Women in the Wall (15 page)

*

[
A.D.
569]

Agnes and Radegunda were travelling across Gaul, Pale skies, dark woods, summer rains, nights spent sometimes in the comfortable annex of a bishop’s house—at Bordeaux and Saintes—at others in wretched improvised quarters. Days of jolting one’s bones in a four-wheeled
raeda.
Now they were in a boat. A second one behind carried their baggage and escort. Gliding. The waters of the Garonne stretched, absorbed light and hardened, icily opalescent as a mussel-shell with a dark-blue rim: the wooded horizon where a storm was threatening. Agnes felt light caressing her, felt her own secret paleness, the paleness of a body she had only recently learned to know, burn in the vigour of the late summer air. Her skin was hyper-sensitive and she had begun, secretly, to wear a silken undergarment beneath the rough wool of her habit. Fridovigia had provided—who knew how? Possibly a stolen altar-cloth? Agnes lay back, stared at a mild,
cloud-specked
sky and felt no guilt. She loved. She was in accord with a love which she felt in the air’s delicate glitter, in the river’s movement, in the crew who were busy steering the boat between islands of purple loosestrife, meadowsweet and reeds. Surprisingly, her scruples had evaporated faster than Fortunatus’s.

“That’s why I’m good at running the convent,” she had said to him before leaving for this trip “I take a decision and stick to it. No point in half doing something. I love you. Wholly. How can that be wrong? I see God in you. Don’t be frightened.”

After all, Radegunda had taught Agnes that knowledge was something one reached directly and with immediacy. One knew God, sin, one’s own calling in one illuminating instant and by intuitive—God-given—grasp. Rules were swept away when the soul was enraptured and Agnes was sure hers was. By sweeping away Radegunda’s rules, was she not being faithful to Radegunda’s spirit? Not quite—but then surely God’s way would not be the same for every soul. Agnes had continued to do her work at the convent and these had been busy months. The coming of the True-Cross fragment from Constantinople had brought all sorts of changes. There was the reception ceremony to be planned involving one of those upheavals which disrupt community life. Radegunda was ebullient at the news of the arriving relic, stunned when the bishop inexplicably refused to welcome it, fired at last by energy and defiance: all disruptive emotions. She wrote letters, sent ambassadors to King Sigibert, wept, prayed, tortured herself, received the king’s assurance that the Bishop of Tours would be sent to take Maroveus’s place and preside over the ceremony, then once again wept, prayed and tortured herself. Other nuns, infected by her emotion, also tortured themselves slightly but showily and grew incompetent. Agnes kept her head and temper and the convent on an even keel during the difficult months.

“Because of
us
,” she told Fortunatus. “I draw strength from our love. I need a human intermediary between me and God. I am an efficient but dependent person. I need love. Before you I loved Radegunda. But her love is all turned towards God. It consumes her and does not warm others.”

“Do not go forth into the world,” quoted Fortunatus bleakly. “Return into yourself. Truth is in the inner man.” He grasped her to him with what she feared was cold lust. “She’s right, you know,” he said.

“Your truth”, Agnes told him tartly, “won’t turn up in other men’s books. You are all divided, Fortunatus. You’re like one of those corpses the pagans mutilated to keep their spirits from haunting them. Your head is buried in one place—usually a book—your body elsewhere and your spirit can never get itself together.”

“Every human being is bound to the living corpse of his own body.”

“Is that a quotation too?”

“From Aristotle.”

“I am making a penitentiary”, said Agnes, “with scales of penalties to be paid by you every time you talk with another man’s tongue. The least will be making love to me right away, wherever we are and without delay.”

“Dangerous.”

“So don’t quote,” she said. “You owe me two lovings already.”

She loved him as a pony eats an apple: skin, juice, seeds and all, rotten bits too if there are any. Easily and with pleasure, nuzzling, ready for more. Wanting to be loved back the same way. And at first he had—who had begun it all? The furtive chanciness of their meetings meant that they never left each other sated nor met too soon again. He was always ready, always tremulous—but he disliked this. There was the difference between them. He was humiliated, feeling caught in his own body as in a trap.

“That’s a quote too!” she accused.

“No, it’s how I feel.”

“Liar! Welsher! Come on. Pay up.”

Ebullient, she could carry him with her for a short while, just as she carried the whole convent. And that was surely a sign of her rightness? Her being in control. It was she who had encouraged Radegunda to make this journey to Arles where they were to visit the convent of St. John which had been functioning for fifty years and, having been founded by St. Caesar, a bishop and papal vicar, enjoyed exemption from later episcopal authority.

“It’s the only sensible thing,” she explained. “If our own bishop won’t be responsible for us, what we’ll do is adopt the Rule of St. Caesar and the exemption going with it. The Rule will guide us. The exemption will protect us. We can visit the convent and learn how their system works.”

Since leaving it, this was to be her first return to what nuns call ‘the world’.

Letters had been exchanged, gifts and messengers sent. Fortunatus had alerted friends and bishops along the way, recommending the two nuns to their care. Their journey led through three Frankish and one Visigothic kingdom. Borders were vague. Gaul was like a painted chessboard whose inks have run. The nuns had provided themselves with an armed escort and wore around their necks small receptacles containing dust from St. Martin’s tomb at Tours, a present brought by the bishop of that diocese, Eufronius, when he came to Poitiers. It was a sure specific, he assured them against the dangers of the road. Which was all very well but, Agnes noticed, a storm was coming up. The surface of the river had darkened and grown choppy. A breeze was rising and the sky turning a luminous but dangerous pale green. She called to the helmsman.

“Will we reach Agen before the weather breaks?”

“I don’t think so, Mother. Currents.” He shrugged.

“Where can we spend the night then?”

Another shrug.

Agnes turned to Fridovigia who was in the prow of the boat behind. “Find out is there somewhere we can stay tonight,” she called. “Somewhere close. A church, a house. Ask the boatmen. They should know. They’re local.”

The river banks were hairy and wild with dark brambles and soaked overhanging beards of grass. No sign of a road. The breeze was clattering the branches of the trees together with that dry warning which comes just before a storm. Agnes shivered. She had been feeling so unguardedly at one with the landscape that its sudden change was like a rebuff. A drop fell on her cheek and rolled down like a tear. Be rational, Agnes. The weather did not lend itself to rationality. Lightning ripped its rent in the sky. She clutched St. Martin’s dust and braced herself for the thunder.

The church house where the party finally found lodging was a small one attached to a village church. The nuns’ party was not the only one driven here by the storm. A pair of Syrian merchants were already installed when they arrived and, although the priest was quite prepared to put them out in favour of the new arrivals, Radegunda forbade this. Radegunda, whose energy came in spurts then died down like a fire covered by wet slack, now took over. This was something for which Agnes always had to be prepared. Radegunda, who thought she left control and responsibility to Agnes, was not even aware of what she was doing. Authority was part of her. She had to make a conscious effort to get rid of it as she had rid her diet of meat, fish, fruit, eggs and wine. When she forgot, her directions were immediately obeyed and often ran counter to some arrangement made by Agnes. Now, she chose to be charitable. The merchants must stay. Travel suspended convent rules and were these not doubly in abeyance anyway since the convent was about to adopt a new Rule? Besides, how send a Christian out into a night like this? Agnes reflected that the merchants could well have slept safely in some stable, and prepared for an embarrassing evening. Radegunda would not eat, would fall into one of her semi-trances in which she was perhaps quite simply conserving the energies which she insufficiently nourished and would be unaware of what was around her. What was around, Agnes had quickly noted, was a half-drunken priest, a housekeeper who was not of canonical age, and a sense of something interrupted. There was a cauldron of some herbal mixture on the fire and a number of bottles and and phials had been arranged on a bench but were now being put away by one of the Syrian merchants. Merchant, she wondered, or doctor? There was a Syrian colony in Bordeaux where they had spent a night on their way here and where she had heard strange tales about these Easterners. “Syrian” was a vague term used, she knew, for any Christian of Eastern descent. They were thought to have curious, perhaps diabolical lore. Their knowledge of surgery, philters and inexplicable cures made them suspect. The Bishop of Bordeaux—who had told her of all this—was of the opinion that the only medicine a God-fearing Christian should seek for bodily ills was the application of a relic. Yet, Agnes knew, the old Romans, probably even her own ancestors, had had medical
knowledge
which was now largely lost. Or had it been gathered up by these acquisitive Syrians who travelled the
trade-
routes 
buying and selling whatever they could market? Greeks? Persians? Armenians? Their quick foreign eyes flashed messages at each other and they moved to a distant corner of the smoky room where Fridovigia was unpacking the food. Minutes later the two were in conversation with the old woman. Agnes closed her own eyes and tried to imitate Radegunda who carried her cloister with her and was totally withdrawn from the obscurely sinister scene. Agnes sat up and tried to face down her own reaction. Why ‘sinister’? Wasn’t it just poor? The oil in the lamps was of an unpleasant cheap variety and the wicks must certainly be of elder-pith. No, it wasn’t that. There was something not right about this house. Secretive: that was it. There was a secret here. The priest and the Syrians had been interrupted in the middle of some activity they did not want known. Well, it was no concern of hers or Radegunda’s. They would spend the night, shelter and move on tomorrow, leaving their hosts to finish whatever it was they were up to. She shivered. Absurd! How absurd it was! Her cool confidence in herself—the
competent
abbess—her control had simply gone. She felt
vulnerable
here off her own ground. It was just as though she were a mollusc which had been scooped from its shell and exposed. Her skin moved on her back. The simplest young girl, she thought, knows more about the outside world than I. Glancing over, she saw the two Syrians’ eyes fixed on her. Fridovigia was whispering something and she saw one of them signal the old woman to be quiet. They had been discussing
her
. Or was Fridovigia just haggling over spice or garum? But there was curiosity and a flicker of something—something like pity?—in the younger Syrian’s eyes. Then Fridovigia said something else and they detached their gaze.

*

Agnes sat with Radegunda and the abbess of St. John’s convent, Mother Liliola. Outside the window lay Arles, a pale stone city surrounded by marshes and wild birds.
Duplex
Arelas
, the twinned town that had been
Con
stantine’s
before he founded his own, rose on two sides of the River Rhône on a scale astonishing to the nuns from Poitiers. Its pontoon bridge, theater, arena, baths and circus were still monumentally intact but, as they rode in, they had passed evidence of the pillagings and plunderings which it, like other cities, had suffered from the recent civil wars. They were talking about this and about the Rule of St. Caesar which they had come here to learn.

“Moderation”, said Liliola, “is the basis and kernel of our Rule. An abbess must guard against extreme
behaviour
of any kind.”

She was clearly in doubt as to whom she should address. Agnes had been presented as abbess. Radegunda’s fame had reached here and did not, Agnes suspected, dispose the Provençal woman well towards her. Her words, after all, were a condemnation of Radegunda’s way of life.

“Penances of a dramatic or theatrical sort”, said Liliola, “may be of use to the individual in her search for
perfection
. They can never be other than harmful to the
community
as a whole—and that”, she looked at Agnes, “must be an abbess’s first concern.”

*

Mint, fennel and rosemary bushes scented the air. Shade was provided by cypresses, those dark rigid trees which stretched in close formation at regular intervals across the surrounding landscape. Packed in
straight-lined
phalanxes, one expected them to start marching like the ghost of an old Roman patrol: one two, one two. But they simply stood. They were windbreaks, sometimes woven together by reeds, so menacing was the blast of the wind they must withstand.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” said Fridovigia. “It’s no use my putting it off. The opposite in fact. You’re quick with child.”

Agnes failed to take this in.

“Pregnant,” said Fridovigia. “You’re going to ask how I know. Well, I know and …”

She talked. The strong scents flowed approvingly over Agnes. So did sunlight and the marsh-wet air. So who was approving her? Herself? A white stone caught the light dazzlingly. On the low wall a lizard was sunning itself. Fridovigia mentioned the Syrian doctors. Ah, so they had been doctors? On the way back, said Fridovigia, she could arrange a meeting. They would be expecting a message from her. At Bordeaux. Or Auch.

“Obviously”, said Fridovigia, “you must act now. This journey is a heaven-sent opportunity.”