The Ruins of Lace by Iris Anthony

Author:Iris Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: SourceBooks, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Heilwich Martens

Kortrijk, Flanders

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.

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