In Beverly, Margery’s purse and the ring Jesus had given her were impounded. Thomas was thrown in prison but the jailer volunteered to keep Margery at his own house. They cut across a broad common where cows lay beneath the twin towers of the minster. She smelled clover and dried milk. The jailer kept jabbing her between the shoulder blades. He had a guilty relation to people. On his hearth sat a dish of white bread sopped up with milk to appease the fairies. He put her in a fine room and from her window she told stories so compelling that women wept and cried, “Why should you be burnt?”

Margery asked the jailer’s wife for a drink. “My husband took the key.” The jailer fantasized during sex—it made him feel guilty so he fantasized about his wife. She would try to be more present but it never worked, never ever, so what is there to the mind-body continuum?

The jailer’s wife: a hot flash—sweat broke out across her brow. She set a ladder against the window and brought Margery a pot of wine and a cup and asked her to conceal them. Margery filled the cup so high she had to lean over to drink. She plucked hair from her chin, between her breasts, and on her upper thighs. Sometimes her physicality seemed like an eruption through the feminine rather than into it.

She sat by the window and imagined Jesus. He’s talking about her to Mary, to a saint. He wants to please her. Children played tag into the dusk on a lawn, in an alley beside it, and up a wall they scaled with a ladder permanently left there for them. Their mild shouts echoed on the green. (When Margery was a girl she ran so fast her legs didn’t support her and she collapsed. This memory seemed to occur outside the social order. She had felt extraordinary power in running, a feeling her body could not sustain.)

The air was soft and chickens settled in the boughs of the apple and quince. The scene was timeless because it had no shadows. The more chaotic Margery’s life became, the more she longed for Jesus. Her anticipation amplified the world as it took a last look at its own blue sky with the greed of the visible. She raised her palm in his rather somber salute. A few stars appeared, serenely actual, and a few bats. Her longing was so direct it seemed kinetic, a power expanding on itself. She sat up in bed in the darkness. Her heart beat painfully. She was surprised to be alone. He owed her what she needed, the commitment of his nakedness for her to endlessly unveil.

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