by Iris Anthony
I held out my hand to her, palm up, the chain of pearls curled into a mound within it. “You forgot these.”
She did not even look at them. “If you insist upon giving them to me, I shall sell them.”
“Your father saved them. For you.”
Her eyes, gone dusky with twilight’s falling, sought mine. “I don’t deserve them. My father has sacrificed everything for me. And my mother…I’ve tried to reach her since she died, since I was four years old, and I could never do it. But even if I could, even if I could walk that mist straight up into heaven, why would she want to see me?”
“She would have wanted you to have these.”
“You aren’t listening to me! I’ve destroyed everything she once loved. Better to give them to the count and try to preserve what’s left.”
“You cannot think that.”
“What else can I think?”
“That this is not a judgment of your worth. It’s an indictment of his!”
“Why can’t you just see me as I am? Why do you have to be so kind…and so…so good?” That last she accused me of as if it were one sin too many.
God grant she would never discover just how wretched I was. I seized her hand and tried to press the pearls into them. “Because I care for you too much to let you pretend anything different.” Care! Care was contemptible. Care was cowardly. I wanted more than fondness and friendship. I put my other hand atop hers. “Don’t you know? I love you.” A miserable and unwanted confession, perhaps, but it was true.
Tearing her hand from my grip, she took a step back. “You love me! God, why—?” Her appeal was directed toward heaven. But then her face seemed to crumple, and she looked at me. “I loved you. I love you still! But my love is a curse. Why can’t you just see that? How could you gain anything but pain from loving me?” There was a note of regret in her whispered words, though it was masked by despair.
I didn’t hope to gain anything. I never meant to press my suit at all. I wanted only that she would shed that mantle of guilt she kept fastened about her shoulders. But my wish was as hopeless as her trying to walk on the evening’s mist. We were but mortals, and we were bound, the both of us it seemed, to fail at what our hearts wanted most.
My confession must have meant nothing; she moved to leave.
“When did you stop trying to jump?” I raised my voice to reach her ears.
She shot me a look over her shoulder. “I did not say I had.”
I was desperate she stay. To lose her to the twilight and her mists would have been one loss too many to bear. “But what would you say if you reached her? And why would you do it? Why would you give yourself to such a useless, hopeless task?” Even as child she must have known she would not succeed.
“Because she knew me before.” Before: before the count and his lace had come. “She knew me, and she had no reason not to love me. I just want someone…” Her words trailed off as she took up her skirts and ran into the fast-falling gloom.
I could finish her thought. I knew it as my own. I just wanted someone to love me as I was. Regardless of anything I had done or failed to do. I wanted to know that at some time, at some point, I had been worthy of someone’s love.
•••
I rose the next morning when I heard the maid knocking about, opening the shutters to the day. I pulled on my hose and breeches and opened the door, expecting to find a bucket of water waiting for me.
It was not there.
Putting on a shirt and tucking it into my breeches, I went down to find the maid. She was stirring the ashes in the hearth.
“I need some water.”
She turned and then straightened, putting a fist to her hip.
Now I knew the reason for my missing bucket: this maid was new to Souboscq.
“Why?”
“Now.” The old maid had always placed a bucket outside my chamber door. I couldn’t wait any longer for it. My skin was already crawling, itching with an urgency that had set my heart to pounding and my fingers to scratching. Already I had nearly torn a hole in my shirt, trying to dig through it to my skin. I had to get away from my skin. “And be quick about it!”
She clomped from the room, muttering beneath her breath, though she was back a few minutes later, lugging a bucket. Water sloshed onto her skirts with every step.
I took the bucket back to my chamber and stripped off my shirt, breeches, and hose. I took up a brush and squatted on the floor. Examined my arms, my legs. Scooped up a handful of water and cupped it to my chest. Once. Twice. Took up the brush and scrubbed myself nearly raw, trying to exorcise all the terrible memories.
“You’ll catch your death.”
I looked up to find the maid staring at me from the door. “Dégage!” I might have shut the door on her, blocking her view, but my task was too important. And, more than that, it was almost complete. I turned my back toward her, took up the brush, and began to scrub once more. I closed my eyes as I scoured my cheeks and forehead, and I could see him reflected in my memories.
My father.
I saw him once more sitting in his cave beside the River Saleys in Béarn, wrapped in rags. I saw myself there, as a boy, cringing at the horror of seeing my father’s skin melt from his bones. Watching the leprosy consume his fingers and toes, his nose and his ears. The disease stole both his voice and his sight. I hadn’t come within ten feet of him all those years of my childhood, though I slept each night just outside the entrance to that cave. And each morning, after I had begged bread for our day’s meals, I ran down to the stream and scrubbed at my skin with a stick. Sloughed off even the possibility of that wasting disease, shedding it into the river. Letting the water carry it away.
Hurry, hurry, hurry!
Before the disease could corrupt me. Before it could take root and spread forth its destructive tendrils.
I scrubbed behind my ears, beneath my fingernails, between my toes. I had done so each morning for years, examining my skin for lesions and then scrubbing at my flesh. Sometimes…sometimes I was too zealous. It could take days for the wounds to heal. And when I smelled a particularly ripe chèvre cheese or passed a herd of goats, it could take days for my nostrils to rid themselves of the scent. Of the odor that smelled like rotting flesh.
I was marked—I was tormented—by memories.
•••
My father had wasted away over the years, in both mind and body, and then one morning, he simply failed to stir at all. It was the summer of my twelfth year.
“Papa?”
I poked him with a stick. Poked him again. Harder and harder, until the sharp tip broke right through his disease-eaten skin. I pulled it out and then flung it away.
“Papa!”
I found another stick and used it to draw the cowl off his face. I hadn’t seen him, not clearly, in over a year. He’d taken the habit of keeping his face shadowed beneath the folds of black cloth. Had I seen him before that morning, I might have believed him already dead. Worms could not have corrupted his flesh as thoroughly as the disease had done. Surely they would not have devoured it with such complete ruthlessness.
His eyes were not closed. The lids had been eaten away long before, consigning him to blindness soon thereafter. But there was dullness to them that morning I could credit to nothing but death.
Where could I bury a man who had already, long ago, been declared dead by the village priest?
And how could a boy inter a man he was not supposed to touch?
I solved the problem by using a fallen branch to roll him farther back into the cave, and then I walled him in behind a fortress of stones. It took me the whole day to haul them up from the river. But by the time I was done, no man or beast would ever be able to reach him. Yet the goatlike odor of his decaying flesh haunted me. It seeped out of the cave in the spaces between the
rocks. I spent the next day fortifying the walls I had constructed the day before. Someone must have spied me at my work, from the far side of the river. Before the sun had abandoned the day, a voice hailed me from the forest. “Is he gone, then?”
I climbed up the wall I had built and shoved a last stone into its place. Slid back down, shredding my hands in the doing of it. “He’s dead.”
“Come into town.” It was the sheriff standing there holding onto the reins of his horse.
I considered the invitation. “You mean…I can go back to the house?”
“Non. It’s been occupied.”
“Not by me. Nor my father.”
“It’s no longer his. He was declared dead, lad. Remember?”
And me along with him. By the priest. “What would I do there? In town?”
“Beg. Just the way you’ve been doing.”
I looked at the cave I had just finished sealing. Looked back at the man who was standing there at the edge of the wood in his fine clothes and handsome hat. Town. There was nothing there for me. Nothing but disapproving wives and their surly husbands. Little girls who screamed in terror whenever they saw me, and boys who spat on me and kicked at me whenever they were given the chance. There was nothing worse than being a leper…but being a leper’s son was close. “I’ll stay here.”
The man lifted his hat, scratching at his head. “What will you do?”
Did it matter?
“Do you have any kin?”
I shrugged. “My father had a cousin. In Gascogne.”
“Does he have a name?”
“The viscount of something or other.” My father had always shaken his head when he said it. Always wondered why the good fortune of his cousin Henri couldn’t have been shared by the rest of the family. “Henri. His name is Henri.”
“If you decide to come into town, you can sleep by the church, as long as you don’t mind the cemetery. There’s a big, sheltering tree there.”
I’d already been sleeping beside the dead for seven years. He could offer me nothing more than I already had.
I stayed outside that cave, continuing to live there for at least another month. That’s where the viscount of Souboscq and his men had found me: living outside a blocked-up cave, dressed in the rags I called my clothes. I heard them coming long before I saw them—horses’ feet battering the earth, the leather of their saddles creaking. He and his retinue rode right up to me. “Are you Nicolas Girard’s son?”
“I am.”
“Then I’m your cousin. Of a sort.”
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
“Where’s Nicolas?”
I gestured behind me to the cave.
His gaze traveled the distance from me to the cave. Then it traveled back. “We shall leave him there in peace. Now then. You’re to come home with me. We can’t have a cousin of the Leforts living in the forest as if he’s no better than a beggar.”
No better than a beggar.
It had never occurred to me that I was better than anything at all. It took six years under the viscount’s tutelage before I considered myself truly a part of his family, even though he never treated me otherwise. And even then, it had seemed as if I was acting. As if, at any moment, someone might come and tear the mask of respectability from my face and recognize me for the leper’s son.
•••
The day Lisette’s father led my horse into the courtyard of his château at Souboscq, I slipped from the horse’s back, touching the sand-colored earth of Gascogne for the very first time. Lisette had run into the courtyard. A little bit of a girl of the age of four, all bouncing curls and excited squeals. Her father caught her up in an embrace. He had kissed her and then turned, introducing her to me.
She grabbed him about the neck, whispering in a voice much too loud not to carry. “Does he have a name?”
“His name is Alexandre. He’s your cousin.”
“I’ve never had a cousin before.” She wriggled from his grasp, slid from his arms, and ran toward me.
I put up my hands, more to keep her from touching me than to catch her. But she ran right through them, threw herself into my arms, and kissed me on the cheek.
She kissed me.
I had never been touched before. Not that I could remember. Everyone was afraid to touch the leper’s son. But she kissed me on the cheek. And it made me feel as if everything would be all right. As if I would be all right. Right there, in the middle of the yard, she had redeemed me.
Chapter 8
Katharina Martens
Lendelmolen, Flanders
In the morning, after prayers and after the taking of bread, we washed.
We washed our faces and our hands. Scrubbed at them: forehands, palms, fingertips. Especially our fingertips. We washed three times a day. Three times a day to protect the lace from ourselves. To keep it from being corrupted.
We held them up to Sister for inspection.
Mathild was stopped.
The Sister frowned. Spoke two words: Chilblains. Go.
I grimaced at the pronouncement. It would not do to have an ulcer rupture all over the lace.
Mathild left my side and soon disappeared down the hall in the direction of the infirmary. I had been there only once. It was a room filled with warmth and all manner of good smells, but it was not a room I wanted to visit often. Too many visits there and soon, one did not return. There had been many over the years who had not come back: Elizabeth, Aleit, Johanna. Beatrix, Jacquemine, and Martina. I did not know what had happened to them.
Their names had never been spoken, but their absence had been noted. And with each disappearance, there always fell a sort of…dread.
The rest of us left the shelter of the abbey and walked through the wind and rain, water sloshing into our clogs along the way.
Once inside, we passed the cows and the pigs. Secure in their pens on the ground level, they munched on hay and slops. We climbed the tall, narrow steps to the loft, elbows pointed toward the soiled, daub walls in case of stumbling. We were forbidden to touch anything with our hands. Least not until we sat with our pillows and put our bobbins to work.
I could touch my lace but once, and that was during the creation of it. The completion of each twist and each cross meant the stitch was mine no longer. The smallest speck of dust could mark it. The slightest smear of dirt could stain it. At all costs, I had to save it from myself. Yet for the time I worked on it, while I created it, the lace was mine. It was mine until it spilled over the edge of my pillow and disappeared into the silk pouch where it was collected.
As we ascended that steep stair, the odor of our animal neighbors grew…but so did the warmth of the air. Without them we might have frozen to death on our benches as we worked. There could be no fire in the fireplace. Ever. A fire produced smoke and ashes, and a hint of either would soil the lace. Far better to risk chilblains, lung fever, or worse than to risk a single ash from one sole fire.
We worked all morning as the sun’s light crept through the tall, narrow windows. I could feel it warm my face. Our hands kept their own rhythm, bobbins clicking. Our clogs scraped the floor now and then as we wriggled our toes to try to keep them warm. Across the room, I could hear Sister chant a rhyme for the children, for those learning what it meant to be a lace maker, those who still sat on a bench without hunching over a pillow. But soon…soon…they would know. And soon they would become entranced by the dance of the bobbin, enslaved by the emerging pattern of lace.
•••
Needle pin, needle pin
Stitch upon stitch,
Work the old lady out of the ditch
If she is not out as soon as I
A rap on the knuckles will come by and by
A horse to carry my lady about
> Must not look off till twenty are out.
•••
I set my own dance to the rhythm of the chant, but I went about it twice as quickly.
After a while, Sister walked over to me. I felt tension pull at the lace as I heard her draw it forth from its silk pouch. “Lovely.”
Oh, there was such joy to be had in the pronouncement of Sister’s one word. Lovely. It would live in my memory forever. It was the highest compliment I had ever been paid.
“When will it be done? Two weeks? Three, perhaps?”
I straightened. Or tried to. “…three. Weeks.” My voice it seemed had gone rusty from disuse.
She nodded.
My heart thrilled. I could feel it thumping in my throat. She had spoken to me. And I had a second reason for happiness this day. Today, my sister would walk the four hours from Kortrijk to come and visit.
I worked as quickly as I could until the noon meal. When Sister clapped, I noted in my memory the place in my pattern and then rose from the lace and followed the others down the stairs. This time, we could put our hands to the walls. It mattered not if we soiled them on the way to the refectory. They would only get dirtied with food. After, we would wash them once more before we returned to our work.
We ate quickly, as was expected in the ten minutes provided. It had been difficult to learn to eat so swiftly when I had first come, but a hollow stomach is an effective teacher. Far better to spend our time washing. Once washed, our hands were inspected. I looked for Mathild, thinking she might join us, but she did not.
Perhaps tomorrow.
Back at the workshop, I worked through one petal. Then a second. A third. And then it was time to begin my deceit. I raised my hand.
“Ja?”
I inclined my head toward the stairs.
“Go.”
I arranged my bobbins to mark my place before rising and laying my pillow on the bench. I descended the stairs, hands out. Without others in front of me, it was difficult to know where the stairs were. It would not do to stumble to my knees.
