Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (15 page)

Wriggling loose, the little girl clawed my cheeks and spat in my eyes.

“You’re an ugly witch! I hate you!”

Jutta smiled like a lizard while administering Guda’s penance.

The child was to stand out barefoot in the late November cold until our magistra deigned to let her back inside. I awaited her with a blanket and a pan of burning embers to hold under her stiff blue feet.

“It’s all right,” I whispered as I chafed the little girl’s skin to coax back the flow of life-giving blood. “This time of year, the plants were sleeping. We’ll sow new seeds in the spring. Together we’ll watch them grow.”

Guda screwed up her face and hurled herself at the screen, pummeling the closed wooden shutters as she bawled for her aunt, who had departed for faraway Stade weeks ago. When I tried to soothe her, she roared, not letting me touch her. What a powerful pair of lungs she had—if she would only allow me to teach her to sing. At last Adelheid caught hold of her. Guda buried her face in her sister’s skirt and sobbed as though she’d never stop.

Watching the little girl break down in the terrors of our prison, I relived my own shattering. I’d sacrificed myself for these girls in vain. Adelheid threw me a stony look, as though she now hated me as much as Guda did and blamed me for all their misery.

That winter an ague spread through the monastery, with more than a dozen monks languishing in the infirmary. Before long, I, too, succumbed. In my dizziness, my soul floated over my body to gaze down dispassionately at that wretch below, that seventeen-year-old drained of every hope. Even my memories of Rorich brought no solace, for I had strayed beyond his reach, my one chance of freedom dashed to pieces. I was like a dead branch severed from the living tree, no more sap left inside me.

As I lay drenched in cold sweat, I heard Jutta order the oblates to stay away from me lest they, too, catch the sickness. Except the children refused to obey her. Instead of shunning me, Adelheid and Guda hovered by my bed.

“I’m sorry I killed your herbs.” Guda’s eyes were solemn and huge.

“Brother Volmar promised us seeds and new pots of earth,” Adelheid said. “We’ll plant them again for you, we promise. Now drink this.”

She gave me an herbal brew steeped in warm honeyed wine while her little sister offered me a hunk of soft bread, still warm from the oven. The girls fed me a bowl of turtle broth.

As I shivered and tried to speak, my vision shifted. Before my eyes, Adelheid grew into a serene young woman, brimming with quiet power. Her once mousy hair shone in the sun, streaming long and free, and she was crowned in gold. In her arms, she held a book.
See me, Hildegard. I am Sapientia. God’s Wisdom.
A ray of light from her heart touched mine.

Guda had grown into a beauty with her golden curls and emerald eyes, crowned like Adelheid. She offered me a cup overflowing with blood-red wine, her eyes brimming in joyful welcome.
Know me, Hildegard.
I am Ecclesia, the true and hidden Church.

From between these two women, a third appeared, an utter stranger, and so beautiful. Crowned like the others, her long black hair swept to her waist. Her silk gown was as red as the Virgin’s beating heart, and her smile gleamed in tenderness as she stretched out her arms.
Hildegard, seek me. My name is Caritas, Divine Love.

Before me this trinity of women blazed, the sacred shimmering through them. My fever was broken by the vision of these three divine maidens dancing around a flowing fountain of pure grace. Three women who formed the face of God.

We formed a pact, my girls and I, the three of us united against Jutta’s tyranny. When our magistra railed at them, they clung to me. The resignation on Jutta’s face almost made me pity her, for Trutwib’s prophecy was unfolding before her dimming eyes. Despite her every effort, Jutta had not succeeded in crushing me under her heel—Adelheid and Guda’s presence only made her slipping grasp of authority more evident. When she ordered me to cut the girls’ hair, I only pretended, the blades slicing empty air. Into Jutta’s cupped palms, I offered my own severed locks and let the children’s hair grow. Jutta had no need to cut her own hair, for her fasting had left her as bald as Methuselah.

Our magistra turned a bitter face to me, her traitor. She who believed herself an eternal maiden, still the girl of fourteen with pearls of rain glinting in her auburn hair, was growing into a feeble crone before her time, her bones as brittle as glass. What seemed to pain her most was how Adelheid and Guda took to calling me “Mother,” the title they should have reserved for her.

Adelheid soon mastered her letters and sums. Her appetite for knowledge seemed as ravenous as my own as she pounced on the books Volmar brought us. When she turned fourteen, the two of us were poring over the newly copied manuscript of Constantine the African’s
Book of Medicine,
full of the secrets of the Arabs, the most advanced physicians. We studied the mysteries of the four bodily humors and the way that blood coursed through the human body in a delta of pulsing streams.

More adept with her needle than the stylus, Guda could sew and embroider with astonishing delicacy. As her skills waxed, her altar cloths and banners became so exquisite that our abbot gifted them to cathedral canons in Worms, Mainz, and Trier. Most of all, Guda loved to sing. By the time her first bloods came, her voice had grown so sweeping and magnificent that she outshone our magistra. Since Guda’s voice was a pure instrument of God, it would have been a sacrilege not to let it develop to its fullest beauty. So I composed canticles for her. Her voice turned my compositions into shimmering revelations.

Years passed. My visions blazed, the visitations that made the girls withdraw to a corner while Jutta simmered in envy that the Bridegroom should appear to me and not her, his face as gentle and soothing as Volmar’s when he came bearing the books that were my consolation for all I had renounced. As I sought to mother the oblates, my own youth ebbed. A girl no longer, I was a woman growing ever older, ignored and unseen, a bush left to blossom down a dank ravine with no one to even notice that the flowering had ever occurred.

Adilhum died, and then the brothers elected Cuno as our new abbot. His rule was more austere than Adilhum’s, more in keeping with the Benedictine ideal. Not for him the feasts of stuffed pheasant and wild swan to woo wealthy patrons. Cuno’s fasts could rival Jutta’s.

After rising to the rank of abbot, he summoned me to compose music for the entire monastery. This was Volmar’s doing—my friend had praised my talents to highest heaven. Although Cuno had never particularly liked me, he went along with Volmar’s suggestion, perhaps in hope that my songs might coax his beloved Jutta to sing again, she who had remained silent for so long, as though her vocal cords had dried to dust.

As my young sisters and I joined our voices in the Holy Office, singing the songs I had composed, I gazed through the screen to see Cuno’s face soften in adoration, as though he had somehow convinced himself that Guda’s voice, so soaring and angelic, was Jutta’s.

Caritas habundat in omnia,
we sang.

Divine love abounds in all things,
From the depths to the heights,
Above the highest stars.

I could lose myself in ecstasy, our voices weaving in a circle of prayer, rising like incense to touch heaven, so far away from this abyss.

My girls grew into women, ordained nuns to whom the world outside our prison was a lost dream. The margravine visited every summer. Meanwhile, her husband died, leaving her with three sons and her only daughter to survive infancy.

Rorich traveled to Disibodenberg when he could, but an awkwardness had come between us ever since that night those many years ago when he had offered to help me escape only to have me turn away. As the years passed, he had become increasingly important in the archbishop’s court, climbing the rungs of influence that might even lead, God willing, to his own election as bishop one day.
If I had, indeed, thrown myself at his mercy that night, would Rorich have risen to these heights
, I wondered,
or would the infamy of our deed have dragged him down?
I tried to be happy for him, to treasure what few moments were left for us to share.

In the year 1136, I was thirty-eight. Jutta was forty-four and had no teeth left in her gums.
Ora et labora,
prayer and work, ruled our days in a rhythm as fixed as the seasons. Volmar brought us herbs of the forest and field that Adelheid, now thirty-two, helped me grind and mix to prepare ointments and tinctures for the monastery infirmary. Adelheid and I devoured our texts of science and learning, while Guda, now twenty-six, embroidered and sang with a voice that made the monks fall rapt inside its beauty.

Our magistra had abandoned every employment apart from praying and fasting. More grimly determined than ever, Jutta made a spectacle of her pain to admonish the rest of us for the pleasures we took in our work and studies, our circle of friendship. We were blinded by our vanity and mortal pride, she chided. Did we not understand that this earthly life was intended to be nothing more than a vale of tears? We would do better, she warned, to mortify our bodies so that our souls might earn their passage to paradise. When Jutta slept, it was not in her bed but on her knees on splintered planks.

I thought our life would drag on like this for eternity, the three of us bumbling around our sainted magistra while we struggled to live the most useful lives we could in the confines of that cage. But even stasis cannot last forever.

That November a package arrived through our hatch. It seemed a plain enough gift, wrapped in rough sacking, perhaps an offering from some grateful pilgrim whose prayers had been answered. Guda pounced on the bundle, her face glowing in delight at this diversion from our dreary routine. She tore open the sacking to find a deerskin pouch.

“It’s for you, magistra,” she called to Jutta, who swayed on her knees. “From the court of Sponheim.”

The pouch bore Jutta’s family’s coat of arms.

“Don’t disturb her,” I whispered.

Her eyes squeezed shut, Jutta seemed determined to ignore us. It was as though we, her chosen companions, were flies—minor nuisances that distracted her from her holy duties.

The mere sight of the arms of Sponheim made the old panic beat in my throat. Jutta’s mother, the countess, had died four winters ago. The only one who could have sent this was Meginhard. Though he had taken a wife, God had cursed his seed and left him without an heir. Banished from our abbey, Meginhard hadn’t sent his sister as much as a letter in more than two decades. My eyes filled at the memory of fifteen-year-old Jutta bashing her head against the stone wall and screaming that she was polluted. Did he think to torment her again after twenty-nine years?

“What could it be?” Adelheid asked, grabbing the pouch before I could stop her. Though wise as far as book learning was concerned, she was possessed of a curiosity as fatal as Eve’s.

“
No,
” I said.

Too late. Adelheid untied the pouch’s string, spilling its contents, which hit our table with an awful clang. While Guda and I looked on, frozen and speechless, Adelheid bent to examine the triple rows of interlocking brass links more than a yard long. Exclaiming at how cleverly it was made, she grasped the thing, then shrieked. On each link was a sharp, inward-pointing barb, designed to pierce the skin.

“Hildegard, what is it?” Adelheid lifted her bleeding hand to her mouth.

“A penitent’s chain.” My heart was like lead.

Twenty-nine years ago, Meginhard von Sponheim had smiled at me through the screen, his serpent eyes glittering, venom dripping from his every word.
I’m her brother, after all. Her only living sibling. There’s a chain that binds us.

“Get rid of it,” I hissed. Wrapping my hand in the sacking it had come in, I was about to stuff the damned thing back into its pouch and fling it back through the hatch. I’d beg Volmar to pitch it into the Nahe.

But Jutta stood before us, her dimmed eyes open wide, as though she had just awoken from a twenty-nine-year sleep.

“What is it?” she asked. “What has arrived from the court of Sponheim?”

My lips trembled. My tongue turned to wood. Reaching out, she took the chain from me. I thought that once its teeth bit into her skin, she would scream and drop the thing like the poisonous snake it was. I braced myself for her tears, her terror, but she remained utterly still, not flinching or making a noise until she finally spoke.

“Sisters, go to the courtyard and take your exercise. Leave me.”

Later, after the three of us had stepped in from the November chill with wind-chapped faces, I scoured the anchorage. But I found no trace of the chain or the pouch and sacking it had come in.

“Maybe she got rid of the thing,” Adelheid murmured, as though in hope that such a torturous device was too much for even Jutta to suffer.

But the knowing pierced me like the barbs on that cold chain. While we were in the courtyard, Jutta had stripped to the skin and wrapped that evil thing round and round her wasted body before concealing it under her hair shirt. I thought of Satan coiling his serpentine body around the Tree of Life, despoiling it, turning its nourishing fruit to poison. Meginhard had meted his final humiliation upon Jutta. Her debasement was now complete.

What a grip her brother held her in. After three decades within the impregnable fortress of the anchorage, Jutta still wasn’t free of him. From that day on, she remained as still as the grave, as though she had taken a vow of silence. She didn’t scold us, even when Adelheid and Guda chattered and laughed during the hours of enforced stillness. She just knelt on her splintered boards, leaving us to tiptoe around her while her lips moved in an inaudible stream of prayer, her eyes frozen on the invisible.

Each morning after Prime, Abbot Cuno appeared at our screen, his fifty-year-old face alight with a young man’s love. Whispering behind their hands, my sisters called him Jutta’s suitor. But Jutta turned her back on him, as though her sins and inner turmoil had strayed even beyond his powers of absolution.