others. But there is something more you have not yet considered.”
“Can the matter not wait until tomorrow, Healing Martha?” I was so tired. I just wanted to sleep.
She took my hand and squeezed it. “I wish it could, but you need to understand what you are about to do. The Host which the Franciscan brought- there are only three pieces remaining. Even broken, it will not be enough.”
“Then we must get word to the Franciscan to ask him to resume his visits. He will help us, I’m sure.”
“No, no, old friend, that he must not do. It would be dangerous for him and for us. You heard Gate Martha-they are watching the beguinage.”
“Then we must find someone else to bring it. Someone the priest will not suspect.”
She shook her head. “You know what punishments are meted out to anyone caught giving the Host to those who have been excommunicated. We’ve no right to ask it of others.
“As for us, we must pray the Franciscan is never found. Even the strongest of men can be broken by the Church’s interrogators. Father Ulfrid may be as blind as a mole in sunlight, but there are others whose vision is clearer. If the friar were to confess that he never came within our walls, they would not be slow to reason out your role in this play and if they did, the matter would not end with excommunication. Not for you, not for any of us. Father Ulfrid wouldn’t plead clemency for a newborn babe inside these walls.”
I felt like screaming in exasperation. “Healing Martha, you were the one urging me to give the Host to the women. What have we been wasting time talking about this for, if there is no Host to give them and no hope of obtaining any? We have failed. We may as well pack up now, tonight, and return to Bruges. The beguinage cannot survive here.”
As if it heard me, a sudden gust of wind howled around the beguinage walls. Doors and shutters rattled and a leather pail skittered across the courtyard.
Healing Martha pulled her cloak tighter around herself. “There is only one thing you can do, old friend. You must consecrate the Host yourself.”
“No! To give the Host that is already consecrated, that is one thing. I would merely be acting as the servant, passing a dish offered by a host to a guest. But I cannot consecrate it. I cannot take bread and turn it into His flesh.”
“It’s but another small step and you are already walking upon this path.”
“I cannot do it,” I insisted. “How could you even think it? I’m not a priest. I am not a friar. I am not even a man.”
“It is not the merit of the priest who turns bread into flesh. It is God who turns bread into flesh and even when that priest has sinned, still the bread becomes flesh.” Healing Martha grasped my wrists and turned the palms of my hands upwards. “So why should God not make flesh of bread held in these hands?”
Why was she asking this of me? I was exhausted. Hadn’t I carried enough in these past weeks? And now, instead of supporting me, she added this terrible weight. Around me lay the closed shutters of the other rooms, the fastened doors, the impenetrable shadows of the empty courtyard. It was a cloudless night. A thousand stars flickered like distant candles in the violet sky. And behind each candle in the darkness was a face watching, waiting, listening. They were silent. They would give me no sign. They would only judge. They would abandon me to choice and condemn me when I chose wrongly.
Healing Martha pushed the door of her room open. She turned to look back at me. The glow of the fire behind her in the darkened room surrounded her with a halo of light.
“Tell me, Healing Martha,” I said softly. “How did we come to be walking down this road and not notice where our steps were leading? When did we turn onto this path?”
“It matters not how or when, old friend. We are set on the path now and there is no going back. There is no going back.”
november
the feast of saint andrew, crucified on an x-shaped cross, patron saint of fishermen. saint rule set sail with the relics of saint andrew to discover where saint andrew wanted his bones to rest and in a storm he was cast ashore in fife, scotland. thus he concluded the bones wanted to be housed in scotland.
i CALLED HER GUDRUN as her grandmother Gwenith named her. It fitted her. “My little Gudrun.” Sometimes when I said it she even turned towards me as if she knew her name. Servant Martha said Gudrun was a heathen name for it means the gods’ secret lore. So the Marthas gave her a new name, Dympna, because she had the falling sickness. It’s cruel to name a child for the affliction that torments her. I bet it was Servant Martha who suggested it. She’d be the first to point out someone else’s weaknesses.
Servant Martha tried to baptise the child too, for neither Gate Martha nor Pega could recall her ever being brought to St. Michael’s, but the Devil would not easily come out of her. Gudrun desperately fought the Marthas who held her, as if they were trying to murder her. Finally she managed to break free and ran out of the chapel to hide in the space between the byre and stable, a gap so narrow you’d think a cat could hardly squeeze in. I sat outside with her half the night murmuring nonsense, trying to coax her to come out with offers of food. She did, eventually, but she never answered to the name Dympna.
At first she ranged restlessly around the beguinage, trying to find a way out, while Servant Martha for her part tried in vain to impose some discipline and order in Gudrun’s day. It was the first time I’d ever seen Servant Martha defeated by anyone. Gudrun could not be set to the simplest of tasks. She wandered away in the middle of sweeping a room, or else crouched in a chaos of wet linen, staring up at the sky in a trance. During services in the chapel she gazed at the candles and the paintings on the walls of the Blessed Virgin, wandering over during prayers to trace the outline of a face with her finger. The clanging of the bell terrified her. She’d press her fingers to her ears and run into one of her hiding places until it stopped. She never seemed to get used to it.
Servant Martha tried to bring her to heel by telling her she would get no food if she didn’t work, but Kitchen Martha and I smuggled food to her in spite of Servant Martha’s instructions. It was pointless to punish Gudrun. She didn’t understand. Hunger was so much part of her life before she came to the beguinage that she didn’t connect it with her actions; to her, it was simply another senseless blow falling without reason. Besides, if I didn’t smuggle food to her, she’d only steal it from the kitchen or the beasts, so I was saving her from a worse sin.
She refused to wear the beguine’s kirtle, repeatedly throwing it off, scrubbing her skin as if it hurt her. All her life she had worn nothing but a light shift and the kirtle must have felt so heavy to her. But Servant Martha insisted her short ragged shift was indecent for a girl of her age, so I stitched her a new linen shift, long enough to cover her, but light enough for her to bear the weight of it. Servant Martha pursed her lips, but said nothing. Even she recognised that it was better that Gudrun wore the shift than walked around half naked. Besides, the girl never left the confines of the beguinage, so who was to see her except us?
Servant Martha had given orders that Gudrun was never to be allowed out of the beguinage. We were not to let her work in the fields for fear that she’d simply wander away and starve by herself or, worse, be drawn to the village to steal food. The villagers already feared her; add theft to her list of crimes and they wouldn’t be inclined to mercy.
We didn’t even take Gudrun with us when we buried her grandmother. There was no point in asking leave to bury Gwenith in the churchyard. Thanks to Servant Martha, the priest wouldn’t grant a Christian burial to any who had lain within our walls, not even on the north side of the church among the unshriven souls. And even if he had, Gate Martha said that the villagers would dig Gwenith up again, dismember the corpse and scatter the pieces, or drive iron nails into the soles of her feet to stop her ghost walking. If they feared her in life, they feared her twice as much in death.
So we took Gwenith’s body back up the hill to her cottage and buried the old woman beneath the stones of her own hearth. In the end the four of us who had brought her down were all the souls who escorted her back up the river to her grave. We buried her quietly and quickly, indecently quickly. I don’t think Servant Martha had forgiven Gwenith for laughing on her deathbed; that’s why she was so determined to force her granddaughter through the gates of Heaven, just to spite the old woman. But how can a soul be brought to salvation, if she can’t understand? And what did Gudrun understand except that the sun was warm and the rain was cold? And her birds, she understood the birds.
Her raven wouldn’t enter the beguinage, but he perched on the outer wall each day at noon, croaking until Gudrun came to him. Gate Martha tried to drive him away by waving a broom or throwing stones. She said a raven hanging about the place was unlucky, a death omen, but it was no use, for the bird would simply flap a little way off and perch in a nearby tree cawing as loudly as ever and watching for a chance to return.
But it wasn’t just the raven Gudrun loved. Whenever I couldn’t find her I knew just where she was hiding. I’d tiptoe into the pigeon cote and there she’d be, squatting on the flagstones, with the pigeons on her shoulders, nestling into her warm hair. They’d lie as quietly in her open hands as if they slept in their own nests. She had a way with them, knowing at once when a bird was sick and how to heal it. Unable to go out to look for herbs, she’d go to the stillroom and take any she needed, pushing aside anyone who tried to stop her. Healing Martha gave her freedom to come and go as she pleased; she said that Gudrun knew as much about curing birds and animals as she herself knew of healing man.
At night, Gudrun slept in the cote, curled up in a heap of straw on the floor, birds nestling against her as if they brooded her. I didn’t try to stop her anymore. On cold nights I’d creep in and cover her up with a blanket while she slept. I’d stand and watch her, her face buried beneath her arm, her hair turned to red- gold in the yellow flame of my lantern. I’d listen to the steady breathing, watch her fingers curled like an infant’s, her baby lips parted as if she was waiting to be kissed. I could watch over my little Gudrun all night.
And it was because of Gudrun that I didn’t leave the beguinage when Servant Martha told us that Father Ulfrid had excommunicated us all. I should have gone when I had the chance. Servant Martha gave us a choice, if you can call what she offered a choice.
“If any of you wish to return to the beguinage in Bruges, we will arrange immediate passage on board ship for you.”
A sea crossing in the middle of winter; who would be crazy enough to attempt that? It had been bad enough in summer. It was like saying to a
