Women in the Wall (23 page)

There have been anchoresses who were visited in their solitude by celestial visions. Some—our chaplain told us—were visited by their Heavenly Spouse who shone so brightly that the cells and dark places where they were immured were lit up as though by noonday sunlight. His light penetrated their flesh. I never dared and do not now dare to long for such visitations. I do
not
complain of my own baseness. I never thought to be a saint. I chose the wall willingly.

The lewd fancies are coming back.
My
visions come surely from hell. They buzz and torment me like summer flies. Those men … laughed. Their weapons clinked on my wall. They shouted and I thought I understood that they were threatening to strip the clothes off the abbess’s back and take their pleasure from her front and rear. One yelled—I heard him distinctly: “The old sow must be fifty! A fifty-year-old virgin is tough as an old thorn bush. Best use your scramasax if you don’t want to skin your prick!”

Did I
hear
that? The words echo in my skull. My mind is as filthy as the vault I live in. I try to fix it on holy things but it slips as my feet do in the muck.

My God, let me be mad. I consent to be mad, damned even, rather than that these men should truly exist.

Where did I get such foulness? I always knew foul words, being brought up by serfs who lived, through no fault of theirs, much like their own animals. When they took me in the convent, they taught me new things but could not efface the old. I could never be like the girls who came from villas and palaces. Yet I too had good blood. I knew this but was used to the poor people who had brought me up. When I left them I cried. I clung to my foster-mother and for a long time regretted her. I could not get used to the silence of the convent. I hated sleeping alone. I used to cry for Merofled, Theudebert and their small brother,
Marileif
. I cried when I remembered how the four of us would snuggle together to keep warm and how, when the really cold times came, we would go into the animals’ stall and sleep between two cows. The heat of those big creatures seemed the most consoling thing in the world and even the smell of cow-dung seemed sweet.

How could I talk about this to anyone at the convent? The abbess used to try and comfort me. Sometimes she asked was I lonely and why? But what could I say? I said nothing. I must have seemed like a half-wit or as if the rough-coated, silent animals had passed a little of their nature on to me. Well, I was suckled by cow’s milk when everyone else is suckled by a woman’s. That must have had some effect. The other novices sometimes cried too when they came first. They used to talk about the luxuries they missed. How could I say that what
I
missed was sleeping with cows and on straw? I lived for the days when I was allowed to take food from the convent kitchens and visit my foster-family.

Then, with the years, I grew used to the convent. I changed so much that my foster-sisters and I began to feel shy with each other. None of us could help it. We’d grown different. They were working on the land and had grown and developed, while I was still a shrimp. At the age of twelve they looked like women and used to tease the men by tying their skirts high around their waists and letting them see their thighs when they were weeding or gathering in crops. I still came to see them and brought them food but by now it was the food and not myself that interested them. I would sit watching while they ate what I’d brought and they would talk and mention secrets they couldn’t tell me because I was a nun. Once or twice my foster-mother gave a kind of chuckle and threw me an odd look saying that nuns were not so different from other Christians as people thought. “Even abbesses,” said she. Her husband had died and her tongue grown bitter. Once when I mentioned something our chaplain had said, she exclaimed: “Ha, there’s a good one, the fox preaching to the hens!” She often made disparaging remarks about the convent, but then she made them about everything and everyone.

No!

I won’t. Won’t think. Not now. My mind escapes, like a ball bounced out of its cup, dangling on its string, swinging. My periods of blackness are more frequent now. My thoughts flow off like escaping sheep, turning, escaping under fences, sliding back along old tracks. An anchoress may slip into lunacy with the speed of a lost animal losing its footing in a bog. Sometimes I have felt the threat encircle me and the soft mud of madness rising round me. Sometimes I have been tempted to let it come.

[
A.D.
584]

Chrodechilde and Basina were winding wool.

“Hold your arms out stiff,” said Chrodechilde, “it tangles if you don’t.”

“My muscles are sore.”

“Offer it up.” Chrodechilde imitated Agnes’s voice. “You like our lady abbess, don’t you?”

“She’s all right.”

“She’s up to something.
You
wouldn’t notice but there’s something going on. A change. A whiff of fishiness in the air.” Chrodechilde wrinkled her freckled nose then laid a finger along one side of it. “I can tell, but shan’t. You’re not to be trusted.”

“Me? Oh Chrodechilde, what can you mean? Tell me.”

“Arms stiff. No. I’m not sure anyway. Only on the scent. I may tell you when I find out what I find out—then again I may not.” Chrodechilde pulled several rounds of wool from Basina’s wrists. “It’s cold,” she shivered. “This convent is always cold. They should light more fires. At night my feet are perished. I have two new chilblains.” Again she imitated Agnes’s voice: “Offer it up, dear!” Then, in her own: “If you come to bed with me tonight, I may tell you something.”

“It’s against the rules.”

“Rules!”

Chrodechilde suddenly began to spin on her heel, whirling faster and faster so that the wool she was holding wound round her as she turned. Basina, her two hands stiff out before her as though in the stocks, had to start running round her to keep the wool from breaking as it pulled off her wrists, got caught, tautened and drew the skein into a tangle.

“Stop, Chrodechilde, stop!”

Chrodechilde stood still laughing and Basina proceeded round her more slowly now twenty, twenty-five, thirty times, trying to gather the wool back on to the skein which held her arms as though handcuffed so that she could only grasp the thread of wool with the tip of her fingers.

“Now why did you do that?” she grumbled furiously, the tears starting from her eyes.

“To see what you’d do. You could have dropped the skein. It would have made far less mess. But you’re such a timid little sheep, playing by rules and you see where it gets you. I shan’t tell you anything.”

“I’ll come to your bed tonight.”

“Who wants you?”

Chrodechilde, whom Basina had now freed like an unwound spool, dropped the ball of wool she had been holding and left the room.

*

Maroveus held up a goblet of wine and observed a transparency within a transparency: the glass was milky, the wine pale gold. New vintage: the colour of morning light or the last blanched leaves on October vines. A little young yet but a good year.

“What are you after?” he asked and sipped and closed his eyes the better to savour the liquid’s passage first to the front of his mouth where his tongue dipped, bright as a blackbird, in the delicious bath then, after a swift bilateral swish into the puffed cheek-hollows, down the reaches of his throat. The successive sensations recalled the movement of a hand drawn across a harp: the acute, almost painful pleasure of the high notes yielding to gradual relief as the sound broadened. The wine was from his own vineyards. One day it might be a match for imports from Italy. If so, the merit would be partly his. There would be something of himself in the liquid he had laboured to produce: an anonymous aroma which posterity—his kind of posterity—would recognize. Would it? The vineyards might be burnt again as they had been in an invasion some years back. He opened his eyes and took another less pleasurable sup.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

He stared at the puffy-faced poetaster who hung round the nuns of Holy Cross and had finally become a priest a few years ago. Why? He was thick with royalty. Probably he’d been promised a benefice. Maybe Maroveus’s own? Well, Maroveus was not about to die to convenience him. If the poet had been on fire, Maroveus doubted if he’d have pissed on him to put it out. The fellow had come here with a lot of talk about Church unity and gabble about politics. Some convent intrigue too. Those nuns at Holy Cross seemed to have finally got their fingers burnt. Something about King Chilperic’s daughter having become a novice and his now wanting her out again to marry the King of Spain’s son.

“Nothing to do with me!” said Maroveus. “I mind my own onions. I have no jurisdiction over Holy Cross! Let the nuns fry in their own fat.”

The poetaster looked sly. Talked about how Chilperic had no heir and how the province might before long be fought over like a bone. It had happened before. Burned vineyards. Yes. Disagreeable prospect. Maroveus couldn’t see for the life of him what
that
had to do though with King Chilperic’s daughter. Obviously some secret the poet thought he might know. He was being sounded.

“If there should be an invasion of Poitiers …” The poet spread hands soft and white as raw dough. Maroveus observed them with dislike.

“What? Why should there be another invasion?”

“My lord,” the poet told him, “there is an army on the march and headed this way. I’ve had news from Tours.”

“What do you mean ‘on the march’? Whose army? Why? How far have they got?”

“It’s King Chilperic’s led by Duke Desiderius. There has been looting and destruction of property.”

The bishop sighed. “There always is. But we’re loyal to Chilperic. He knows that. He’ll respect the city.”

“Some say he’s heard a rumour that the men of Poitiers were negotiating to hand it over to King Guntram. There is also a … possibility that Chilperic may be intending to revenge himself on the convent which refused to give up his daughter.”

“Daughter? Daughter? Nobody ever yet fought a battle over a daughter. If it were a son were hiding there, now, I might understand your fear, especially as Chilperic, since the death of his sons, has no heir. But as he hasn’t he hasn’t. Why are you so peaky looking? Can’t you hold your wine, man? I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. If there’s an army coming, let it come.
I
’ll deal with it. I’ve done it more times than you’ve said mass. I only hope my vineyards don’t get burned or trampled before they get here. I’ll put on my vestments and wait for their messengers in the basilica. If the worst comes to the worst I’ll break up a gold chalice and pay them off—throw a sprat to save a salmon. You go and tell your nuns to sing psalms and stop bothering their holy heads about politics. Tell them to pray for me.” Maroveus bowed Fortunatus out. “Oh, and thank you”, he called after him with some reluctance, “for letting me know the news. If you’re as well in with heaven as you are with the courts of Gaul, you need have no worries.”

*

Chrodechilde’s jaw was remarkably undershot. It extended like a drawer packed with teeth which seemed to nibble the air with sharp hunger. A dormitory of novices were watching it do this in silhouette against a combustive sky. She turned from a window through which she had been watching houses burning on a distant part of the convent estate. It was cold. On the low vaults of the ceiling, shadows stooped like mewed-up hawks. The flame from the single lamp was warped and the smell unpleasant. Wicks and oil were short. They had to come from the port of Marseilles and roads from there had been impassible for months: the war. But now the war was here.

“Some sin has been committed in this convent.” Chrodechilde was whispering. “Some secret sin. Else why should God allow my uncle Chilperic’s soldiers”—she dropped the royal name with relish—“to burn our lands? There are no accidents for God.”

Feelings in the dormitory were tense and she struck chords on them. She knew how to weave connections between the novices and the ‘world’ which, by
cloister-Rule,
stopped at the convent door. Even arson and murder could be committed on the convent’s own estates, yet concern the novices only as further reasons for prayer. But Chrodechilde could make them feel intimately involved.

“Maybe
we
could expiate that sin—whatever it was—and stop the war. Unless”, she jumped down from her look-out point, “the only reason for the burning is that the king is annoyed at not getting back his baby here. He wanted her out, you know, but she refused to go.” Chrodechilde walked to the bed on which Basina was lying and ran a long lean forefinger around the curve of her cousin’s buttock. Basina’s shift was thick but to novices alert for the faintest fleshiness, the gesture was disturbing.

“Now who’s being sinful?” one wanted to know.

“Think so?” Chrodechilde wagged the offending finger, then, abruptly, bit it. Her teeth left two tracks like beaded crescents. “See!” She held up the wounded digit as the tooth marks filled with blood, then disappeared, overrun by a flux which dripped on Basina’s shift. “I would expiate any sin I committed. Would each of you?” She sat on Basina’s bed. “As I see it,” she took a handful of her cousin’s hair and began to plait it, “all of us are here because we weren’t wanted by our families: rejects. Which is not to say”, she added, “that a reject can’t become a saint. The last shall be first. I intend to be first—although I am not the last.” She had plaited Basina’s mane into two tresses which she now held like reins, tightening them so that her cousin was forced to raise her head. Chrodechilde jerked the head several times, then let the hair go. She looked around the dormitory. “What’s the matter with her?” she asked, tilting her jaw at Ingunda who was lying on her own bed. “Why’s she crying?”

A novice whispered. “She’s afraid the soldiers may have killed her foster-family. Tenants on the estate. The flames are just about where their house must be.”

“Serfs?” whispered Chrodechilde. “Oh, I suppose she’s somebody’s bastard then? Poor thing! And she’s crying for the foster-family?”

“Yes.”

“She’s a dim creature, isn’t she? Crying for a
foster-family
. God, I shouldn’t have minded if
all
my fosterers were put on one pile and roasted like oxen. It would be quite a pile too, I can tell you. I wore them out.”

*

“There’s no doubt”, Fortunatus told Radegunda, “the army was looking for the prince. Only the leader knew. Duke Desiderius. Luckily he was willing to be bought off.”

“For how long?”

“For good. He’ll tell the queen he searched the convent and found nothing. Afterwards he won’t dare go back on his lie. He’s an easy man to deal with: greedy, I had to give him more than I’d expected. Almost all the jewels you let me have. He confirmed what we guessed. The talk about Basina was cover for their interest in her brother’s
whereabouts
. They rather believed he
was
dead but wanted to make sure. Desiderius promised that we needn’t worry any more.” Fortunatus paused. “There was something odd about his manner. He kept hinting, then stopping himself. I had a feeling something else was up and that he was wondering whether to take me into his confidence.
Something
—I’m guessing now—dangerous. Desiderius has no particular loyalty to Chilperic or Fredegunda. I had the impression he was about to change sides—but not in favour of either of the other kingdoms. He managed to give me to understand that some totally new endeavour was under way. He as good as told me our prince—whether dead or alive—was no longer important.”

“Odd.”

“Very. With two of the kingdoms of Gaul being without an heir and the third ruled by a minor, how
could
a
legitimate
heir lose importance? Unless…?”

“A Byzantine move? The Emperor Maurice?”

“Or the Frankish nobles? They resent royal power and this is a good moment to challenge it—or both together.”

“But have they
another
pretender?”

“Well,” said Fortunatus. “There is Clotair’s bastard, Gundovald—if he
is
Clotair’s. All princes of the royal blood, legitimate or not, have a claim to succeed.”

“Clotair”, said Radegunda, “always denied Gundovald was his son.
He
said he was the son of a serf.”

“But the Emperor Maurice gave him hospitality all these years—that gives him some credibility.”

“Well,” said Radegunda. “He may be God’s instrument. We shall see. I doubt it though. There is something about
our
prince—I don’t think I’m deluding myself. I can feel a calibre in him, some chosen quality. But, obviously, the moment is inopportune. We must keep him hidden. I want him trained morally and mentally in case he should be called on to rule part or even all of Gaul. I want him moved to a cottage on the estate. You must be our go-between. Another invasion is unlikely.”

“You know the extent of the damage left by this one?”

“Agnes told me. She seemed disproportionately upset. What happened was terrible, of course, but might have been worse: a few rapes, one or two houses burned, some looting, no death. It is horrible but worse happens every day somewhere in Gaul. There is something shortsighted about Agnes’s grief. As though she could only pity wounds she could feel with her hand. Like Thomas Didymus. We must,” said Radegunda, “take the longer view.”

“Two of the girls raped were foster-sisters of one of the novices here,” Fortunatus told her. “I forget her name. It seems she had some sort of collapse.”

“The flesh”—Radegunda sounded impatient—“is weak.”

“Yes.”

“To go back to the prince: I want you to take his
education 
in hand. I have drawn up a reading list…”

Ingunda was in bed with fever.

On the day after the army left the area, she had begged Agnes’s permission to take food and medicines to her foster-family whose house had been destroyed. The steward had brought news that worse might have happened and Agnes had been unsure whether to let the girl go, but Ingunda pleaded energetically and Agnes was struck to see her daughter’s face suddenly change. The sullen flesh had come alive. Its heaviness gone, it flickered, mobile as fluid.

“Can I go?”

“All right.”

“Ah!” The girl sighed. “Thank you.” She smiled.

Agnes lent her a mule, then awaited her return with some anxiety. But the girl was away for hours and Agnes had things to do. Returning from checking a long inventory with the cellarer, she found the dispensary sister waiting for her. Ingunda, she was told, was back, had fainted, had been given an infusion of herbs and had vomited it. Now she seemed delirious. What should be done?