“I brought something for you to see, Edyth,” she said. “Lord Geoffrey just bought this in Flanders. You may look at it while I visit with your mother.”
Lady Caxton stretched out her velvet-sleeved arms, and my eyes went wild. It was a book, a leather-covered one. I’d never touched a book before.
“This is a bestiary,” she said, “a book of animals. Some are familiar, but some are from Elsewhere.” She widened her eyes with a sly smile of intrigue.
“Thank you, Lady Caxton,” I whispered, bowing. I received the book reverently and sat on the threshold. Inside were wolves and boar, hares and beaver and mice and deer. And creatures from the faraway lands—unicorns and two-headed serpents. I traced the animals with my finger. I couldn’t read then, but the animals told me their own stories. I’d never seen colors like that before—except when they came with sounds.
Whoever painted those animals must have seen colors like I did.
When Lady Caxton took that book home with her, I stood in the doorway and wept. Mam shut the wattle gate and caught sight of me wiping my eyes.
“It was so beautiful, Mam,” I declared. “If I had a book of my own, I’d never put it down.”
Mam was pensive as she cleared the table from the visit. “Come here, Edyth.” She beckoned, gesturing for me to sit, then took up a piece of charcoal from the ashes and began to draw on the table.
“I’m sorry I never taught you how to read,” she said, with that sad look she got when she realized her daughter was growing up. “I took it for granted that I learned in the Caxton household. Maybe I thought you wouldn’t need to if you were a weaver, like me. But time got away from us, I guess.
“This is B, for bird,” she began. She wrote the letter and made its sound, then added short, triangle wings, a beak and feet—and the B became a puffy little robin. She made a lopsided vessel for V, and for girl, a circle-faced G with strands of hair like garlic scapes.
“Now you try, Edie,” said my mother. “This is D. It’s the first letter of dragon.”
I made the D into the coiled dragon from the animal book. L became a gaping lion’s mouth.
“Yes, you have it,” Mam said, surprised at how quickly I grasped it, and how effortlessly I could draw. “Has that been in there this whole time?”
“I draw things, sometimes,” I said.
Truth was, I’d been hiding my drawings from Mam for years. When I was little, Da brought home a load of salvaged wood, and we all helped unload it. In the cart was a smooth-planed board, long and wide. I sneaked the board into the barn and hid it behind the cow manger. After my chores were done, I’d grab a cold charcoal nub from the fire’s edge and go out to the barn. I started drawing pictures on the board, and soon I brought life to the images that came to me from daydreams or night dreams.
Mam borrowed a small prayer book from Lady Caxton. Day after day, she took time from her work to teach me to read. I loved the feeling of the words jumping from the page into my mouth. After we’d been at it a few weeks, Mam had me demonstrate my skills for Lady Caxton.
“Your reading needs work, but your letters are quite good,” she said. “You should encourage her, Heloise. Reading and writing can help her secure a position in a manor house.”
“That’s my girl,” said Mam. But before Da came home, she rubbed the drawings off the table when I wasn’t looking.
Little by little, I filled my drawing board with a world of impossible and imaginary creatures. I discovered that if I made my charcoal from a twig and scuffed the end into a point, I could get finer details. I drew fantastic scenes from my head—battles and horses, stories I heard in church, huge hands coming down from the sky or up from the earth. I drew my family and my dog and cat and the sheep and the fruit trees growing by my house.
But the black charcoal on the brown board didn’t show up the way I saw in my head. I tried rubbing in the green juice of leaves, but it absorbed and turned brown. The best I could do was draw the shapes of color—concentric circles, starbursts, jelly-like blobs with points of light.
If only I could make the colors I saw.
— 7 —
I don’t want to admit it, but I am starting to like it here. It’s warm and clean, and in a way it feels like a fresh start. I don’t have anything left to lose; there’s a kind of comforting blankness about each predictable day.
But what if all this beauty, all this routine—what if it’s just making me sedated, like daily doses of theriac? Is that how these women make it for decades without losing their minds—by numbing themselves with minutiae? I may like it now, but a lifetime feels awfully long. There’s nothing for me in Hartley Cross, of course, but I still long for it. I want to sit by a real fire, not just waves of invisible heat. I want to smell fresh-cut hazelwood, dig my hands into oily fleeces. Want to feel Mason’s whiskers on my cheek and inhale the scent of his skin. Saint Christopher’s is nice…but safe.
The bell rings for the morning meeting. I choose a seat in the farthest corner of the chapter house, the back row, by the door. The novices chatter about the goings-on down in Thornchester. Most of them are from here, and they know city words and city ways. They know how to navigate a town and its alleys. Hartley Cross has no alleys, only one L-shaped street made of muck, and beyond that, fields—and beyond that, the river I was never going to cross, with its mist rising like feathered spirits in a warning dance: It’s all right, it’s all right not to venture past here; we will possess and devour you if you do. You belong here, where it’s small. Here, where you won’t dare to expect more.
The more I think, the higher the water rises in my eyes. So I take out a piece of parchment from my psalter and draw what I remember of my little village. It’s not that I could ever go back there, but if I’m to be part of this priory, someone will have to pull me in, will have to tell me how it’s supposed to work here, how to never yearn for home. How to forget, for the rest of my life.
* * *
—
I made the mistake—once—of opening my mind to the other children in Hartley Cross. I was eleven years old. We were playing blindman’s buff in the market square, me and my best friend, Methilde. I was it—I was always it—blindfolded and bucktoothed, stumbling about like an idiot with my hands waving in the air. That’s when I saw one of my favorite colors. It was so delicious, I stopped in the middle of the game and grinned.
“Mmm…Do you see it?” I said. “Coming from Lord Geoffrey’s house—it’s bacon cooking, all violet and scratchy!”
“What?!” cried Methilde. “Purple bacon!”