by Iris Anthony
The woman in the abbess’s chair suddenly leaned forward. “I hope your meals are not as plain as your robes…or this room.”
“We have one meal each day at this time of year. And it is—”
“One! That will not do. It cannot be good for the body or for the soul.”
Sister Clothild opened her mouth as she turned to the girl. Then she closed it up as she turned toward the count. Finally, beneath a gathered brow, she shot a look at the rest of us and then took her place among us without saying another word.
The girl sat back in her chair with a smile. “I don’t know how I am to dismiss you, but I’m sure you all have other things to do. Might I suggest, perhaps, that you go about the doing of them?”
CHAPTER 4
Anna
AUTUN
I tried to make sense of the words the priest had spoken, but I could not do it. “She cannot have meant it.” How could she have meant it?
My eyes traveled beyond him, across the rush-strewn floor toward the bed where my mother had lately lain. To the curtains she had woven with her own hands and the mattress she had just had restuffed. To that place of refuge and peace, where I had slept with her from my birth, fifteen years before. How could she have intended to cast me from it?
The priest was seated at our table, looking across a parchment at me. Concern was evident in his eyes. “I assure you she did mean it. We spoke of it in great length, and she made provisions for it here in her will.”
She wanted me to leave? To go out there? Among all those people? “I do not—I cannot—” In faith, I did not know how.
“I have already spoken to the bishop, and he is writing a letter for you. He will give it to you tomorrow, in the morning, if you go to confession. That way you can leave early and have the whole day to travel.”
So soon? “I do not see how I can leave just now.” The servant had not yet even made the bed. The hearth in the center of the room needed to be swept. There was much too much work to be accomplished and too many affairs to be put in order. My hand began to itch at the thought of them all.
I felt the priest’s eyes on me.
The room was too bright. I moved toward the window, shivering from the wind that poured in through it, and drew the shutters closed, securing them with a flip of the metal hook. That was better. Only the fire’s light remained. A calming, golden, flickering glow. “She has only just died. There are things I must see to. There are people…” So many people. Too many people. Already they had begun to come to the door, keeping the servants busy in tending to them.
“Your mother had debts.”
“Then you must pay them. Please. As a priest you must know what to do and who must be paid.” My mother had kept meticulous accounts. She was always going over them at night before she retired to bed.
He sighed. “She was quite clear. There is nothing to pay them with.”
“But my father was not a poor man when he died. And she herself was an heiress.” When they had spoken at such great length, why had she not told him this? I went to the chest and retrieved her accounts. He had followed me, so I placed them into his hands. “She kept a record of everything. If you look, I am certain you will find—”
“Her lands are already encumbered, and your father left debts of his own when he died. I am truly sorry.”
“Surely, there must be something.” I tried to take the records back so I could look at them. I had never been able to learn how to write, but I knew how to read. Numbers could not be much different than letters.
He placed a hand firmly atop the accounts. “There is nothing. Which is why she knew this house and all her possessions must be sold. And even then—”
“Sold!”
“Yes.”
“But then where am I to live?” My gaze drifted back to the bed. I wanted nothing more than to retreat to its feathery depths, pull the curtains about me, and sleep away my sorrows. “Surely you do not need the bed?”
“Everything that can must be sold.”
“Where am I to sleep?”
“The house itself must be sold.”
“Then…what is to be done with me?”
He sighed once more. “The pilgrim’s way is the only path open to you, and it is what she wanted.” He glanced away from her records toward the parchment he had placed on the table. “Once your mother’s debts are paid, there will be nothing left. At least on the pilgrimage to Saint Catherine’s relic, you will be fed, and your needs can be attended to at the hospices along the way.”
I did not understand what he was saying. Was I to leave my home? And if so, for how long? When could I come back? “Even if I went, I could not stay on pilgrimage forever.”
“No.”
Suddenly, I felt far younger than my fifteen years. “Then what…what am I to do?”
“I think, all things considered, you ought to do as your mother requested. She wanted what was best for you. She wanted you to go on pilgrimage so you could be healed.”
***
The priest left me there with only my memories for company. Mother was gone. And now she wanted me to go too.
I began to tremble. The fire was not hot enough to chase away October’s chill. I waited some time for one of the servants to come tend to me, but no one came, so I bent and picked up a piece of wood, feeding it to the flames just the way I had seen them do. And then I added another and another. I stood there for some time in the center of the room before the fire as the flames gorged themselves on a plentitude of wood. But why should they not? The priest had said none of this—not the wood, not the table, not even the bed—was to be mine.
I crouched before it, knees drawn up to my chest as I watched. Its heat enflamed my cheeks. Its smoke furled out into the room instead of up through the hole in the roof, and it set my eyes to weeping. Too late I remembered the dangers of stopping near the fire, and a spark ate a hole through my sleeve. When I stood, I saw my hem had dipped itself into the cinders.
What would my mother have thought of me? The mother who had always insisted that to be deficient in body did not mean I had to be slovenly in appearance. She had always kept me well away from the work of the household, claiming it would only tire me. Even during her long illness, she had never once let me aid those tending to her needs. She had only ever asked me to read to her from the Psalms or recite the prayers she had taught me as a child. To be sure, I had tried to do those things she always had, to accomplish her tasks in her stead, but I could not work the loom, and the spindle and distaff needed a guiding hand I could not give them. I’d had to content myself with my own tasks of feeding the chickens and gathering the hens’ eggs, of strewing the rushes and culling nuts for worms.
Why could I not go on as I always had, here inside the house, away from prying eyes? I could find someone to go to market for me. I could ask someone to light the fires and the candles on my behalf. There should be no reason for me ever to have to leave.
Except that I could not stay. My mother had wanted me to be healed. She had wanted me to go pray to Saint Catherine. We had planned to go, together, once she was well.
I went to the window, unlatched the shutters, and cracked one open. On the street outside, people passed as pigs routed in the muck and carts clattered by. There were so many people out there. They were talking, laughing, calling out to one another. As I stood there watching, a pair of them even came to blows.
I opened the shutter a bit wider.
What would it be like to go out there among them again?
I reached up with my left hand—my good one—and felt that hollow, empty place near my right arm where my bosom should be, and then I slid my hand across to the other side. Why should one side be so plump and full while the other was not? What poison lay inside my breast that it had failed to grow?
Perhaps no one out there would notice. Why should anyone f
ind out what I had always managed to keep hidden beneath the folds of my tunic?
As I watched from the window, a child skipped out to cross the street. Midway, he stumbled over a wandering dog. Reaching out, stretching both hands wide, he circled his arms until he had regained his balance, and then he ran off down the road.
Perhaps no one would notice my breast, but how could they fail to remark upon my hand? I held it out in front of me: my useless right hand. Far smaller than my left, only three fingers protruded from it, and those were all misshapen. One, twice as large as it ought to be, had two fingernails at its tip. The second finger had none. And the third finger, pushing up from the middle, was no bigger than my smallest toe. My hand itself was scarred and shiny, the skin stretched too tight, from the time when a priest had plunged it into a kettle of boiling holy oil. And there was a wound that still seeped a clear-colored ooze from the place where the surgeon had cut into my palm, trying to free the fingers he had thought were trapped inside it.
My hand ached with a throbbing pulse in the summer and tingled with a needle’s pricking in winter’s chill drafts. Never did it let me forget its presence. Always it served as a reminder, as a mark of some sin too terrible to forgive. Fearing that great sin had been her own, my mother had done penance more times than I could count. And now it was my turn to atone for it, to seek redemption from it.
What sort of heinous evil was hidden in the depths of my soul that it had manifested itself in this? This awful, distorted, misshapen body. And why were others forgiven their transgressions while mine forever marked me?
What kind of girl was I that God Himself had scorned me?
And why was my mother making me go out there again?
By myself?
Alone?
***
That first time, when I snuck out the gate and followed a servant to the market, my mother had not known I had gone. She must have thought me occupied with the chickens. Because she had not noticed my absence, and since no one else had remarked upon it, I did it again. But the third time I was caught. And not because anyone had seen me or stopped me. I was caught because I had wanted to play.
A group of children had organized a game of some sort in front of the church where the market was taking place. I watched for some time, trying to understand how it worked. Once I did, I presented myself to them and asked to join them.
One of them, a girl who could not have been much older than me, looked at my hand and started shrieking. “She has the devil’s hand! The devil’s hand!”
The other children ran toward the church. From the safety of those heavy, stone-framed doors, they shouted at me. “Go on—leave! Go away!” Only they would not let me. One of the boys came down and shoved me. When I fell to the ground, another one joined him in hitting me. They rained blow after blow upon my head, my back, my legs. A man finally came from the market and drew them off.
He brushed the dirt from my tunic, and then he led me to the fountain and cleaned off my face. When he asked me where I lived and whose child I was, I told him, but he called me a liar. He said my father had no children. I slipped from his grasp and huddled there on the ground by the fountain, bruised and crying, listening to the man berate me for lying, wondering why I had the devil’s own hand, until my mother came and found me.
She wrapped me in her mantle, turned me away from the scoffs and the sneers, and took me home. After examining my wounds, she cleaned them and changed my torn tunic for a new one, and then she lay down with me on the great bed. There in the privacy of the curtains, hidden once more from the world, I asked her, Why? Why was I different? Why had the devil given me his hand? And why God had allowed it?
She only wrapped her arms around me and made me promise I would never leave the sanctuary of our courtyard for the city again.
I never had.
After that, everything changed. She must have sensed how different, how closed away from everything I felt, for after that day, whenever she returned from her comings and goings, she took great pains to explain to me everything she had seen and done.
I knew the mayor’s wife favored tunics in shades of crimson, with embroidery that circled the hems of the skirt and the sleeves. I knew the baker always kept a bit of my mother’s bread dough for himself before he baked it. I knew the mayor’s son was hoping to marry the tailor’s daughter, and that one of the priests kept an old tabby cat out behind the church. I knew everything about the city, and yet I knew nothing at all. I had been told of the citizens’ generosity and foibles, of their births and their deaths, but I had never seen their faces. At least, not that I knew.
Without my mother, how was I to know whether I was talking to the cooper or the blacksmith? Whether I should take great care with my words or whether I could speak freely?
I had kept my promise to her. I had never passed through the walls of the courtyard again. Why, now, was she forcing me to leave?
In all the time I had spent gazing out the window, still no one had come to see after me. Though the house was large and long, it was a single room, and it was clear all the servants had deserted me. I did not blame them; there was no reason to stay. I would have to pack for the journey on my own then. At least it was not difficult to decide what to take. The priest had said everything—Mother’s arm and neck rings, her tunics and shoes, our bed, our kettles, the chickens and the cow—was to be sold. I did keep for myself a pendant my father had given her. It was a small cross, enameled in blue, hardly bigger than a walnut. She had other pieces that were much finer, but the pendant was one she had worn always, tucked away on a thong beneath her tunic. I did not think anyone would have noticed it but me. And I did not see how any could begrudge me that one memory.
I found those things that were my own: my other inner and outer tunics, a second girdle, and a handkerchief. My bowl, my spoon, and a cup. A knife. My shoes, a hair comb, and a cloth to place them all in. I wanted to take the psalter from which I’d spent many happy hours reading, but the book might help to pay her debts, and so I left it on the table.
The fire had died as I packed. It felt as if it was time for supper, but no servants were here to make it. I went to the stores myself, but as I looked at the long shelves, I saw there was no food. Perhaps it was just as well. I would not have known what to do with it. I had never been allowed to help in the preparation of meals. My mother had feared I might injure myself. I would have been happy, though, with a bit of bread or cheese.
As darkness fell, I heard the scuffle of footsteps out in the courtyard. A servant come to aid me? My spirits rose, but then the chickens let out a dreadful squawking, and a burst of unsavory language soon followed. Heart thudding, I crept to the door. Wrestling with the bar, I hoisted it up and then pushed it across the door. Opening a set of shutters, I tried to see what was happening, but the angle was wrong, and I did not wish to give away my presence by leaning out, so I pulled the shutters closed, securing them with a hook.
My mother had always warned me about the world outside these windows, telling me I would be safe as long as I stayed behind them. But she had never told me what to do if the world did not respect her commands, if it came inside the courtyard.
I stumbled the length of the house in my haste to fasten the rest of the shutters. But without the benefit of the outside light, with no fire and no candles, the darkness was complete. When someone banged against the door and then on each of the shutters in turn, I sank to the floor and did not answer.
CHAPTER 5
I do not know how long I sat there.
Long enough that the voice outside went away. Long enough that the mice came out of their nests and began to scamper through the rushes. Long enough that my teeth began to chatter from the cold. Pushing to standing, I cast my hand about me, searching for something, anything to hold on to in that vast expanse of darkness.
Shuffling forward, my toe hit something hard. My hand quickly
told me it was a stool. Arm outstretched, I moved toward what I hoped were the shelves. Somehow I misjudged and walked into the chest instead, striking my knee upon its corner. But moving on from it, after an eternity of patting and shuffling about, I found the bed.
I climbed up into it and then slid beneath the counterpane. Pulling it up over the top of my head, I wrapped my arms about myself, imagining them to be my mother’s. And I began to whisper the prayer we had always said together: Have mercy on me, O God…have mercy…have mercy. I could not remember the rest, and so I whispered those few words over and over until my tongue began to trip itself from fatigue and I drifted off into sleep.
Though I did not hear the cock greet the morning, a pale light crept in through the hole in the roof and the cracks in the shutters. It did not take long for the darkness about me to soften. Slipping from bed, I followed the lightening of the gloom to a window, and then unfastened the shutters, opening them the barest slit.
I shook the wrinkles from my tunic and straightened the braided girdle about my waist, bringing the knot around forward from where it had pressed into my back during the night. Mother had always plaited my hair, for it took two hands to accomplish the task. For this day, I let it fall free. I was not, perhaps, so tidy as Mother would have made me, but it was the best I could do on my own.
When the sun crept higher, I threw on my mantle, and then I went about and opened the rest of the shutters. Pulling the counterpane up, I drew the curtains closed around the bed. I might have left the bedclothes as they were, but it did not seem quite right to leave them in disarray.
All was in order. I had nothing else to pack, but still I lingered.
The last time I had left the courtyard I had come back bloodied and beaten. This time, if the worst should happen or Providence should conspire against me, there was nowhere to come back to. This time, there was no hope of return.
***
I opened the door and shut it up behind me, then I went to the gate. Pushing it open, I saw it was busy outside, out there, on the street. There were too many people and too many creatures and too many carts.