Women in the Wall (22 page)

“Hullo,” said the foundress in a matter-of-fact voice. “Who are you? A new novice? What’s your name?”

“Chrodechilde,” she said, shocked and wondering was this some sort of test, “Mother.”

“Well, Chrodechilde, were you curious about my tower?” Brisk but indulgent. “Nothing much to see here, is there? I suppose it would be a good idea if I were to meet all the new novices but, recently, I have withdrawn rather from the community. I have”, Radegunda
prevaricated
outrageously, “been ill. However we’ve met now, haven’t we?”

They had. On a humiliatingly mundane level. In her state of overstimulation, Chrodechilde could only suppose that the foundress—who of course had supernatural insight and knew all about Chrodechilde—had deliberately staged this scene so as to humiliate her. She began to blush the maddening, prickling blush of the red-haired. “I’m sorry,” she said inadequately.

“Don’t be,” said Radegunda. “I’m glad we met. Pray for me. The prayers of the innocent are precious.”

Chrodechilde genuflected, kissed Radegunda’s hand, mumbled something and fled.

She did not hold this failure against Radegunda whom she continued to admire. Later, however, when an attempt to win Agnes’s affection—Chrodechilde, like a stray dog, tried for allies wherever she could—had also failed, she turned fiercely against Agnes. What happened was that she intemperately courted the abbess and, when it was pointed out that ordinary respect for convent rules, which she despised, would be more pleasing, took bitter offense. She was lonely, desperate for immediate approval and now, since the two women who represented authority, had refused this, resentful. They had better look out. She would bide her time. She was their enemy, she decided, and had survived through the next years in the convent very satisfactorily, living a life which was half real and half in her head. The real part had to do with the other novices, some of whom she cowed by violence while others she won by charm. Basina was being treated to the charm.

“You’ll be all right here,” Chrodechilde told her. “It’s not perfect but it’s safe and we’re trying to make things better. You must help. We’ll explain. Oh, don’t be alarmed. There’s nothing here as bad as in your stepmother’s court. What an animal that woman is!” she whispered, stroking Basina’s neck and terrifying her by her daring. “An obscene beast! They must have a hot place waiting for her in hell! No, nothing like that here. There are just little things that need changing—like our having to take orders from a woman who is neither royal nor even of our own race. You know who I mean. A Gallo-Roman nun. Well, who runs Gaul? Who conquered it? Mind you, while the foundress is alive you could say that she’s only relaying
her
orders and so we—you and I who are of royal blood—are not demeaning ourselves by obeying since the foundress is a queen. But when she dies? Did you know that she burns holes in her flesh with live coals and … oh, am I frightening her, little squirrel? All right, I’ll say no more. But the point is Radegunda can’t live long at this rate, can she? And then we’ll be left with old Agnes. Some of us are thinking of complaining to our relatives. You could help there. We won’t write to your father, perhaps, since things are tricky for you in that quarter, aren’t they? But we could both write to our uncle, King Guntram of Burgundy. I wouldn’t mind Agnes not being of the blood royal if she had any leadership, but she’s just a stickler for rules. So dull. No feeling. Feeling—for me anyhow—is the very pulse of religion. I can tell
you
’re the same. Passionate! The spirit kindleth and the letter killeth—or something like that. I can never remember words. I’m not a word person at all. I’m too spontaneous. I think that’s a strength. I mean, instead of looking up old words in books—and I see you have as much trouble as I do learning to read—instead of that, we look into our hearts. We invent for ourselves. I think that’s better. I’m sure I’d make an excellent abbess. You know Agnes was about my age when she became abbess? Radegunda didn’t want power herself, you see. I admire her immensely. A passionate woman! Have you heard how she burnt herself with coals? They say the smell of burnt flesh came right into this dormitory …”

Basina rose the next day aware that she was sought after and that there were little poles of power, nets of intrigue, all that was needed to give life zest within the convent walls. Although weaker than her cousin, although utterly passive in her affections, she was less easily won than Chrodechilde might think. Precisely because she was passive, she was faithless. She began to wonder did she prefer the abbess to her cousin. Would she not rather be in the camp, since camps there were, of the woman who was abbess than of this clearly dangerous cousin of hers who only aspired to be?

Basina began to court Agnes, the only nun who held out against her. That it was a question of holding out and not of indifference she was sure. She had seen something on Agnes’s face when she had asked her whether her love of God had never wavered. The question had been random—but not innocent. Basina was not innocent. She had been reaching purposefully though uncertainly for a weapon and Agnes’s reaction had shown that she had found one. Now she set out to see could she break through the abbess’s defences.

Agnes took over the duties of the mistress of novices. It was in a writing class a few days later that she discovered that several of the girls were unable to hold their pens. Why?

“Show me your hands.”

A show of shyness. Then the palms were shown:
bleeding
and scabby in imitation of the stigmata.

“Where else?”

Their feet of course. Scratched more or less vigorously with a nail. One child had yellow pus on hers.

“What about the wound on Christ’s side? Did you imitate that too?”

No. They hadn’t thought of that. Or perhaps, since the fifth wound would not have been visible, had not felt it to be worthwhile. Imitating the exploits of great saints—as small boys did those of great circus performers—they stuck to externals as actors must. It was a form of homage. There was no mockery here. Agnes saw that. More than a game, it was a rite. As other children might play with dolls, these, reared for the cloister, were seeking an equivalent. The equivalent though was dangerous. Nobody can take a doll for a baby but a nail-scratched palm can deceive an imaginative girl into believing she has been marked out by heaven.

“Whose idea was it? Who did it first?”

Silence. Solidarity. But she could guess.

She made mild fun of them, preached sound sense—and was undermined by Radegunda. The children declared they wanted to confess their sins. Publicly. A deputation went to Radegunda, explaining that the abbess, because of the mildness of her nature, was being too lenient with them. They themselves felt the need to unburden.

“For the sake of our souls, Mother Radegunda, prevail on the abbess.”

Radegunda prevailed. The game intensified. Among the shadows of the draughty chapel where oil-fumes mingled with the rankness of evergreen garlands, the little girls, ceremonially, one by one, prostrated themselves on the mosaic floor and cried out their guilt with the art of practised actresses.

“I blasphemed. I pretended to have received the favours of Christ. I scratched my own palms and feet until they bled a bit and then pulled off the scab when it formed. It didn’t even hurt much. Now I am afraid I have endangered my soul. Please give me a penance.”

“I used menstrual blood.”

“I didn’t copy the others but my refusal came from pride. I felt superior. My sin is worse than theirs.” This from Ingunda.

“I”, Chrodechilde confessed, “thought the whole thing up. I am the worst sinner of all.”

And on and on. Boasting. Competing. An orgy of it. Radegunda sat listening, her face stiff with charity. How silly she is, thought Agnes sadly. She encourages zeal and all she gets is theatre. Some of the older nuns looked bewildered, even stunned. This sort of thing was new to the convent.

“All right.” Agnes stood quietly in the chapel. “We’ve heard your confessions now.” She turned a quelling look on the flushed excited faces. Eyes glinted; lips were licked; tremors passed among the adolescent herd. They had intoxicated themselves, keyed their nerves to a pitch of collective expectancy and were ready for anything—except to be let down. The bright, drugged eyes implored Agnes: “Something,” they pleaded. “Prescribe something violent. Strange. Anything. Only don’t, please, force us back into our imprisoning separate selves.”

Agnes spoke in a dousing voice. “There is nothing,” she told them flatly, “which prevents feeling like shamming it. Pretence”, she insisted, “dries up the heart. Now I cannot be sure but what I think is this: that you have been playing with religion and that the repentance you all expressed just now was also play: a sham. If it was, you had better admit this to yourselves, because the hearts you dry up”, she warned, “will be your own. You may go.”

There was a silence. More: a kind of vacuum as the girls grappled with the probability that nothing more was to come, nothing to happen after all.

“That”, said Agnes, cruelly mild, “is all. We shan’t discuss this incident again.”

They left, slowly, shrunkenly, dragging themselves and she, touched by their dejection, felt distaste for what she had done. Wasn’t it like rubbing soot into the eyes of a peacock’s tail, sham eyes but which have delighted many? She had broken the current uniting them, quenched and shown up the sad spuriousness of their fantasy—and what else had these girls got? Why had she done it? In the name of a genuine but perhaps unavailable experience?
She
, certainly, had never enjoyed religious ecstasy and had no tips as to how to achieve it. Or had she been aiming for order and the sort of conduct with which community administration could best cope? And was refusal of sham emotions—resignation to a narrow life not just as likely to dry the heart? Hadn’t it perhaps dried up her own?

“Well,” said Chrodechilde to Basina. “You saw. She has no temperament.”

“I’d have said”, Basina answered, “that she won that game.”

*

Next day she went to see the abbess who was making wreathes for the altar.

“What you said about pretence, Mother,” she said, “moved me. I think I have tendencies to be pretentious. I …”

“Think of your work,” Agnes told her coldly. “And think three times before starting a sentence with ‘I’. Work will save you if you want to be saved.”

“May I help with yours?” Basina picked up some laurel branches which Agnes was bending into circles.

“You’d do better to practise your writing. If you’re going to stay with us, you’ll have to learn to write.”

“If?”

“If.”

Basina began to cry. Deliberately? She was a great crier. But what difference did that make, Agnes asked herself. She knew the root complaint of these little girls who
alternately
disguised and paraded it: a need to be loved. Small birds thrown early out of whatever cold nests had hatched them, they grabbed what cover they could. Like rejected nestlings too, many were unappealing. The God in whom convent-Rule invited them to sink their separateness was a comfort to the very few. For others he fell apart in the mind: a scarecrow-lover put together from scraps and hazy images of a world in which they had no place. The best thing for them would be to love each other in a mild and not too individual manner. Or so Agnes felt—and failed to act on, for she picked up the crying child, kissed her and told her she could stay.

Basina kissed her back, noted the smell of verbena from Agnes’s clothes, fell in love with her and thought she might warn her against Chrodechilde.

A bell rang.

“That’s for me. I have to go,” said Agnes. And so was not warned.

*

Later that day Agnes and Ingunda finally met to work on the sacristy vestments. Agnes was shy of the girl and at first planned to let her talk. But the girl did not talk so Agnes had to start questioning her if she was not to let the hour go by without either of them opening their lips.

“Do you get on”, she asked, “with the other novices?”

“Not well,” said Ingunda. “They’re from better families than I. You know—I speak bad German and worse Latin. I’m improving … but slowly—besides, they remember what I was like before.”

“Did they
ask
you to join—to pretend you too had the stigmata?”

“Oh, they asked me all right. They were all doing it together. In the dormitory.”

“Weren’t you tempted?”

“No.” There was a pause. “Don’t think I’m better than they are,” said Ingunda. “It’s more the other way round. I’m more down to earth. I mean, can you imagine the family that brought me up, my foster-sisters, doing a thing like that? They’d think it daft. It’s like fasting. They never heard of it. When you had food you ate it—or saved it. You don’t think of depriving yourself of something you don’t have half the time!”

“Are you … happy?”

“I’m content.”

“But you miss Fridovigia?” Agnes fell back on the acknowledgeable link. “Don’t you?” she begged.

“Oh, I was sorry for a bit when she died. But, after all, she was old. She’s better off dead.”

Agnes felt rebuffed. How much easier it would be to get close to Basina who came rubbing up against one like a spoilt cat. This girl … Agnes looked at her: intent face, closed. A touch of the peasant who gives nothing away. Well, what had she expected?

“Time for compline,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Will you come again tomorrow?”

“All right.”

[
A.D.
580]

“I tell you,” said Fortunatus, “I have lost my appetite. I can’t eat.”

Agnes was impressed.

“Not a thing. I can’t swallow!” Hand to recalcitrant throat.

“That is bad!”

It was. She knew. The seat of his energies was his mouth. Its functions combined beautifully.

“I”, he complained, “have never aspired to be important. Or heroic. Or saintly. You know that, Agnes. My God!”

Was God nodding, one wondered? He was supposed to note the fall of a sparrow and here he was sending a lark on a hawk’s errand!

“All this about”, Fortunatus lowered his voice and cupped a hand funnel-like about his mouth, “the prince is not my kind of thing at all!” They were standing by the convent wall which dropped sheerly below them into empty open countryside. On the inside was the garden which did offer some cover for possible eavesdroppers but Fortunatus had checked every bush.

“Well,” said Agnes, “Radegunda has things well in hand. I mean: nobody sees him.”

“How long can that last? I ask you. With two hundred women fluttering around. He’s like a cock in a barnyard. They’ll
smell
him!”

“She’s with him all the time. And she has marked the door of his cell with the tau cross: the sign of the plague.”

“And suppose she goes off into a trance? What then? What worries me is Bishop Bertram. What’s he up to? Which side is he on? What’s his game? He’s an intriguer, a tricky customer, slippery, deep. God knows what he’s up to. Anyway he left me no choice. Can you imagine my feelings when he arrived in my place with the wounded—for all I knew, dying—prince? I couldn’t throw him out. That might cost me my life—he
is
Chilperic’s son. But keeping him was almost as dangerous. Bertram has a hold on me now. Do you think that’s what he wanted?”

“Why should he want a hold on you?”

“There’s always dirty work to be done. They always need someone to do it. They could have anything up their sleeves. Anything. Saints Hilary and Martin guard us! It’s all very well for Radegunda. She’s a queen. She’s a saint. She probably wouldn’t mind being a martyr as well. Might welcome it. Though you probably don’t know it—it’s shocking how little people do know of their religion!—self-slaughter has been condemned by two Church
Councils
. Two, wilful martyrdom is a form of self-slaughter. Ergo—but women never understand theory.” Fortunatus walked up and down, gulping in air as though it might save him from drowning in some element which his splashing movements made present even to Agnes. “Oh,” he cried and was so clearly aghast that she would have caught and calmed one of his hands as one does a bird which has strayed desperately indoors—but how could
she
? Safety, she knew, haunted his mind. He had left Italy in search of it.

“Fortunatus, is there something you want us to do?”

He flung up his hands prayerfully. “Agnes, for your own sake, for my sake, for the prince’s sake,
be
careful
! Have you got him dressed as a nun at least? Shaven?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“He’s not dying I suppose?”

“He’s recovering. Radegunda has applied poultices and …”

“Mmm!” Fortunatus waved away medical detail. “Now comes the tricky decision: do we get him out of the convent and slip him off somewhere and, if so, where? If any harm came to him, we would be responsible—and he
is
heir to the throne of Neustria. On the other hand, if Fredegunda ever heard that we had helped him it would be the rope and pulley for me.”

“We can pray.”

“Oh, by all means pray. Pray. We can ill afford to forego any available support!” He spoke with violence. “The question is where could we send him? It’s a bad moment. Usually the kingdoms are at each other’s throats and refugees from one safe in the others. Not now. Right now there’s a reshuffle of alliances. Everything’s up in the air. Until lately, it was clear enough.” Fortunatus sliced the air into segments. “Chilperic was on one side, Guntram and Childebert on the other. That was after Guntram adopted Childebert as his heir. But the latest word is that Chilperic is also thinking of adopting Childebert as his heir. Great family spirit, what? Childebert may be an orphan and a minor but no one can say he lacks fathers. And Chilperic’s fatherly feelings have evidently been saved for now. After all, it’s largely his own fault if he’s heirless—or thinks he is, since he doesn’t realize that you know who is in the land of the living. If that little fact were to leak out, Fredegunda would soon make it past history. In the twinkling of a knife. She’s more of a man than he—he only plants the royal seed; she reaps it. She’s trying to grow some more of her own at the moment, according to reports. She’s desperate to get pregnant. Going to witches, sorcerers and Syrians of every stripe. Rubbing herself with ointments, dosing herself with potions. She doesn’t neglect the saints either. They say she prepares steam infusions and—saving your presence—vaginal douches with scrapings from St. Denis’s tomb. A woman of eclectic belief. She’s on a diet of she-rabbits and dandelions from what I hear: sympathetic magic. Maybe she’ll produce a buck rabbit.”

“You sound well informed,” Agnes spoke with distaste. He sounded, it occurred to her, in better spirits too. Gossip restored him. “Well,” she said, “what now?”

“Nothing,” decided Fortunatus, “for the moment. We’ll have to sit tight.”

Radegunda had become attached to her patient. He was not the child she had supposed. Time flew. He was fifteen and a veteran of several campaigns, but weak now, harmless and amenable to good advice.

“Peace”, she told the prostrate prince as she dressed the wound in his chest, “is something we would all enjoy if young men like you would refuse to fight.”

“Refuse? I”, he told her, “spent most of my wars running away.”

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of. The Bible says …”

“Who’s ashamed? It’s a matter of luck. I mean if an army suddenly surrounds the place where you’re sitting with your stepmother drinking perry—well, you run. Or take the time I was sitting in Bordeaux over my lunch when a fellow I’d never seen in my life appeared outside in the street roaring that he was going to hunt me like a deer. He was an ally of my late uncle, Sigibert, who was on bad terms with my father and he swore he’d chase me across Gaul with horns and trumpets like a deer. Did you know that stags used to be tutelary animals—no, I suppose you wouldn’t be interested. Anyway, he didn’t say ‘stag’ but ‘deer’ and like a deer I ran. And he followed. Just as he’d said. With horns and trumpets. I still dream of them at night. Painful. It would be doing me a kindness, since you don’t sleep much, to waken me when I bell.”

“Bell?”

“Like a deer. Like this.” The boy began to roar.

Radegunda clapped a hand over his mouth. “For God’s sake. You’re in hiding here. You’re supposed to be sick.”

Clovis apologized. “I’ve hurt my chest,” he complained.

“Did you try to poison Fredegunda’s sons? Did you poison them?”

“Those poor brats? Why should I? They were never meant to live. She smothered them in affection—as well have smothered them between two tics. She has the evil eye.”

“Did you have someone else poison them?”

“I did not. They died of the plague. She was furious. She’d hoped
I
’d get it, you see. I used to find strange bits of clothing stuck under my sheet at night: rags from plaguey corpses. She had me sent to the villa at Berny where it was raging. My father consented. Poor man, he’s like an extra limb of hers. Between them they make up a human being. She’s the head, guts and liver, he’s the penis. Sorry if I’ve offended you.”

“Do you want to be king?”

He tried to shrug, hurt his wounded chest and grimaced. “If it comes it comes. Right now the omens point the other way.”

“Will you fight and burn the country if you become king?”

He laughed sourly but carefully, not disturbing his dressing. “Are you wondering whether I’m worth saving? People come to that sooner or later. I see them weighing me up. ‘What are his chances?’ they ask themselves. ‘Shall we keep in with him? How close to his father is he?’ In your case we can substitute ‘God’ for ‘father’, am I right?”

“Oh, I intend to save you anyway. My professional pride is involved. I ran a hospital once.”

“It’s a lucky wound isn’t it? A touch nearer the heart and I’d be dead. I suppose they think I
am
. Except for Bertram. I keep wondering why he saved me.”

“You don’t believe he might have had a virtuous impulse?”

“I believe you might. But I know Bertram. I’ve been working things out as I lie here and what I think is this: there has to be an opposing party, some group who would like to have someone—me or another—to put up against Fredegunda. So this gives me market value. Bertram can keep or kill me according to who bids highest—Fredegunda or the others. He’ll be haggling over me now with Brunhilde and Childebert and maybe with the nobles who don’t care much for our family anyway. Possibly even with Guntram, though
he
has nothing at stake. He has no heir of his own.”

“You don’t believe
we
would kill you?”

The young man had a crooked, mirthless smile. “You don’t have to know what you’re doing. You’ll hand me over to Bertram and he’ll do his own dirty work.”

“I could”, Radegunda had an illumination, “tell him you were dead.”

“And what would you do with me then?”

“Hide you. Here. You could dress as a nun. Would you feel demeaned?”

“To be a woman? I suppose not really. I’m not proud, you know: not of my sex or race or even stock. I’ve had no reason to be. I belong to the stepfamily. Everyone who wanted to keep in with Fredegunda treated us worse than they did the palace dogs. My two eldest brothers died in stupid wars, wars about nothing. As for being a woman—well, the toughest human being I’ve ever known was a woman: Fredegunda.”

Radegunda looked at the weak, young face and
remembered
Chlodecharius, her brother. She was convinced this situation had been sent. What she meant to do with it, she did not yet know, but this would be revealed to her. The first step was clear: Bertram must be deceived. The boy’s survival would be a secret from all but Agnes and Fortunatus. She would keep him alive as she had failed to keep her brother alive, teach him and maybe one day he might be instrumental in bringing God’s rule to Gaul. It was a mad idea but surely that proved that it had come from that more receptive part of the mind to which God talked directly: the feminine part which waited, humbly and uncritically, to be fecundated by divine decisions which are unfathomable and must simply be accepted. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me, she prayed, according to thy Word. What word though? How would she know it when it came?

“My tutor”, said the boy, “was from the East. Very knowledgeable. He taught me some anatomy. The womb, for instance, consists of seven cells or pockets. Men are born in the three right-hand ones which are warmer, being near the liver; women are born in the colder side: the left. Hermaphrodites are born in the middle cell and they, my tutor held, though in some ways monstrosities, are in others the most perfect of humans, being conceived in the most temperate and balanced heat. The golden mien, the point of equilibrium where an object hovers so that it falls neither to right nor left is the ideal spot. Mentally, my tutor, said, we should all strive to be hermaphrodites, being neither over-choleric like men nor over-passive like women. Unfortunately, his training of me did not get far. We never reached the point of equilibrium.”

“What happened?”

“Fredegunda thought he was a sorcerer. She was afraid he was making me too clever and besides she doesn’t like foreigners. When my father put his eye on and another part of him in a slave girl with whom he had been recently presented, she decided this must be the result of sorcery and my tutor must be the sorcerer. The slave was Eastern like him and that was enough for Fredegunda. She had my tutor castrated with live coals and then strangled. I
apologize
for the grossness of the tale.”

“God rest his soul,” said Radegunda. “He must have been an admirable man and his theory bears out my own: the ideal human being is sexless. Now you have had some training in striving to conform to the ideal. If we keep you here and dress you as a nun, the experiment can be
continued
. We shall see if we can breed masculine faults out of you without breeding feminine ones in. You might be the saving of Gaul. You must”, she fixed him with fiercely focusing blue eyes, “swear to me that you will neither reveal nor attempt to make use of your masculine attributes while you are here. If you do, I shall be obliged to get rid of you at once.”

“Whereupon Bertram or Fredegunda will get me. Obviously”, said the boy, “I am in your power.”

“I need more than your passive agreement. I need your active collaboration.”

“You have it,” said Clovis. “I swear by the True Cross.”

“Nor”, Radegunda warned him, “may you reveal your presence here to your sister or anyone else.”

“I won’t.”

“Swear.”

“I swear.”

*

[
A.D.
587]

I have been asleep again or in a faint. The two are more and more similar now. I thought I smelled resin a while ago and heard armed men moving in the cloister. One rattled his scramasax in the slit of my wall. Franks. They were shouting in some patois I hardly understood, shouting—God forgive me, I
thought
I heard: “Where is the abbess, the old she-fox. We’ll run her to earth yet and cut off her brush!” Surely
that
was a demon? Yet it might not be. Sanctuaries have been violated and profaned before now. Silence. Where are they? Gone? But the convent is large. Sounds carry badly through these thick walls. I hear nothing. My mind is plagued by ignoble thoughts. Agnes … God, may not mortification of the mind find grace in your eyes? My mind is a sewer. Cloacal. The sewer smell is the devil’s. Many saints have recognized him by his sulphurous exhalations. But he has penetrated into my mind! God
is
this your will for me?