by Iris Anthony
The woman straightened as we stepped into the place.
“That’s Gertrud. And this…” The man gestured to me as he hung his cap on a hook and shrugged off his cloak. “This is…a Frenchman.”
“Alexandre.” It didn’t matter that I was a Lefort. In these circumstances, I might as well have been a Girard.
“He’s to help me with repairing the dike.”
She cast a glance toward me and then went back to stirring a kettle that hung over the fire.
“I told him he could have a corner to sleep in.”
She deigned to give me a longer look this time, as if I merited further inspection. After she was done, she turned toward the man. “I’ll give him some straw, as well, if he’ll plug that hole in the roof.”
The man raised a brow at me.
I nodded
“He’ll do it.”
“Fine. That’s fine.” She took a bowl from a sideboard and ladled something into it from the kettle. Then she set the bowl in the middle of the board, which sat in the center of the room. One of the two girls helping her pulled some bread from the fire and swept the ashes from it. The other had busied herself with carrying the smallest of the children toward the table.
The man spoke a blessing and then broke the bread. The woman divided it among the family and then gave me the hard, ash-stained end. Once everyone else had dipped their bread into the bowl, it was pushed down to me. I sopped up the remainder and ate it, then followed it with several sips from a jug of beer. There being no cloth, I wiped my fingers on the hem of my doublet.
Afterward, the woman nodded toward a ladder I might have had trouble climbing in the best of conditions. “You’ll find the hole up there, in the loft.”
I wish I could say I made quick work of the task, but climbing the ladder seemed to wrench every aching bone in my body, and examining the hole in the loft’s dim light didn’t make the work easy. Once I found the hole, I didn’t know what to do about it. My experience had to do with forest living and stone-walled châteaux.
“Fallen on hard times, has he?” The woman’s voice carried up to the loft through the sizeable gaps between the floorboards.
“Nee. I rather think he’s trying to come up in the world, to advance himself.”
I poked at the hole glumly. The man had got it right: I was a fellow who had been hoping to advance himself. Now I was just a fellow who was hoping to survive.
It felt as if the hole had been made from the slipping of a tile. Reaching up past the roof into the rain, I pulled the tile back into place, sending a stream of water down my arm and dampening my shirt in the process. I finished the work from the inside, by thrusting my fist at the tile and using that jarring motion to close the final gap.
The woman fulfilled her promise. As I bedded down for the night, I fluffed up my straw, settled my cloak about my shoulders, and then closed my eyes. When sleep came, it brought with it a desperate longing for Lisette, who could mock me with a teasing glance and then redeem me with a single touch. Were she to see me now, she would know without doubt I was not worthy of redemption.
•••
Due to the interminable rains, it took a full two weeks to mend the farmer’s dike. By the end of the first day’s work, I began to suspect the sun never shone on this miserable place. We wrestled mud into the cart to transport it to the banks of the canal, only to pack it into the dike and watch it slide away, down into the waters with the constant, dripping rains.
There was no work we did that the rain did not undo. I fell onto my corner of straw each night, exhausted both in body and in spirit, filled with a sense of complete and utter defeat. Each new day saw us starting again to repair the same washed-out place. “How is it that you stay here?” I asked the question one especially frustrating afternoon, when thunder rumbled in the distance and the sky was more parsimonious than usual with its light.
Sweat and rain comingled, so when I paused to wipe my brow, I could not say whether I was swiping away evidence of my own spent efforts or the heavens’. Rivulets of the stuff had turned my locks into channels, directing streams of water down my brow to either side of my nose. These streams ran down into the canal waters that pooled and eddied around my thighs. The more I labored, the greater I added to my own discomfort. “How do you do it?” I could not imagine one more hour, one more day trying so strenuously to delay the inevitable advance of water toward the family’s hut.
The man sent me a bleak look. “Don’t you mean to ask why?”
I didn’t have the energy to shrug, and the phrasing of the question mattered little to me. The how and the why were not so very different things when my hands were coated in layers of muck and I had been standing, for hours, in water that surpassed my knees.
“I tell you, Frenchman, there is nowhere else to go.”
Nowhere else to go.
That, I could understand. What would compel a man to fight God and nature, to wrestle with mud and rain, to wrest from the sea land that was never meant to be seen? Only the fact that there was no other choice. If he wished to survive at all, he must do the impossible, must spend his life doing the unbearable. He must try through any means, be they useless or futile, to bring reason to such insanity.
There was nowhere else to go, therefore a living must be stolen from the sea.
I could find no greater logic, and I could imagine no better answer. Things must be as they were simply because that’s the way they are. And so, standing in that murky canal, with rain pouring down upon my head, I laughed as I had never laughed before. I laughed until I wept, my tears mixing with my sweat and with the rain. It all streamed down my face and joined the water, which did not care from where it had come, and only added, in the end, to my work.
There was nowhere else to go.
How exactly right that my journey had ended here. There was nothing in the world for me now except this one thing. This one task: to finish repairing an irreparable dike. And after that, to deliver a length of lace to the Count of Montreau. And after that? There was no inheritance; there was no château; there was no home.
But I would do what I had to, simply because I must.
The load of mud we had just packed into the dike slid down the embankment and was swept away by the canal.
•••
There was no way to come clean after such work. The water from the well was nearly as muddied as the ground itself. And yet I knelt in front of it every evening, trying to rid myself of the day’s mire. The farmer regarded me silently that first evening and then left me to my own devices after that.
By the fourth night, I had rubbed all the hair off my arms, and my skin had gone red from my efforts. The fifth night I’d borrowed a knife to clean my fingernails. The tip had gouged furrows beneath the nails, which subsequent days of work had filled in with dirt.
By the end of that first week, I had given myself an even more thorough scrubbing, for I had determined to visit the abbey to inquire after my lace. I nearly flayed my own skin in the doing of it. While trying to excavate the dirt from beneath my nails, I’d pried one of them entirely off my finger. And there was an ooze that issued from the places where I had scrubbed the top layer from my skin.
“Stop this foolishness!” I looked up from examining the damage to find the farmer’s wife staring down at me. “What are you trying to get shed of? It’s only the remnants of God’s good earth.” She gestured to the lesions I was trying to scrub clean. “Are you too good for God? Is that it?”
Too good for God?
“You’re only harming yourself. And besides, you can only be as clean as you are.”
For the first time in memory, I felt shame on account of my washing. I’d always known it had marked me as odd, but I had also figured it had left me purer than the others around me. It had left me clean. But here, washing was as usel
ess a task as trying to mend the dike. I would find myself just as dirty the next day. And quite soon, in fact, I would run out of skin.
I poured water into my hand and then splashed it onto my face. Rubbed it into the beard so new it itched. I looked a proper Dutchman now. Not even Lisette would recognize me. “The Flemish are known for being clean, are they not?”
“Ja.” She nodded. “But even we can see where good sense lets off and madness begins. You keep yourself so clean you’ve begun to grow ill from it.” She circled a finger above her ear as she spoke.
If the leprosy were going to take me, wouldn’t it already have done so? If any were going to discover my paternity, wouldn’t they have already done it by now?
“Clean your face, clean your hands. Wash your clothes once in a while, and be done with it. You can’t be rid of it all. Not this time of year. And besides, you’re frightening the children.”
I leaned to look around her skirts and saw the children peering from the door.
You can’t be rid of it all.
Was that what I had been trying to do? Rid myself of all traces of my father? Shed this skin of mine to hide the truth of my past? To be someone I was not?
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I could only be as clean as I was.
Chapter 15
Katharina Martens
Lendelmolen, Flanders
One day as we sat upon the benches, side by side, I heard a rustling from Mathild. She cried out as I heard her bobbins hit the floor.
The unthinkable had happened!
She had dropped her pillow. All of her work would have to be discarded now. Though every precaution was taken to keep the workshop clean, it was inconceivable that the lace could have survived its contact with the floor. I could have wept from the injustice of it all. That such a beautiful creation should be cast aside.
“What’s that?” I heard Sister tapping across the floor, and I clutched at my own pillow so I wouldn’t be accused of having lost mine, as well.
“Mathild?”
Mathild pressed herself against me.
“Go!”
Mathild rose, but as she tried to leave, she must have stumbled, for she fell to the floor.
“Help me.” For the first time, I heard her speak without whispering. I heard her words fully. Clearly. But her voice was dead. It had no life.
“Get up!”
“I can’t.”
“Now!”
“I can’t. My clogs—the threads!”
“You’re making a mess of it. Of everything.”
She had gotten to her knees, right below my feet, I could tell by the way her shoulder bumped into my own knee. She was weeping. “I can’t…I can’t see.”
“Come.” The shape of Sister leaned over and grabbed Mathild’s arm, pulling her from the floor. She tugged so hard, Mathild stepped right out of her clogs. I knew it because I heard the shuffle of bare feet against the floor. Sister kept on walking toward the stairs. But then she paused. “Katharina.”
I raised my head toward the sound of her voice.
“Watch. Keep watch.”
I nodded, though I knew I could see no better than Mathild. I opened my mouth to speak, but I knew not what to say. And so I said nothing. And the work continued around me as always. In spite of the mess on the floor. In spite of the emptied pair of clogs.
When Sister returned, she took up Mathild’s pillow and set it on the bench beside me. Soon another girl, a younger girl, came over from across the room to take her place.
Mathild didn’t join us for prayers, and she didn’t join us for supper. When I fell onto my pallet that night, that same new girl from the workshop was there in Mathild’s place.
•••
I climbed the stairs the next day as the last of the girls, the oldest of the lace makers. I wondered then, what might happen to me.
And what had happened to Mathild.
Had she joined the shouting voices beyond the abbey wall?
And was it true what Heilwich had said? Did the girls who left the workshop turn their efforts to vile things?
What vile things? Did they make messes and defy orders and make people late?
I could not imagine such a life. But more than that, I could not imagine a life without lace. My sister had said she would see me freed. But freed from what? If I did not make lace, then what would I do?
I could not see. Not everything. Not most things. What would I do out in the middle of a city filled with shouting people? What could I do?
I began to know a certain anxiety. It disrupted my work and turned the dancing of the bobbins into lurching as my fingers faltered. And so, I determined not to think upon it. Not to imagine the world outside the wall. Why should I?
I loved lace.
Lace was my life. It was the reason for my existence.
What else had I been created to do? If God in his mercy had granted me life, then surely it was to do this. To create exquisite, beautiful lace was my duty, my sacred trust. That’s what the nuns had told me.
That’s what I believed.
And so why would God rob me of this one task? The only task I could perform, the only reason for which I was created? Surely he would not do such a thing. I loved lace.
Mathild had not.
It was not so much her failure to make the lace that had betrayed her. It was her failure to love it. For how could the memory of that which you loved desert you? Even with the coming of perpetual darkness, how could those patterns fail to illumine the way?
But throughout that day, as I fumbled with my bobbins and resorted to checking the count of my stitches with my fingers, I realized I was no longer an aid but an obstacle to what I created. It could no longer be made with me…and it could certainly not be created without me.
The dance was nearly done.
In that moment, I realized my great sin. Pride. Vanity. It was not my love of lace that had enabled me to do great work, it was very great pride that had deceived me. I was no better than Mathild, no better than any lace maker in the workshop. I was just more vain. But I smiled as I bent closer to my work. Perhaps, there was yet a certain humility in my vanity. I did not need to be known. It was enough that the lace had a chance to leave, had a chance to live and be loved. Nee. It did not matter. Not to me. No one had to know my name.
•••
The three weeks Heilwich had given me were almost up. She spoke as she shoved a loaf of bread through the wall for me. “I know I promised to get you out, but I haven’t got the money just yet. Not all of it.”
“I’m almost done with the lace.”
“Almost done?” Heilwich yelled the words at me. “But I’m not ready for you to be done! You can’t be done.”
“They don’t know I’m almost done. I haven’t told them yet.” I didn’t want to be parted from the lace. I hoped God would forgive me.
“Good. Good! Don’t tell them. You can’t tell them until I have the money.”
“But they’re going to know. They’ll check soon, and I won’t be able to hide it.”
“When?”
“On Saturday. They check on Saturdays.” Unless we told them before that. “For certain by then I’ll be finished.”
“Saturday! I don’t know if I can get the money by Saturday. And in any case, I can’t be here on a Saturday. Father Jacqmotte would never let me come. Not with all the preparations to be done for Sunday. It takes me half the day to get here and then back. But…what will happen when they find out you’ve finished?”
“They’ll give me another pattern.”
“Then start on the new pattern.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”
“Why not!”
“Because…” I hated it when Heilwich yelle
d at me. This was all her doing, anyway. All of this deceiving and hiding things. “If it’s not a pattern I’ve made before, I won’t know how to do it. I have to be able to see the pattern to work it.”
“For certain you do.” Her voice had softened.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Here’s what you don’t do. Don’t leave the abbey.”
“But how do I stay?”
“If they don’t check until Saturdays, then you’re safe until this Saturday. When will they give you the new pattern?”
“On Monday.”
“Then you have to pretend until then. Can you do that? Can you pretend you’re doing what you’re supposed to?”
If I pretended, then I wouldn’t be doing what I was supposed to, would I? “I don’t know…”
“Maybe…can you just…do it slower?”
“Why?”
“So they won’t throw you out of the abbey! Least not until I can come and get you out myself.”
“They wouldn’t do that. Sister wouldn’t do that. Not to me.”
Her hand came through the wall and grabbed at my own. “Just promise me. Promise you’ll do it.”
“Fine. I’ll try.”
“Don’t try, Katharina. Do. You must do this for me. For you.”
“I…will.”
“You can’t let them know until Saturday, understand?”
“I guess—”
“This is important, Katharina! Until Saturday. Whatever you do, you can’t let them know about your eyes.”
“I won’t. I won’t tell.”
•••
Don’t work so fast.
But how could I do my work to the best of my ability unless I worked as quickly as I could? Wasn’t that being slothful? And wouldn’t Sister notice? She had trusted me to finish the lace, and now Heilwich wanted me to be late.
I tried to do as Heilwich said. I truly did. But I couldn’t. Not once the bobbins began their dance. Even as artlessly as I now moved them, they insisted upon keeping their own rhythm. And it was only as we headed down the stairs of an evening that I remembered my promise to my sister.
