Heat emptied the streets. The plants’ obvious joy in the toxic light exposed their alien and vaguely hostile nature. Clothes hung to dry were stiff in minutes. Jesus sent fluctuations that drove farmers in the fields to seek shelter. A blue mist smelling of sulfur rolled in and clouds gathered in the north. Thunder-startled pheasant cocks rocketed upwards in a whir, crowing a harsh kor-kok. Vast drops of rain were succeeded by round hail, then by pieces of ice three inches across; froth and spray stood four feet above the Tiber.

The storm continued all night; it dwindled to a drizzle, then exploded frantically. Hollow lanes were torn up; young trees whipped, old ones swayed slowly, and howling dogs traded their amazement. Jesus had warned Margery the night before not to go far from her lodging. Old men said they had never heard such thunder—the lightning radical and bright. Rome stood shadowless and cast out of the dark. By morning the air was mild, a tepid bath in which body shape was lost. A flash of blood on the toilet paper: the maid’s period had begun. Pairs of gray ducks appeared in the flooded meadows, their quacks low and reedy.

•

A priest from England arrived bringing money for Margery. She was so relieved she told him the story of her life up to that minute. Her nipples and cunt were raw and alert from tasting Jesus, stretched and prickly, sweet and bosky. She ate with this priest and his party every day.

To discredit Margery, the pilgrims told the priest that a German who didn’t know English had confessed her. Margery replied, “Preyth hym to dyne wyth thow & wyth yowr felawys, & than xal thee knowyn the trewth.”

At dinner Wenslawe joined in when they spoke Latin. When they spoke English he sat with his big hands folded. He was overly sensitive of his body, its inexpressiveness. He wore a hood with a liripipe and chewed on the left side. They ate duck stuffed with ground duck, parmesan, pine nuts, and raisins. In August, eight months earlier, he’d cracked a molar biting on a stone in a dish of lentils while dining with his mother for the last time before she died. The darkness of centuries surrounded his bright shocks of pain. The devil invented teeth, he thought grimly.

Margery related the story of Elisha and the she-bear. When questioned, Wenslawe repeated the story in Latin because he understood English only from Margery. She could speak with anyone. So thank you, Jesus, you made a foreigner understand her when her own countrymen abandoned her because she never stopped weeping and talking about you.

On Easter, 1415, the priest from England gave her enough money to return to Lynn. Margery said good-bye to Wenslawe and to her maid. The maid’s moment of intensity was over; she stepped back to look like and die with her ancestors.