“Bacon’s green, stupid, didn’t you know?” taunted Emma. “With orange spots!”
“And scratchy, too?” said puny Will. “Maybe the way your mam makes it, with the pig hair still on it!”
“Edie’s mam makes hairy purple bacon!” Methilde jeered. I blushed, my cheeks like round fireballs, and pulled off the blindfold. My best friend was standing there pointing at me, laughing. They all surrounded me, mocking me and slapping the back of my head and my shoulders and chanting—
Edyth, Edyth, Round and Red,
Something’s broken in your head!
They hit me, harder and harder, until one of them smacked me right in the face and cut my lip. It was like they all smelled blood, and then they were on top of me, and kicking me, too. Not Methilde, though. I could make out the hem of her dress, her bony ankles. At least she wasn’t beating me. But she wasn’t stopping it, either.
Through the pounding, another hand grabbed mine and lifted me out of the pile. Henry set me on my feet and walked me home, his arm around my shoulder, the cruel laughter of the others disorienting me more than the blows.
“What was that about, Edie?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said through swollen lips.
“Was it the colors?”
I didn’t answer. There was a violence going on inside my ribs.
“I’ll tell Da. They can’t treat you like that. You can’t help it.”
“No, Henry, don’t tell. Please. It’ll only make it worse.”
“Well then, if they give you trouble, you tell me. It’s you and me, Edie. I’m always looking out for you.”
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.”