The Maiden's Sword by Ethel Herr

Author:Ethel Herr [Herr, Ethel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC027050
ISBN: 978-1-4412-6252-3
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Breda

29th day of Flower Month (May), 1568

When the gray light of dawn crept in around the fringes of the darkness, Tante Lysbet rose to her feet and walked to the window. The sky yielded gradually to the strokes of a multihued paintbrush, and a hint of the rising sun tipped the wings of a pair of flying gulls with gold.

“God, for days Betteke longed to see just such a sky,” she cried out, “and you withheld it day after day, no matter how she begged. Now you send it, after she has passed on….”

Passed on to where? The thought stopped her mouth and stirred her mind.

Where, indeed, was Betteke’s soul? Yesterday’s priest had offered her one more opportunity to escape eternal hellfire—if she would repent. But his accusations were lies, and she had nothing to repent of. So what then? Lysbet shook her head as if to dislodge the tangle of religious cobwebs. Did any priest have the power, after all, to decide such things?

While Betteke still breathed, she had often told her of the page in God’s Book that promised “to let go of this body is to make our entrance into the presence of the Lord.”

Lysbet returned to the window and stared, transfixed. How brilliant the colors in the heavens had grown! “If what Betteke said is true,” she said aloud, eager to convince herself beyond question, “then she has truly arrived in the heaven. Could it be that her Vader-Shepherd has decorated His skies that we might celebrate with Him?”

Lysbet lingered at the window until the colors faded into the pale blue of an early morning sky. She reached into her own bodice and reverently slid Betteke’s sacred pages into their new place, close to her heart.

“Vader in the Heaven,” she began. Never had she expected to address God so. Creator, Protector, Savior—all these she knew and spoke readily. But Vader? A new fire had been lit in her heart.

“On this sun-robed morning,” she prayed, “you have delivered your child from the indignities of an unjust execution. Now I know you are indeed in this place. Can you forgive me that I so long doubted? Can you teach me to trust as Betteke trusted?”

The cell came instantly alive with a wondrous, awesome something that Lysbet didn’t have a name for. In her soul, she felt an overwhelming joy in the forgiveness of her newfound Vader. All the ugly fears that had plagued her ever since the day the Spanish soldiers and Breda’s bailiff had dragged her here seemed to melt away into an unimaginable peace. Drowsiness tugged at her. Rearranging the fetid straw into a semblance of a bed, she lay down and closed her eyes.

“Thank God,” she prayed as she drifted toward sleep, “Betteke’s suffering is past, and her enemies have been cheated of their coveted revenge for an action never done but only imagined in their darkened minds.”

The next thing she knew, men’s voices were buzzing above her and a boot was kicking her in the side.

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