Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  Next she flies, her fellow novices Ruth and Swan-neck in her wake, to the cellatrix, and demands entry to the cellar, where she discovers a side of bacon and keg of good ale set aside for the secret hunger of the cellatrix and her minions.

  Bacon? Marie says. But I have read the Rule, there is a prohibition against eating four-legged animals.

  Goda snorts derisively in the door and says, Impossible to feed so many on bread alone. Only the bodies of my animals have kept us alive during the starving times.

  Marie thinks, truly, she does not believe she could live here in this bitter sodden place without at least the consolation of bacon. Fine, then; she will allow it.

  But now the cellatrix is saying with her mighty arms crossed, in an angrily defensive voice, that it is not unheard of to serve meat at an abbey, other abbeys serve four-legged animals every day but Friday, she was only doing what the other cellatrices do.

  Ah. Do other cellatrices keep food to themselves despite their sisters starving? Marie asks, and Ruth would later recount that Marie’s face was terrible, granite, inhuman in this moment; that the cellatrix, a stout and loud woman prone to slapping the servants and lesser nuns, cowered in fear. Marie does not shout, though she demotes the cellatrix to work in the fields, though the field nuns are mostly drawn from the English, and certainly not the French of bluest blood.

  She promotes to the cellatrix position noseless Sister Mamille, who has not felt hunger since her nose was bitten off and who has a mind that slides only along lines of justice and fairness. She would prove a most excellent and thoughtful cellatrix even to the last days of Marie’s own abbacy.

  Only a short while afterward, Marie bestirs herself to dig from her trunk the coin by which she sends Goda, who is perhaps horrible but honest, into town to buy enough flour and pigs and geese to feed the abbey until the gardens can be used; and while she is there, Goda must buy Marie some giant clogs for she is tired of feeling the bite of cold stone through her soles. She hands the subprioress a stick on which she has drawn the span of her feet.

  Goda takes the stick and the coins, then looks at them, shaking with anger. She spits when she speaks. If Marie had this money all along, why did she not spend it earlier, why did she not spare the nuns their weeks of suffering.

  Marie says to herself oh for god’s sake because she thought she was going to have to fund many more years of her life at court and not among these reject simpleminded nothings of nuns at this pigsty of an abbey; but she calms her face until there is no insult there and says that her mind had been full of other things, which is also not untrue.

  She goes up to the abbess’s chambers, and sits in the light through the horn shutters, which makes her feel as though she’s the wick of a lit candle. What she must do next comes into her sight whole and clear and very large.

  Marie spends the afternoon with the account books, tracing how Emme, in trying to curry favor among the local gentry, had allowed so many of the abbey’s lands to be defaulted on. The abbess hums in the corner, smiling. When Marie asks with fury in her voice why the abbess let the renters escape without paying for so long, Emme says only that, herself being blind and at the time subject to unscrupulous inferiors all around, she had considered and had believed that if she sued the renters for their sums, the gifts made to the abbey would dry up, for all the gentry were related, as Marie herself knows, and a strike against one would be seen as a strike against all.

  Better to lose rents than friends, the abbess says, as if this were a piece of actual wisdom.

  Marie asks if the venerable abbess was truly saying that she had chosen the gifts of a few pounds of pepper and a few wagons of wood over the means by which the nuns in the abbess’s care would eat and thrive.

  But the abbess, having said what she wished, considers to herself that she can explain herself best in song, and begins to sing in her high and silvery voice.

  Marie stuffs what she can of her outer pair of stockings in her ears and bends her head to work.

  That afternoon, from among all of the renters who had chosen to default upon their rent to the abbey, claiming the abbey’s land as their own, Marie selects the most egregious, the family who lives as though they are gentry upon the land that is not theirs, that is the starving nuns’.

  In the night, a voice in her whispers that she cannot do this, she is but an uncouth girl belonging nowhere, beloved by no one, merely seventeen, not even a real nun yet, and her habit is shamefully patched in different-colored wool, and her face holds no beauty, and her arms are merely women’s arms. How dare she.

  Well, she says in return, if she truly cannot, the worst that would happen is she would die, and that would not be so very sad, now, would it be. But the child oblate Adeliza’s face stays before her, pinched and blue and piteous, and the rage begins to boil in Marie. She must at least try.

  And so she rises and her army of nuns follows her, for by now they have all heard that she is a crusader who knows the holy righteousness of the sword. They arrive at the farm in the very early morning. Marie wears her most royal mien and looks terrible upon her warhorse. She knocks on the door. But the door is opened by a yawning underservant who sees the strange and far too tall nun standing there, and slams it upon her.

  Marie, very calm, jumps upon her horse, wheels about, and bids sister Ruth knock again. When the family’s slattern opens the door to shout at her for rousing the household, Marie thunders past the girl and rides her horse into the hall where the family and servants are sprawled about still sleeping; and with the abbess’s staff that she took with her, she lays all about her until, in terror and confusion, bruised and bleeding, the household flees out of the kitchens and into the forest. Then from the nearer trees where she has had all the servants and laborers of the abbey wait with pans and shovels in case a hand-to-hand war would be needed, Marie summons a destitute widow who has long been faithful to the abbey and who has six mostly grown children, each hardy enough to fight. She installs them as the rightful inhabitants of the estate. At last, she piles into the nuns’ and servants’ hands what she takes from the disgraced family’s things, room by room, until every hand is heavily laden: all the silver the family had stored, all of their plate and paintings, even the half-moldy manuscripts and a herbarium found in the study, for the abbey had sold off nearly all its precious things to feed hungry mouths and there were few books for the nuns to meditate upon. She also takes all the milch cows save one she allows the widow, as well as all the goats and chickens.

  In high dudgeon, Prioress Marie herself rides that day out to the rest of the delinquent renters with her gold-embroidered sleeves poking from under her habit, with her Plantagenet face, seconded by Goda on the donkey because the subprioress often has to translate to French and back again. By then, each of the delinquent renters has heard of Marie’s routing of the prideful family. Each understands that, with the advent of the young prioress, a grim new day has befallen them.

  And on the day they are summoned to appear to repay what was owed, the disgraced renters come and Marie shows no mercy to those who weep poverty or too many children; and at last they too relent and reach into their pockets and pay the abbey’s portion, some grumbling but most half proud to have a woman so tough and bold and warlike and royal to answer to now. For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.

  TWO

  This first spring that she has come to the abbey, Marie plants the apricot pits she had stolen from the queen’s garden, to get them away from herself, for they are a souvenir of all she has lost. They will struggle to grow, sprouting weak thin leaves. She will feel as though her own life is bound up in the trees. She doesn’t yet know if she wants them to shrivel or thrive.

  The pressure of the hierarchy upon the nuns is daily, crushing. Marie learns to recognize certain steps of her diocesan s
uperiors in the hall, for they wear boots, not the clogs of the abbey’s women, and when she hears them she leaps up and goes silently out the back ways and leaves vague Emme, who after all is still abbess, to deal with the demands, the rules, the shaking down for money, the endless requests of gifts of the nuns’ time, effort, prayers, all of which Emme affably agrees to, then conveniently forgets to tell Marie.

  Well, Marie decides, she must train her superiors in the community like dogs or falcons, with rewards, and slowly, so they don’t know they’re being trained.

  She is reprimanded for making herself scarce. She apologizes in writing, for she is less uncouth in writing, more like the self she yearns to become. She includes a list of the things she’d had to attend to that day: the pruning of the apple trees, the bad taste of wild onion in the milk, an aged nun who cannot stop her nose from bleeding, a little villein girl bit by a dog, both now frothing at the mouth, an estate in arrears, and a servant caught eating the laundry chalk. I so wish my time could be spent in little chats over good wine and cakes instead, she writes in the words of humility, carefully revealing a flash of anger.

  Still, her superiors with their stinking breath, their cheeks pimpled from shaving with dull ecclesiastical razors, their self-important smiles, their potbellies, keep trying to find her. She keeps stealing away, throwing Emme in their path.

  Soon they learn to remove their persons back to the city, to write letters to which Marie responds with intricate courtesy and concessions, but slowly expanding silences. She flips their demands into favors she’s doing them.

  Her mastery will be gradual but, by the time she becomes abbess many years later, complete.

  * * *

  —

  After Easter is the hungriest time, between the last of the winter stores and before the bounty of the garden. A family of peasants, tired of starving, steals winter rye from the abbey’s fields a half day’s ride away and bakes the rye into bread. But there is a disease in the grain, or perhaps it is cursed by the devil, and after eating it, some dance uncontrollably and sing naked in the streets, others scream with terrifying visions, others go stiff and barely breathe.

  Nothing can drive out the disease: not praying, not bathing them in holy water, not tying them to their beds, not leaping out from the night to frighten them, not holding them by the ankle in the cold river, not beating them around the head with a yew branch, not burying them crown to toe in warm manure, not hanging them upside down from a high tree and spinning them until they vomit, not drilling a tiny hole through their skulls to let the bad humors out of the brains. The rumor spreads that the abbey’s lands are stalked by the devil, that those who eat of the abbey’s land are taking the devil into their bodies.

  Ah, Abbess Emme says, hearing past the music to the predicament, and mutters that it’s a short leap from the abbey’s grain going unsellable to the sisters themselves being agents of the devil. Nuns already are suspect, unnatural, sisters to witches.

  She bids the horses be readied. She and Marie will ride out to exorcise the fields.

  A fine morning; haze where the tops of the grasses touch the air. Marie watches the way the windswept landscape empties into a great dark forest pressing tight to the abbey’s closest fields. Then above the treetops there looms a giant man-made arch, as soon glimpsed as lost. When Marie makes a low noise in wonder, the abbess says, Yes, Romans. Something to carry water, I think. She hums her song again and Marie marvels at the kind of people so magnificent they can create something to last a thousand years beyond their lives. Humanity must be disintegrating to dust, the people of today paltry in comparison with what they had been a millennium before. The Romans, the Greeks, such giants compared with the Normans, or far worse, the paltry brittle-boned English. In a thousand more years humans will be as thoughtless as the cud-chewing kine of the fields. She longs to be among the greats of the generations before. Marie might have discovered others like herself in that era. She would not have felt so alone.

  They arrive at the blighted fields near dusk. Marie and the abbess dismount and sing a shortened Vespers as the villagers draw close. They go into the house where the family lies in panting rigidity. One girl’s eyelids are peeled back, her eyeballs jutting from her skinny face as though she’s staring at a demon dancing on the sooty ceiling. The abbess blesses each afflicted person, then has Marie lead her into the fields. Emme orders torches held unlit circling the diseased rye, and shovels and rakes carried by each body capable of using them.

  Then a marvelous transformation overcomes the abbess; she sharpens. She grows beyond the boundaries of her thin body. She stands in the very last shock of daylight through the trees so that her pale face glows visible to those even a furlong away. She raises her arms. Her voice grows deep and loud and she intones a prayer in Latin that Marie has never before heard or read. When the abbess shouts Amen and nods, Marie touches her torch to those on either side of her, and each person runs to light the next torch, and on the fire goes in the deepening darkness until the field is encircled in points of light. At last the abbess gives a cry and brings her arms down, and all lower the torches to the fields. The greasy rye goes up quickly; the rabbits and nesting birds unloose. A screeching vole darts past Marie, and she runs it down and kills it with her clog because its little body is licked with flames. At last the fire, which the shovels keep from blowing into unblighted fields, burns itself to embers and the abbess and prioress kneel and pray through the night. Everyone else steals off in the darkness to sleep.

  The two nuns stay in the smoldering fields praying until the smoke clears with dawn. Marie is chilled to shuddering, her body aches everywhere, she hates such unnecessary suffering with a powerful hatred. To take her mind off the pain in the night, she prayed for each of her sister nuns one by one, each nun’s flaws blazing bright. Slowly, she decides that instead of the abbess’s practice of assigning work according to what the nuns do least well, as a lesson in humility, Marie will assign work due to strength. No more sickly nuns coughing in the fields or weakly hanging up the wet washed sheets, no more Goda ministering to disputations, no more milking done by weeping terrified Sister Lucy, whose sister was killed by a heifer kick to the head. So many hours have been forever lost through feebleness and reluctance. There is nothing wrong, she thinks, in taking pride in the work of one’s body. She has never been convinced by any argument for abasement. Surely god, who has done all good work, wants work to be done well.

  At last, a rim of sun appears, and Marie helps the abbess off her knees and half carries the older woman to the cottage where the horses had been kept.

  The abbess gives final instructions: only wheat will be planted in that field for three years, a great wooden cross shall be erected on its north side to keep the devil off. The woman of the household takes the abbess’s cold hands in her own and chafes them until Emme has stopped her shivering.

  They have given the food they brought from the abbey to the starving people of the village, and ride off hungry. When they are long out of earshot, Marie asks the abbess where she learned to exorcise fields. No book she knows holds such a ceremony in it.

  The abbess is exhausted and pale. She smiles and says, Oh of course I made it up. Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs. And then, lulled by the rocking of her fat little horse, the abbess falls asleep.

  In this, Marie catches a gleam of the true purpose of the night. Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed. This abbess who found herself unmoved by her own nuns’ starvation was alarmed to action by the threat of dark gossip.

  And Marie sees the outline of Eleanor now, the way that she has built walls around walls around herself, walls of wealth and blood and marriages, friends and spies and advisers, and the outermost is her reputation, which she spends a great deal of money to maintain. A woman’s power exists only as far as she is allowed; wise Eleanor understands th
at she must find her freedom only within such unbreachable form. Marie has a swift vision of herself as a tiny figure, climbing the walls; oh someday she will find her way over the queen’s rampart, someday she will be inside, out of the wind.

  Eleanor will be a model, then, Marie thinks, for her own purpose on the earth, at this abbey she hates so much. She will build around herself walls of wealth and friends and good clear reputation, she will make her frail sisters safe within. Marie will mold herself in the queen’s form, she thinks. The abbess snores, the horse farts, the day draws on, and Marie’s mind leaps and runs, making her plans.

  * * *

  —

  Marie takes the veil on the Feast of the Ascension, after a night of fretful sleep during which she dreams of the great river of her youth freezing suddenly under a hot summer sun and shining its dazzling light back into her eyes, blinding her. She rises to the morning that is to end her brief novitiate and feels flighty, hot, unsettled. She is far too nervous to hear the Mass, to see and sense the joy in the faces of the nuns as they smile heat in her direction, it is too much, she drops her eyes, she will see nothing but what is in her hands, her own folded habit in one, the unlit taper in the other, she follows Ruth and Swan-neck as they remove themselves with great solemnity to put the habits on, they return to the altar with the candle now lit, oh she is desperate, she prays it will not blow out, at last the blessing with Accipe virgo Christi velamen virginitatis and the sprinkle of holy water, and the strange weight of the black veil placed upon her head. Color of death, she thinks, of night, of despair. Still, she opens her hand to the gift of a ring.

  There is a three days’ silence for the brides, and then there is a wonderful feast. Marie and her two newest consorors sit blushing at the center of the celebration.

  She has passed from the temporal to the everlasting; she has committed herself to this scraggly awful place, to these women she hardly knows. There is in fact a change in her, something subtle, but every time she tries to touch it, to turn it around and consider it, she is left holding nothing.