Shapes are drawn on the floor, and cubes of dressed stone lie waiting to be placed.

  He points out the chapel’s features. “There’ll be arches to match the priory church. And stained glass, and a roof, of course,” he chuckles.

  We sit on the steps of the chancel, neither of us knowing where to begin. “Alice came to see me,” he says at last. His voice is halting. “But I already knew—I saw you when you came out of the goat barn. It was hard to miss…the blood, you know…coming through your dress.”

  I grind a little pile of dust under my shoe. “You knew.” He doesn’t say anything, and I clench my jaw. “And you didn’t try to get a message to me? Nothing?”

  He looks genuinely surprised. “I was trying to protect you.”

  “Protect me? You left me there in the field, Mason. I woke up with Agnes standing over me. And you forgot your damn hood.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” he protests. “Wake up there with you? Wouldn’t it have been a lot worse if we had both been found in the morning?”

  “You don’t protect someone by abandoning them,” I chide. “You could have woken me up so I could go back to my cell. You could’ve spoken up for me when you knew I got beaten for a drawing. Asked how I was. Anything.”

  “I really thought if I stayed away—”

  “Mason, one minute you say you’re going to break me out of here, then you completely drop the subject. What is it that you really want?”

  “I didn’t want to pressure you. And I hoped the answer would be yes, anyway.”

  “But you can’t assume that, because the fact is, aside from what’s going on with the sub-prioress, I actually like it here. Being assigned to the scriptorium was the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’ve lost that. Now? If I breathe sideways or, God forbid, I shit at the wrong time of day, I’ll be punished. I’m trying to make it work here and I can’t risk it all on a fantasy. What if I get kicked out because you can’t make up your mind? I don’t have other options. I’m here on Henry’s arrangement. I doubt he can find me a better one.”

  “Edyth,” he sighs, “I have to tell you something.”

  “What now?”

  “It’s about Henry. Remember when you asked me for news from home? I didn’t tell you everything. I couldn’t. But I have to now. Henry’s…gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean?”

  “He’s dead, Edyth. He took his own life.”

  That ringing in my ears comes back, the shaking green Sound, my head squeezing so hard that I need to squint to see.

  “After you left,” Mason continues, “I tried to keep helping him, but my father was dying. Henry got so t
hin…dirty…I don’t think he was feeding the animals, either.

  “When I went to fetch Brother Robert to give my father last rites, I saw Henry standing on the bridge where they…where they killed your da…and when me and Brother passed by again, he was gone, and I saw that Flemish dagger your father gave him. And blood. I’m sorry. So sorry. I should have told you.”

  My stomach lurches at the thought that my last words with Henry were fighting. Just like with Da.

  Any shred of anger I held against my brother is gone instantly. Poor, poor Henry. He wasn’t lording it over me. Letting me go was a sacrifice. He needed me. He was alone, too.

  It’s you and me, Edie, I hear Henry say. You and me.

  “Dead? All of us, dead?”

  Mason hangs his head and stares at his hands. “Not your baby sister.”

  * * *

  —

  I close my eyes and remember. The red circle drawing itself round Mam’s knees. Her sweat glowing in the rushlight, her muttering losing more and more sense. The smell in the room was dark purple, crawling like vines up the walls.

  I held Mam from behind, and out slid my sister into my mother’s waiting hands. We laid Mam down, and the midwife pulled Mam’s tunic aside for the baby to take the breast; the newborn grasped with her tiny paw-like hands and found it immediately, suckling like an eager lamb. Mam laid her hand on her new daughter, whispered something in her ear, kissed the little head.

  And then Mam’s head lolled to the side, and I felt my mother’s spirit walk past me and out the door.

  The baby felt it, too, the whish of our mother, walking away.

  * * *

  —

  “I never get to say goodbye,” I weep. “To any of them. To anyone I love.”

  “You don’t have to say goodbye to me. I won’t leave.”

  “Don’t say that. You can’t stay here past the fall. You’re lucky they haven’t kicked you out already. Don’t you understand? You’re a freeman. I’m a peasant’s daughter, and a criminal’s daughter at that. I’m still bound to Lord Geoffrey, and I’ll always be. I’m only here on his permission. If I run away and get caught, I’m dead.”

  He doesn’t answer, but puts his arm around me and pulls me close as I weep. Of course I want him to stay. And of course I want to go. Sitting here against him, feeling the warmth of his body, I wish we really could run away. But it can’t be. Goodbye will have to come.

  “We can sort it,” he says. “We’ll figure something out.”

  The grief comes in waves, for what’s gone, and for what we’ve not yet lost. Mason carves out a space, right there in the hollow of his arms, for me to both hold my family and to let them go. Sometimes I feel him tremble, too, for his own mam and da.

  Blankets of soft green fall over our shoulders, like the two of us are an ancient sculpture of two lovers in the forest—an old, old love covered in moss.

  * * *

  —

  We calm after a while, and he kisses my head as I lean on his shoulder. “Edyth? Can you draw me something?”

  My face is swollen from crying. “I don’t have anything to draw with.”

  “Here.” He gets a long stick and points to the dirt. “This is how we do it when we make carving plans.”

  “What should I draw?”

  “How about something from home?”

  The first thing I think of is the market cross. I strain to recall it, though I’d seen it every day of my life. But then I remember how I’d step up to the cross and trace the knotwork with my finger, its rows of quatrefoils, its faded Latin letters, and it all comes back. I draw it on the dirt floor, and to finish it off, I draw Pounce and Juniper sitting obediently on either side, and we laugh a little. I sit beside Mason again, and he puts his arm around me.

  “You know what I can imagine?” he asks, his words soft against my forehead.

  “What?”

  He pulls me closer. “You drawing the scheme for this chapel,” he says. “You design, I’ll carve.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I laugh. “That was one drawing in the dust.”

  “Edyth, don’t sell yourself short. Look around. We could do anything in here. And I hear you have a fondness for drawing on walls.”

  “All right, Mason.” I nod, going along with the idea. “Let’s see what you can really do with that chisel.”

  “I am grateful for your blessing,” he teases me. “I shall endeavor to be worthy.”

  “To hell with the Anti-Pri,” I say, sudden and plain. “I can do more than fetch things.”

  I lose that cockiness, though, when the bell rings—and I have to try to leave this chapel unseen.

  — 21 —

  When I stand before Agnes in her study, the scolding is intense.

  The beating is worse.

  “You have violated my trust again, Edyth,” says Agnes de Guile, as she matter-of-factly wipes blood from the cane. “Being late to prayers—”

  “But I—I don’t remember ever hearing the warning bell.” Gingerly I pull up my chemise and try to dress.

  Agnes huffs and recomposes herself. “I can only guess why you were so distracted. Remember the steps of humility, Edyth. What is the seventh step?”

  “Be convinced you are beneath everyone,” I manage weakly.

  “That’s right. If you would only accept that you belong to the priory now. Why fight it?”

  And suddenly, her tone becomes strangely soothing. She attempts to help me pull my sleeves on, but the cloth only catches in my wounds, and I shudder.

  “Edyth, I understand your not finding a place here right away. I’m doing you a favor. You should be grateful. I’m protecting you from yourself. You could do a lot of damage here if you don’t learn from me. You wouldn’t want to hinder people’s spiritual walks, would you?”

  “No, Sub-Prioress.” I wince, really wanting to shove her off me, but I’m just trying to get through the pain.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about your story, Edyth. No one asks for a curse—murders, and suicides, and childbed deaths. Your whole family gone. But not lost. In fact, they wait in the fires of purgatory. Do you ever think of that?”

  Of course I’ve thought of it. It’s what I’ve been trying not to think about for a whole year. It obsesses me, waking or sleeping—nightmare images of Mam and Da, their faces contorted as they suffer in the smoky dark.

  “But for some reason, God has let you live, Edyth. You can help your family now. Or at least, you can avoid making it worse for them. I can show you the way.”

  I get to my feet and look at her through disheveled hair. My anger at Agnes shifts to curiosity.

  “I can help them? How?”

  “Accept my training in penance. You will take their punishment on yourself, and shorten their time in the flames. But the more you transgress, the more you multiply not only their time, but your own.”

  It’s confusing, but maybe she’s right. I remind myself that as much pain as I’m in, theirs is far more severe. And in a strange way, it gives me hope—that somewhere, in some kind of eternity, they are still alive. If I can help them, it’s almost like being closer to them. Maybe this is the reason I’m here.

  “What do I have to do?” I ask soberly, lifting my chin, ready to do this for my family.

  “Rule number one: detach yourself from sin, and do not see that boy again. Two: cease with your drawings. You are a manual laborer; reconcile yourself to that. Three: come to me daily after chapter for penance. Now go wash yourself, and then fetch feed to the hogs.”

  * * *

  —

  “Edyth!” Mason catches up with me in the alley between the goat and hog barns, but I hurry my pace, lugging this bucket of grain. If I go to him, I’ll lose my resolve; I’ll be pulled apart. If only I could steel myself against the desire t
o fall into him.

  But he grabs my arm and turns me around, and I shut my eyes tight against the memory of the lash.

  He doesn’t need an explanation. “I’m going to kill her,” Mason seethes. “She can’t do this to you! You’re not even supposed to be in this place!”

  “Please, Mason, stop! Stop, please—” A torrent of sobs brings me to my knees.

  “Whoa, Edie, it’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you.” He wraps his arms around my head and lets me burrow into his chest and cry, rocking there in the straw.

  “I can’t get out of this, Mason. I want to see you, but I can’t hurt my family.”

  “Your family? Edyth, what are you talking about? Your family’s gone.”

  “I’m helping them. I’m taking their suffering,” I try to convince myself. “I can help Henry.”

  Mason sighs. “Did she tell you that?”

  “I can shorten their time—”

  “I know you don’t believe that. She’s a liar, Edyth. A damn liar.”

  The truth is as raw as my skin. Mason’s eyes penetrate so deeply, I flood with tears again.

  “Oh God, Mason,” I sob. “I’m so stuck. I can’t change this, can’t change anything. It’s like my life is being lived for me and I just want to end—”

  I don’t have the courage to say it.

  “God,” he whispers, pulling me closer. “God.”

  He strokes my veiled head until I quiet. At last I lift my face to his and he presses his lips to my cheek.

  “Mason,” I say, “I’m not used to the lash. I never got it at home. I don’t know how to‚ you know, brace myself against it.”

  “What do you mean, never?”

  “Well, I got roughed up by the other kids. But you know how my da was. Nothing but a look from him, a sharp word—would you want to give him a reason to punish you? And Mam was patient with me…and I kept my distance from anyone else.”