Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (12 page)

“The prelates allowed me to go to Bermersheim during her final weeks,” Rorich said. “She died of cancer of the stomach.”

I winced, my hands knit over my belly.

“Her agonies seemed endless. She struggled to form the simplest of words, yet we could tell she was trying to say something. The last word she managed to say, over and over again, was your name. She died regretting what she did to you.”

I covered my face.

“She loved you. Truly. She thought to save you from a fate that might even be worse. Our sisters weren’t lucky in marriage. Clementia has taken a vow of celibacy in order to leave her husband.”

At least no one bricked her in.
But my brother’s grief forced me to acknowledge that I wasn’t the only one to suffer. What must my sister have endured in her marriage to take such a drastic measure? The sad stories of my women pilgrims came back to me. Thick-headed as an ass, I had allowed my self-pity to blinker me from the fates of others. At least I could honestly say that I had never endured a man’s violence.

“If Clementia seeks shelter, she may find it here, with Jutta’s permission, of course.” My words came choked and wooden.

“She has found refuge in a women’s cloister in Mainz,” my brother said. “Her health is frail. I don’t know if she would survive the journey here. Keep her in your prayers.”

I nodded, my throat swollen up.

“Father, Drutwin, and Hugo have returned from the Holy Lands. Father went to Mother’s deathbed, but she didn’t recognize him.” The tears glistened on my brother’s face. “She only wanted you.”

Speechless, I remembered the times she had been tender, taking me in her lap and stroking my hair.

“Father is a broken man,” Rorich went on. “Crippled in body and soul. I can only imagine what he witnessed—and committed—in the wars. Hugo is now acting as lord of Bermersheim. He’s thirty, but he looks sixty and still needs to find a wife. Drutwin has joined me in Mainz. He wishes to take holy orders to cleanse himself of the blood he shed.”

All those murdered Saracens and Jews. How sheltered my life was here. I hung my head while listening to my brother’s litany of loss.

“You must have heard of the diseases brought back from the Crusades. Bermersheim has its first lepers. Before she died, Mother donated the monies for a lepers’ squint to be built in the village church so that the poor souls can look in and follow Mass even though they may never step inside the church again.”

“Rorich.” Again I tried to touch his fingers through the screen. “Are you happy in Mainz?”

He was silent, his face in shadow. “The prelates seem to favor me. In a year or two, if I continue to enjoy their good graces, they might make me canon.”

This, I knew, was the most fortunate outcome he could hope for, considering that his master, the Archbishop of Mainz, remained the emperor’s prisoner.

“Sister,” he said, “if and when I become canon, I’ll return for you. I swear I’ll do everything in my power to take you back with me then. Your abbot might listen to a canon.”

I looked at my brother through my tears. So much was out of our hands.

“Give my love to Clementia and the rest,” I managed.

“I know you aren’t allowed to keep any personal possessions,” he whispered, taking something from the pouch at his waist. “But Mother wanted you to have this.”

After a glance around to make sure no one was watching, he slipped something shining through the screen into my palm. Mother’s ring of jasper and silver. Mechthild had possessed no rubies as the Countess of Sponheim did, no garnets such as Jutta had worn before she renounced the world. The jasper ring was the finest adornment my mother had owned, more precious than any trinket my father had thought to give her. The ring had been her own mother’s gift to her. Mother could have bequeathed it to any of my six beautiful sisters. Instead she had given it to me.

“Forgive her.” My brother’s eyes were imploring. “Pray for her soul.”

Holding my mother’s ring to my lips, I nodded, the tears streaming down my face.

Before taking his leave, Rorich presented me with an ell of wool, an offering from Father and Drutwin. The fleece had come from our sheep at Bermersheim. The women in our village had carded, combed, and spun the wool before our best weaver had woven it on her loom and dyed it pale green. Fingering the fabric, I imagined the women of Bermersheim singing their spinning songs, distaff in one hand, drop spindle in the other. I could picture them at work, but try as I might, I could not summon Father, Hugo, or Drutwin’s faces, those men who were strangers to me, riding off to the Holy Lands while Mother still carried me in her womb.

With Jutta’s and Cuno’s permission, I cut the cloth to make vestments for Rorich.

“May your handiwork bring glory to Disibodenberg,” Abbot Adilhum said, no doubt hoping that my brother would indeed rise to canon and inspire the wealthy merchants of Mainz to make donations to the humble monastery where his sister dwelled.

While I stitched, I tried to remember Clementia, how gracefully she had danced at the court of Sponheim, once upon a time, outshining even Jutta. My magistra, had she deigned to speak, would have ordered me to embroider the vestments with angels and saints. Instead, taking threads of dyed silk and wool, I decorated the robes with leaf and flower, agate and nettle, tree and branch, recalling my time in the forest with Rorich, our dreams of running away together and living like bandits.

My love for Rorich trumpeted inside me—all we had shared and might share again if only my abbot might soften. As I lost myself in my work, a vision shimmered before me. Trapped though I was inside the anchorage, the universe unfolded before my eyes, shaped like a great green egg brimming with life, as rich as the virgin forest with the purest streams surging through it. Encircling that wild greening like a necklace of gems were the four winds, the four elements, the sun and the moon, the seven planets, the entire starry firmament. Encirc-ling all this was a ring of flame, the holiness of God, my Mother, blazing everywhere. Our abbot and prior preached that God was above all things, and yet my vision told me that God was
in
all things, alive inside every stone and leaf.

A white cloud, filled with light, opened and a voice began to sing.
I am the breeze that nurtures everything green and growing, that urges the blossoms to flourish, the fruits to ripen. I am the dew that makes the grasses laugh with the joy of life.

Joy.
I was transported, a child again, barefoot and laughing, lazing with Rorich on the mossy stream bank while the trees arched above us, mighty and protecting. One day my brother would keep his promise. He would come for me and take me back into that greening world of sunlight and leaf.

A
T SIXTEEN, I WAS
in the full flower of my young womanhood, such as it was, and scribbling a furtive letter to Rorich.

My abbot has told us that Adalbert, Archbishop of Mainz by the grace of God, shall soon be released from his imprisonment and restored to his rightful office. And that you, my brother, shall become canon.

My wooden stylus scratched the words on a wax tablet before I committed them to the precious parchment I would have to beg off of Cuno.

Don’t forget your promise, I beg you. Life has become unbearable here. Jutta is a walking corpse who stinks of the grave. Before long, I shall die of my own despair.

My stylus hovered over the tablet. If I penned such an outrageous letter, Cuno would surely show it to Adilhum, who would not only refuse to allow it to leave the monastery gates but also inflict a severe penance on me.

“What are you writing?” Jutta’s bony fingers stabbed a needle through the linen altar cloth she was struggling to embroider. Hunger and imprisonment in these dark rooms continued to exact their toll—her eyesight was fading. Her stitches, loopy and uneven, resembled the efforts of a five-year-old.

“I’m copying out the Vita of Saint Ambrose from the book Volmar lent us,” I lied, showing her the tablet that I knew she could no longer read. “Is there anything I may copy for you, magistra?” I pitched my voice as sweetly as I could to hide the insolence that beat so hard inside my chest.

“For that I have Volmar,” she replied, cool and aloof, holding his devotion to her over my head.

My eyes stung and my skin burned. If only I could keep my thoughts chaste, I might have some peace. But I couldn’t chase Volmar out of my heart, my only true friend in this hell. In truth, my secret yearnings would have him become much more than a friend. The dreams I had of Volmar left me quivering like plucked psaltery strings.

Volmar was acting as Jutta’s private secretary, for Prior Cuno deemed it fitting for a woman of Jutta’s stature to have a dedicated scribe. Volmar appeared each morning between Prime and Terce to write the letters she dictated and to attend to her every wish. Did she require fresh straw for her bed, mulled wine to ease her cough, new strings for her psaltery? Could the lay brothers launder her blankets and linens?

During her audience with him, Jutta sat well back from the screen, hiding shadowed in her veil, so he couldn’t see her wasted face or smell the stink of her slow starvation.

That particular March morning I arose from my stool, my wax tablet in hand, prepared to leave the room to give Jutta and Volmar their privacy. My magistra, however, called me back.

“Stay and listen, Hildegard. This concerns you.”

Like a scolded child, I returned to my stool and lowered my head while she conversed with Volmar, who couldn’t mask his love for her if he tried.

“I must write a letter to my mother,” she informed him. Beneath her brusque words, her speech revealed a vulnerability, a loneliness aching to be soothed.

Volmar sat with his wax tablet to take down the message that he would later transcribe to parchment, forming each letter with grace and beauty, perfecting Jutta’s grammar until the Latin was flawless. Of course, Jutta’s mother couldn’t read German, let alone Latin. When the letter arrived, the countess’s chaplain would read it to her and then write down the countess’s reply.

Ignoring Jutta’s dictation, I tried to catch Volmar’s eye through the screen, but his head was bent over his tablet. Reaching under my veil, I fingered a tendril of hair growing past my nape. With Jutta’s eyesight fading, I had taken outrageous liberties. When she handed me her shears every quarter, I only pretended to cut off my hair. Hidden beneath my veil, it grew and grew. What would Volmar make of my flaxen curls? I wondered if he had ever laid eyes on a girl’s uncovered hair. Did his thoughts also stray to the impure? Did he dream, as I did, of carnal love? I closed my eyes as a warm flush enveloped my body.

On my tablet I wrote,
Like billowing clouds, like the never-ending rush of the stream, longing can never be stilled.

“The sad conclusion I must draw,” Jutta dictated, “is that Hildegard is an unworthy companion for this life. Her spirit is too coarse, too full of stubbornness and sin.”

My heart stopped. Did she mean to be rid of me after all? The wax tablet fell from my hands and hit the floor with a clatter that made my magistra cringe.

“My sister in Christ,” Volmar interjected. “Surely you can’t mean that. Hildegard has been your steadfast friend.”

My eyes moistened to hear his kindness.

Ignoring him, Jutta soldiered on with her letter. “But Christian mercy forbids me to cast her out of this, her only home.”

Picking my tablet off the floor, I wrote in a shaking hand.
Rorich, save me before I rot here.

“After much prayer,” Jutta continued, “God has revealed to me that it would be most pleasing to his eyes if I could receive new and more fitting handmaidens. Let them be young oblates with tender hearts who respect what a gift it is to join me in this holy seclusion.”

The inside of my mouth went dry. So dragging me down into this living grave wasn’t enough. Now that I had grown into a woman with my own mind, she would demand that yet more young lives be sacrificed to her madness. She would force me to stand by and watch as she broke those children just as she had broken me. And I had no doubt that the oblates would come. Their parents, eager to earn the favor of the court of Sponheim, would offer their girls to Jutta as they might have shunted them off into unwanted marriages. This had nothing to do with God and everything to do with the vanities of the world.

Closing my ears to my magistra’s reprimands, I staggered out into our courtyard. Reeling between my potted seedlings, I prayed to the Spirit pulsing all around me, in every grain of soil, in the wind that swept the mare’s tail clouds.
Please stop her.

Later that day I committed my gravest sin to date. Tearing a page from the
Life of Saint Ambrose,
one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church, I worked with my knife, scraping off each letter till every last trace of ink flaked away, leaving the parchment as bare as Adam beneath the Tree of Life. Dipping my quill into the ink I had mixed for myself from pulverized oak gall and gum arabic, I wrote my pleading letter to Rorich. What would happen when Volmar—or Cuno—discovered the missing page? My fear of never reaching Rorich was greater.

After Prime the next morning, I pushed my scrolled missive through the screen into Volmar’s hand.

“Make sure it’s delivered, I beg you.” I didn’t hide my tears from him.

Jutta, stirring beneath her veil on the far end of the room, asked me what I was doing.

“She only asked for another book to read,” Volmar told her.

His eyes, as wide as heaven, locked on to mine as he hid my letter in his sleeve.

The clouds opened, lashing down March rain that flooded our courtyard and threatened to wash my fragile seedlings from their pots. My head fuzzy from the Lenten fast, I bent over the monks’ cowls I was sewing. The paths and tracks of the forest would turn to deepest mud. Rain would swell the rivers, the Nahe and the Glan, until they burst their banks. Even if Volmar had succeeded in passing my letter on to a messenger without attracting Cuno or Adilhum’s attention, would it ever reach my brother? And supposing Rorich received my message—could he truly presume to come here and demand my release even if he was elected a canon of Mainz Cathedral?