A Cloud of Outrageous Blue

by Vesper Stamper

  “Takewhatyouwant,” she mutters, without stopping or looking up.

  “Do you need…help?”

  “Ha,” Cook gruffs. “Beyond help.”

  “I could chop these greens for you,” I offer.

  “Get to it, then.”

  I wash a dirty knife and dry it. Neither the wash water nor the towel look like they’ve been changed in days. I begin to chop the vegetables, half of which need to be discarded.

  “Would you like these in the pot?” I ask. Cook shrugs. I scrape them from the board into the pot, fetch a clean spoon and taste the pottage. It’s so bland as to be nonexistent. I take it upon myself to add some salt, dried herbs, ale. I find a covered vessel and ladle some soup into it, even as Cook keeps blindly stirring. I stuff my bag with two loaves of bread, half a small wheel of cheese and an armful of apples.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Cook keeps stirring.

  With the hot pottage in one arm, the sack of food slung across my chest, and a finger through the handle of a jug of cool ale, I push back out into the autumn blaze. The girl is still outside the infirmary, still mumbling. I leave her an apple I know she will never eat. As quietly as I can, I sneak up the scriptorium stairs and serve the stew to Muriel and Anne.

  The workday passes, and it starts to darken outside, the still dusk reflected in the quiet of the scriptorium. I don’t want to leave now, but dark means I can take the rest of the food to Alice.

  I slip in the back door of the church. The sanctuary is full of fasting, crying nuns. Their chants are mixed with penitent sobs—

  Have mercy!

  Pass us by!

  We are wretched!

  Let your eye turn away!

  Lift your hand from us!

  —bursting in angular purple shapes that melt down the stone columns. The noise is hateful to me, but I can talk softly to Alice, undetected.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “It could be worse,” she says, pushing out the chamber pot. “I’m starting to think I’m lucky to be in here.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  She takes the lid off the pottage and begins to eat. “Do you have something else for me?”

  “Of course,” I say, delivering a copy of Poetica through the opening.

  “Oh, thank God,” she says. “Aristotle.”

  She reads, and chews, and I lean my cheek on the cool stone wall and think.

  So this is my life. No one told me this was how it could turn out.

  My first real friend, behind an impenetrable wall.

  The boy I love, probably gone, both of us likely doomed.

  And now just waiting…waiting for the foulness to enter my body, waiting for the end of everything. The sick girl, Cook’s eternal, automatic stirring—I cannot let that happen to me. I’ve got to push against this somehow.

  Alice slides the pottage bowl back out to me. “Thank you,” she says.

  “You’re welcome,” I respond. “You’ve got to make that bread last a couple days, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  * * *

  —

  In the scriptorium, Anne calls us together, after vespers.

  “Edyth, Muriel, let’s talk,” she says. We gather our stools closer. “We might as well admit what we’ve all been thinking. No matter how long we stay up here, it feels like we’re only putting off the inevitable. The end is going to come for us, too. Let’s face it: we’re working on books no one will read.”

  “That’s terribly morbid, Anne,” says Muriel.

  “Well, that’s what I’m here for,” says Anne. “A scribe’s got to keep the artists’ heads out of their arses.” We dissolve into peals of laughter. What a relief to laugh.

  “All right, ” I say, wiping tears away. “What do you suggest?”

  “I think we three should make a book together.”

  Muriel and I exchange a glance. “Isn’t that what we already do?” she asks.

  “I mean something we do for us, not for a patron. We should stop whatever else we’re working on and spend our last days creating our own book. About death. At least then, if we succumb, we’ll have made our peace with it.”

  “But what if we survive?” Muriel counters. “We’ll have a book but no patron. They’ll have us for theft.”

  Anne ignores her. “I want to do the whole book in three colors: ultramarine, and gold, and silver.”

  “But those aren’t colors; they’re treasures!” Muriel protests. “Even a king wouldn’t commission a book like that! They’d have our heads!”

  “Oh, Muriel, you’re so practical,” says Anne. “Who’d have our heads if everyone’s dead? For once, this isn’t for anyone but us. Edyth, we’re giving you a promotion.”

  “Fine,” Muriel acquiesces. “But what do you mean, a book about death?”

  “We’re going to make fun of the bastard,” Anne says with a dark smirk. “We’ll mock death right back into hell.”

  “By making a book no one will read,” I say.

  “By making something beautiful,” says Anne.

  — 35 —

  It’s hard to express how these pictures are changing me. My soul’s quieted, and my hand is free. I eat contentedly but just enough. Every night I fall asleep to the desperate cries of the nuns across the way in the church, feeling pity more than fear for Agnes and the Dragon. I sleep soundly and dream in colors from another world. Everything seems so much simpler, so much more profound.

  My mind is on work; my mind is on death.

  I’m less afraid of it somehow, as though I was bracing myself against life before. Now that the end seems so close, I can live free for however long I have left.

  On the docket this morning is a very precious page: Muriel’s miniature of Christ’s anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane. The parchment sits on the slanted desk. It’s one of the most exquisite designs Muriel has ever done. I imagine a reader, years in the future, turning to this image as they thumb through page after page in this collection.

  Or maybe the world will never recover, and this book will turn to dust, as the grass grows tall as trees, and vines smash open these windows.

  I’ve drawn an elaborate border around the piece. I’m going to work the margins with gold leaf today, and my skin tingles with anticipation. I’ve been perfecting my technique on a practice sheet, with small patches of the thin foil, like Muriel taught me. I get up and check that the doors are shut tightly. A draft of air would be a disaster.

  “I’m doing the gold,” I warn Muriel and Anne.

  From the drawer marked Aurum, I carefully pull out an envelope containing small squares of gold leaf and lay it on my desk like a ritual. I hold my breath and take out a sheet of the gold with pincers, and then I lean my head all the way down to the page and breathe onto the gesso, the air from my very lungs making it come alive for an instant, enough to grab the gold like glue. I press the gold down into the moist gesso with a square of silk and burnish it with an agate stone, wiping away the excess leaf.

  Piece by piece, I lay the gold around the border of the page, in the intricate border I’ve outlined. After the leafing goes down, I incise it with a sharpened stick, leaving the impression of stars in the sky surrounding the Man of Sorrows. And then it’s time for the lapis.

  My desk is arrayed with pots of ultramarine, and I lose myself in its current. I lick the end of my brush to get a finer point, giggling to think of the crushed gemstones getting stuck between my teeth, filling my body with blue. Even a queen wouldn’t have such luxury.

  * * *

  —

  When I wake up from my stupor, it’s because Muriel is shaking me.

  “What?” I murmur. Muriel gives me a fearful look.

  Somehow—in another trance—I’ve nixed the ornate linework and laid
down a border of gold skeletons instead, the whole of mankind’s drama dancing around the nucleus of Christ.

  Muriel nods slowly with pursed lips. “Now that is interesting.”

  “I need to see the prioress,” I tell her.

  * * *

  —

  I stand alone before the prioress in her study, turning my paint-splotched towel over and over in my hands. It’s dangerous to be here. The wailing of the penitent nuns is close and loud, coming from right next door.

  “Forgive me, Mother. I have something to tell you.”

  “Lock the door, Edyth. And speak softly.” The aging woman wears her wimple but no veil. She leans back in her big oaken chair, sweating, pale, darkness encircling her eyes.

  “Venerable Mother, we’ve been making a book, Anne, Muriel and me,” I say. “We’re using up all the lapis, the gold, the silver. I wanted to tell you, because it’s right that you should know.”

  She’s pensive for a minute. Talking is difficult for her, I can tell. “Continue,” she manages.

  “I was thinking about why things like gold and lapis stone are so valuable. At first I thought it was because—I don’t know—the way they catch the light, or how bright they are. But then I thought, they’re just colors chopped out of rocks, like any other.”

  The prioress smiles with interest, and I go on.

  “I asked myself, how far do you have to go to find, let’s say, yellow ochre? In Hartley Cross, it was everywhere. You’d find chunks of it in a field. I never put it together, but now I realize that the walls of Saint Andrew’s were covered in ochre paintings.”

  “And how far do you have to go to find lapis lazuli?”

  “To the edge of the faraway lands, as I understand.”

  “That’s right, Edyth. It is because those elements are rare,” says the prioress, with gravel in her throat.

  “And that’s why I know what I’m supposed to do.”

  The prioress leans forward and gazes at me intently. “Tell me.”

  “It was when I was using the ultramarine. I don’t know why that color is so overwhelming, maybe because the world I came from was so drab, and that color’s still so new to me. But I thought about the illumination in the Gospel book, my dream, the stained glass.”

  “Go on.”

  I take the Gospel book off the shelf and open to that page.

  “This whole time, I thought the rest of the pieces of the puzzle were symbols somehow. I knew the comet was real, because the three of us saw it, not just me. But I kept thinking that the rest of it was a symbol of something else, expecting to get the answer in my head, or in a dream. Now I really know: the tree is real, and the water is real. I think that blue is going to lead me to all of it, and I’m the only one who can find them.”

  “And that is why it had to be you,” Prioress Margaret says, falling into a fit of coughing. She motions for the cup on her desk; I help her drink, then wipe the perspiration from her face. She finally calms and leans back with a contented smile.

  “I’m dying, Edyth,” she says. “But I’m satisfied, because you finally understand. Don’t you see? Your whole life has been preparing you for this. Your dreams, your drawings, your colors—they’re not an accident or a mistake. You are as rare as that beautiful color. You see more of reality than all of us put together.”

  “It’s funny,” I ponder. “It seems like when life makes the least sense, when I’m the most confused, the answer is right in front of me.”

  — 36 —

  Leaving the prioress’s study with the Gospel book in hand, I’m exceedingly careful not to be seen as I make my way to the chapel. I knock softly on the door, hoping Mason is still there, hoping he stayed for me.

  “Mason,” I call, “if you’re there, please let me in.”

  When he opens the door and I see him, I want to die, the way my heart hurts. He looks tired, defeated, but he lets me enter. He bars the door.

  “I was wrong to hide away,” I whisper. “I want to live like I’m not afraid, of death or life or anything in between.”

  Mason says nothing, but leads me over to the pallet of straw and pulls me in so close, face to face. He brushes his lips and cheek against mine, and there’s the barest space of soft air between us until he kisses me, and kisses me, and kisses me.

  I’ve never had a feast of sensation like this, like each kiss is a bite of a soft, ripe fruit made of gold, silver—ultramarine. We grasp each other tightly, needfully. He slips off my gown and his tunic so we can feel that much closer, and we exhaust ourselves, and bruise our lips.

  We lie quiet, really seeing each other for the first time.

  “I love you, Edyth.”

  “I love you, too, John Mason.”

  * * *

  —

  He builds a little fire, hoping no one will notice the smoke. We hold each other again, watching the sparks rise.

  “Mason, I need to show you something.” I reach for the Gospel book and turn to the page with the yew tree.

  “Is this the comet you saw?” he asks, sitting up.

  “Yes. And this tree is out there somewhere for me to find. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when I get there, but I’m not worried about that. I can feel that it’s true, that I’m living this unfolding story, and it’s my story.”

  “I can help you look,” he says. “Just meet me here in the chapel at midnight.”

  “Thank you, Mason. I want you to be part of this.”

  I close the book and begin putting on my green linen dress.

  The sleeve of my linen chemise slides back.

  Black spiders down my arm.

  I look at Mason. We stare at each other for a long time, knowing what the other is thinking, the sickening horror that’s just taken a bite out of our guts. He gingerly reaches for my arm and lifts it, looking into the sleeve. The black tendrils cover the whole length, from my armpit to my just-blackening fingertips.

  Adrenaline floods my body like nettle stings. “Don’t touch me!” I jump up away from him. “You’re going to die!” I recoil, leaving the book on the straw, reflexively grabbing my painting towel.

  “Edyth, it’s going to be all right!” Mason’s words are reassuring, but his tone betrays his panic. “I’ll take you to the infirmary!”

  “No. I’m not going in there!” I turn and run out of the chapel, I don’t know where—just away.

  With the towel, I wipe and wipe my hands, squeezing meaning out of the cloth—what is this all for, the malachite and terre verte staining my dress, the flecks of gold and ultramarine adhering to my fingertips, flurrying out of my hair? What is the rest of the picture—and how could it be the Divine Will that I should die before I find out?

  And after all that, is this to be the end of my story?

  Orphaned and dying forgotten in some cloister? Who will take care of Alice? And what will happen to Mason? We’ve shared more than each other’s air now.

  I may have just killed Mason. Judas, too, was killed with a kiss.

  I run down the cloister walk, past the cold calefactory, the barns and stables and the vegetable garden struggling against the weeds. I feel it now, a painful swelling under my arm. I’ve got to get out. Out.

  * * *

  —

  How I never noticed this weathered gray gate before, I don’t know. The wall is a good eight feet high, tiled on top with lichen-spotted slates interposed with dark brown-orange mosses. I stare at the burgeoning golds of the trees just outside it. The gate is neglected and striped with ivy vines. If I thought I’d have trouble, I was wrong—the vines aren’t holding it shut at all. I manage to shimmy it wide enough to fit through.

  My heart heaves out grief and urgency.

  I hurl myself through the gate into the clean, round air of the woods, and instantly I step into a different spa
ce altogether. Past layers of wet and rotting leaves, unfurling spirals of baby ferns and a pile of discarded pottery shards, it is pristine—different from the brushy woodland of home, like a carpet leading to the forest edge. I jump across the debris and enter the wood.

  The forest floor is clear, with no fallen limbs, no brush, no coppiced trees. These are like the columns in the priory church, rising to meet at the upper canopy. There are elm and oak, all great, old giants, knobby and twisted. I can feel them connected under my feet in some vast web, something that’s existed before me or my grandparents. Before the Normans and the Romans, even. Maybe these trees were here before there were any people at all, growing as saplings at the very birth of the world. If trees could be people, these would surely be elders.

  I look overhead, where the sunlight flickers among the leaves. The colors are constantly changing, but there is a thread of sound pulling me in. I see it before my ears can even hear it, winding through limbs, dodging the falling leaves, wrapping around tree trunks. It floats and curls against the tawny reds and ambers, and the thread becomes a ribbon.

  It is distinctly lapis blue.

  I reach out to the rough bark of an elm in front of me, watching the color follow the contour of the ground into a darker space, like night. I’m deeper in the wood now than anyone should go. And there, in the inky distance, the ribbon widens into the sound of a boiling pot, or of rain on a roof.

  I round another craggy oak, and there ahead, shrouded in color, is the most gigantic yew I have ever seen.

  I approach the ancient tree; a split right down the middle of its vast trunk shows that the tree is hollow inside, like a cup, full of its own fallen needles. The soil around its base has eroded, exposing roots like flying buttresses anchoring their wooden cathedral. Beneath the roots, a spring bubbles away, clear and clean, a mist rising off its surface. It’s growing, filling up a recess in the ground and becoming a pool.