Women in the Wall (5 page)

“Like a courtier,” he had said. “It sees the dazzle, not the danger. I should talk! I should have left Clotair’s court long ago!”

“Would you leave your sister?”

“If she won’t come with me.”

“She
is
married to the king.”

“Do you know how many wives he’s thrown out? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I keep telling her. Sooner or later she’ll fall out of favour and then …” Chlodecharius stroked Agnes’s hand.

“I wonder what will become of you, little Agnes? Will you marry one of Clotair’s leudes? Some great strapping Frank with hair bursting out of his nose like a prawn’s feelers?”

“No I won’t,” Agnes laughed and shivered.

“Ah, but my sister said ‘no’ too. Only when she ran away, Clotair came after her and got her back. It only made him madder for her. What does my sister teach you, Agnes?”

“Prayers. Latin.”

“She’s trying to turn you into a copy of herself. But you’re not like her. She torments herself. Do you know why? Because she can’t live as she wants to so she chooses to live worse. That way the choice at least is hers. It’s pride. She’s proud as the devil.”

“What am I like?”

“Nothing yet. You’re still at the tadpole stage. You might become a frog—or a butterfly. If you’re nicely treated and petted and looked after then you’ll be a very lovely butterfly. I wish I could take you with me to Constantinople and see it happen.”

“Can’t you?”

“No.”

But on other days he had said he could and would and had described the city as full of gold and spices and strange, domed, majestic palaces. While he spoke he held her hand and Agnes had the feeling he was saying a long, slow goodbye. She was not sure she really liked being with Chlodecharius who was so gloomy and a little dull. She might have had more fun with someone jollier but then, there was no jollier person around. Besides, she was really a little young for courting so it was flattering to be kissed and told in his sad, renunciatory way, that she, unlike himself, was made for happiness. He sounded sure. “You’re like water,” he told her, “you’ll flow where the stream-bed carries you. Radegunda and I are stubborn. Weapons jangled at our birth. Our stock is bloody. Did you know that her name means ‘Council in Combat’? Clotair’s means ‘Famed in Battle’. Well-matched, you see.”

There was always a vague apprehensiveness about him, a halo of blackness such as clings to things after one has been staring at the sun, but Agnes wasn’t sure he hadn’t manufactured it himself by his own wild glaring at doom. He puzzled her and she always left him with a feeling of relief, giddiness and a sense of something left unfinished. The way back to her own apartment led past the courtyard where boys from the palace school took their recreation and sometimes she paused there to chat and cast slanting glances around her. Experimenting. If Chlodecharius enjoyed her company, why didn’t they? Usually, they laughed and told her she was too young for such games and that she should run back to her nurse. Once though—just a few days ago—one of them said:

“Well, let’s see then, little flirt. Let’s see just what you’ve got there!” He drew her into a corner where he began to do things which made her kick and scream until he put his mouth over hers—his tasted horribly of stale wine—and held her thighs and arms. As this kept both his hands busy, he was unable to go on doing what he had been doing before, but Agnes’s terror only increased as his body bore down on her with its menacing, uneven shape. She managed to bite his tongue, then his lip, tasted his blood and, as he wrenched away from her, screamed for Chlodecharius. Suddenly she was released. Chlodecharius was there and the two young men were fighting while the rest of the palace students stood around shouting and laying bets. The one Agnes had bitten was younger than Chlodecharius but bigger and much tougher.
Chlodecharius
took a bad beating. At the end of the fight he had to be taken to Fridovigia who applied poultices and gave him a specific against headaches consisting of wine in which she had dissolved eleven grains of pepper and several crushed worms.

“No need to bleed him. He’s done that himself.”

It was two nights later that he came to Agnes’s bed. Although it was dark she recognized his step and was neither surprised by his coming nor by the lurching hesitancy of his gait. If Chlodecharius came at all it would be hesitantly. She whispered his name to encourage him and show that she was neither asleep nor afraid.

“Ag … nes!”

“Yes? . . What is it?”

He stood swaying by the edge of her bed then lowered his weight heavily on to it and rolled bumpily towards her.

“Are you all right, Chlodecharius?”

He was heavy. Hoping to shift some of his weight, she got her arms around him. Clasping him, she felt one of her palms filled by a hard smooth protrusion. It took her several moments to realize what it was.

“Listen!” Agnes’s nurse was shaking her. “You’re contaminated too! The king doesn’t like to be blamed. You’re the one who went rushing about shouting the news so the death couldn’t be passed off as natural.”

“A knife,” said Agnes glassily, “it was a knife!”

People had said—even to her face—that she had now been ‘marked for life’ as a bad day is marked by a black stone. She didn’t feel marked, not connected at all really to the dead man. People thought he had been her lover but he hadn’t been.

“How could he?” Fridovigia had shouted, raging against the gossips, shooing them away. “She’s a child. Leave her alone. She’s not eleven yet,” Fridovigia had lied, making her sign against the evil eye. “She’s eight years old, young, young, just grown quickly, that’s all.”

“And don’t you cry”, she said to Agnes now, “too much at his funeral. Don’t cry at all.” She would have shooed his memory out of Agnes’s head.

In songs sung by the royal harpist, girls’ hearts stopped at the same moment as their lovers’ even when those lovers died in distant battles. Death found a quick and parallel path in each love-twinned body. But Fridovigia’s grasp on reality was clearly superior to the harpist’s. Agnes felt nothing at all. Like a drawing on sand rubbed out by the tide, like writing on a scraped tablet,
Chlodecharius’s
memory was already almost gone. Agnes, faced by the insignificance of any—and so of her own—life, again began to cry.

Her nurse could have slapped her.

“Now why?” she asked furiously. “Why?”

“Because I
didn’t
love him. Nobody did.”

“What rubbish! What do you know? His sister did, didn’t she? If she’s capable of love. That sort turn their eyes to heaven and their thoughts to themselves. You’d do well to do the same. I might as well save my breath to cool my porridge. Do you want to join him in the grave?”

“No.”

“Well then?”

They’d be digging it now. Sliding the spade in. Cutting sods. Tug of roots yielding as tiny connecting filaments snapped first serially, then all at once. Smell of pollen and rank greenery when she and Chlodecharius met in hideouts in the woods. The undergrowth was so thick that once Clotair’s hunt had ridden by without seeing them and another time a boar sow with her litter of striped cream-and-brown cubs passed so close that they could have put out a hand and caught one.

“Why doesn’t she smell us?”

“We smell of the forest,” he told her. “Earthy.”

Would his wraith haunt her now, returning in reproach with earthy smells, mouth clenched on the coin which must be placed in it before burial to pay his passage over death’s river? But why her? Was it her fault? She shrugged, intrigued yet impatient at her life’s thread having thickened so interestingly before she was twelve.

“Listen,” said her nurse.

Agnes put her fists over her eyeballs and rubbed them in a child’s gesture. “Oh, nurse,” she complained in a high babyish voice, “I’m so tired, you can’t imagine. So ti-ired. I want to sleep.”

*

It had been dark by the early afternoon and now, hours later, the terracotta oil lamps disposed around Radegunda’s bedroom had begun to smell and smoke. A servant came in offering to pinch off the burnt ends of the papyrus wicks, but the queen sent him away. Smoke wreaths snaked through the air and the light solidified their outline, hardening them into ropes and chains. The room was choked with coffers, for Radegunda’s possessions had been moved in from the marriage chamber where Clotair now slept alone.

“Not”, said his queen harshly, “that I expect that to last more than a night or so.”

Most of the coffers were open and the gleam of gilt embroidery and jewels cut like knife-tips through the smoke. The bed had been piled with tunics, mantles, sleeves, head-veils, silk bonnets and a variety of other garments. Coloured motifs—losanges, crosses—caught the light, floating like bright geometric fish on a dark underlying sea of fabric. Stools and benches bore
translucent
scent-bottles of glass and alabaster.

“I shall take everything,” said Radegunda. “Why should I go naked to my new Spouse? It will be my dowry and I shall give it to the Church.”

She walked briskly about the room, selecting and rejecting garments, talking excitedly. Occasionally, she shook out a long rippling length of silk or linen which hung like a memory in the firelight, then was folded away. A pearl-studded belt was uncoiled then rolled tightly up again with a clap.

Agnes sat on the small stool used for climbing on to the bed—it was the only one unencumbered—stared at the jewels, blinked in the smoke and listened. The queen had been talking since their return from the funeral.
Occasionally
she came over to Agnes, bent towards her and stared hard into her eyes. Her own were blue and bright like the paste inlay in her
cloisonné
jewel-box:

“I hope”, said she, “you are making a true sacrifice. I would not want you to come with me because you were afraid to stay at court. You must come because you want to make a gift of your life to God.”

Agnes did not reply.

“You may feel regrets”, Radegunda told her, “now and later. They do not matter. What concerns me is the purity of your intention.”

“My nurse, Fridovigia, says …”

“Take no notice of what she says. She’s a worldly woman.”

“She will come,” Agnes said, “if I do.”

“If?”

Agnes scraped her sandal against the side of her stool. She leaned backwards and felt her shoulders sink into the feather tick behind. She wriggled back into its embrace, feeling it press forward around her like a nest. She would have liked to stay there forever.

“You
are
coming?” harried the queen.

Agnes said something about Chlodecharius but
Radegunda
 was not deviated.

“He is with God,” she said. “We must be concerned now for ourselves. Death is the rule of this world. His was not exceptional. If you stay here you must expect to see murders. The manner of this one makes me believe God has special plans for you. He sent you a dying lover to point the way the flesh must go. The flesh, Agnes, is future carrion. If you stay, you will begin to crave its enjoyment with another man. You will marry. Your nurse is probably planning a marriage already.”

“Yes.”

“Ah! And is that what you want?”

“No.”

Radegunda looked pleased. “I had feared you might hope for a family. Are you sure you don’t? A family …”

Could not, Agnes decided, be counted on. People left you. Radegunda was leaving. Chlodecharius had and, before that, her parents dead so long ago that she could remember neither them nor the villa they had lived in except through Fridovigia’s opulent recollections: glimpses of malachite and porphyry glimmering and darkening like weed in the wall of a wave. Drowned vistas, they dissolved under scrutiny like reflections on water.

“It’s over,” Agnes had finally shouted at her that
morning
. “Can’t you see! They’re dead!”

Fridovigia wanted it all to begin again: ceremonies, painted rooms, a husband for Agnes who would provide babies and a household of solid figures. In Agnes’s
eye-view
the figures danced impishly away. The only one to be truly counted on was Fridovigia herself. And, because she could be counted on, there was no need to give in to her. Radegunda was far less reliable.

“Please don’t go away, Radegunda,” Agnes begged. “Don’t you leave me too. I love you, Radegunda!”

“That mustn’t be your motive. I am casting off all human affections. If you come with me as my sister in God I will love you accordingly. Will you?”

Love? Yes. “But”, said Agnes, “is it forever?”

“Would you play the harlot with God. Give him the gift of yourself then take it back?”

The queen was excited, looked for an excitement to match her own in the little girl. But Agnes resisted. When she was with Radegunda she saw her, some of the time, with Fridovigia’s sardonic eye. When away from her she missed her tenseness, the yearnings which burned in her—and decided she could not let her go. Instinctively, she bargained, held back.

“Must I decide now?”

“Yes. I leave tomorrow. We will need the night to pack. You may think”, persuaded Radegunda, “that your regret for the world means you should not make this leap. But without regret there would be no sacrifice. It is the nerve and core of it. I feel none and so my home-coming will be less pleasing to God than your sacrifice. Come over here, Agnes and sit with me.” Radegunda swept a row of gold ornaments off a bench. “You are nervous,” she smoothed Agnes’s hair which the girl had been biting and twisting through her fingers. “Listen, I know you are weak. It’s because I know it that I want to spare you the disappointments you’d meet if you stayed in the world. It is because I know them that I want you to escape them. Can’t you let me save you, Agnes?” The queen’s tone was tender, coaxing. She ran her splayed fingers gravely down the girl’s face and neck, then past her chest, waist, knees, right down to her sandals which were muddy. In embarrassment Agnes caught the hand. “Now,” said Radegunda, “while you are young and almost unhurt, fresh, now is the time to give yourself to God. Once you’ve taken the decision you’ll never have to think again. You’ll find peace.”