Grayling's Song(41)

Divination


Used in various cultures throughout history, both ancient and modern, divination is the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by reading signs or omens. In contemporary society, it is encountered in the form of astrology, tarot cards, the I Ching, and the Ouija board. Reading tea leaves or the lines on one’s palm are other types of divination.

For more than five thousand years, diviners, such as Sylvanus, have read prophecies in all manner of objects, including dust (abacomancy), spiders (arachnomancy), entrails of animals (haruspicy), the howling of dogs (ololygmancy), and, of course, cheese (tyromancy). Their prophecies were taken seriously and probably changed the course of history more than once. Today, although few read the future in animal entrails, millions of people practice a form of divination by consulting their daily horoscope or flipping a coin to make a decision.





September


12TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.



13TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

My father must suffer from ale head this day, for he cracked me twice before dinner instead of once. I hope his angry liver bursts.



14TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

Tangled my spinning again. Corpus bones, what a torture.



15TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

Today the sun shone and the villagers sowed hay, gathered apples, and pulled fish from the stream. I, trapped inside, spent two hours embroidering a cloth for the church and three hours picking out my stitches after my mother saw it. I wish I were a villager.



16TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

Spinning. Tangled.



17TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

Untangled.



18TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

If my brother Edward thinks that writing this account of my days will help me grow less childish and more learned, he will have to write it. I will do this no longer. And I will not spin. And I will not eat. Less childish indeed.



19TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

I am delivered! My mother and I have made a bargain. I may forego spinning as long as I write this account for Edward. My mother is not much for writing but has it in her heart to please Edward, especially now he is gone to be a monk, and I would do worse things to escape the foolish boredom of spinning. So I will write.

What follows will be my book—the book of Catherine, called Little Bird or Birdy, daughter of Rollo and the lady Aislinn, sister to Thomas, Edward, and the abominable Robert, of the village of Stonebridge in the shire of Lincoln, in the country of England, in the hands of God. Begun this 19th day of September in the year of Our Lord 1290, the fourteenth year of my life. The skins are my father’s, left over from the household accounts, and the ink also. The writing I learned of my brother Edward, but the words are my own.

Picked off twenty-nine fleas today.



20TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER

Today I chased a rat about the hall with a broom and set the broom afire, ruined my embroidery, threw it in the privy, ate too much for dinner, hid in the barn and sulked, teased the littlest kitchen boy until he cried, turned the mattresses, took the linen outside for airing, hid from Morwenna and her endless chores, ate supper, brought in the forgotten linen now wet with dew, endured scolding and slapping from Morwenna, pinched Perkin, and went to bed. And having writ this, Edward, I feel no less childish or more learned than I was.



21ST DAY OF SEPTEMBER

Something is astir. I can feel my father’s eyes following me about the hall, regarding me as he would a new warhorse or a bull bought for breeding. I am surprised that he has not asked to examine my hooves.

And he asks me questions, the beast who never speaks to me except with the flat of his hand to my cheek or my rump.

This morning: “Exactly how old are you, daughter?”

This forenoon: “Have you all your teeth?”

“Is your breath sweet or foul?”

“Are you a good eater?”

“What color is your hair when it is clean?”

Before supper: “How are your sewing and your bowels and your conversation?”

What is brewing here?

Sometimes I miss my brothers, even the abominable Robert. With Robert and Thomas away in the king’s service and Edward at his abbey, there are fewer people about for my father to bother, so he mostly fixes upon me.



22ND DAY OF SEPTEMBER

I am a prisoner to my needle again today, hemming linen in the solar with my mother and her women. This chamber is pleasant, large and sunny, with my mother and father’s big bed on one side and, on the other, a window that looks out on the world I could be enjoying were I not in here sewing. I can see across the yard, past the stables and privy and cowshed, to the river and the gatehouse, over the fields to the village beyond. Cottages line the dusty road leading to the church at the far end. Dogs and geese and children tumble in play while the villagers plough. Would I were tumbling—or even ploughing—with them.

Here in my prison my mother works and gossips with her women as if she didn’t mind being chained to needle and spindle. My nurse Morwenna, now that I am near grown and not in need of her nursing, tortures me with complaints about the length of my stitches and the colors of my silk and the thumbprints on the altar cloth I am hemming.