Almost two years had passed since Margery returned from Rome. She was poor and in debt. Three feet of snow covered Lynn; Margery was so cold she became bewildered; she heard the trilling shree of a waxwing. The wind deprived her of breath and swatted tears off her face. Some said she had epilepsy because she turned blue as lead. They spat at her in horror of disease. Some said she howled like a dog.

Margery wanted to see the shrine of St. James at Santiago Compostela. She told her friends, “Jesus will give me money,” but he delayed until midsummer.

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Lynn’s gardens abounded with solstitial flowers: roses, cornflags, orange lilies, pinks, and yellow honeysuckles so fragrant they perfumed the street. Willow down filled the air. A linnet warbled in a tuft of hazel trees. The yellow wheat, the fresh grass. A couple sheared sheep; brown wool accumulated at their feet. The horizon lacked incident, an irrigation ditch, a wash of clouds only slightly whiter than the sky.

She arrived in Bristol on May 26, 1417, and waited six weeks. Henry V had requisitioned all ships for his second expedition. The beach seemed pressured, empty; the small waves exasperated Margery with their demand for attention that, once given, offered nothing to attend. Fishermen laid out nets to dry in the wind. Mobility and chance were beginning. Sanderlings pattered along the foamy edge. Moving randomly through the world canceled the agreement between space, time, and Margery’s body. Jesus taught her to make angels; they lay on their backs and dragged their arms in the sand to shape wings. Then they turned over, serious and happy, groins and faces pressed into the warmth.

The city was full of soldiers; there was a campaign to suppress heretics before the attack on France. Margery said a prayer before bed to give her unconscious a list of problems to work on.

•

A ship was ready to sail to Compostela—a little galley high of prow and stern. The sailors believed Margery controlled the weather so one of them warned her they intended to throw her overboard if a storm hit. Dark clouds covered the sky; the water was lumpy as flint. Pale fulmars followed the ship in stiff flight for seven days.

Margery and Jesus stayed two weeks in Compostela. Rain fell steadily on the city’s head; water spilled down stone gutters and into the granite streets. Glittering drops in Jesus’s hair and lashes. Margery was never dry. They watched a white goose in a maze, its head bobbing just above the box hedge. It waddled forlornly in the rain, turning corners, backtracking, until it sauntered out of the puzzle.