THE CAT WAS HUNGRY. He pushed at the lumpish weight that was holding him down, spitting and scratching until Alyce shifted and he could crawl out to see what creatures there were about that were both good to eat and easy to catch. His exertions woke Alyce and she sat up and looked about her.
At first she made to stretch and smile and face a fine new day; then she remembered. It was afternoon, she was a failure, and she had run away. It was beginning to rain and she faced a night outside alone in the wet. She curled up again into a wet soggy ball.
“I am nothing,” she whispered to herself. “I have nothing, I can do nothing and learn nothing. I belong no place. I am too stupid to be a midwife’s apprentice and too tired to wander again. I should just lie here in the rain until I die.” And she fell again into a dreamless sleep.
But the next morning her young body, now used to a roof and warm food on cold mornings, pricked and pained her until she awoke. It was still raining and she was still a homeless failure. She stood up, picked some of
the leaves from her hair, wiped her drippy nose on her sleeve, and looked around.
She knew where she was. Behind her were the village, Emma, the midwife, and failure—she could not go back there. She could not stay here in the rain waiting to die, for she was too cold and hungry and
uncomfortable and alive. So she went on ahead. The cat stalked behind, stomach empty and feet wet, but unwilling to let Alyce go on without him.
An hour’s walk brought them to the crossroads where the road from the village met the road to the sea, and there Alyce could see, through the wet November dawn, a light.
It was an inn. Alyce had never been in such a place, where anyone could find a bed or dinner provided he had the coins. Alyce did not have the coins, but she had two strong hands and an empty belly to fill, and she was soon at work in the kitchen, trading her labor for bread and a bed out of the rain. Purr made himself useful keeping mice from the barley and tasting everyone’s cheese.
The inn was really no more than a large stone cottage with a room over the big kitchen, a loft above the stable, and tables in the hall good for sleeping on or under. The innkeeper was called John Dark, for he was nearly sightless, but none so blind that he could not find an untended mug of ale anywhere on the table or pinch a plump cheek as it passed. Most work about the inn was done by his wife, the round and rosy Jennet, who
could carve a fowl with one hand, turn cream into butter with the other, and still have one left over to hoist a noisy guest by his shirt front and chuck him out the door.
“Oskins, boskins, chickadee,” Jennet said next day to Alyce. “You are such a help to me that I would you would stay on awhile.” Alyce had
nowhere to go, so she stayed, grateful that she had found work she was not too stupid to do, even if it was only scouring the tables with river sand or skinning an eel for a pie.
Alyce worked hard and lived mostly on beans, bread, and Jennet’s bad beer. Each week the autumn grew colder and wetter, and the inn, although dirty and drafty, was much cozier than any barn or dung heap to be found outside, so she remained, empty of heart. She would not think about her
months in the village or Will Russet or the bailiff’s Joan or the midwife, for such thinking brought the tickling to her throat again, but sometimes the smell of garbage or of apples baking would make the village so alive in her mind that she would look up quickly, certain she had been magically taken back there again, and her eyes would blink in hope and dread. Sometimes too she thought of the boy she had sent to the manor and wondered how he fared and if she had at least done that right.
Soon it was Christmas and the inn teemed with folk going away or coming home. Alyce hung holly and ivy from the charred beams in the hall. Musicians with their rebecs and gitterns and sackbuts came to drink and stayed to play. Ducks and geese on great skewers were turned in the roaring fire until they were golden and juicy and so fragrant that the cat and the
mice came in from the stables hoping for a bite or two. It was all colorful and warm, but Alyce enjoyed none of it. Her heart heavy, her eyes blank, and her mouth as tight as a hazelnut, she went about the business of
Christmas as if she were mucking out a stable, muttering over and over to herself, “I am nothing, have nothing, belong nowhere.”
January dawned frosty and gray and stayed that way, and Alyce stayed, too. Just before gray January turned into black February, she noted a thin,
brown-coated back hunched over a table close to the fire and realized she had seen that same brown-coated back for weeks now, hunched in the same way over the same table before the same fire.
Alyce began to watch the man, not knowing he had long watched her and wondered what could so blight a person so young. He was long and skinny as a heron, with black eyes in a face that looked sad, kindly, hungry, and cold. She thought at first he had the pox, for his long face, long nose, and long yellow teeth were all spotted, but it proved to be only ink, splattered as he pushed his quill pen furiously along. Corpus bones, she thought. He is writing! That is a man who can write! She kept her eyes down as she served him his bread and ale, barely daring even to breathe the same air, she who was too stupid to be a midwife’s apprentice.
While they watched the big sow drop seven piglets one dark afternoon, Jennet told Alyce about the brown-coated man. Magister Reese, it was said, was a renowned scholar. Staying at the inn for the winter, he was working off his room and board by keeping accounts and penning letters for guests while he finished writing what was rumored to be a great and holy book.
Alyce studied the man. She noted that John Dark liked to sit near him, for he was careless of his ale; that Jennet made sure to give him the smallest portion or the toughest meat, for he ate what he was given and never complained; that he never scolded Tam the kitchen boy, who had been kicked by a horse and was not right in the head, even when Tam spilled beer or bacon fat on his papers; and that only the geese seemed awed by him, scattering hurry-scurry when he entered the inn yard lest another tail feather go for a quill pen.
Alyce took to sweeping that corner of the floor more carefully and scrubbing that end of the table more frequently, hoping to see what he was writing and what it might look like, for her curiosity overcame at last even her bleak despair. After a while he tried to speak to her, but she would only clutch tighter to her broom and sweep furiously in silence, so instead he took to talking to the cat.
“This, puss,” he said, shifting the sleeping animal off the page he was writing, “is my masterwork, an encyclopaedic compendium I call ‘The Great Mirror of the Universe Wherein You Can Find Reflected All of the World’s Knowledge, Collected by Myself, Magister Richard Reese, M.A., and Dedicated to His Ampleness the Bishop of Chester,’ so called for he is ample in all the world’s virtues.” Or “See how I can make the ink blacker
by mixing soot with the boiled oak galls.” Or “This, cat, is a P, as in puss or pork or plum pudding.” Or “The letter’S must be made just so, never thick or wiggly or with an extra curve at the end, but just so.”
The cat listened carefully, although sometimes he lost patience with the tutoring and began to bite at the tantalizingly moving pen. And Alyce, too, listened, so that she learned some letters as the cat learned. She liked best the O, the D, and the G, for they looked friendly. Z seemed mean, X
wicked; and W always made her yawn. Q was by far the most beautiful, she thought, even if it could not stand alone and must be accompanied
everywhere by the compliant U.
Sometimes at night, when the cat’s belly was full and he had no need to prowl about looking for supper, he let Alyce cuddle him against her as they went to sleep and tell him more about what she had learned that day: how A began Alyce and apple and ark, when to put a tail on the S, and what letters might be made to spell Purr, even though he must, she thought, know these things as well as she. During the day, when not boiling or sweeping or chopping or skinning, she wrote letters in the frost on the woodpile with a twig, scraped them into the soot of the chimney wall with the handle of the broom, and stuck her finger in the mutton soup and wrote them on the table in the kitchen. At night she found them written out in stars in the clear cold sky.
Once Alyce knew all the letters and a number of combinations, Magister Reese began teaching the cat words, reading aloud bits of wisdom from his great encyclopaedia. As a result Alyce heard about the heavenly planets circling the earth in hollow transparent spheres, about the great empire of
the Romans that once stretched all the way to Britain, about the faraway island of giant ants who walk upright and mine for gold. She learned about the four humors that govern the body, how to plant corn by moonlight, and where the Antipodes are. And still he had not said a word to her.
When one day he threw away a page he had ruined with an inkblot,
Alyce snatched it up and stuffed the stiff vellum into her bodice. Each night before she blew out the last candle, she would labor over the page, picking out letters and sometimes even words that were familiar to her.
One showery afternoon when raindrops sparkled like fairy dew on the new green leaves, Magister Reese sat dreaming over his mug of Jennet’s
thin, bitter ale. Winter was nearly over and his book far from finished. What was he to do next? Should he stay or go? “What do I want to do?” he asked
himself. Spying Alyce sweeping her way toward him, he asked her, “What do I want?” And then, pointedly, “And what, inn girl, do you want?”
Alyce stopped still. She thought just to sweep away, but the shock of his addressing her directly was lost in that intriguing question. What did she want? No one had ever asked her that and she took it most seriously. What do I, Alyce the inn girl, want?
She chewed on a lock of her hair to help her think. What did people want? Blackberry pie? New shoes? A snug cottage and a bit of land?
She thought all that wet afternoon and finally, as she served Magister
Reese his cold-beef-and-bread supper, she cleared her throat a time or two and then softly answered: “I know what I want. A full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world.”
Magister Reese looked up at her in surprise. “You ask a lot for an inn girl.
I thought you’d say a sweetheart or a yellow ribbon for your black hair.” “No, this is what I want, but it is my misfortune instead to be hungry, out
of humor, and too stupid to be a midwife’s apprentice.”
“None so stupid,” he said. “You can read as well as the cat.” Alyce smiled. And so winter turned to spring.
