I take the long way to the kitchen. The grass is variously overgrown and patchy from the sun. In the frenzy to get into the church, pilgrims dropped things without caring; the paths are strewn with litter and weeds, and loose chickens run amok.
In the refectory kitchen, Cook sits on a stool, mindlessly stirring beans. On the worktable, a pile of greens is wilting badly. The kitchen doesn’t have its usual smell of good things, but of an underlying scent of rotting cabbage. I clear my throat.
“Ave,” I greet Cook. “I didn’t think anyone would still be here. May I take bread for my sisters?”
“Takewhatyouwant,” she mutters, without stopping or looking up.
“Do you need…help?”
“Ha,” Cook gruffs. “Beyond help.”
“I could chop these greens for you,” I offer.
“Get to it, then.”
I wash a dirty knife and dry it. Neither the wash water nor the towel look like they’ve been changed in days. I begin to chop the vegetables, half of which need to be discarded.
“Would you like these in the pot?” I ask. Cook shrugs. I scrape them from the board into the pot, fetch a clean spoon and taste the pottage. It’s so bland as to be nonexistent. I take it upon myself to add some salt, dried herbs, ale. I find a covered vessel and ladle some soup into it, even as Cook keeps blindly stirring. I stuff my bag with two loaves of bread, half a small wheel of cheese and an armful of apples.
“Thank you,” I say.
Cook keeps stirring.
With the hot pottage in one arm, the sack of food slung across my chest, and a finger through the handle of a jug of cool ale, I push back out into the autumn blaze. The girl is still outside the infirmary, still mumbling. I leave her an apple I know she will never eat. As quietly as I can, I sneak up the scriptorium stairs and serve the stew to Muriel and Anne.
The workday passes, and it starts to darken outside, the still dusk reflected in the quiet of the scriptorium. I don’t want to leave now, but dark means I can take the rest of the food to Alice.
I slip in the back door of the church. The sanctuary is full of fasting, crying nuns. Their chants are mixed with penitent sobs—
Have mercy!
Pass us by!
We are wretched!
Let your eye turn away!
Lift your hand from us!
—bursting in angular purple shapes that melt down the stone columns. The noise is hateful to me, but I can talk softly to Alice, undetected.
“How are you?” I ask.
“It could be worse,” she says, pushing out the chamber pot. “I’m starting to think I’m lucky to be in here.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
She takes the lid off the pottage and begins to eat. “Do you have something else for me?”
“Of course,” I say, delivering a copy of Poetica through the opening.
“Oh, thank God,” she says. “Aristotle.”
She reads, and chews, and I lean my cheek on the cool stone wall and think.
So this is my life. No one told me this was how it could turn out.
My first real friend, behind an impenetrable wall.
The boy I love, probably gone, both of us likely doomed.
And now just waiting…waiting for the foulness to enter my body, waiting for the end of everything. The sick girl, Cook’s eternal, automatic stirring—I cannot let that happen to me. I’ve got to push against this somehow.
Alice slides the pottage bowl back out to me. “Thank you,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” I respond. “You’ve got to make that bread last a couple days, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
* * *
—
In the scriptorium, Anne calls us together, after vespers.
“Edyth, Muriel, let’s talk,” she says. We gather our stools closer. “We might as well admit what we’ve all been thinking. No matter how long we stay up here, it feels like we’re only putting off the inevitable. The end is going to come for us, too. Let’s face it: we’re working on books no one will read.”
“That’s terribly morbid, Anne,” says Muriel.
“Well, that’s what I’m here for,” says Anne. “A scribe’s got to keep the artists’ heads out of their arses.” We dissolve into peals of laughter. What a relief to laugh.
“All right, ” I say, wiping tears away. “What do you suggest?”
“I think we three should make a book together.”
Muriel and I exchange a glance. “Isn’t that what we already do?” she asks.
“I mean something we do for us, not for a patron. We should stop whatever else we’re working on and spend our last days creating our own book. About death. At least then, if we succumb, we’ll have made our peace with it.”
“But what if we survive?” Muriel counters. “We’ll have a book but no patron. They’ll have us for theft.”
Anne ignores her. “I want to do the whole book in three colors: ultramarine, and gold, and silver.”
“But those aren’t colors; they’re treasures!” Muriel protests. “Even a king wouldn’t commission a book like that! They’d have our heads!”
“Oh, Muriel, you’re so practical,” says Anne. “Who’d have our heads if everyone’s dead? For once, this isn’t for anyone but us. Edyth, we’re giving you a promotion.”
“Fine,” Muriel acquiesces. “But what do you mean, a book about death?”
“We’re going to make fun of the bastard,” Anne says with a dark smirk. “We’ll mock death right back into hell.”
“By making a book no one will read,” I say.
“By making something beautiful,” says Anne.
— 35 —
It’s hard to express how these pictures are changing me. My soul’s quieted, and my hand is free. I eat contentedly but just enough. Every night I fall asleep to the desperate cries of the nuns across the way in the church, feeling pity more than fear for Agnes and the Dragon. I sleep soundly and dream in colors from another world. Everything seems so much simpler, so much more profound.
My mind is on work; my mind is on death.
I’m less afraid of it somehow, as though I was bracing myself against life before. Now that the end seems so close, I can live free for however long I have left.