A Cloud of Outrageous Blue Read online

  It’s you and me, Edie. Those words make my heart ache now.

  That was the day I knew, really knew. It wasn’t just how the sounds and smells brought on the colors. I was different in every way possible: my dark frizzy hair that wouldn’t stay put; my stupid overbite and apple cheeks; the way I had to draw all the time, on everything. The games the others played, their awful jokes, how the Other Girls talked about boys in that way—that’s what I was supposed to do. That’s who I was supposed to be. I just couldn’t sort out how.

  * * *

  —

  In Hartley Cross, at least I knew what I was dealing with. But what if the sisters here at Saint Christopher’s are just like the Other Girls at home, only with different faces, different names?

  My face flushes and sweat pools in my armpits, every sound too loud, too loud. I’ll sit on the outside like always, sweating through the linen, sweating through the wool.

  But someone comes into the empty space between: Alice sits down next to me as Agnes dismisses the chapter meeting.

  “I’ll help you with your Latin,” she says.

  “Oh.” I blush. “Thanks, Alice, but you don’t have to do that. The sub-prioress said I’m not going to need it, since I’m just a worker.”

  “But even the conversae go to the offices and Mass. Don’t you want to understand what you’re praying?”

  A thousand nights of bedtime prayers with Mam swirl into my memory. The night she died was the last time I prayed. The last time I tried to understand.

  “Why?”

  “So you can…you know, talk to God?” Alice makes it sound so obvious.

  I feign nonchalance. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “That’s what prayer is…”

  “No, I know that. I’m not that stupid.” I smirk. “I mean, why would I want to talk to Him? We don’t have anything to say to each other anymore.”

  “Oh,” says Alice, disappointed. “Well…all the same, it’s Latin, Latin everywhere. And it’ll keep the sub-prioress off your back if you just know it, that’s all.”

  That’s as good a reason as any, I suppose. “All right.”

  * * *

  —

  She’s a good teacher, Alice is. She knows—really knows—the language. Not just the translations of the words, but the meaning behind the passages. For some reason, Sub-Prioress Agnes’s teaching muddles my mind, and I usually leave class feeling dumber. But Saint Benedict’s instructions make sense coming from Alice. After a few weeks of her tutelage, I follow along pretty well in class, and I think Agnes is even a little impressed.

  — 8 —

  It’s a warm day for winter; little puffs of cloud hang around everyone’s faces, but outside’s warmer than the church, so we have class in the cloister. The courtyard flits like the inside of a beehive. Sisters swish down the corridors or poke at patches of bare soil in hopes of seeing some early green.

  We recite from after terce until sext, memorize from after the midday meal until nones. The endless rote memorization helps me brace against the grief that comes when I least expect it. I welcome the constant interruption of the day. The moment I begin to drift into thoughts about my family, or Mason, the warning bell rings, and I drop everything and go to the daily office—and forget again, at least for a while.

  Forget Da’s body swinging above the river.

  Or Mam lying lifeless, the baby suckling at her anyway.

  Every now and then I see a man, usually a workman, inside the cloister, which is jarring after days upon days of being solely in the company of women. There’s Father Johannes, the priest who performs the daily Mass, leaving the church and returning to his own house by the gatehouse. And there’s the old monk from my journey here, but other than the church or the refectory, I don’t know where he comes from or where he goes.

  Alice and I sit on the ledge in a corner of the cloister and quiz each other. I can’t imagine anyone more knowledgeable than Alice—her flawless recitation, her insights, just how many things she knows about. It’s not limited to books, either. There are girls and women here for all kinds of reasons, and Alice seems to have the dirt on every one of them.

  “I’ve had a revelation, Edyth,” she says, looking down at her book and pretending to recite. “You’ve basically got three categories of people here: I call them the Pious, the Privileged and the Pitiful.”

  “So how can you tell who’s who?”

  “Oh, you can spot the Privileged easily. They’re just like whatever priggish girls you knew back home, always judging you but always changing the rules. And the Pious, they keep to themselves, like Mary over there.” She points to a girl daintily turning the pages of her Rule with her pinky up. “As for the Pitiful, well, you’d never guess, but Beatrice there, they say she’s got a baby back home by a baron. He gave a big donation to put her away here. Poor thing.”

  “Lord, that’s awful.” I cringe.

  “They’re the unmarriageable daughters, the ones no one else wants.”

  “I guess I’m kind of in the Pitiful category myself.”

  “Oh, come on,” she chides. “Give yourself a chance.”

  I shrug it off. “What about you?”

  “Let’s do our recitation,” she dodges with a wink.

  We turn to today’s lesson and I read the Latin, still halting, but better.

  “Decimus humilitatis gradus est, si non sit facilis ac promptus in risu.”

  Alice looks up and smiles. “The tenth step to humility is to avoid laughter,” she translates in a whisper. She nudges me mischievously. “I’ll never last.”

  Suddenly a great cry goes up in the cloister, and we all go running down the corridor. The sub-prioress herself is on the ground, holding a young nun in her arms.

  “He crouches there in the shadows,” the girl pants, gesturing above her head. “The dragon…fire glowing in his iron belly…spitting hot coals at me!”

  The colors of her voice shake like shimmering flame. I could almost believe her—some nuns keep vigils and stay awake for days until they begin to see things. Creatures. Beings from another realm.

  That kind of orange-sparked fury has appeared to me once before, on the day I fought with Da—the day everything began to unravel.

  * * *

  —

  The sun was well past noon. All morning I had vacillated between tears and growls—Da had said there was no future with Mason. Now that Da had been named reeve, he said it was our chance to raise our prospects.

  “I won’t allow this family to go backward,” he’d said. “He’s a wanderer, Edyth. All stonemasons are. If we were still just a family of sheep shearers, he would be a fine choice. But I’m telling you that we must wait and find someone more appropriate. I won’t have you leaving Hartley Cross. Your mam needs you here when the baby comes. Put him out of your mind. Forget about the Mason boy.”

  That afternoon, I sat on the threshold, furiously carding wool, my body hot with anger. Then I heard a little sound, like the distant scurrying of a mouse at first, padding and scratching down the garden path. The noise rapidly changed and grew voices: a celebration? A wedding?

  Well, now I know that’ll never be me, I thought.

  Shouts and hollers exploded from the roar of a crowd, an orange-sparked cloud of men’s voices rolling up the hill. The ground beneath my feet popped with the energy, not of reveling, but of rage, and it lit into me and I bolted out of the wattle gate. As I ran, I saw more sparks, pocks of flame rising from a mob rushing down the high street.

  Thief!

  Liar!

  Traitor!

  In their midst, the gray eye in the firestorm, was the hooded and roped victim of their fury.

  My mind went crazy with the cacophony of crowd color. I hated public hangings; I’d seen a dozen criminals hung from this bridge over the years
. But I ran toward the growing throng anyway. I jumped along the fringe of the crowd, trying to get a glimpse as they willed themselves, one throbbing entity, onto the wooden bridge. The men were all from Hartley Cross. The miller wrapped a noose of heavy rope and handed it to Lord Geoffrey, who shoved it down over the hooded head and tied the other end to the rail. There was no chance the victim could break free of his bonds; down was the only way out of this.

  I ran around the bridge to the riverbank and stood shin-deep in the water, my skirts waving in the current like fish tails. Just as the men hoisted the condemned man up onto the bridge rail, I saw something flash in the sun: a familiar bronze belt buckle under a round belly.

  The mob pushed the man from the railing, and he dropped into the frothing river, flailing there, wet only to the knees, until the violent splashing gave way to a gentler wake, and finally stillness, as the water ebbed against the unresisting body. Lord Geoffrey reached over the railing and pulled off the sackcloth hood. Red hair and beard tumbled over the scarlet, bulging face.

  Da.

  Currents of green life lapped at my ankles and surged up my body: the last of my father’s life, washing out into the river soil.

  “See there, men?” spat Lord Geoffrey. “There’s justice yet! Reeve Edgar le Sherman, honest and fair,” he mocked, “defrauding his own fellows for gain. Funneling my money to a Flemish woolers’ uprising! Remember this: anyone who steals from a lord steals bread from your own table. Today you did your duty and caught the thief!”

  A righteous cry went up from the mob.

  The sting of the cold water waved up into my feet and I froze to the spot in the muck.

  “From this point on, shun his family!” With that, Lord Geoffrey shot a look directly at me. I hadn’t been aware of how conspicuous I was. “Let no one come to their aid—let them beg or starve!”

  “But my mam…the baby—” I didn’t know where the words were coming from, since I was outside my body.

  What was happening?

  Just then, a woman’s wail threaded through the venomous cheers. Mam. My mother was coming, her legs buckling as she leaned the full weight of herself and her unborn baby on Henry’s arm. The crowd dispersed at the appearance of the pregnant widow they’d just made, shame turning their heads this way and that.

  Two figures stood alone on the bridge: Mam and Henry, looking over the rail at the eddying body below them. Henry rushed into the water and grabbed our father around the waist, trying to sort out a way to get him down. He spotted me on the other side of the river.

  “Edyth!” he called. “Help me!”

  Like a statue coming to life, I took a step toward Henry, but the riverbed dropped, too deep to wade across.

  “Go up and cut the rope!” Henry shouted. I took my knife from my belt, ran up to the bridge and hacked at the rope. My face burned and I could barely breathe. The damn thing was too thick. I sawed and sawed, cursing the rope, tears and snot and spit everywhere, the sparks so furious I couldn’t see past them. Mam sat on the ground, her huge stomach resting on her outspread legs, hands helplessly at her sides, howling and howling.

  At last the rope’s inner core snapped, and the current jerked Henry and Da forward.

  “Edyth! Get down here!” Henry hollered.

  I ran back around and plunged into the water. Together we lugged our father’s body to the bank. We sat stunned and soaked and panting.

  “Wait here,” said my brother. “I’ll go home and get the cart.”

  I stayed under the bridge with my father’s body, my mother above, watching the frayed rope flap in the wind. Two women alone, as alone as could be, the water flowing on as ever before.

  * * *

  —

  Henry and Mason dug the grave under an oak tree, with Da’s own sleeping sheep the only other witnesses to his funeral. Brother Robert did his ministrations, sprinkling the body and the rest of us with hyssop and holy water. We all helped slide the homemade coffin off the cart. Then I saw it.

  One of the planks of Da’s coffin had been cut from my drawing board. Right there, by his head, was a drawing of me and Mason sitting on the church wall.

  “No,” I cried out loud.

  Mason came and put his arm around me, but I shrugged it away. All I could think was that my last words with Da had been a fight over this boy. He nodded sadly and joined Henry instead. They lowered the open coffin into the grave, and the clouds parted, barely, to reveal a sliver of moon.

  * * *

  —

  The sparks of the memory settle like fiery snow and disappear into the stone pavement of the cloister. My heart pounds in pain.

  Sub-Prioress Agnes holds the terrified girl until she calms, then rises and sends her on her way with a kiss of peace. I’ve absently drawn a dragon on the parchment sheet in my psalter. Alice takes it from me before I can stop her.

  “Pitiful,” whispers Alice.

  “What?”

  “I guess you’d act that way, too, if you’d gone through what Felisia did,” she says, examining the drawing.

  “Who?” My ears are still ringing.

  “That…dragon girl,” she says, waving her name away. Before Alice can say more, Agnes approaches us, and Alice shoves the drawing under her book.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that, girls,” says the sub-prioress. “Felisia has a tendency toward the dramatic. People like her have a long journey of penance ahead of them.” She excuses herself and goes on her way.

  “I can’t sort it,” says Alice, gazing again at the drawing.

  “Sort what? It’s a dragon. See? That’s the head—”

  “No, I mean the sub-prioress. She changes like the weather. I mean—one minute, she’s praising you, the next, she’s cracking the whip. Who is she?”

  “I think she’s all right,” I suggest. “Strict, maybe, but she’s in charge, after all.”

  “But everybody gets quiet when she comes in the room, waits for her to speak, hangs on her every word. And she loves it; you can tell. I don’t trust people like that.”

  “Well, what I want to know is, where is the actual prioress? Isn’t she supposed to be running things?”

  “Prioress Margaret? She’s never here,” says Alice. “But it would be nice if she’d come home once in a while.”

  “Although you know what they say,” I counter. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

  — 9 —

  The new year comes, and with it I turn seventeen. My birthday’s right on the feast of the Epiphany, and there are dried figs at breakfast, left over from Twelfth Eve. I slip one into my sleeve for later. Make that two.

  After breakfast, Agnes de Guile announces a meeting for the novices and conversae, and we all gather at the lectern. The rest of the community files out to begin their work.

  “Girls,” she says, “we’ve been watching each of you since you arrived to identify your unique gifts and where you will serve best. I am happy to announce your work assignments.” We all grin and some of the girls bounce on their toes. I’m curious to know where Agnes sees me fitting in here.

  “Right,” she begins, “we’ll start with the sacristy. To work there is a great privilege. Not only will this person care for the holy vessels and vestments, but she will be in the presence of the Body and Blood themselves. This is entrusted to…Beatrice.” Agnes hands the girl a small parchment sealed with a linen tassel.

  “Next: working in the library means being trustworthy with knowledge, and not leading seekers astray. Mary, this honor is yours. You’ll report to the armaria, the head librarian, in the scriptorium tower.

  “Felisia,” she continues, “you will be my assistant. I will personally teach you penance and help you through your troubles.” We all smile with pity at Felisia, whose eyes brim with grateful tears.

  “The ca
re of the medicine garden requires encyclopedic knowledge, and responsibility for life and death. Alice Palmer, you will apprentice to Joan, our physician.” I’m happy for Alice; this is perfect for her. She beams with satisfaction.

  All the girls smile at the honors they’ve been given, the way they’ve been noticed, the parchments with their names written on them. In Hartley Cross, women might be masters, like Mam with her weaving, but no one was going to give Mam a parchment with her name on it.

  I wonder what mine will say.

  “Edyth le Sherman, such an…earthy girl deserves a commensurate assignment. You’ll be in the scriptorium, preparing pigments,” the sub-prioress declares, that yellow tooth peeking through her smile. She makes the sign of the cross over us. “Thank you. You may all go to your work now.” The girls practically skip to their respective jobs.

  “Come, Edyth, Felisia. We mustn’t be late.”

  The scriptorium. The word rolls around in my mouth delightfully. It sounds like someplace distinguished, like a manor hall or a bishop’s house. I trip over my skirts trying to follow Agnes’s brisk pace. We wind through a labyrinthine succession of halls, and as well as I know my way around by now, I quickly lose my sense of space. We cut through winding halls, past other nuns and doorways hung with evergreens, across the nave of the wide church, and finally, panting slightly, Agnes whisks outside through the back church door, into the entryway of a three-story tower and up the dizzying steps of a spiral staircase. She pushes open the heavy door.

  Instantly my tongue crackles.

  The room smells of chalk and leather, smells I haven’t conflated before. A cluster of large oaken desks are pitched at quarter angles, each one occupied by a scribe rapt at work. An entire floor-to-ceiling bookcase is filled with heavy leather- or wood-bound books—and through a passageway, I see what can only be the library, with the novice Mary already talking to the armaria. It’s utterly quiet except for the scratches of quills and the swishes of brushes. No one raises their head.