After a week of traveling through the woods, Mathilde and her mother have finally gotten within view of the abbey. It is a monstrous thing, weather-worn stone, dark and foreboding, protruding from a hillside somewhere between Cologne and Ghent like an unwelcomed growth. Mathilde follows her mother up the hill toward the building with a mixture of relief and trepidation. She knows this is the last time she will see her. She watches her mother’s back as she walks up the hill, this sturdy, solid woman, this woman who had borne seven children, four of them dying at birth, the remaining two, aside from Mathilde, dead now of the disease that also killed their father and that plagued their entire village over the last year. She wants to study her mother’s shape, burn it into her memory. She has heard that in the next world there are no fathers or mothers, husbands or wives. She has heard that people turn into light-forms, shadows. She wants to be able to find her mother when she sees her again, so she watches her back sway all the way up the hill, her brown-gray hair blowing in the breeze, her chapped hands gripping tightly to a basket of provisions that is to last her the whole way home.
There is no lengthy goodbye. The Abbess, a gaunt woman with a face like parchment, watches silently as Mathilde’s mother bends her gray face close and kisses Mathilde’s forehead. She asks Mathilde to pray for her. I will try, Mathilde wants to say, but instead she says, “I will.” And then her mother turns the mule around and retreats into the forest.
***
After informing Mathilde of the daily schedule of prayer— Matins at two a.m.; Lauds at dawn; Prime, Terce, and Sext between six a.m. and three p.m.; Vespers in the evening; and Compline before sleep—the Abbess instructs four sisters to show Mathilde to the dormitory so she can change into a tunic and veil. It will be some time before Mathilde takes her vows, the Abbess says, but in the interim she would act as if she is already part of their order.
The sisters are, at first glance, identical: pinched faces under brownish-gray veils. Upon closer inspection, though, Mathilde begins to see differences. There are two sisters whose faces show them to be much older than Mathilde. The third sister is small and chubby and quite young, her voice high as a child’s. The fourth sister, Else, is about the same age as Mathilde, an age that in other circumstances would be considered marriageable. Else gives Mathilde a small, secret smile, and Mathilde smiles back. It feels strange on her face, so long has it been since she has done it.
In the dormitory, the sisters place upon Mathilde’s straw mattress a tunic and veil matching their own and then, without speaking, leave the room. Mathilde pulls the tunic on quickly and then tries to cover her hair with the veil. Her hair—nut brown, braided in one thick rope hanging down her back, bearing the memory of her brother who tugged it and her mother who combed it—is too long to fit completely under the veil, the bottom of it waving behind her like a tail when she finally follows the sisters to the refectory for dinner.
Mathilde sits beside Else on the long wooden bench. As the sisters pass bowls around the table, Mathilde follows Else’s motions by spooning herself one ladle of stew and tearing off a small hunk of bread. Spooning the broth into her mouth, she is struck with the memory of her mother’s stew. It was thick, full of meat they would pull out with flesh hooks and eat on the side, while the broth would thicken with grains and vegetables. On cold days it would warm her whole body, and her mother never put a limit on how much Mathilde could have, even if it meant that she herself would go hungry that night.
Dinner is passed in silence. About halfway through dinner Mathilde realizes that the women are communicating through sign language. Across the table, the young chubby sister makes a circle with her thumb and forefinger. The girl’s skin is pink, and she has white, almost invisible eyebrows and eyelashes. Compared to the gaunt, gray faces of the villagers Mathilde left behind, this girl resembles a well-fed pig. Mathilde does not know what the girl is signing until Else reaches over, grabs the bread basket, and passes it across the table.
Mathilde finishes before the other sisters, so she puts down her spoon and sits silently as they finish. Outside, it grows dark. The windows are open, letting in cool night air. Mathilde watches the moon slowly rise above the fields, and she thinks of home, the same moon rising above her family’s hut. Her family, mostly gone now. Is this to be her new one?
There is a clatter across the table. A bowl flies past Mathilde’s head, breaking on the wall. The young piggish girl had thrown it. Now she begins shrieking, hissing, climbing on the table. She points at Mathilde, calling her a witch. Mathilde recoils. The Abbess and the rest of the sisters continue to eat while a large-boned, middle-aged sister named Grede rises slowly from her seat and walks over to where the girl is thrashing on the table. Grede looks at Mathilde sharply, clearly angry with her for something, and then she pets the girl’s head. This calms the girl, who now climbs off the table and snuggles into Grede’s arms, rubbing against her, purring. And then, with a firm grip around the girl’s torso, Grede leads her out of the room. The sisters clean up the mess calmly, saying nothing. Else picks up Mathilde’s spoon and replaces it on the table face down. After they leave the room, she explains to Mathilde that the sisters believe if a spoon is left face up, the devil can enter through it. That’s why the girl— Agnes—had an outburst.
The bells ring for Vespers. As the sisters walk through the glass-walled cloister, Mathilde watches two shapes moving in the night: Grede and Agnes. Grede opens the gate to the pig pen and Agnes enters, crouches on all fours, and mills among the animals. She will stay there until her spell is over.
This, Mathilde soon learns, is just part of their routine.
***
Witch. The word is all-too familiar. Mathilde was born with a veil over her eyes, her face cocooned within a caul. This rare occurrence, her mother told her, would gift her with second sight. And she was right: Mathilde could see things, sense things before they happened. Not always, and not with perfect accuracy, but she knew, for instance, when the disease visited their village that it would kill many. She could smell death in her dreams. A hilltop turned into a heap of bodies for a moment, and then back into a hilltop. She tried to warn them, the villagers, but they turned on her, accusing her of witchcraft, proclaiming that only God knew their future, and God would protect them if they were pious.
He didn’t.
Mathilde watched as her neighbors, friends, brother, sister, and father all perished, and there was nothing she could do. She prayed, but He did not do anything either. Still, the accusations of witchcraft continued, even as Mathilde helped tend to the sick, prepare the bodies for burial, dig the graves. This accusation is what prompted her and her mother to leave their home after they had buried the last of their dead. Although there was another abbey closer to their village, her mother chose this particular abbey because, she said, she wanted Mathilde to be as far away from the pestilence as possible. By the grim smirk on her face, Mathilde knew her mother was referring not to the disease but to the people of their village. And she knew, too, that this would be the last joke her mother would ever tell her.
***
The days have a rhythm like the plainchants they sing during Mass. Every movement is in a single key; there are moments of rest and silence, and moments of vigorous chanting; there are hard syllables and soft syllables and round vowels that open up space in their throats and echo off the high ceilings like the voice of God calling back to them.
With the first light of dawn, Mathilde and the sisters walk to the church for Lauds. After Lauds, the priest arrives from a neighboring village to hold Mass, his voice muffled behind the wooden screen. To receive communion, the sisters approach the screen and the priest’s hand emerges through a small door to drop the wafer onto their tongues.
After Mass, the Abbess leads the sisters to the chapter house where she reads a chapter of rule. It is Grede who often brings violations of rule to the Abbess’s attention. One morning, Grede complains that Mathilde is not keeping her hair covered. The Abbess notes in response that Mathilde is still a novice; when she takes her vows, her head will be shorn like the rest of them. It is the first time Mathilde understands the physical reality of her transformation. The long brown hair she inherited from her mother would be gone, just like her mother was gone.
When the meeting ends, the work day begins. Mathilde follows Grede and Agnes out to the animal pens and they spend their days with the animals: shearing sheep, milking cows, collecting hens’ eggs. As they work, Grede looks at Mathilde with suspicion and speaks to her only when instructing her to do something. Her disposition with Agnes is softer. When Agnes spills a pail of milk, Grede does not chastise her but helps her clean it up. When Agnes stands in the middle of the pen among the sheep, staring off into the distance, Grede shakes her gently, like waking a child from sleep.
In the afternoons, Mathilde sometimes walks the cloister alongside Else. Mostly, Else tells Mathilde stories of her childhood. She had been born into a family with too many daughters, and it was cheaper to become a bride of Christ than the bride of a merchant. Besides, she tells Mathilde, the thought of marrying a man was terrifying. Her hand lightly brushes Mathilde’s as they walk, swinging their arms.
Sometimes after supper, when they retire to the dormitory, Else combs out Mathilde’s hair, stroking it with such tenderness Mathilde feels like crying. Sometimes in the dark, she relaxes back into Else’s arms, and a feeling comes over her that is so new, but so natural, she doesn’t know what to do with it. Sometimes Else stays in her bed and they sleep curled together like spoons.
Else always sneaks out of Mathilde’s bed before all the sisters wake up at two a.m. Then Grede, holding a candle, leads the line of them down the night stair to the church where the Abbess meets them for Matins. After Matins, they head back to the dormitory to rest a couple hours before dawn, but Mathilde can never fall back asleep; she thinks of her father, dead now for months, and of her mother, who has most likely fallen victim to the disease by now as well. Praying feels hollow, like shouting into an empty cave. She listens for God’s voice but hears only the breathing of the sisters. Once in a while, she hears someone dream-talking. It reminds Mathilde of how her sister would sometimes laugh in her sleep when they were young. Even after the disease came and their brother died and she got sick as well, even then her sister sometimes laughed as she dreamt.
***
One night when the bell rings for Matins, one of the sisters does not rise. It is Katherine, an old woman who had a white thin-skinned face with piercing blue eyes and whose gnarled hands were constantly clasped in prayer. The sisters retrieve the Abbess who confirms what they already knew: Katherine is dead.
The Abbess tells Mathilde she is to take her vows the next morning. In order to be classified as an Abbey, she says, they need at least twelve ordained sisters aside from the Abbess, and Katherine’s death makes them one short. If Mathilde does not take her vows before Katherine’s funeral, the priest would use it as an opportunity to reclassify their order and provide them with less assistance. Mathilde does not feel ready, but she cannot say no.
In the morning the church is dimly lit by three candles placed around the altar. Else, standing beside Mathilde, squeezes her hand. They chant their opening prayers, and then Mathilde kneels in front of the altar and removes her veil. She sees something shining in the Abbess’ hand: a pair of shears. When the first cut is made, severing the long braid, Mathilde feels unmoored. The braid lies besides her on the floor like a dead snake.
Mathilde repeats the muffled incantations of the priest, vowing chastity, poverty, obedience, the words exiting her mouth automatically, without conviction. I love Christ into whose bed I have entered, she repeats. The tiny wooden door in the screen squeaks open, and the priest’s hand emerges, barely visible in the dark save for the small gold band he holds. Mathilde holds out her hand and the priest fumbles to find her fourth finger until he finally slides it on.
The priest then instructs her to lie before the altar face down as a symbol that she is dying to her old life. Mathilde spreads her body on the stone floor, nose pressed into the dirt. She has often wondered, over the past year, when and how death would come to her. When she did not die after her brother, with whom she had played, or her sister, with whom she had shared a bed, or her father, whom she had cared for in his illness—she wondered what it would take to kill her. She tries to think of the entirety of her life: her childhood, sitting upon her father’s knee, the way he taught her the alphabet by carving letters into apples, and how they would eat them afterward, sweet and crisp. Is this what people think of before they die, apples? But no, she is thinking now of her mother. Could she still be alive?
Mathilde rises. The priest, behind the screen, says a blessing and she can see his hands forming the sign of the cross. She repeats the motion, and with that, her bap tism into this new family is complete.
***
The next morning, the Abbess tasks Mathilde with preparing Katherine’s body for the funeral. Katherine’s body is kept in a stone room, laid out on a wooden board, still clothed in the tunic she had been wearing when she died. When Mathilde pulls the tunic up over the sister’s torso, the smell of death is so pungent it dizzies her, and her vision grows fuzzy.
In the center of this fuzzy vision, Katherine’s body transforms, and suddenly it is the Abbess who is laid out before her. Dotting the length of the Abbess’s torso are constellations of sores, the same sores that dotted her brother’s body, and her sister’s, and her father’s, and the body of every neighbor who died of the disease. Mathilde grabs on to the table to keep from falling. She looks away but the afterimage of the Abbess’s body remains. When she finally looks back at the table, it is Katherine’s body again, lying there spotless. But Mathilde knows, now, that the disease is coming for them. Perhaps it is she who brought it?
This thought eats at Mathilde all day, until right before Vespers, when Katherine’s funeral is to be held. Mathilde watches through the windows of the cloister as the priest rides up in the dying pink light, and it occurs to her that perhaps it is not she who has brought the illness to the abbey; it might be the priest, and he might be bringing it right now.
In the silence of the cloister, Mathilde sits by each of her sisters and pleads with them not to take the Eucharist, or if they must, take it by hand rather than by tongue. They look at her, as she knew they would, outraged. Else asks why, and Mathilde wants to tell her, but cannot; to do so would be to admit she knows something no one can know. Mathilde looks at Else, hoping somehow her eyes will convey all that her voice cannot, and then the bells ring out for the funeral Mass.
***
The following Sunday, the priest never arrives. The sisters congregate in the church, but behind the screen is only silence. The next day, and the next, it is the same. Then, one morning, the Abbess does not show up for Matins or for Lauds or for Prime. The sisters search the cloister and the fields, but she is nowhere. The Abbess sleeps in a small room attached to the chapter house, where the sisters finally congregate. None of them have ever been inside the Abbess’s bedroom; to do so would be to invade the privacy of the head of their order, the only woman deserving of her own room. A quiet argument breaks out between those who want to enter the Abbess’s room and those who think it unseemly. Finally, without speaking, Mathilde gets up, rushes past the other sisters, and opens the Abbess’s door.
Mathilde is hit immediately with the smell of rot. Despite the heat, the Abbess is bundled under layers of wool. Her breath draws in and out in short, raspy waves. Her eyes open as slits amid her swollen face, which is dotted with boils. Pus drains into the corner of an eye. She blinks rapidly. When she speaks, her eyes are unfocused,
trained on the ceiling. She asks Mathilde if the priest has arrived. Mathilde replies that he has not.
The Abbess closes her eyes. “Last Rites,” she says.
“I can ask Grede, but—”
The Abbess shakes her head vigorously and grabs Mathilde’s wrist with surprising strength. “No,” she says. “You.”
Mathilde shakes her head, wants to refuse, but how can she? She thinks of her father, dying, pleading for Last Rites, no priests left in their village. Mathilde and her mother prayed over him, hoping for some miracle, but none came. It was then that she began to wonder about God’s power, or powerlessness, in their world. And if God didn’t have the power to anoint the sick, then who did? The priests were all dead, proving after all that they were only human. Which meant Mathilde, human too, could become a vehicle of God’s power, of His mercy.
Mathilde rushes out of the room, around the throng of kneeling sisters, through the cloister, and into the church. In the tabernacle, Mathilde finds a chalice with communion wafers, leftover wine, and a vial of consecrated oils for anointment. When she gets back to the chapter house, the sisters are arguing. Grede stands, blocking the doorway to the Abbess’ room.
“She is dying,” Mathilde pleads.
“The priest will come.”
“He is dead, too.”
Grede pounds the wall next to the door and the room falls silent.
“Have you cursed us?” she cries. “Before you came, no one died!”
The sisters murmur. Else speaks in Mathilde’s defense. Agnes crouches down and crawls along the floor until she scrapes her knee and lets out a painful howl. Grede runs to her side, and Mathilde takes this as an opportunity to open the door to the Abbess’s room. She rushes to the woman’s bedside, but it is too late.
***
Grede organizes the vote for a new Abbess. The sisters form a line, each of them whispering their vote into Grede’s ear. On Mathilde’s turn, she whispers the name of the oldest nun in the order. It is strange to lean so close to the sister who loathes her. When the scent of Grede’s body reaches Mathilde, she pulls back. Rotting flesh. She knows it may not indicate disease; it could be an open wound from a belt of thorns or a hair shirt, or any of the other accoutrements of suffering these sisters inflict upon themselves. Still, Mathilde worries.
Immediately after votes are tallied, Grede announces that she has been named the new Abbess. She tells the sisters that despite the death of the old Abbess, they must continue on. They must do their work, say their prayers, or else the fabric of their life would unravel. It is the one thing Grede says that Mathilde can agree with.
***
The following days proceed as usual, except that in the place of daily Mass the sisters spend extra time working the fields. Even those who normally do indoor work are outside, the growing chill making their breath more visible week by week. Then, as they near the harvest, disease strikes again: first an older sister, one close to Grede, dies after three days of illness; a younger sister passes away soon after. Both bear the typical boils and blisters, and both scream in pain near the end, all the silent suffering of their lifetimes given voice in their last moments.
During chapter meetings, Grede seems thin, tired, worn. Her eyes grow large, her cheekbones sharp. And then, one day, as Grede stands before them at the meeting, she coughs up blood. The sisters draw back with a collective cry, but Grede wipes up the sputum with the bottom of her tunic, dabs at her mouth with her veil, and continues reading the chapter of rule as if nothing has happened.
The next morning, when Grede does not show up for Lauds or Prime, and when she does not show up for the chapter house meeting, Agnes runs in a frenzy to find her. Standing outside the door to Grede’s room is another sister, who blocks Agnes from going in. Agnes tries to push past, banging on the door, scratching the sister’s face, screaming about the Devil. Else tries to hold her back, to calm her, but Agnes shoves her off. Mathilde approaches Agnes cautiously, explaining that Grede is ill, and that she is trying to protect Agnes by not letting her enter the room. But Agnes will not listen. Even as she calms down, she insists that Grede is not ill but possessed, that demons have entered the abbey and are taking over Grede’s soul.
Her fear is infectious. One of the younger sisters, as well as the sister guarding the door, begin to murmur that perhaps Agnes is right, the illness is the workings of Satan. The sister guarding the door opens it and lets Agnes enter. The other sisters rush in behind her while Mathilde hovers beside the doorway.
Upon seeing Grede, Agnes calms down. Grede, having heard Agnes’s outburst, explains in a weak voice that her body is sick, but her soul is pure. She is ready for Last Rites.
She looks at Mathilde.
***
Mathilde stands above the bed with the chalices and holy oils. She begins by taking Grede’s confession. Grede hesitates a long time before saying anything.
“Agnes,” she says. “Is my…” She doesn’t finish.
“I know,” Mathilde says, and when Grede looks at her questioningly: “You treat her with the tenderness of a mother.” Mathilde smiles, thinking of her own.
Grede’s breathing becomes more shallow. Mathilde hurries to administer the Eucharist. Grede opens her eyes and looks into Mathilde’s face, for the first time with something resembling kindness.
“Look after her,” she says.
***
The air grows colder, the sky sunless. The remaining sisters work together to prepare for harvest, but as the weeks wear on, two more of them die, Lyse and Delphine, within hours of each other. They are down to seven sisters. There is no vote for a new Abbess, and the sisters seem aimless. Else tries to give them purpose, direction, and asks for Mathilde’s help. Despite her doubts and anger and questions unanswered by God, Mathilde agrees. They begin to hold meetings, praying, discussing how to keep up with the farm work when there are so few sisters left.
On the first day of harvest, the clouds threaten a storm, but the sisters spend most of the day in the fields, picking and threshing and gathering. The experience is a small reprieve from death. They run through the rows. They hide from one another like children. By the end of the night, the sisters are fatigued and red-faced. They sleep soundly.
They wake before Lauds to a crack of thunder. They lie in bed as the rain pours and the shutters shake and the intermittent rumble of thunder makes them jump. Agnes climbs into bed with Mathilde, and Mathilde tries to comfort her, singing her a lullaby that her mother had once sung to her. Sleep, little sheep, sleep. The Lord fends off the murdering wolf. Sleep, little sheep, sleep.
But Agnes does not sleep, and it is clear the other sisters are not sleeping either. Else climbs into bed with Mathilde and Agnes. She begins to say something, but her voice is drowned out by the loudest crack of thunder yet, and then the darkness is broken with a flash of light. One bolt of lightning, and then another, hits a tree not far from the abbey, and the tree falls into the far end of the cloister, shattering windows. The sisters scream. Hail pellets the roof. The sisters begin to murmur excitedly: Lightning, hail—these are all signs. The work of demons.
“Demons?” Agnes repeats. Mathilde tries to quiet her but she repeats the word until she falls asleep, and when she wakes, the word is still on her tongue.
The storm has quieted, so the sisters go to check on the damage in the cloister. It is not bad, but through the shattered glass walls they see something worse: lightning has scorched their fields. Mathilde and Else run outside and find the unharvested crops ruined. When Mathilde tells Agnes and the other sisters, they conclude it is the work of demons. Demons are hiding everywhere in the abbey, they say, in the corners and in the shadows, ready to prey upon them.
Another death. A quiet sister, Hette, leaves her bed at night to die in the barn with the animals. There are now six sisters left. All besides Mathilde and Else look at this number as a sign. The devil’s number. At first, this obsession leads them to more pious behavior. They chant more furiously at each office, they spend their free time praying, they take vows of silence. Some of them wear belts of thorns and flagellate themselves. The weeks go by in this fashion, the sisters mostly keeping to themselves, eating very little, trying to plan for the winter ahead. They have a small amount of crops from the first day of harvest, plus animals for meat and milk.
But then, one morning when Mathilde and Else go to milk the cows, they are greeted by a sight that is, at first, hard to make sense of. It looks like animals are writhing around on the ground, but it is really Agnes, an older nun named Doro thea, and two middle-aged nuns named Anna and Liphilt, crawling over the hay on all fours, howling, naked, wild-haired. Dorothea is in the horse stall, and when she emerges her mouth is smeared with feces. This sight, though, is nothing compared to what Mathilde sees next. The animals—all of them, save for one horse—have been killed, slaughtered by these four sisters, and left to rot. Their corpses are strewn about the barn, bloody intestines pulled out, partially eaten.
Mathilde rushes forward and grabs Dorothea first, trying to shake her into her senses. The old woman resists, but Mathilde pulls her out of the barn and drags her back to the cloister and finally into the church, where she lays the woman on the stone floor and leaves her there, running back to get the others. With Else’s help, Mathilde is able to drag all the screaming sisters into the church. The four sisters lay on the floor, naked, their screams finally falling silent.
The next month is a practice in self-sacrifice. The sisters allow themselves only one small meal a day. With their hunger, their fears of the devil increase. They begin to see him everywhere, especially in the rectory during their meal and late at night in the dormitory. Most of the sisters’ time now is spent sitting in the drafty cloister, looking out the cracked windows at the first snow. Out in the whiteness they see demons tempting them to do things like steal food or slaughter their last remaining horse for meat, and to ward off the demons they flagellate themselves.
As Mathilde lies in her bed at night listening to the sisters’ breathing, she is more lonely than she has been in a long time. Else has stopped coming into her bed. Mathil de wonders if this loneliness is a sin, a recognition that God is not with her. But she struggles to conjure Him out of emptiness. She realizes she has felt His presence most through the presence of those she loves: the touch of Else’s body pressing against her own, the memory of her mother’s scent, her father’s chapped hand touching her cheek.
Then, one cold night, Else crawls back in bed with her. Mathilde, feeling small and childlike, asks Else why she has been distancing herself.
Else hesitates, and then says she is afraid the disease is beginning to take root in her. She has begun feeling feverish. And she, too, has begun seeing things. Shadows.
Mathilde holds her the rest of the night, afraid to let her go. But Else is not the next to die. It is Dorothea, passing in sleep. Liphilt goes next, succumbing the following week. Immediately after she dies, Agnes and the other remaining sister, Anna, run to Mathilde in the cloister and ask if they may eat Liphilt’s flesh, since they have nearly run out of food.
“Do you want to be next?” Mathilde cries, realizing it sounds like a threat. The two sisters recoil from Mathilde, rolling their eyes back in their heads so that only the whites are showing, and then they fall on the floor and contort their bodies.
She tries to pull the two sisters up off the floor and calls to Else for help. Else comes, out of breath. She is thin, skeletal, and Mathilde can see the sign of fever in her eyes.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“We must leave,” Mathilde finally says.
***
They hitch their last remaining horse to a cart filled with what little provisions they have left. They lay Anna, sick in mind as well as body, on the cart too, hoping the journey away from the abbey will at least calm her fears of the devil. They hope the same for Agnes, who walks beside the cart, looking in at Anna from time to time.
“Where are we going?” Agnes asks. Her face, for the first time in months, looks pink and healthy in the cold December air, her eyes clear.
Else, on horseback, looks questioningly at Mathilde.
“There is another abbey,” Mathilde says. “A five-day journey. My mother and I passed it on our way here.” Her voice catches on the word mother. So long since she has said it.
“Why did you join our order,” Else asks, “if that abbey was closer to your village?”
Mathilde realizes that even though she had revealed much to Else, she had never divulged how thoroughly her community had convinced themselves that she was a witch, to the point where Mathilde herself had been on the verge of believing it. But she does not want to speak of witchcraft while Agnes and Anna are within earshot.
“My mother,” Mathilde finally says, “thought it best I join an order farther from our village. To be as far from the disease as possible.”
A noise like a laugh comes out of Else’s throat. “That did not work out in your favor, eh?”
Mathilde looks at her and smiles. “I am glad to have joined your order,” she says, squeezing Else’s hand. They hold hands for a few minutes, Mathilde keeping pace with the horse. It feels a little like praying.
When they stop for the night, Mathilde and Agnes make a fire. Else is quiet, lying on the cart next to Anna, who has still not changed positions, though she is breathing and her eyes are open. Anna has not eaten or drunk since the previous day. They try to entice her by placing the last of their meat close to her lips, but she will not open her mouth. They try to offer her water, but her jaw is clamped tight.
In the morning, they find Anna no longer breathing. They fold her hands over her chest and place her body under a pile of brush and leave her behind. Mathilde hopes they will reach the abbey before any other deaths befall them.
The next days wear on, bitter. It begins to snow, their footsteps leaving behind them a trail that is quickly covered. No matter how far they walk, the forest looks the same, tree after tree. Mathilde begins to wonder if they will ever reach the abbey. She begins to wonder if this other abbey even exists, if it were a vision she had conjured to give herself hope.
Else complains of blisters and bleeding pustules. Mathilde tries to assure her that they will soon arrive at the abbey and the sisters there might have some salve to heal her, but she can see in Else’s eyes that she knows the end is near.
Upon waking on the sixth day, Mathilde is terrified she might find that Else has died overnight. She is alive and breathing, though weak. Else pleads that they should arrive at their destination soon, not because she hopes for a cure, but because she wants to taste the Eucharist one final time. “And a strawberry,” she says, smiling. “I would like to taste a strawberry one last time.”
They quicken their pace, Mathilde trotting beside the horse, the three sisters silent throughout the day and into the dusk. Darkness begins to fall, but as they continue farther, the woods grow lighter. They are entering a clearing. They see a field full of brilliant, untouched snow. And beyond it, an abbey.
It is large, a cathedral and multiple stone buildings surrounded by a gate, warm candles glowing behind stained-glass windows, snow topping its spires. They run until they reach the gate, out of breath and on the verge of collapsing. Mathilde looks at Else, making sure she is still with them.
“We are here,” Mathilde says. Else is silent, but her eyes gleam.
They stand at the gate, ring the bell, and wait. As the hours draw on, Mathilde despairs. What if, after their travels, after having arrived at their destination, they are left to die outside the gates?
They drift in and out of sleep. They wake sometime in the middle of the night to a messenger arriving on horseback. When the hood is pulled down, the rider is revealed to be a woman. She greets them and pulls out a key, opening the gate.
Another woman, this one in white, emerges from the building and greets them as if they are expected guests. The messenger rushes ahead. Mathilde and Agnes, supporting Else, hurry to the large building, where the woman in white opens the door and beckons them inside.
The room is bright with candlelight and a large fire in the hearth. Shockingly, it is full of people: dozens of sisters dressed in white tunics, wearing wreaths of flowers around their veils. And others, too: men and women and children, whole families, babies even. There is music, and a feast is laid out on a long table.
Agnes rushes forward and begins gorging herself on roast goose. Mathilde, holding Else, approaches the nearest sister.
“Sister,” she says, and she does not have to say any more. The sister takes Else’s body from Mathilde’s arms and brings her into a nearby room, where they lay her down on a straw bed. There is a tabernacle in this bedroom, something Mathilde has never seen outside of a church before. Later, she will ask the sisters about it, and she will come to know that in this abbey, many things are different. These sisters are of the Beguine order: They marry, they preach, they have children, and they translate the Bible from Latin so all people can read it.
Else will never know the identity of these women in white. Soon after they place her in bed, Mathilde administers the Eucharist, and then places upon Else’s tongue a small strawberry she has gathered from the feast table. Else chews slowly, staring into Mathilde’s eyes with a small smile on her face, the same small smile she gave when they first met those many months ago. She dies shortly thereafter, before dawn, warm in bed, Mathilde at her side, holding her hands. In Else’s last moment, her eyes flicker with fear but also with gratitude. And although Mathilde is filled with sorrow at the passing of the woman she loves, as she emerges from Else’s room back into the ongoing feast, she feels something like light filling her body. She approaches Agnes, who has stopped eating and is sitting comfortably on a chair among the other sisters. They are asking her where she comes from, and she is answering them, chatty as a little girl. Mathilde sits down beside her.
Agnes turns excitedly to Mathilde and exclaims, “Pope Clement just announced a jubilee to honor those who’ve survived the year!”
Mathilde has lost her first family, and most of her last. But the room is glowing with an amber light that reminds her of the hearth of her childhood, and the people— more people than she has seen in a long time—are clustered close together in groups of sadness and celebration, some crying, some embracing, some laughing, some dancing. In the crowd of dancing bodies, Mathilde notices one body in particular, a shape she recognizes from behind, a shape so familiar she could have found her in the dark. Mathilde does not move but watches the woman for a long time, afraid to be wrong, afraid to lose her again. Mathilde continues to watch the woman dance, swinging side to side as from joy to grief and back again, and when the music ends, when the woman finally turns around, it is her mother’s face that greets her, and Mathilde rushes to meet her in the middle of the room.
