“I’m to be your maid, miss.” Marte does not look cheerful for it. But Marte never looks cheerful.
“I thought it was to be Cecilia. She’s not ill, is she?”
Marte snorts. “Off to be married.”
“To whom?” She recalls the scene at the brewery. “Rolf?”
Marte shakes her head. “No, miss, a Frenchman. She met him at the hospital, on the traveler’s side.” She scowls. “She’ll be off to Paris.”
“It was sudden, then?”
“As a pestilence.”
Aleys laughs. “You think so well of marriage?”
Marte gives a dour grimace. “Head lice were better, miss. Your pottage.” She shoves it through the window. “I’ll just wait here while you eat it.”
“Let us pray together.”
Marte backs up a step. “I’m not taught in church prayer, miss. You pray. I’ll just listen and be the better for it.”
“You attend the evening readings.”
“I like the stories, miss. Doesn’t mean I know to pray like you.”
“You could learn.”
“The beguines’ school is meant for those who will take the gray dress. Or children. One like me”—she shrugs a round shoulder, looks at the bowl on the sill—“I earn my keep.”
“Well, then, I could—”
“That’s kind of you, miss. I thank the Lord for my food and ask him to see me through the night. That’s enough for the likes of me. The Lord needn’t pay me extra attention. That’s for you saints.”
Aleys sighs. “I’m not a saint.”
“Well, you’re something out of the ordinary, miss. Healing them lepers and all.”
“I didn’t heal any lepers.” Not that she knows of, anyway.
“That’s not what the lepers say. Some of them have thrown away their rattles. You can’t hear them coming anymore. Like as to bump into one of them round any corner.” Marte clamps her mouth shut, like she’s used more than her allotted words.
“Miss, you won’t be letting your porridge go cold. I hurried over with it warm.”
At first, the anchoress is a novelty. Crowds gather outside the hold, shove their way into the parlor, whisper plaints through the curtained window. Aleys might as well be the local apothecary taking orders for simples. She never sees the people; they speak to her through the dark square, and she must imagine them old or young or hale or infirm from the pitch and rasp of their voices. The windowsill forms the border between her hold and the disembodied, clamoring need in the parlor. Those who breach that no-man’s-land, who try to brush the curtains aside, find that the saint in the box won’t hesitate to crush their fingers with a snap of her wooden shutter.
From the street, people peer through the horn window, their silhouettes hovering indistinct against the panes. Aleys schools herself not to shrink back; she knows they can’t actually see inside. But sometimes they knock to get her attention. It’s unsettling. She tells herself that the town’s fascination will wear off. It’s like a first snow. People come out to gape at December’s flakes, but soon her presence will be February slush, taken for granted.
They come for blessings, they come for kitchen table advice.
“He stole my goose.”
“Her ill temper curdles the milk.”
“There is this small matter of debt to the guild, nothing untoward, but I wondered if he might consider ... ?”
“I have this carbuncle, see?”
She cannot see, thank heaven. She is protected by the black curtains. Without sight, without touch, the healing tingle comes less and less to her fingers. The people don’t know that. They still believe. She yearns for nighttime, to be left alone with her prayers.
