“Child,” she said. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I fear worse than a ghost, Sister.”
She nodded. “Common in Bamberg now.”
In the warm morning light, the memories of last night were fading fast. No, not memories, a nightmare. Heinrich was fine. I was fine.
This was my punishment. I’d been so close to crossing that line, but God was giving me a second chance to rein in my desire. I needed to atone. I needed to help others, to drive away the gaping pit in my gut threatening to swallow me whole.
Margareta was staring at me with something like understanding in her eyes.
“Sister,” I began, my voice smaller than I intended. “I need—I wondered if you might need help in the sick house today.”
“The sick house,” she repeated. “Yes. Yes, there’s always workthere.” She set down the chamomile and wiped her hands on her apron. “Walk with me.”
We crossed the courtyard in silence. I was grateful for it as my thoughts were too tangled for conversation. Shadows lingered in my mind, and Heinrich—always Heinrich.
“You disappeared last night,” Margareta observed as we entered the sick house.
“I did.”
“And now you come to me wanting to work your hands, to be useful.” She moved to the bedside of a woman laid up with childbed fever. “There’s wisdom in that. When the mind is troubled, the body knows what to do.”
She handed me clean linen. I prepared the feverfew the way she had taught me. I’d learned much from my mother, but I had only been a child. Margareta had drawn me into the sick house more and more after the pox and slowly taught me what she knew. I’d learned much, but I also saw gaps in her knowledge, especially in matters pertaining to women.
I thought of my nightmare. I thought of how I could smell when sickness ran in the blood, deeper than a fever. How when I laid my hands on the ill, I knew exactly where they hurt, and whether I’d be able to heal it.
“Sister Margareta,” I said quietly. “Do you ever wonder if—if we’re meant to know more than the convent’s texts teach us?”
The old nun’s hands stilled, where she’d been laying a cool cloth on the woman’s brow. For a moment I thought I’d said too much, revealed too much, our short talk at the festival making me too comfortable. Then she looked at me, and her expression was complicated, filled with a sadness and ferocity all at once.
“I wonder many things,” she murmured. “I wonder why women must come to the sick house only after they’re already ill, instead of learning to tend themselves. I wonder why the Bishop’s library is locked to us, when knowledge of God should belong to all his children.” She wrung out another cloth, her movements precise. “I wonder why…women are burned for knowing the same herb-craft that I practice here, behind these walls, with the Church’s blessing.”
My breath caught.
“No, I do not wonder the last,” Margareta continued, her voice barely above a whisper. “I know why. The difference is that I am obedient. I ask permission and work within their rules, and so they call me holy instead of heretic.” She moved with a gentleness that belied the steel in her words. “Some…do not ask permission. Some know knowledge is their right, not their gift. And so they are killed for it.”
She straightened, meeting my gaze.
“Are you ever afraid?” The question slipped out before I could stop it.
She looked around the room filled with Bamberg’s ill and forgotten, those who simply had nowhere else to go.
“I have loved the minds and souls of women more than I fear the fires of men.” She let out a deep sigh.
“Now,” she said, louder, brisk again. “I need willow bark for the fever, and Goodwife Heller in the corner needs her dressing changed. Can you manage, or shall I show you?”
“I can manage,” I replied, and found that I meant it.
Chapter 11
Katharina
The chapel was cool after the close heat of the sick house. I slipped through the side door and found Heinrich already in the rectory, arranging his books on the small table where we took our lessons. Sunlight slanted through the stained glass, painting him in fragments of color—gold across his back, red along his jaw.
He looked normal, entirely himself. The same slight furrow between his brows when he concentrated, the same careful way he handled the pages of his precious books.
I waited for something to feel wrong.
