A bee backed out of a lily trumpet. A turtle walked resolutely across the path, shifting attitudes of attention. Margery started small. She asked Arundel for permission to receive communion every Sunday—unusual at that time but not exceptional. He consented with a nod. His gray eyes drifted, diluted in thick lenses. Thus established, Margery asked him for authority to wear white clothes—to confirm her affair with Jesus. Her voice was a clear bell that broke at the highs with a scratch of emphasis. He approved. Margery exulted; she warned him to restrain his household, especially from swearing oaths on the body of Jesus. Margery talked so fast the Archbishop could hear her gasp between sentences. “You will answer for it, unless you correct them or put them out of your service.”

Arundel looked up when he cleaned his lenses. He responded mildly and their conversation continued through the autumn dusk. When his retainers annoyed him with questions asked in weak voices, annihilation woke in his huge distorted eyes and Margery saw the Arundel who burnt heretics. He barked a series of commands; the last—“Put your heads down!”—canceled all the others. He told Margery, “Nothing like a little Law to cow the ruffians, my dear!”

The retainers crept away and laid their heads on their folded arms; soon their bodies softened with boredom and they fell asleep on the lawn and the turf seats, alone or draped over each other like hamsters. Arundel sat on his stone throne, his tall hat naked on a cloth next to him, while Margery paced back and forth. Her hands went first, outlining in the dark her entire life up to that moment. They talked till stars appeared above the elms.

16

Margery lost her friends. A community is founded on finitude; there can be no community of immortal beings. Here’s a typical story: Jesus sends her to Catherine Hungerford, a respectable lady whose husband died at sea two years before, in 1411. In welcome, Catherine touches her heart with both hands, fingers spread like fans. She feels her mother’s voice and gestures in herself as gracefulness.

Eternity is organized as a warm October evening, so it’s odd and perhaps beautiful that the lady has a thick fire burning. She has a large supply of wood at hand for processing dyes. Margery takes in the cut of Catherine’s sleeve, the length of the hem. Margery makes impossible wishes—for someone’s age, money, talent, clothes, eyes—then waits a pressured moment to give the wish time. Finally she states, “Madame, your husband is in purgatory. He will be saved but he will take a long while to get to heaven.”

Catherine’s husband was a good man and she misses him; she watches her desires yellow into problems and fall from the branch. Why has Margery denied her own husband to pursue the indefinite Jesus with an endless monologue?