If Merchant Martha kept up this pace we’d soon be back inside the beguinage, and what joys awaited us there. Heavy bales of wool and cloth to be unloaded in this baking heat, soiled bedding to be stripped in the infirmary, and pigs waiting to be fed with the mess of scraps. I longed to walk in the fields and feel the grass round my legs and the sun hot on my back, just a few minutes of peace before we were back in the noise and endless chores of the beguinage.
Holding tightly to the edge of the cart, I said, “Merchant Martha, can you stop the cart? The motion is making me queasy. Let me off here and you go on. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
Merchant Martha reluctantly pulled on the reins and the cart wheels crunched to a halt.
Pega glanced back, all concern. “I’ll walk with you, Beatrice.”
“No, no,” I said hastily. I wanted to walk with my own thoughts, without anyone’s chatter ringing in my ears. “You go on with Merchant Martha. She shouldn’t travel by herself with a loaded cart; it’s not safe.”
I clambered down and set off at a good steady pace along the track behind the cart. Pega looked back anxiously a couple of times, but I waved cheerfully to reassure her. The cart gradually pulled further and further ahead and, before long, it disappeared from view behind a coppice on the curve of the track. Now that the cart was safely out of sight I slowed down and let my feet carry me into a patch of fallow land. Slipping off my shoes and hose, I revelled in the soothing coolness of the grass under my feet. Out of sight of track or cottages I threw myself down in the long grass and lay on my back gazing up at the rooks lazily flapping towards the distant trees.
A soft hum of insects buzzed around the flowers. Butterflies with purple eyes on their wings tumbled and flipped from one flower to the next. My mother once told me that butterflies are the souls of unbaptised children who cannot enter purgatory or Heaven or Hell. You must take care never to kill a butterfly, she said, for if you did you’d be killing a child.
I closed my eyes. The sun burned red through my eyelids. It was so hot. The Vineyard in Bruges had been cool in the summer. The canal wound round our walls and slipped in under the boat gate, sparkling and dancing in the sun. The children splashed on the bank and ran barefoot in the cool, damp grass, laughing as it stroked their hot feet. Sometimes I ran with them. There were always little children and babies there, plentiful as daisies on the Green. But they weren’t my children. They were never my children.
That last time I convinced myself it would be different, lying in a bed, stifling in the heat of a roaring fire with a swarm of women buzzing round, whispering too softly for my ears. Fingers plucked at my shift and kneaded my belly. Another pain, sharp and short, not like before, then a gush of hot liquid flooding across my thighs, and with that came red-raw agony that went on and on, building in waves until I thought it was splitting me in two. I screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming even after the pain had gone.
The room grew dark. I was so cold, shivering, despite the heap of covers they had piled upon me. When I opened my eyes again, the women were gone. I called for them to bring my baby to me, but no one came. I could hear him crying. I could see the crib rocking as he thrashed his little fists in anger. I struggled from my bed and fell to my knees. The floor tipped as if it was a raft afloat on the open sea. I dug in with my fingers and crawled inch by inch across to the crib. It was empty.
I howled. I howled until they finally came running, pressing their fingers against my mouth, trying to make me stop, but they didn’t bring my baby. They didn’t let me hold my baby.
The midwife swore that this child drew breath and she had baptised him, so the priest would permit him to lie in the family tomb. But we both knew he had not. For more than a week he had not stirred inside me. The midwife gave me a potion to bring on the labour after the fever began, but she spoke of it to no one. The priest took one look at the infant and knew the midwife had lied. My husband wouldn’t look at him at all. And my son, my son was not buried in the family tomb.
The midwife was a kindly woman. She told my husband that the infant had been born too soon, but I had carried this one the longest and the next was sure to be born alive. But there was to be no next one. That night my husband took my maid to his bed and I knew he wouldn’t come again to mine.
For months I kept the empty crib beside me, hoping, but even as I rocked it, some part of me knew it would always be empty. Even now in the night I still rise, half asleep, at his cry and the creak of his cradle rocking. Pega grumbles at me to go back to sleep, saying it’s only the wind whining through the rafters or the mice squeaking in the thatch. But some nights I dream that it’s not the wind I can hear, but my child scratching with his tiny fingers at the fastened shutters, trying to come back to me.
I SENSED THAT SOMEONE was coming towards me and rolled over onto my belly. A young girl with a wild tangle of long red hair was ambling though the meadow. I’d seen her before-Gudrun the witch-girl, the girl without a tongue. I crouched lower in the grass. But she was wandering lost in her own world, blowing on the puffball of a dandelion, watching the clouds of downy seeds drift around her head. She reached out to grasp a handful and blew them away again, sending them swirling up into the blue sky.
The sun was beginning to sink, hot and red, drifting down to the softly rounded hills. The girl turned her face to it. She pulled her shift over her head and let it fall to the ground. Then, naked as a fawn, she began to dance. Turning in slow circles, her arms outstretched to the source of light and heat, as an infant to its mother. Faster and faster she spun, her flaming hair flying out around her, her arms wide, her back arched. Her ribs slid up and down beneath her white skin. Then breaking out of her circles, she ran and leaped through the meadow, scattering scarlet poppy petals, which drifted down in dizzy spirals to the golden grass.
A butterfly came to rest on her outstretched hands. She held it out on the tips of her fingers, swaying slightly with the poppies as if a soft breeze rocked her. A second butterfly alighted on her arm, another on her back and on the tip of a strawberry nipple, still more on her shoulders, her buttocks, her thighs and in the mass of her fiery hair. Her naked body was covered by the delicate red and purple wings. Her skin trembled and shuddered in tune with their fluttering. She knelt carefully, facing the sinking sun. The flames of her hair haloed her upturned head as she slowly stretched out her butterfly hands to receive the sacrament of light from the dawn of time.
Suddenly I was drenched in cold terror. I felt guilty, ashamed as if I had been spying upon a couple committing some forbidden and unnatural act. As if by looking I had committed the sin myself. Without caring if I startled her, I scrambled to my feet and ran from the butterflies and the scarlet poppies. I ran as fast as I could from that hot bright meadow, and I did not once look back.