Women in the Wall (28 page)

“You had no choice.”

“I didn’t. Oh, my God. I’m a man of words. I could write a poem about a conspiracy—but
run
one, oh God!—and they give me responsibilities! I’m so terrified, I refuse to carry any papers on me, yet they use me as a courier. I learn things off rather than have papers, then I get so frightened my mind goes blank. If I told you where I do carry papers you’d—you’d be disgusted! Talk of
grubbi
ness
. God have mercy on me.” Fortunatus threw himself on his knees.

“Get up!” said Agnes. “Why should your prayers be heard?”

“You’re harsh, Agnes!”

“I’ve seen you before now recover from a fall which destroyed … others. You land on all fours like a predatory tomcat pushed off a balcony.” She heard her own voice with surprise. Bitterness gave it an edge, a life which she had thought gone out of her. A kind of cold, slow pleasure flamed through her.

“You hate me?”

“I have forgiven you but not myself for listening to you. I wish none of us had ever listened to you.
You
brought the prince here!”

“Shshsh!” Fortunatus goggled at her, mouth and eyes gasping. “For God’s sake!” He repeated his round of the door, the tapestry, the curtain. This time he climbed on a stool and stared out the window.

“Am I the only sane creature left?” he lamented. “Listen,” he opened a coffer, inspected it, poured some wine he found there, drank it and sighed. “My motives, Agnes, are not selfish. Truly. I’m afraid for myself, I’ll admit. Why not, for God’s sake? But I’m afraid for this convent too and for Gaul. It’s my adopted country. I don’t want to see it mangled again—I’ve seen more of war than you, you’ll admit?”

“But
you
first introduced the prince!”

“Did I have a choice? I wish I’d smothered him. He”, Fortunatus leaned towards her, caught her shoulder, let his breath—wine-laden now—play hotly on her ear, “is not to be relied on either. He’s nervous, like a horse who’s been too long in the stall. He’d do anything. He’s—well, what would you expect? He spends his time disguised, dressed as a woman, gardening. From boredom. Studying Latin with me. He has no sense of reality. How could he have? He needs a woman too. He’s growing up. The family of Clovis, you know—hot blood! He should be got out of here.”

Fortunatus’s face ballooned too close. Agnes could not see or focus properly. It was a puffy face now. Wine had thickened it and age—he was well into his fifties—twitched and pinched it into cruel little lumps and udders.

“I’ve told the bishop,” he said, “and they say it’s my affair to keep him in check! ‘In check’! ‘In check’! It’s easy to say. Here I have a mad saint and a randy youth on my hands. I should get him some whore—keep him from breaking into the convent. That’s what I’ll end up as: a pimp. All in the noblest cause, you know, but causes have a way of mobilizing the oddest elements. Change is tricky. Throw something up and it may fall back in your eye. One can’t predict. Perfection is not of this world—that’s an axiom. It’s dogma. So mustn’t it be wrong to seek it?”

“Seeking safety”, said Agnes, “is not always the way to find it.”

“You’re always reproaching me, Agnes. I’m weak.” He sighed.

“I know.”

“Also,” he straightened up somewhat, “I have some sense. I know more about what lies outside these walls than you do.
There
was
nowhere
to
go
,
Agnes. We were safer here.”

“Safer!”

“Happier—well, we might have been. If you had wished. But you’re stiff: an extremist. I always hoped you’d relent, come back to me after…”

“After the child was born?”

“But you closed me out. Suddenly you—like Radegunda—were playing all or nothing. But
we
’re not like that, Agnes, you and I. We’re not all-
or-nothing
people. My God!” He began to laugh and plead at the same time. “Our whole story was born under the sign of compromise: a love affair in a convent. I was your second choice, Agnes. You had already chosen God. I only did that years later—
He
was mine. I pray He’ll forgive me. Our affairs had to be secret, had to be cautious, preferably a little light-hearted. I tried to tell you that, Agnes. We had to divide ourselves …”

“You can’t divide a child!”

“Did it die, Agnes? Was that it? You never told me—and I have wondered.”

“You never asked.”

“I was afraid to. You had closed me out.”

Agnes’s jaw felt frozen: held in a clamp of ice. With a wrench she opened it. “She—the child—didn’t die. She grew up and became a novice here. Now she expiates our sin. She is the recluse: Ingunda.” She steadied herself.

He turned away. Bent shoulders, a bent head, silence were all she was presented with and a soft, hooped back. “He is suffering,” she thought and wondered was she pleased? Sorry? Triumphant? Somehow justified? No. None of these. She probed herself: nothing. His suffering had come too late to alleviate hers. Why had she told him at all? An experiment perhaps? And why had she said that Ingunda was expiating their sin? Did she believe that? In a way, a confused way—but which sin? Having loved or of not having loved enough? She sloughed off such
niceties
? What did clarity matter? It might have helped once. Now it was too late. Life was almost over. The world, she felt obscurely, was almost over too and Radegunda’s conspiracy absurd. The soft, hooped shape in front of her was shaking. So he could still feel? Maybe after all he was more generous than she? Younger too. He didn’t feel things were over. He could worry. He could cry.

“Fortunatus!”

He didn’t turn.

Tears. Easy response. She envied it. She left him to it. Standing there, she exiled herself into nothingness as she had learned how to do and waited five, ten, twenty-five minutes? She couldn’t have said. Finally, he turned.

“Why didn’t you … tell me?”

“Because…” Why? There must have been reasons. They receded, eluded even her memory. She should have. Of course, she should have. Fortunatus, the eel, the
back-bending
, flexible courtier, might have ferreted out ways and means to help. But Agnes—as he said—had been too stiff. She had refused to deviate from her rejection of him, from her response to his rejection of her. Stiff! Her throat felt stiff now. She couldn’t swallow. It felt like dry stone. She was, had been a stone for a decade and a half. He had stunned her.

“Agnes!” His face, all grimy lines, a gleam of tears, pain, was knotted and concentrated on her. “Agnes! We can still do something!”

“She won’t listen. You think I didn’t try!” The protest ripped at her throat, came out in tatters of sound. “You think I … I…” Now she was crying too. “Besides it’s too late.”

“Listen!” He came close, held her. She let him. “When we finally launch the … attack. When the prince is produced, there will be great confusion, comings and goings, war. I can use the time—our forces, disguised maybe, I’ll work that out—to kidnap her. Take her off somewhere where I can talk to her, reason with her, try to show her a wider world than the convent…”

“She won’t…”

“She may … We must try, Agnes.”

“When?”

“Soon. I’ll push the thing forward. I know I can. Radegunda wants me to anyway. So does the prince. I’ll persuade Palladius. Agnes, don’t cry.”

“The sin…”

“Holy Virgin, Agnes, you think too much, say ‘no’ too much! It won’t be
her
sin. Let it be our sin. We can take it on ourselves. We owe it to her and… to
us.
”

“Who?” Ice was receding from her dead emotions, freeing the ragged-edged wounds so that they hurt again. “I am too old,” she cried.

“You are a greater coward than I!”

“Yes.”

“There’s always a middle way: slow, foot before foot. But you leap or hold back entirely! You lacerate yourself!”

She pulled away from him, put a finger to her lips, jerked her chin towards the door, turned and began to fold
vestments 
in the coffer behind her.

Fortunatus moved with silent caution to the door, then whipped it open.

“Well?” she heard him say. “I thought I heard
something
. Where are you supposed to be at this time?”

“I … came to see you.” Chrodechilde’s voice. It quavered, then reasserted itself.

The door concealed the two women from each other. Agnes did not move.

“Why?” Fortunatus asked in a flat voice.

“I represent a body of nuns. I’m their delegate. We have no one else to turn to. The foundress is so absorbed…”

“What about the abbess?”

“It’s about her!” Chrodechilde began to recite: “We, not in any malevolent spirit but because we have the good of our holy convent at heart, feel obliged to bring to your attention the fact that our abbess is no longer able to carry out her duties. We feel her illness has troubled … her mind? At any rate,” Chrodechilde was producing her words faster and more nervously, “we have”, she said, “drawn up a list of charges. I and my cousin Basina in particular feel that we are not being treated as we should be. We are the kinswomen of kings and for all the respect shown to us we might be the daughters of low serving women. The food and clothes we are expected to … you don’t take me seriously, Father Fortunatus?” She interrupted herself. “I can see you’re not sympathetic. But these things are not as trifling as they might seem. They interfere with one’s devotions—besides, rank is rank even in a convent. Certain things are due to it and the abbess has never acknowledged this. Listen, before that peasant girl, Ingunda went into the wall and became a recluse—she was weak in the head, poor creature, so perhaps that was for the best—can you believe that the abbess paid more attention to her than to any other novice? As if she were trying to humiliate us! There are many irregularities in this convent—may I come in? The corridor is not a safe place to talk.”

“Come in,” said Fortunatus.

Chrodechilde walked in, saw Agnes, and stopped. “You trapped me!” she reproached Fortunatus.

“Go to your dormitory,” Agnes told her.

Chrodechilde left. Agnes watched her walk down the corridor then turned.

“Do you think she heard anything?”

“I’m not sure. It didn’t look like it. But she’s clever. This is another reason for moving fast.”

“Yes.”

“Could you,” he asked, “keep her locked up for a while? Isolated?”

“Yes.”

“Be firm.”

Agnes was so firm the convent was shocked.
Chrodechilde
was the first nun ever to be punished by publicly receiving twenty lashes of a strap on her shoulders. The beating was administered by the abbess herself and
afterwards
Agnes sentenced her to stay in an isolated cell. Justina would bring her her food until further notice.

“It shook her little following,” said Justina afterwards. But I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. They have a grievance now!”

[
A.D
. 587]

“Happiness”, Radegunda pinched the loosening flesh on her arm, “is shucking off the body. I have known it. I’ve been outside mine. My freed soul looked down at this body which is blood-nourished like a tick in a dog’s ear. There was nothing it wanted less than to return to it. That is why it did.”

She was walking in the convent garden with Fortunatus who, for once, was not listening to her. He was thinking of a message he had sent the bishops of Saintes and Tours. His genius for Latin acrostics had come in handy for he had inserted the dangerous message vertically and slantwise in a hymn. The key was in a seal which showed an X and a Roman cross superimposed. None but the bishops
themselves
, who knew his liking for such learned tricks, would notice the design. “Security here weak,” he had written. “Delay dangerous. Prince should be moved now.”

“I could not”, Radegunda was saying, “believe at first that God wanted me to sacrifice our peace here for the peace of Gaul. I had intimations, but how could I believe them? They might have come from the devil.”

“Indeed,” said Fortunatus inattentively. He could see the road down which a messenger would come. It was white and parts of it, in the faltering air, seemed mobile. Soon a messenger must appear. He would be small and white at first, hardly bigger than a puff of dandelion-down bowled along by a breeze. When he arrived, he would be as dusty as a miller. Fortunatus had already discerned three imaginary moving specks.

“The safe course always”, said Radegunda, “is to say ‘no’. But is safety God’s way? ‘Leave all and follow me’ surely meant leave safety too?”

Her face was unhealthy. He was only half listening to her. Already, he had decided not to tell her the bishops’ answer. The best thing would be to get Clovis off the estate without her knowing. The other problem was Chrodechilde.

“I hunger for action,” Radegunda sighed.

Fortunatus shuddered. “Have you”, he asked, “grown tired of prayer?”

“I despise prayers which try to wring concessions from God.”

“Pride!”

“It is my besetting sin,” she acknowledged. “It is the devil’s own and he is clever at disguising it. I had thought I was renouncing it by engaging in action. Action risks failure.”

“Do you want”, Fortunatus let his horror sound in his voice, “to fail?”

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

Her eyes had sunk in her head. Their fierce, burning quality was put out by the sunlight. For the first time, the poet realized that she might die soon. She was sixty-seven and had led a life of extraordinary privation. No, he did not trust her.

“Tell me”, she said, “about the prince.”

“His Latin is coming along. He’s intelligent.”

She shrugged; her face sharpened. “I mean what’s he
like
? His temperament? His character? Have you managed to restrain that richness of the blood that all his family have? I think of poor Clotair. The boy is twenty. What does he do for sex?”

“I thought you had cast the body off—forgotten such things.”

“Don’t be foolish. We’re all stuck with and in a body. And the body
he
’s
stuck with has probably got violent appetites. Like his grandfather. What’s he doing with them? He should eat little if he’s hoping to quell the flesh. Especially meat—he should abstain from that.”

Fortunatus had a suspicion the prince was doing
something
highly incautious about those appetites. There were plenty of girls working on the convent estate and Clovis, being dressed as a female, had easy access to them.

“Have you asked him?”

“Yes. No. I think he’s all right?” Her sudden,
ridiculously
late, practicality threw him off stroke.

She had turned from him and was shading her eyes. “There’s someone on the road,” she announced. “A rider. Are you expecting a message?”

“Yes. Actually.”

“Have you given up confiding in me?”

“I don’t bother you with details.”

“Details are just what I want to know. It’s definitely a messenger. He’s moving fast. Why don’t you go down to the gate so as to stop him. If you don’t, he’ll go into town to look for you. I’ll wait in my cell.” Her tone was as alert as it had ever been. “Bring me the news”, she said.

Fortunatus bowed. Before moving out of sight, he turned to look at her. She was standing with fists pressed together so that the knuckles showed white. Under her loose habit, her limbs bulged like tent pegs, each slightly out of place as though a fist had wrung and twisted her the way one wrings a wet cloth. She was, he remembered, often, if not always, in pain.

He climbed down the steps to the convent door, walked out and settled himself on a bundle of wood at the edge of the road along which the rider must pass. Yellow celandines grew in a hollow by the roadside. Glossy-petalled, they reminded him of the gold which the bishops were amassing for the coming uprising. Some had come from Byzantium. More would be supplied by the dissident nobles who had been mobilized and alerted. Several of these were more violent than the kings whose power they resented, and one or two bishops had expressed doubts about relying on them.

“We are not relying on them,” Bishop Egidius of Rheims had retorted to Bishop Palladius whose idea would have been to keep the conspiracy small. “We need military men and are using them. Once the present government is removed, a period of confusion intervened and our prince has presented himself, it will be appropriate for us to hail him as the God-appointed heir who can unite our unhappy country.
We
need only surface in the role of healers.”

Astute enough, thought Fortunatus, but such a plan depended on tight security and that no longer existed. Rumours leaked in all directions and probably only the fact that they were garbled in the telling had preserved the plotters until now. Speed and stealth were no longer to be hoped for. Fortunatus regretted the years of poetry, piety and pleasant dalliance with the two nuns who had been seeking nothing but peace when they founded their convent. What had gone wrong? Personal matters aside—he banished
them
, could not now cope with their
implications
although, from time to time a black halo fringed his mental images, corrosive as a scorch, and reminded him that in his own life too there was something to be faced. But he managed to dodge confronting
that
until it could be dealt with. Aside from it then, what had happened here in Holy Cross? How had the temporal—even the expedient—come to count so much? Or
was
Radegunda’s interest in the immediate matter at all? A woman whose view trembled off into eternity, could hardly accommodate her eyes to the close at hand. Maybe the plot was only a pawn’s move in some very long game played with God? She might be offering it, giving them all as martyrs. Anything. Fortunatus felt a shiver of panic. She might indeed. Her rage for self-laceration might have begun to nibble all round her. She did hate the world. He stood up. This was fanciful. He would do better to worry about the active plotters. Some new recruits were very queer fish indeed. But when you spread your net wide that
was
what you caught: scavenging fish and crabs who might tear holes in it. Duke Rauching for instance. Fortunatus had been shaken to hear they had enlisted him. He was a brute, a barbarian who had buried two of his serfs alive because they had dared to marry. The two had sought refuge in a church, refusing to come out until Rauching had given the priest his word that he would allow them to live together “until death”. Rauching gave and kept his word—in his own way, by burying them alive. Fortunatus had used the story to try and teach Clovis the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law.

“The trouble with Frankish laws”, he had tried to explain, “is that they have no unifying spirit at all, no concept of equity. They’re like a housewife’s repair kit: so many patches for applying here and there to stop the more obvious holes, to keep disorder in check. But they have no guiding principles, not even a concept of honour. Look at the laws protecting women. If I violate a girl, the Frankish laws don’t consider I have offended honour. They consider I have offended against property because she belonged to someone and whoever it is, guardian, betrothed or husband, will want monetary compensation according to her worth. If she is an embroidress or of child-bearing age, I pay more. If I only picked up her dress and uncovered her, I pay less. A little more if I uncovered her backside than if I only looked at her thigh and less again for the knee. But a Roman would have either killed me or closed his eyes to the matter. The offence is absolute. Honour is not measured in inches of leg.”

Clovis’s interest had noticeably sharpened with the mention of backsides and legs. “I think our laws are more humane,” he said. “Fancy killing a man for violating a girl, who maybe liked it.”

“Well that has fallen into disuse,” Fortunatus admitted.

“The Church’s laws are like ours,” Clovis had argued. “Sins are graded, aren’t they, by the amount of flesh one makes free with?” His hand stroked fat air.

No power to conceptualize! A Frank. Still, the boy was bright enough. Fortunatus had a feeling he didn’t believe in much—which was what came of keeping him inactive and making him think. Bad? Good? Better than making him a bigot probably. And how inactive was he in fact? There had been a trace, a smear of femininity about the cottage sometimes when Fortunatus came. Something impossible to pin down: a bunch of wild flowers in a cup, some oaten or spelt bread which had not come from the convent kitchens, an air of tidiness, something.

“I want to see my sister,” Clovis had said recently. “If the plot is ever coming off it’ll be soon, from what you tell me. I should see her before I leave here. After all, I might be killed.”

“All the more likely if you let people know you’re alive.”

“Five years you’ve had me boxed up here like a monk,” the boy complained. “How much longer?”

“Do you know how Gundovald died?”

“Do you know how often you’ve told me?”

“I thought you might have forgotten.”

“I’m not a coward. I’d rather die than live another year—another
half
year in this place.”

“It’ll be soon now,” Fortunatus had promised. It had better be. The boy was impatient. Radegunda was impatient. Chrodechilde was, in her own way and for her own reasons, a danger. She had come to him again, complaining about her mistreatment at Agnes’s hands. She had been half hysterical, threatening to run off and enlist the help of the kings—“my royal uncles”, as she called them. They were unlikely to take any notice of her but he couldn’t take a chance on this. It was no time for a royal inspection. He had managed to calm her, promising—he had no idea what. She was twenty-one years old or thereabouts, a lusty, violent creature at the top of her energies. The whole convent was a tinder-box. The long, over-long gestation of this plot must come to some sort of outcome fast. There was Ingunda too … What a time that rider was taking. The road wound back and forth below the town and they had sighted him when he was only a blob of dust, but still … Impatiently, Fortunatus stood up and began to walk in the direction from which the man must come.

The rider, masked in surrounding clouds of dust like some descending Olympian, almost ran him down.

“Fortunatus! The man I’m looking for. Have you had the news? What are you doing on the road?”

The rider was Palladius himself.

“I haven’t,” said Fortunatus, “but I can see it’s bad.”

“God save us, but it’s bad!” The bishop looked right and left, back then forth again. The country was flat and open. “Everything’s over,” he said in an exhausted voice. “Disaster! God, but I’m tired. I can hardly breath. And saddle-sore. This dust.” He began to cough. “I came alone,” he managed to say between coughing and spitting and wiping his chapped mouth. “Mad! I might have been killed twenty times on those roads, but …”

“Don’t try to talk,” Fortunatus told him. “We’ll get you a drink at the convent. We’ve got to go there. Radegunda saw you arrive.” He wondered whether to warn Palladius about her but decided not to. He would see for himself.
She
might be cooled by the look of him. The bishop looked wild-eyed. His face was streaked with filth and his horse probably not long for this world. A shawl of froth covered its withers and blood streamed from its mouth. Fortunatus led it slowly towards the convent gate. “Are we in danger?” he dared to ask. “The prince I mean?”

“No. I don’t know.” Palladius coughed again, swallowed with difficulty and leaned forward over the horse’s neck to whisper, “Rauching was taken: butchered. But he had no time to talk.
Someone
talked but we think whoever it was knew only about the nobles—the laymen—not about
us
. He knew, whoever it was, that King Childebert was to be murdered by Rauching and tipped the king off. When Rauching came for an audience, he found Childebert surrounded by a bodyguard. The audience went off quickly. Neither Rauching nor the king said anything of note. We know this from a man of ours who was there. Then, when Rauching walked out the door, he was tripped up, swordsmen leaped on him and hacked his head into a smear of brains. ‘Like spilled porridge,’ said our spy.” The bishop’s whisper was hoarse but level. He showed no feeling. Weariness, sustained shock and perhaps sheer repetition had taken the nerve out of his voice. “The body”, he went on, “was stripped and thrown out of the window. The king’s venom saved us. His anger. He should have had Rauching tortured and tried to get names out of him. Instead, he had him butchered on the spot. Our allies, Ursio and Berthefred, who were to have moved in with troops and taken over the palace, were warned in time and managed to flee. They’ve withdrawn to the town of Woevre. Meanwhile King Childebert has gone to Andelot to strengthen his alliance with his uncle, King Guntram. There’s going to be a purge among the dissident nobles. With any luck,
our
connection—the Church’s—won’t even be known. But your prince had better be kept out of sight. What was your message about ‘weak security’ for? What’s been happening here?”