It’s what Friar Lukas said. Be patient. She doesn’t want to be patient. Aleys harnesses herself to the prie-dieu, prays and prays harder to be shown her gift. A real gift. She has to prove herself. More than fasting, more than a hair shirt. If she can’t attract followers and she can’t preach and she can’t translate, there must be something she can do. She prays for a calling to serve God that’s as clear as a clarion. Something big.
19
Aleys
“There’s fleece on the quay, a shipment of English.” Katrijn stands before Aleys in the refectory, her leather bag slung across her chest. They haven’t even finished breakfast. “I suppose you can grade grease wool? You are a draper’s daughter.”
The reminder of Papa sends an icicle down her back. Aleys swallows the last of her bread. “Iwasa draper’s daughter.”
“Well, you still have two arms. We need help with the sacks.”
“I—” Aleys wants to protest. She left home to pray, not pick wool.
“I assure you, Sister, God resides as much in the marketplace as he does in the church. Follow me.”
There’s little point in arguing with Katrijn.
Ida waits for them inside the archway, basket on her hip. She recently took the gray dress, which makes her look even smaller, her dark eyes even more intense. Aleys wonders why Ida’s not at the hospital today. It makes no sense for Ida to haul bags of fleece when they could have Cecilia.
Katrijn and Ida walk with purpose, scattering pigeons. A fishwife squints at them and spits to the side. Another draws her apron over her child’s head, and Aleys recalls the baker’s wife back home claiming that death hung in the folds of the beguines’ skirts. Outside the apothecary a group of men watches them pass. “Mertens’s wife,” someone sniggers. Even though she’s tailored her robe into a brown habit more fit for a woman, people still recognize her. Sophia was right. They need better stories.
They cross the city toward the loading docks of the canal that runs north to the seaport and the channel to England, where the fleece is sourced. The poor English have such bad soil, she’s heard, there are more sheep than men. It’s here in the Low Countries, where people are plentiful and labor is cheap, that the drapers turn filthy fleece into a wool so fine it’s coveted by kings and bishops.
The plaza is loud with horses pulling pallets across cobbles and hawkers shouting the price of eel and herring. The air is flecked with sheep dust. The familiar grassy scent of fleece spills from burlap sacks that line the plaza. That smell takes her home. For a month every year, the house smelled like a barnyard until Papa farmed out the last fleece to the professional wulle-breken, who would beat out the sheep shit until it was clean enough to card. It occurs to her that Papa might be here to meet the English shipment. If she saw him, what would she say? Part of her shrinks at the thought, but another part yearns to run into his arms. Would Papa even greet her? He might turn his back.Let her be God’s child. Her heart twists at the memory. Aleys takes a few steps into the plaza, scanning the fleece stalls on the other side. Katrijn and Ida are making their way across the crowd, but there’s no sign of her father or brothers.
Aleys turns to check behind her and stops short at the sight of the wharf crane. She’d walked right by it. The huge wooden structure leans over the canal like a great heron scanning for minnows, but instead of legs it has enormous treadwheels on each side. A rope with a large hook snakes from the crane’s beak like a strange tongue. Bobbing below is a barge stacked with barrels. Workers clamber over the stack, loosening ropes. A man grasps the swinging hook and fixes it to the topmost cask and yells “Klaar!”
There’s motion within the treadwheels. Aleys squints into the nearest one. Inside the dark wheel is a pair of boys. At least, she thinks they’re boys. They appear misshapen, with the thighs of men and the chests of children. The boys lean forward and begin to trudge up the inside of the wheel, which groans like a donkey. Slowly, the wheel turns, the rope tightens, and the top barrel rises from the stack. It’s stampedGascogne. Fine wine. These barrels journeyed under sail up the coast of France to the Low Countries before they were put on this barge to the center of Brugge.
“Quite the marvel, is it not?” A man beside her is watching the crane. He is pale, with deep-set eyes and dark curls under a black velvet cap. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw it. The ingenuity!”
“The children,” she says. “It seems cruel. Why don’t they use horses?”
“Inside the wheels?”
“Or men?”
“Dwarves, maybe. They pay the boys.”
A carter on the quay uses a hooked pole to fish the rope that holds the barrel, walking back until the strained line is bent in two and the barrel hovers above his wagon. “Laat los!” he shouts. The rope quivers with tension as the barrel twists in midair. The pair of boys stops, balances, and turns carefully. It looks for a moment like the momentum of the load will drive the wheel into a violent backward spin, and the boys with it, but they are precise as they walk in tandem, reversing the direction of the wheel. The barrel drops into place and the carter scrambles up to release the load. The children turn again and trot forward quickly as the hook swings up and back over the barge. One of the boys stumbles; the other catches his shoulder. Aleys shudders. If God is in the marketplace, he hides himself well.
“Spinning squirrels,” says the man. “That’s what people call them. By any name, the machine is magnificent. Themagna rota.”
“The great wheel,” echoes Aleys.
He turns to her and raises a brow. “Latin?”
“Mmmm.” She turns over her shoulder to look for Katrijn and Ida. Ida is clutching her basket as if she fears pickpurses in the jostling crowd. Aleys should rejoin them. They won’t like her idling with a strange man.
“Ah! I know you! You’re that woman in the begijnhof. I should have recognized your friar’s cloth. So what does that make you, exactly? A nun or a beguine?”
“I’m not a nun,” she says wearily. “I’m a Franciscan sister.”
“But where are your brothers?”
“They are—” She falters. She knows only two of them. Lukas and Hervé. She couldn’t even say where the friary is. It’s awkward to claim she’s joined the brotherhood. “They will be teaching me once they secure me my own place.” It sounds absurd, she realizes, the idea of a woman living on her own.
“I see. And what will you do? Preach Latin to the ladies?” He smirks. “You might as well lecture the sparrows. Women can’t possibly understand.” He affects a dramatic shrug. “But then, I suppose Saint Francis preached to birds.”
