Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  Two nights before she left, Ursule took Marie on one last hunt. They rose in the chill April night and went on foot to a pool of water in the woods, where the animals came down to drink in the darkness. There Marie and Ursule sat at the foot of the trees, letting their thoughts dissolve to make themselves more like the roots of the trees they sat upon and erase some of what was human in them. For long hours they sat without thinking, when, in the earliest stirrings of the long dawn, the fog lifting in peels from the surface of the warming water, Marie saw at the farthest edge of the pool the shape of a deer. And it was a doe, because a fawn was nuzzling at its belly, but it was unworldly, because it wore a rack of antlers upon its head and its body was made of the purest white. Seeing this creature as if fog gathered and made flesh, Marie held her breath and went entirely still. If her aunt had seen the doe, it would already be dead, blood unspooling in ribbons into the water.

  Then the white doe lifted her head and looked at Marie across the pond; looked her entire self into the girl. She spoke something there into the wordlessness at the center of Marie. Time stilled. The forest watched. Then the doe turned and with a single bound disappeared into the shrubbery with the fawn leaping behind. Ursule went off the next day to Fontevraud, and Marie carried that doe with her, this awe and mystery, until at last she put it on the page.

  * * *

  —

  She writes for days, copies the lais to fineness. She writes in a fever and sleeps little and her skin grows translucent and what small fat she once stored under her skin is gone; she is all sticks and knots in her hunger to return to the barn to make her work in the guttering light of her candle stub. With a small portion of her mind, during the day, she works through the account books and begins to understand the creaking and neglected machinery of the abbey, but hardly cares what she learns.

  Poor Sister Eulalia, whose acne bursts into horrible pus whenever she bends over, who often has to change her wimple halfway through the day it becomes so greasy, says, watching Marie, that the new prioress is now become only two great eyes, burning bright.

  Swan-neck says that Marie’s skin burns also, she throws off enough heat to warm both girls on their shared bench in chapel.

  Ruth says she thinks that Marie will die soon, for Ruth was born into a family of fortunetellers and she can see the handprint of death shining on Marie’s face.

  Marie writes a prologue to her collection. Those to whom god has given understanding and eloquence must not be silent or hide their gift, but must return the gift so that it flowers under the admiration of others. In the prologue she does not direct the manuscript toward its true target, but rather off a little to the side, to the far lesser spouse, if the far greater power. Perhaps if the lais fail to move the queen, the frenzy of her jealousy at this dedication will call Marie back to the court.

  And when her little pile of parchment is finished and as beautiful as she can make it, she looks up to find that it is the day before the Feast of the Annunciation, Lady Day, that weeks have come and gone since her arrival at the abbey. She takes some more of her coin from the trunk and skips Sext without permission to ride into town, the world greening all around her. She will buy enough soft white flour for breads and honey for cakes, a heifer to slaughter for the feast, for otherwise the next day would be a sorry affair of nuts and dried berries and a stillborn calf that Goda had carried on her shoulders from the distraught bellowing heifer to the kitchen. Roasted and with an apple in its mouth, it won’t strike anyone as so sad, the subprioress had snapped to the kitchener, whose face had shown horror. Marie rides with the manuscript held tight to her chest in a celebratory mood. In town, she wraps her book with its letter in the finest leather coverings she can buy, and pays a fortune to have it galloped the leagues back to the Westminster court that very day, to be placed within the royal hands that will, she is sure, deliver her, if not that day then very soon. She laughs because the pennies she pays to send the gift bear the likeness of its stated recipient, though not the true one.

  And then she waits, nearly panting. She imagines Eleanor bending her head over the manuscript, reading, at last fully seeing Marie, fully knowing her. Marie feels she will die of her love. Or, perhaps, of the glory sure to come to her. For Eleanor will be like a cut glass through which Marie’s light flows; the queen will have the manuscript copied and given to those she loves, and each new person who reads Marie’s poems will be filled with the girl’s own brilliance.

  Through the queen’s intercession, through her returned love, Marie thinks drunkenly, she will live on forever.

  She watches the sun come up warm on the day of the new year, Lady Day, this day of first creation, the day when the angel descended and whispered the word in Mary’s ear and filled her with divinity.

  She is too agitated to do any work with the abbess and so she takes the Amores down from the armarium and reads as the abbess dictates into the nothing a stern letter to a creditor. But the book is not speaking to her today, Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim, it is speaking to some other woman with no hope in her heart.

  And so she stands in the middle of the abbess’s dictation and takes up her little merlin upon her shoulder, and ignoring the abbess’s voice raised in admonition, she goes out to the stables and saddles her horse and trots down the hill to the winter-rye fields and once there she sets her falcon free; and she gallops through the fields and forest the length of the road to town, watching for her deliverance. But when no messengers come up the road and she can see the town through the trees, she pulls her horse up and walks it back, listening behind herself for the sound of hoofbeats. But there is nothing all the way back, also. The nuns working in the garden rise up like a family of pine martens to watch her drawing near, because it is outrageous to head off for a pleasure ride when there is always work to be done. Wevua will surely fall on Marie with savage vengeance.

  The fine bright sky clouds over and a heavy rain begins to fall. She whistles and whistles for her merlin but the bird does not return. When the rain is so harsh she can no longer whistle, she leads the mare inside the stable and curries her and picks the mud from her hooves with a sharpened stick. The bell rings None; in the chapel, her habit runs with water that pools under the bench and she shudders with the chill. After, Wevua slashes her hands with a switch for running off, for being so careless as to get herself soaked, until they are swollen and bleeding and unusable. But Marie, thinking how soon she will be rid of this place, hardly feels the pain.

  And shivering in her wet habit and with smarting hands she goes into the refectory, from which good delicious smells of the feast of Mary are emanating, and though they are supposed to be eating in silence, the sisters whisper with joy until the abbess stands with a rare anger in her soft face and says, Enough. Silence. And then they eat the soft breads and meats and cakes and roasted turnips quietly, eating and eating until they are full and then beyond full, and poor child oblate Adeliza has to run out to vomit, then runs in again frantic that she will not have time to fill her stomach again. But there is enough food and just barely enough time. The alms to the beggars at the wicket that day are enormous.

  The rain stops, but the ground is soaked and cold, the mud thick on the road.

  Vespers.

  Compline. Her ear aches from listening. But still no messenger.

  After Compline a villeiness who works in the kitchen is waiting in the cloister outside the chapel. When Marie comes out, she thrusts into her hand a filthy cloth through which Marie can feel the light body of her bird.

  At first she feels a terrible pain to have lost her merlin, that good small fierce friend of hers. Then a strange happiness bolts through her, because in her poems there is a story in which lovers exchange a message through a dead nightingale wrapped in an embroidered cloth, and perhaps this is the message she has been longing for.

  Yes, she thinks, she would sacrifice even her bird for it.

&
nbsp; She opens the cloth and sees what she had expected, the torn bloodied body of her bird, which a greater falcon has killed; the merlin had been made slow and dull with the long winter inside. But though she searches, she finds no message in the villeiness’s dirty cloth.

  The servant says something in a pious voice. Goda steps forward and translates into French. The villeiness had said she was walking back to her home and saw from the skies a great haggard, a wild lady-hawk, shooting down as though an arrow from the silver early moon and catching the merlin in its talons as it flew, it squeezed so tightly the little bird’s blood scattered like wheat upon the ground and the servant followed the blood drops and found the prioress domina’s falcon in the path and knew that the great prioress domina would want to know what had happened to it, for, though it is unnatural to keep the fierce devil birds of the forests as pets, the gentlefolk have strange desires and there is no profit in judging them, for all godly folk of the church know that the flow of judgment like the flow of water must go not up but down, alas. The villeiness smiles the gaps in her teeth at Marie.

  Marie says in a very low voice to please, subprioress, tell the woman thank you and she will find her tomorrow to give her a penny.

  But with this the woman seems to object, and Goda speaks to her harshly and the woman snatches the cloth from Marie and drops the dead bird back in her hands, and disappears muttering into the darkness.

  Goda says with a jutted jaw that the woman had wanted two pennies and then Goda had said she was greedy and would get none at all.

  The other nuns have already moved off to the dortoir. Only the blind abbess stands with Marie. She reaches up and touches the prioress’s face, and feels the wetness there.

  The abbess says that ah, so Marie has discovered what happens when one neglects one’s duty and is disobedient.

  Marie says yes, though it is with hatred that her voice is muted.

  The abbess says she was going to send the prioress to the misericord for her punishment. Five lashes and between Prime and Terce kneeling on unhulled barley. But she thinks now that Marie has suffered enough. Plus they can’t spare the barley. Poor little bird. The abbess had grown to be fond of her little noises in the night.

  Marie says yes.

  Wevua slides out of the doorway. She says that Marie’s sisters have already begun to sleep and yet her own bed is empty and if she does not want to be lashed she will go in.

  Marie says yes. Dumbly she follows Wevua inside. She lies down. She holds her cold aching hands in her sleeves to warm them. She listens all night, twice tricking herself that the yew’s branches clacking in the wind are the hooves of a galloping horse. But they are not. And no one comes. And no one will come. And there would be no one at all fetching her home.

  In redoubled sorrow, with the nuns around her starving despite the single feast, with the grayness and misery of this life, she thinks then very seriously of letting herself die.

  * * *

  —

  She sits at Lauds unhearing.

  Acedia, she knows, is a sin. Despair.

  Hatred is worse; and Marie’s hatred would rip her limb from limb, if she lets her attention stray from it.

  She thinks of running away from the abbey; of running into the woods alone and catching beasts to eat with her hands and drinking from the freshets, becoming a wildwoman or a lady brigand or a hermit in a hollowed trunk of a tree. But even on this island there are few wild places left, no place that did not at last end up too close to a village with other humans in it. No, she is caught in a great net made by her sex and the excessive height of her body, she would be easily known, she is imprisoned by her lack of English, she has been made stuck by those years of loneliness she had already lived in secret after her mother died, when she impersonated her mother in all business, because the wolves of her mother’s family would never let a bastardess girl child inherit such wealth. Marie is caged into her fate by the isolation of those two years, only mitigated by busy Cecily; Marie would never want to live through that desert of her soul again. She is not built to thrive without others.

  Into Marie’s mind flies the pet nightingale the queen had raised by her own hand from a tiny egg found in the gardens. In that court so thick with bodies that even some of the nobility sleep shoulder to shoulder in the great hall, the bird was given its own chamber. All day the bird would fly from window to perch and open its mouth and sing, and the queen and her ladies delighted in the song. But Marie had known well the nightingale—le rossignol, le laüstic—and she had often heard the wilder type of this breed of bird through her window during the long hot summer nights of her happy childhood as the river slid past the château with its hush. She found the captive bird’s song unbearable. It sang no inspired flights or strange tunes lifted from the hearts of other birds, it sang the same few songs the same few ways. Its imagination had been limited by the closeness of the walls of the room, the smallest tooth of sky seen through the window, the stifling inside air, the worms fed it one by one out of the hand of the queen.

  When she had been feeling especially suffocated by the expectations of the court, Marie had often wanted to take the bird in her hands and snap its neck.

  And the ladies whose eyes grew misty in listening to the sad creature—these ladies in their endless circulation between court and chamber and chapel, with never a thought of galloping through fields, nor fighting nor hunting nor disputing nor reading the great dead philosophers nor swimming naked in a river whose current could grab their feet and throw them a mile, nothing but sewing and sighing over stories of courtly love, adultery, and secret suffering—these bony lady necks Marie could also imagine snapping in her huge hands.

  As the light from the window dawns against the white plaster of the western wall of the chapel, she feels a fire at the ends of her fingers. And this fire brings her back into the blunt truth of her body. Her body is pressed against the wooden bench. Her hips are against the hipbones of Wevua and Swan-neck. Her nose smells their skin, her tongue tastes her own sleep on her teeth. Beyond the voice of the cantrix, she can hear a common wood thrush singing in the hawthorn outside, a bush that just yesterday had dressed itself in a shivering lace of white flowers.

  It seems to her now that she can see this second bird’s song visibly in the air, how it moves upward out of the little beak so wild, but because it is sung into the wider day, the song soon dissipates on the wind.

  She brings her attention in close, because the nuns all around her are singing. The abbess’s milky eyes are shut in fervor, her voice rises silvery and sure above the rest.

  And this song too Marie can see in waves made visible.

  The song rises from the mouths of the nuns in puffs of white breath, it expands as it flies, it touches the tall white ceiling and collects there until it grows so heavy that it begins to pour down the walls and the pillars and the windows in a cascade; it trickles back across the stone floor to where the nuns’ clogs press, and up through their wooden heels and it reaches their tender living skin and passes into the blood and purifies itself as it rolls through their bodies, up through the stinking entrails and the breath exhaled from the lungs. And the song that rises into them and leaves their mouths is prayer intensified, redoubled in its strength every time it pours through them anew.

  It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard.

  Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so.

  Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer.

  So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.

  Fine then, she thinks with bitterness. She will stay in this wretched place and make the best of the life given her. She will do all that she can do to exal
t herself on this worldly plane. She will make those who cast her out sorry for what they’ve done. One day they will see the majesty she holds within herself and feel awe.

  Her love for Eleanor she buries deep within her, even though it is still alive, and it will flare up in her life and have to be banked again and again; it will morph to hatred then flare into love, then be snuffed into grief that leaves her empty.

  Marie looks around and sees the knobs of the women’s spines delicately pressing through the thick wool of their habits.

  She looks down at the unfleshed bones of her own hands, and wrenches herself out of the last of her stupor of despair.

  In the thin cold light of the cloister, she turns as the nuns come out and does not let them go on to their work. She is prioress after all, she is superior. Wevua tries to order her to silence, but Marie fixes on her a look so sharp, even Wevua goes silent.

  In recessing, she had made a plan, she tells them, separates them into groups. She will take this place in hand, she says to them grimly.

  First, she brings the silk-spinning nuns to the pond and shows them how to fish for trout with hempen line and worms dug out of the manure piles, which is so easy she did it as a child of four, and she tells them she is ashamed of them for squealing with disgust. She makes the field nuns collect the tender new nettle leaves and search out mushrooms, but certainly not the ones that bruise when pressed, she says, unless they want to have waking nightmares full of devils and strange flaring stars in colors bright. That evening they will have fish and soup, at least.