Catherine, Called Birdy: October

The woman said Moses led the Jews from a land of slavery to freedom, just as they were going to find freedom in Flanders, riding in tall ships with billowing sails, pushed on by the breath of God.

Then came the grand procession of the animals—two by two—on a painted scroll, unwound by the puppeteer and his apprentice so the animals looked to be crossing the stage, full alive and lively...

He stared at me long without speaking, while his forehead furrowed and his mouth grew small as a mouse's turd.

"I will? Is aught amiss with the lady?”

So by default alone Edward would be her favorite.

The jouncing cart did my stomach no kindness after jellied eel and potted lamb, so I was most relieved to alight.

The jouncing cart did my stomach no kindness after jellied eel and potted lamb, so I was most relieved to alight.

A tall monk with a big nose greeted us and led us from the guesthouse through the abbey gate, past kitchens and dormitories and vast storehouses, to the abbot's office behind the chapel.

Others add fanciful designs to the first letter and decoration to the page.

I visited Brother William who was mixing colors and gave him some good ideas for inks—a rose the color of a newborn lamb’s nose and the iridescent green you sometimes see in the film inside a fresh raw egg.

Another monk let me help prepare the vellum for the next day’s writing, but I knew the skins came from our sheep and I was afraid I would recognize one.

I used to study music, since my mother said a lady must be accomplished, but the noise I made was so awful my father gave my lute to the cook.

We flirted with the guards and arranged to meet them later in a chamber, where we will send Aelis’s old nurse and her sewing woman on some pretext.

They are much more beautiful and stately than geese, but a little vain and not as smart.

My brother Robert is a rooster, strutting here and there, crowing about himself.

Chased by a naked Thomas, the chicken flew out the door and down the road toward the church, leaving little fires smoldering in her path, until Ralph Littlemouse threw a bucket of water on her, whereupon she lay down gasping in the road, bald and charred.

I can see him besieging the Scots by setting fire to hundreds of chickens and letting them flap over the Scottish castle walls.

Later I told Morwenna my jest about the flaming chickens and she, traitor and carrytale, told my mother.

They think I am not trying hard enough not to laugh. Bleak. All is bleak.

They sat astride magnificent white horses and, below their linen tunics, wore tight-fitting hose and red leather boots to the knee with orange silk lining.

Learned men in the East call this the birthday of the world, the anniversary of the Creation on this day four thousand years ago. So says Uncle George. I wonder who has kept the reckoning.

They say it was the year the miller's barn caught fire or the new priest was driven from the village for lechery.

He also brought me a special gift, a popinjay in a cage carved of ivory and sweet-smelling wood, to join the family of birds in my chamber.

She had lost the circlet that bound her hair, her boots were torn and muddy, and her nose was red from the sun.

25TH DAY OF OCTOBER, Feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, shoemakers, pricked to death with cobblers’ awls

Below is Hell, where poor souls with my father’s face writhe in eternal torment.

I gave God Perkin’s face since Perkin is the wisest person I know, but Morwenna flew into a terrible fright, wailing about blasphemy and damnation, so I painted Perkin out and now God just has a sort of watery gray face.

I could almost see them as he spoke—the Gravelly Sea, all gravel and sand without a drop of water, which ebbs and flows as other seas do and is full of fishes; the nearby Isle of Giants, home to men thirty feet tall who sleep standing up; and the Isle of Pytar, where the people are tiny as elves and eat nothing, but live by the smell of wild apples.

My uncle George has brought gaiety and wonder into my life.

I will not give him to Aelis and satisfy myself with wormwood cordials!