A Cloud of Outrageous Blue Read online

  ALSO BY VESPER STAMPER

  What the Night Sings

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Vesper Stamper

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781524700416 (trade) — ISBN 9781524700423 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524700430

  The illustrations were created using acrylic ink, watercolor, and black colored pencil, enhanced digitally.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Vesper Stamper

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Quarter Days and the Daily Offices

  Prologue

  Winter 1348

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Spring 1349

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Summer 1349

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Autumn 1349

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedicated to Notre-Dame de Paris

  and the memory of Carl Titolo

  It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.

  —VIKTOR FRANKL

  synesthesia

  (sih-nuss-THEE-zhuh)

  n. A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.

  THE QUARTER DAYS

  Lady Day, March 25

  Saint John’s Day, June 24

  Michaelmas, September 29

  Christmas, December 25

  THE DAILY OFFICES

  Matins, Midnight Prayer, midnight

  Lauds, Dawn Prayer, 3:00 a.m.

  Prime, Early-Morning Prayer, 6:00 a.m.

  Terce, Midmorning Prayer, 9:00 a.m.

  Sext, Midday Prayer, noon

  Nones, Midafternoon Prayer, 3:00 p.m.

  Vespers, Evening Prayer, 6:00 p.m.

  Compline, Night Prayer, 9:00 p.m.

  Prologue

  The Legend of the Spring

  When the earth was newborn and the waters were being gathered together around the dry land, when no bird flew above or fish swam below, a fissure opened in the ground, and a spring emerged, heated by the fiery cauldrons beneath.

  It bubbled there happily, effervescent and warm, and when the first wanderers arrived in that place, they drank its sweet waters and were refreshed. They planted a sacred yew seedling at its edge and called the place holy.

  Now, once every generation, a bright ball of fire appeared in the sky, and shortly after, a disaster would follow—famine, pestilence or war. But though all the peoples around them fell, those who drank from the spring were spared. They venerated the spring, building it around with stone.

  Over time, attitudes changed. Hearts grew proud, and the spring was abandoned. The stones sank back into the earth, and the yew’s roots thickened over the spring. The ball of fire would flash as it always had, though few noticed. Fewer still grasped its significance. Countless thousands were lost.

  But a stream needs only one stone to change its course, just as a generation needs only one person to take notice of a warning, and avail herself of the remedy.

  This is the story of one.

  — 1 —

  Everyone in the canvas-covered cart is asleep. Four other travelers nestle into the deep straw of the wagon bed—strangers, all of us, except for a father and his son of maybe nine or ten years. The old monk there’s a snorer, and it takes him the whole trip to get his bones comfortable. When I got into this cart, the only space had been next to the woman with the gray hair, the pink fleshy face, the gentle-eyed, reticent smile. She made as much room as she could, but someone’s knee or elbow is always in my side—

  —like the proverbial thorn. That’s what Mam would have said.

  “Tusmore village,” says the driver. “Everyone out who needs a piss.”

  The monk needs help getting out, so I lend him a hand. From the gap in the cart cover, the white winter sun blinds me, and when my eyes adjust, it’s like I haven’t left Hartley Cross after all. They look the same, these villages, and each one makes me hurt for home.

  I don’t dare leave my satchel in the cart for curious eyes or fingers. It wouldn’t be right to say that all of my worldly possessions are here in my stitched-up bag. Most things I had to leave behind. The blankets. The cooking kettle. Pounce barking me home, and Juniper winding around my ankles with that deep purr. The sheep, the trees, the forest trail.

  Don’t forget the fort you built with Henry against that uprooted oak.

  Don’t forget the scent of the fields in the rain.

  Don’t
forget the crack on the daub wall that looked like a fawn’s face.

  Don’t.

  Forget.

  I reach into the satchel and run my fingers over each item until I feel the drawings I made of my parents. What’s left is barely discernible, the fine lines made with the brass stylus on fire-browned parchment, burned in a moment of anger.

  Don’t forget Da’s face. And don’t forget Mam’s face. And don’t forget baby sis’s face.

  Nor even your brother Henry’s.

  I would have stuffed the entire house into the satchel if I could. But I only took what fit—Mam’s cloak and dark woad-blue gown, the small clay honey pot Henry gave me, my best willow charcoal twigs, rolled in a piece of linen, to draw with.

  I hold the stone cross from Mason and sense his impact on it, his hands shaping and smoothing it. And don’t forget Mason’s hands.

  I may have to surrender all these things when I get to the priory, but it’s a risk worth taking—they’re all I have left of everyone I love.

  * * *

  —

  It was only yesterday, midmorning, when everything changed.

  * * *

  —

  “Edie?” Henry’s voice was alarmed. He shook me. Shook and shook. “Edie, wake up!”

  I stirred, shoved his hand off my shoulder and looked sideways at my big brother. Suddenly everything came rushing back like a tempest:

  Da’s murder.

  Mam’s death, birthing little baby sis.

  Mason avoiding me, just like the rest of the villagers.

  The fear of starvation.

  The intensifying fights with Henry as we got more and more desperate.

  Death and loss and fury and hunger.

  “Get away from me,” I grunted, rolling back over.

  “You weren’t waking up,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  Henry ignored me, grinning, almost dancing with excitement. I sat up slowly, suspicion gnawing at my belly.

  “Edie, I know where you’re going to go!”

  “Henry, we talked about this,” I reminded him. “You said we were leaving together. In the spring. You said that Lord Geoffrey would wait until then to evict us. Remember?”

  “I know, but this is better. Brother Robert’s got a prioress friend up north, and she said she’d take you in. Lord Geoffrey agreed. It’s Saint Christopher’s Priory, in Thornchester. It’s all sorted. They normally only take noblewomen, but out of charity they’ll take you as a conversa!”

  A priory?

  The word felt like a fresh, icy slap to the side of my head. And a conversa—a lay sister, a servant? So instead of being a wooler’s daughter with at least some dignity, I’d be cleaning the latrines of prissy nuns? How was that better?

  “What do you mean, it’s all sorted?” I pressed him. “Who put you in charge of me?”

  Henry looked stunned. “Da did, Edie. When they murdered him.”

  Of course it was Henry’s decision; I knew that. The moment Da died, Henry became head of house, but that didn’t really give him options. He still had to answer to Lord Geoffrey Caxton, the very man who killed our father. We were bound to Lord Geoffrey, and I was bound to Henry. But I didn’t want to accept it. Henry was only two years older than me—my brother, not my lord.

  “But don’t you understand?” he coaxed. “It’s better than we could have hoped! You and I would have been lucky to find a house half this size to let, in some strange place, scraping by on someone else’s land—we could have been beggars!”

  I tried to be calm, but I just couldn’t. “This is it, then, Henry? Sixteen years old, and the best thing I can hope for is to rot away in some convent? Where they send the old hags and toady girls? And I should be grateful? Go to hell!”

  The words singed my mouth as I spat them, and Henry flinched, all the optimism drained from his face in a moment.

  He set his jaw and spoke with an unnerving softness. “Fine, Edyth. I tried to do my best by you. If this is your thanks…then we’ll say goodbye now. The wagon will be here for you at dawn.”

  He opened the cupboard and grabbed half a loaf and filled his waterskin with ale. I had never been angry with my big brother before, my best friend, my hero—but desperation lit one last flaming arrow on my tongue.

  “Traitor! It’s you and me, Edie,” I mocked his childhood promise. “What a lie! You don’t care about anyone but yourself! It’s Henry and Henry, and to hell with little sister! Edyth, Edyth, Round and Red, might as well be left for dead!”

  Henry turned and gave me a look I’d never seen. Something about the muscles in his face made him look much older than eighteen, like fate had cornered and caged him. He clenched his teeth and his muscles pulsed; he sniffed hard, walked quickly out of the house and slammed the door to my enraged scream.

  I sank to the floor, skirts in a pool around me, and cried.

  * * *

  —

  The day darkened early. A raindrop hung pregnant from the edge of the windowsill, all silvers except for a thin strip of rainbow edging its metal belly, and I could feel those colors on my tongue, like the time when I tried licking the edge of the cold kettle, just to see if it tasted like I thought it would: yes, like blood and ash, like the dark brown stripes that appeared at the outsides of my eyes. That was when Mam could stir things in the kettle, the green alexanders with the fresh spring butter. She could stir things in a kettle, because she was alive.

  That was when Da was alive, too, and he would dip the hardest edges of the brown bread and sop up the iron-tinged butter, and it would drop in his beard and glisten there for a bit, until he’d grab the corner of Mam’s apron and wipe his mouth proper, like a gentleman.

  But my father was no gentleman, much as Mam would have liked him to be. He was stout and red-bearded and loud and butter-drippy. Da, with a belly like the raindrop, with a belly rivaling Mam’s, carrying the child that would end her life.

  * * *

  —

  Nothing can be done about it now. Come spring, Lord Caxton will turn Henry out, and someone else will be living in that house where I was born. Someone else will make their pottage on our fire, rise their bread dough in our proofing pot. But before the next family moves in, they’ll bring the priest to cleanse the house of the evil that once resided there, the scourge that caused a whole family to fail.

  — 2 —

  Somewhere in Derbyshire, the road beneath us changes suddenly from packed dirt to bumpy stone and jostles everyone awake to a harmony of groans. Little lightning bolts shoot at my vision with every crash of the wheels. The stones of the old Roman way are at odd angles, and the driver eventually moves off to the grass just to avoid them. Days upon days have passed, and we are all road-sore.

  “Stopping,” says the driver, pulling in through a town gate. “I’ll go find a tavern. Wait here.”

  He’s taking a while, so I jump out and stretch my legs. The town’s not a large one. But it’s eerily quiet, except for some skinny horses and sheep in the streets. The driver comes back with a distant look on his face.

  “Strange,” he says. “Town’s empty. Old man told me to stay out—everyone’s dead. Some kind of illness…he’s the only one left.”

  Dead. That’s a word I’ve heard too often this year. I tuck my face into the hood of Mam’s cloak and will her to be alive for me, just for this moment, while we shake the dust of the town off our feet.

  * * *

  —

  After Henry left that last day, the wattle gate crackled open and a pair of shoes shuffled on the flagstone. I was afraid of being alone in the house like that. No one could be trusted, and no one was asking for my trust, anyway. Henry and Edyth le Sherman were poison people, not to be pitied, only shunned.

  Once I was sure the stranger was gone, I rose slow
ly from the hearth and cracked the door open. On the threshold, placed on a thin layer of fresh snow, was a wooden box. Inside was a kettle of just-made porridge, steaming hot. A loaf of bread, some dried apples and a cheese. A thick woolen blanket, a little moth-eaten. Two pairs of old knit mittens. A palm-sized cross carved from stone.

  Mason.

  * * *

  —

  Is that sort of kindness even possible now, where I’m headed? I’ve heard about priories, vast and cold, where women go to hollow out and shrivel until their skin’s like the parchment of their prayer books.

  A place where I’ve got to hear day and night about God.

  After He took every good thing from me, to make me go to the very place I can’t escape Him? It’s like giving vinegar to someone dying of thirst.

  * * *

  —

  At the edge of town, by a bend in the river, Mason and his da lived in a house smaller than mine. Mason’s mam died when he was very young, and not one to stand on ceremony or comfort, Old John chopped off a third of their house and burned the walls as fuel. Piles of different kinds of stone lay in the yard. A small barn barely held a horse and its tack. Mason’s people weren’t crofters like us; they earned wages or were paid in kind, so there was a meager kitchen garden but not much land. Besides, stonemasons travel where the work is, so home was a relative concept.