The Ruins of Lace (13 page)

“Stop this foolishness!” I looked up from examining the damage to find the farmer’s wife staring down at me. “What are you trying to get shed of? It’s only the remnants of God’s good earth.” She gestured to the lesions I was trying to scrub clean. “Are you too good for God? Is that it?”

Too good for God?

“You’re only harming yourself. And besides, you can only be as clean as you are.”

For the first time in memory, I felt shame on account of my washing. I’d always known it had marked me as odd, but I had also figured it had left me purer than the others around me. It had left me clean. But here, washing was as useless a task as trying to mend the dike. I would find myself just as dirty the next day. And quite soon, in fact, I would run out of skin.

I poured water into my hand and then splashed it onto my face. Rubbed it into the beard so new it itched. I looked a proper Dutchman now. Not even Lisette would recognize me. “The Flemish are known for being clean, are they not?”

“
Ja
.” She nodded. “But even we can see where good sense lets off and madness begins. You keep yourself so clean you’ve begun to grow ill from it.” She circled a finger above her ear as she spoke.

If the leprosy were going to take me, wouldn’t it already have done so? If any were going to discover my paternity, wouldn’t they have already done it by now?

“Clean your face, clean your hands. Wash your clothes once in a while, and be done with it. You can’t be rid of it all. Not this time of year. And besides, you’re frightening the children.”

I leaned to look around her skirts and saw the children peering from the door.

You can’t be rid of it all.

Was that what I had been trying to do? Rid myself of all traces of my father? Shed this skin of mine to hide the truth of my past? To be someone I was not?

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I could only be as clean as I was.

One day as we sat upon the benches, side by side, I heard a rustling from Mathild. She cried out as I heard her bobbins hit the floor.

The unthinkable had happened!

She had dropped her pillow. All of her work would have to be discarded now. Though every precaution was taken to keep the workshop clean, it was inconceivable that the lace could have survived its contact with the floor. I could have wept from the injustice of it all. That such a beautiful creation should be cast aside.

“What’s that?” I heard Sister tapping across the floor, and I clutched at my own pillow so I wouldn’t be accused of having lost mine, as well.

“Mathild?”

Mathild pressed herself against me.

“Go!”

Mathild rose, but as she tried to leave, she must have stumbled, for she fell to the floor.

“Help me.” For the first time, I heard her speak without whispering. I heard her words fully. Clearly. But her voice was dead. It had no life.

“Get up!”

“I can’t.”

“Now!”

“I can’t. My clogs—the threads!”

“You’re making a mess of it. Of everything.”

She had gotten to her knees, right below my feet, I could tell by the way her shoulder bumped into my own knee. She was weeping. “I can’t…I can’t see.”

“Come.” The shape of Sister leaned over and grabbed Mathild’s arm, pulling her from the floor. She tugged so hard, Mathild stepped right out of her clogs. I knew it because I heard the shuffle of bare feet against the floor. Sister kept on walking toward the stairs. But then she paused. “Katharina.”

I raised my head toward the sound of her voice.

“Watch. Keep watch.”

I nodded, though I knew I could see no better than Mathild. I opened my mouth to speak, but I knew not what to say. And so I said nothing. And the work continued around me as always. In spite of the mess on the floor. In spite of the emptied pair of clogs.

When Sister returned, she took up Mathild’s pillow and set it on the bench beside me. Soon another girl, a younger girl, came over from across the room to take her place.

Mathild didn’t join us for prayers, and she didn’t join us for supper. When I fell onto my pallet that night, that same new girl from the workshop was there in Mathild’s place.

•••

I climbed the stairs the next day as the last of the girls, the oldest of the lace makers. I wondered then, what might happen to me.

And what had happened to Mathild.

Had she joined the shouting voices beyond the abbey wall?

And was it true what Heilwich had said? Did the girls who left the workshop turn their efforts to vile things?

What vile things? Did they make messes and defy orders and make people late?

I could not imagine such a life. But more than that, I could not imagine a life without lace. My sister had said she would see me freed. But freed from what? If I did not make lace, then what would I do?

I could not see. Not everything. Not most things. What would I do out in the middle of a city filled with shouting people? What
could
I do?

I began to know a certain anxiety. It disrupted my work and turned the dancing of the bobbins into lurching as my fingers faltered. And so, I determined not to think upon it. Not to imagine the world outside the wall. Why should I?

I loved lace.

Lace was my life. It was the reason for my existence.

What else had I been created to do? If God in his mercy had granted me life, then surely it was to do this. To create exquisite, beautiful lace was my duty, my sacred trust. That’s what the nuns had told me.

That’s what I believed.

And so why would God rob me of this one task? The only task I could perform, the only reason for which I was created? Surely he would not do such a thing. I loved lace.

Mathild had not.

It was not so much her failure to make the lace that had betrayed her. It was her failure to love it. For how could the memory of that which you loved desert you? Even with the coming of perpetual darkness, how could those patterns fail to illumine the way?

But throughout that day, as I fumbled with my bobbins and resorted to checking the count of my stitches with my fingers, I realized I was no longer an aid but an obstacle to what I created. It could no longer be made with me…and it could certainly not be created without me.

The dance was nearly done.

In that moment, I realized my great sin. Pride. Vanity. It was not my love of lace that had enabled me to do great work, it was very great pride that had deceived me. I was no better than Mathild, no better than any lace maker in the workshop. I was just more vain. But I smiled as I bent closer to my work. Perhaps, there was yet a certain humility in my vanity. I did not need to be known. It was enough that the lace had a chance to leave, had a chance to live and be loved.
Nee.
It did not matter. Not to me. No one had to know my name.

•••

The three weeks Heilwich had given me were almost up. She spoke as she shoved a loaf of bread through the wall for me. “I know I promised to get you out, but I haven’t got the money just yet. Not all of it.”

“I’m almost done with the lace.”

“Almost done?” Heilwich yelled the words at me. “But I’m not ready for you to be done! You can’t be done.”

“They don’t know I’m almost done. I haven’t told them yet.” I didn’t want to be parted from the lace. I hoped God would forgive me.

“Good. Good! Don’t tell them. You can’t tell them until I have the money.”

“But they’re going to know. They’ll check soon, and I won’t be able to hide it.”

“When?”

“On Saturday. They check on Saturdays.” Unless we told them before that. “For certain by then I’ll be finished.”

“Saturday! I don’t know if I can get the money by Saturday. And in any case, I can’t be here on a Saturday. Father Jacqmotte would never let me come. Not with all the preparations to be done for Sunday. It takes me half the day to get here and then back. But…what will happen when they find out you’ve finished?”

“They’ll give me another pattern.”

“Then start on the new pattern.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

“Why not!”

“Because…” I hated it when Heilwich yelled at me. This was all her doing, anyway. All of this deceiving and hiding things. “If it’s not a pattern I’ve made before, I won’t know how to do it. I have to be able to see the pattern to work it.”

“For certain you do.” Her voice had softened.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Here’s what you don’t do. Don’t leave the abbey.”

“But how do I stay?”

“If they don’t check until Saturdays, then you’re safe until this Saturday. When will they give you the new pattern?”

“On Monday.”

“Then you have to pretend until then. Can you do that? Can you pretend you’re doing what you’re supposed to?”

If I pretended, then I wouldn’t be doing what I was supposed to, would I? “I don’t know…”

“Maybe…can you just…do it slower?”

“Why?”

“So they won’t throw you out of the abbey! Least not until I can come and get you out myself.”

“They wouldn’t do that. Sister wouldn’t do that. Not to me.”

Her hand came through the wall and grabbed at my own. “Just promise me. Promise you’ll do it.”

“Fine. I’ll try.”

“Don’t try, Katharina. Do. You must do this for me. For you.”

“I…will.”

“You can’t let them know until Saturday, understand?”

“I guess—”

“This is important, Katharina! Until Saturday. Whatever you do, you can’t let them know about your eyes.”

“I won’t. I won’t tell.”

•••

Don’t work so fast.

But how could I do my work to the best of my ability unless I worked as quickly as I could? Wasn’t that being slothful? And wouldn’t Sister notice? She had trusted me to finish the lace, and now Heilwich wanted me to be late.

I tried to do as Heilwich said. I truly did. But I couldn’t. Not once the bobbins began their dance. Even as artlessly as I now moved them, they insisted upon keeping their own rhythm. And it was only as we headed down the stairs of an evening that I remembered my promise to my sister.

I did remember.

I just hadn’t done it in time. For not two days later, I created the last of the petals and felt the last of the scrolls form underneath my fingers. I was done. The sheer exhilaration of it prickled my scalp. I was done. Done! But…what would happen now?

I set my bobbins to dancing, forming a pattern that was no pattern. They looped and dipped and twisted without creating anything at all. I needed time to think. I stayed up all night trying to decide what to do. But I had no choices. Not really. I was done with the lace. But there were still five more days before Heilwich’s visit.

How was I going to save Katharina? I had only a week. Less than a week if her secret was discovered on Monday. That night, after I returned to Kortrijk and after I had banked the fire in the kitchen, I sat down on my pallet and counted the money I had saved.

The coins had not grown in number since I had showed them to the Reverend Mother. I had added one to them, but then I had given one to that urchin, Pieter.

I felt a desperate panic. Which was followed by the impulse to pray the rosary. But what good would that do? How could that save Katharina?

What I needed was money.

More of it than I had.

But what could I do? How could I come by more?

I supposed…I could do what I had done for the other coins.

Sighing, I covered my head with my apron and then pressed my forehead to my knees. Had it truly come to this? To helping De Grote? After I had told him, once and forever, I would never work for him again?

My hands began to tremble as I thought on it. About how terrible it had been that first time, digging up the coffin Father Jacqmotte had buried just the morning before and opening it to hide a length of lace inside.

At least De Grote hadn’t hacked up any of that body. Sometimes he ordered a corpse’s chest be cut out so lace could be rolled up and placed there instead. But that first time, he’d only lifted the dead man’s arm and tucked the lace inside his coat.

Such a horrible, horrible night.

The char girl caught me not once that next morning, but twice, staring into the fire at nothing at all. And when I went outside to go to market, I found I carried not my basket, but my broom. And I was gripping it with the same fingers that had helped to dig up a coffin.

I had turned around and taken the broom back to the kitchen, and then I’d sat down on a stool in the cellar and peered at my fingers in the dim light.

Opened them.

Closed them.

Tried not to remember what they felt when they had touched the dead man’s coat. That feeling ate at me. It soured me. And right there in the cellar, I fell to my knees and retched. Again and again and again. I retched until I tasted only bile. And yet again until there was nothing left but a guilty conscience and a wicked soul.

If only I had been able go to confession.

But I never would. How could I confess to…to…doing what I had done? What words could I use? What could I possibly say to induce a priest to pronounce forgiveness?

I let someone else prepare Father’s meal that afternoon. He wouldn’t have wanted to take the food from my hand. Not if he had known.

I deserved no mercy from God. Not after that.

Dómine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum.
Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof. Forgiveness was too great a gift for a soul like mine.

Oh! I did not wish to do it. I did not want to go to De Grote again.

Besides, he must have found others to do the work I had done. There must be dozens like me in the city. I imagined there was one of me at each of the parish churches. There had to be. Lace was that important.

I did not want to do it. Not after I had promised myself I wouldn’t.

But De Grote might be my only choice. Blind as Katharina was, she’d be no match for those men who loitered by the abbey’s gate. They’d snatch her, and bed her, and what could be done then?

•••

I made my rounds the next day, taking soup to the aged, rags to the poor, and medicines to the infirm. I cast a careful eye about as I walked. If I had to do it, if I had to go to De Grote, it would be nice to know there was a body ready to fall into a coffin. If I decided to do it, whom could I count upon to die?

There was Annen, the weaver’s wife. She would drop a babe any day now, and her last two had died ere they’d had a chance to breathe.

“Annen Moens!”

“Heilwich.” She put a hand to her back and stretched in a way that reminded me of a sapling. “How is Father Jacqmotte?”

“Same as always. But how are you?”

She took a great breath of air into her cheeks and then blew it out in a huff. “Sick unto death of breeding.”

“But it’s to come soon?”

She smiled. Or perhaps it was a grimace. “Any day.”

“Make sure you send someone to fetch me.” Just in case. Just in case I decided to go to De Grote.

She nodded.

I continued on to the Lievens’s. They had a daughter in poor health, and the week’s wet weather was sure to have set her back. Knocking once on the door, I lifted the latch and pushed through.

Elen Lievens came at me, smiling, hands extended. “Look at our Zoete!”

I looked.

“It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

Truly miraculous. The girl who for so long had lingered abed was bent over the fires, stirring a kettle as if she never intended to stop. As I gazed upon her, she lifted her head. “It was the borage.”

“The what?”

“The borage conserve you brought last week. The jar you said was blessed by Father Jacqmotte.”

Just because I had said it didn’t mean it had been true. Father Jacqmotte was too busy to bless every jar and vial I waved in front of his nose. If anyone had done any blessing, it had been me. I’d sprinkled some holy water on it while I’d been cleaning in his office. “I’m so…glad.”

“Aren’t we all?” Elen left my side and went to press a kiss to her daughter’s forehead.

I left soon after.

I argued with myself the length of the street. But I came to no other conclusion than this: I did not want to go to De Grote. But I might just have to.