by Lauren Groff
Then Wulfhild says that she feels bleak inside because she has enough to eat and she knows her family does not. The girl does not look sorry, she looks fierce.
Marie says that she would send along to Wulfhild’s family a ham and a tun of flour every Christmas and a tun of apples in the fall, would that do?
And the child’s shoulders loosen and she rests against Marie’s chest for some time in silence, and at last she says gravely it will do. For now.
Marie tells herself sternly she must not love Wulfhild more than she loves the others; but she smiles when she sees the girl, she cannot help it.
* * *
—
Time compresses, springs forward. Now they are thirty-three nuns and four oblates; and on Fridays, Marie has pilchards and salmon served, for the abbey can at last afford it. She has cajoled the nobles into donating the land surrounding the abbey, she is persistent and vaguely threatening until they give in and show their bellies, playing dead.
In her letters, Marie reads that Eleanor has broken from her marriage to live on her own lands in Aquitaine. The abbess’s spies say that the queen is fomenting rebellion against the English crown in her own children’s breasts. The queen’s children are restive, riding about making alliances and promises. Marie is sent the song sung on the streets of Paris and London about the queen: a great eagle throwing her eaglets out of the nest too soon for them to fly.
The apricot tree fruits at last; the kitchener is scandalized that Marie plucks up a fruit and eats it raw and not baked in a pie. She says oh no no Prioress, we are women we are not animals, and Marie thinks of her good courageous horse, now quite old, how quiet and loyal and loving and patient the beast is; and at the same time she watches the idiot kitchen wench reach with a bare hand into the boiling parsnips, withdraw her hand, look at it dumbly as it steams and goes pink with a terrible burn.
Before the girl begins to wail and Marie crosses the room to plunge the burnt hand into the washing water, Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals. Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.
News trickles in that Eleanor is kidnapped in flight for the sin of rising up against England, kept first in the Château de Chinon, then dragged across the channel, and kept captured in a series of castles and houses in this very damp mizzling country the queen so despises.
The first flare in Marie’s heart is joy: Marie is the free one now, she is the mistress of her own lands, she oversees estates and servants. Now it is Eleanor who has found herself in a cage.
Then the moment passes and she sees how impossible keeping Eleanor would be; surely they could have only taken a phantom of Eleanor, not the real woman. She remembers a play of Euripides, how the true Helen of Troy was not in the besieged city during the long war, having been replaced there by a goddess-conjured figment; the true Helen was living in the sunlight and flowers of Egypt, far from bloodshed and the stink of death.
She writes to the queen but has no reply, as her letters chase the queen who is dragged here and there at her captors’ whim. At last, she hears that the queen is in a château thirty lieues to the north of the abbey and she creates an urgency in the abbey’s lands there. She carries comforts for Eleanor: sweet-smelling herbs and the last length of abbey silk, soap, wine, a clever prayerbook that fits in the palm of a hand, unruined by Gytha’s having painted the first parents blue and the serpent red. Marie rehearses how she will treat the queen with such gentleness in order to illustrate her own freedom. How she will use the best of her manners to show how very little she still forgives the queen for rejecting Marie’s gift of lais, which was, of course, the gift of her own soul.
As she sometimes does when she rides out to the abbey’s estates, she leans forward against the horn of her pommel, and lets the motion of the horse’s gait build against her until she gasps and something in her breaks.
She is always calmer afterward.
But when she arrives, her heart is thudding as if she were a girl of fifteen not a great lady of thirty-two, striding purposefully forward, all her authority haughty on her face, she is met with bewilderment: But dear lady prioress, she is told, the queen was rushed from the castle only hours before and they were not told where she was sent.
Marie returns to the abbey rueful, crushed.
Sister Ruth, who has an eerie gift to understand things left unsaid, and who knows something of Marie’s terrible love, catches the horse’s bridle in the yard and sees Marie’s face. When the prioress descends, Ruth says angrily, Even if you saw her, she would not deliver you from this place. You are stuck here with us.
And Marie opens her mouth to protest, but feels the truth of what Ruth said landing somewhere in her gut.
The wise inherit honor, but fools get only shame, Marie says at last with a hot face.
* * *
—
A Welsh sister comes, Nest, a young widow so sad she could only take refuge in a nunnery. She has a lovely face with great large lips and a mole near her left nostril that seems to draw her beauty out, although her skinny shoulders are hitched so high with nerves that they press against her jaw. Her Welsh is somewhat incomprehensible and at first she moves alone through her days, but when the sacrista develops a goiter that presses out from her throat like a fat butterfly, Nest goes into the fields and returns with a little blue-green weed that she boils in the kitchen until it’s a thick syrup. After a month of administration, the goiter sinks back into the long smooth throat of the sacrista and her eyes stop bulging.
Marie calls the novice to her. At first the nervy woman is quiet when Marie tries French, then her poor English, and the few words of faulty Welsh, but when she shifts into Latin, knowing Nest can sing the divine office, an intelligence blazes behind Nest’s eyes and she leans forward and speaks quickly, her high and bony shoulders trembling. Until Terce, the women speak of herbs and poultices and the balancing of humours, until Marie is comfortable that Nest’s knowledge of medicine outstrips Marie’s own. As they descend for prayer, Marie tells Nest that she has just now made for her the position of infirmatrix, she surrenders the responsibility of bodily healing of all the abbey’s people to Nest. It is a burden for a prioress, to be in charge of pus and broken bones and rotted teeth and death-rattles, the vomit the flux the frenzy, on top of the never-ending business of the lands and the squabbles among the sisters. Plus, when Goda was put in charge of healing, she only ever purged the worms out of everyone.
Nest accepts. Within weeks, she has a large apothecary garden planted beside the infirmary.
Marie sometimes catches Nest watching her slyly from the corner of her eye but has no time to discover why; she struggles still passionately against the land that is always giving her too little in drought and disease, or too much in flooding or extended winter, against the new diocesan who seems to believe this abbey of virgins to be a source of personal wealth. She must draw up herself a dummy account ledger to show the abbey’s great debt, which is false, for, she considers, to counter corruption, a similar corruption is only logical and right.
Small fires are used to battle a whole forest afire, she says aloud, and Goda says sharply, I do not know what passes through your mind, you are indeed a strange one, prioress.
And just as the plague of greed is driven off, a plague of locusts eats the wheat; Marie weeps for the lost bread but presents a calm face to her sisters, for she is learning to control her emotions to give her sisters peace in the world.
Sister Wevua begins to slide through time in her mind, and has to live in the infirmary now.
The child oblate Wulfhild has sprung up to the height of Marie’s chin, tall for a growing maiden, she can do math in her head as fast as Marie, writes fluently in three languages.
Sister Agatha dies of tripping in the field during harvest and knocking her temple upon a stone.
/> And Elgiva crosses the cloister thinking of the novice Torqueri eyeing the kitten at its dish in the creamery; how she bent her own kittenish face close to the surface of the fresh milk and dipped the point of her pink tongue in; how Elgiva, straining the milk across the table, had to close her eyes because it was as if she could feel the tongue running lightly up and down on the inside of her entire skin. When she opened her eyes, she saw Torqueri still bent there, laughing; and that Lilas too had stilled her motions and was watching, flushed and mouth open, from over the butter.
* * *
—
They are forty nuns now. Marie is thirty-five. She has been eighteen years a prioress.
This is impossible, she thinks; she has been here in this damp stinking mud-befouled corner of Angleterre longer than she has been alive anywhere else. And yet how much more vivid for her remains the château in Le Maine with her wild, fighting aunts and the constant music and storytelling and the dogs panting from a day on the hunt dragging their tired bellies to the fire where the ticks rained off their hides; or the court with its lovers stealing into the embrace of trees in the allée, the grottoes, the laden table, all the beautiful ladies in their silken dresses shining like jewels in the brackish fog breathed up from the river.
She sees the abbey as though with a stranger’s eyes: the stones scrubbed now, more white than gray, the fences neat, the fields rich. This is not the place she had come to, miserable and heartbroken, so long ago.
At the fair she overhears women talking about the livestock and they say in their strange English that this spring’s lambkins are as happy and fat as abbey nuns.
Marie laughs in astonishment; it is true, in eighteen years the nuns have gone from pitiful skeletons to gamboling like spring lambs.
She is moved right there in the street to thank the Virgin, not only with the words of her mouth but with the words of her heart, and is surprised to find them in earnest.
How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.
* * *
—
Wulfhild is eighteen. She comes to Marie saying that she cannot take the veil, she wants to marry.
Marie carefully checks her anger. Is there love?
There is, Wulfhild says, a blush starting in her cheeks and streaking down her throat.
Marie asks if there is money.
None whatsoever, she would be poor as dirt. Wulfhild laughs.
All those languages learned to fluency, all that reading for nothing, all those numbers so elegantly mastered. And though there is pain inside Marie’s chest, she has learned by now to control herself.
Then Wulfhild will be the abbey’s bailiffess, Marie says. It would give the prioress a chance to rid herself at last of the snakes around here who are using their power to steal from the abbey. And the salary would be a handsome one for Wulfhild and could pay for servants, a nice house in town.
Wulfhild says in alarm that she has never heard of a woman bailiff. And who would accept her authority?
Marie says that she herself would ride with Wulfhild for the first month, and after that month, everyone will accept her authority.
And it is the gentlest month Marie has yet had at the abbey, the hot still August days with the struck-iron shimmer of insect noise and Wulfhild growing into her role. Marie’s pride blooms maternal when Wulfhild proves herself a lady among the gentlefolk; her pride doubles when, out in the fields, Wulfhild switches in a breath to the grossest, most scathing English to roust the lazy from their naps in the shade. Honest Wulfhild. Her scrupulous accounts show how profoundly the abbey had been robbed by those previously entrusted with its business, even under the threat of Marie.
One night, Marie steals out to smell the apricots ripening. She takes a raw fruit in her hand to feel its weight, to marvel at the large and healthy tree that god compressed into a seed. But this fruit comes off its stem easily and its flesh has a little give to it like the firm thigh of a girl, and in the dark Marie rubs the soft down of the fruit upon her cheek and feels a thrill up the length of her skin. She thinks of her lost servant Cecily, her comfort, her mouth, her hands. It has been nearly two decades since Marie’s body has been touched in love, since the white waves have risen up from the very center of her and swept her spirit briefly out of her body. The perfume of the fruit’s flesh, the soft give under her teeth. But on the pit Marie cracks the front top molar on the right side of her mouth all the way to the throbbing nerve.
For the rest of the night she lies in contrition upon her face on the cold stone of the chapel until the bell for Lauds rings and there is a rustle on the night stairs and the nuns began to descend. She can barely sing. Even the abbess, whose mind is lost in her neumes, sees with clouded sight the fatness of her prioress’s right cheek and asks if she has been bitten by a spider. Although Marie had meant to ride off to visit three noble families that day, she cannot with a face so swollen. At release from Prime, Marie searches for the infirmatrix, until she finds her weeding her herbs, whispering encouragement to each small plant in her native Welsh.
Lovely Nest looks up and a shy pleasure comes over her face. Marie feels a stirring in the long-neglected center of her, beneath her ribs.
Nest asks Marie if it is that time again, because she has eased Marie’s twisting pain of the womb with her mother’s recipe for dwale: bile of a gilt in heat, lettuce, henbane, hemlock, bryony, and belladonna in a solution of vinegar.
Marie says no, toothache, although Nest’s dwale would take the sting off.
Nest tells Marie to come inside and she stands and brushes the dirt off her hands, and leads Marie past the three nuns set out on their chairs to warm their bones in the sunshine.
Sister Estrid looks at Marie with terrible hope, saying Maman? Mindless Duvelina smiles beautifully at a mote dancing in the sunlight. Wevua, who would forever see Marie as a novice, mutters, Here comes that whingeing weeping godless brat of a prioress.
The beds are empty in the infirmary, with the old nuns all sitting outside. The back room, hung with last year’s herbs, smells rich with horehound, beebalm, honeycomb, rosemary, the herbs that infiltrate Nest’s habit. There are no windows and the only light comes from the door and the embers where Nest is simmering herbs in a kettle. Nest lights a little clay lamp, and Marie feels the heat of the fire on her lips and tongue as the infirmatrix tilts the lamp into Marie’s mouth and peers in. Nest says that the prioress must be suffering; she has to have the tooth out. It is rotted. A shame, Marie having kept all her teeth so late in life. A marvel of good health.
Marie blushes, and tastes the dirt of the garden on Nest’s fingers when the infirmatrix ties the thin strong catgut around the dead tooth.
Nest says she will pull on three, and Marie braces herself and closes her eyes and Nest says one, then on two there is a sharp pain, and Marie opens her eyes again to see Nest holding the string with a bloody black and white stump at the end of it.
Marie says that she thinks thou shalt not lie is a commandment, not a suggestion.
Nest says that an infirmatrix’s deeper commandment is that thou shalt not cause more pain than thou must. She gently takes Marie’s face in her hands and looks in her mouth again. In a jug she has steeped betony in aqua vitae and bids Marie rinse her mouth thrice with it, and spit into a basin until there is no more blood. Then she takes a little brush and paints the sore gum with honey and makes Marie sit with mouth gaping until the honey dries.
The third time Nest looks into Marie’s mouth, Marie closes her lips upon Nest’s fingers. Honey, earth, herbs. She kisses Nest on the soft skin between the eyebrows. Nest does not draw away. Marie takes the infirmatrix’s head in her hands. Nest flushes and kisses Marie on the mouth. She stands and closes the door and when she returns in the dark, she has already removed her wimple and veil and coif. She takes Marie’s hand and puts it on her shorn
head, removing Marie’s headcloths with practiced fingers. Nest pulls Marie to standing, unties Marie’s belt, removes her scapular, and tells her to lie down. The infirmatrix’s hands lift the hem of her shift and then Marie feels the shock of smooth skin upon the flesh of her inner thighs and understands when she feels Nest’s breath that it is not a hand there but Nest’s far softer cheek. She feels her eyelashes brushing her skin. Her skin shivers the length of itself. And then Nest’s mouth is there, her hands are there, and Marie is brought violently to the swift central current of a river where she is released, she spins, she goes under. When she comes up again, she shakes and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. Sparks fly in the dark.
Marie lets the infirmatrix dress her. Nest pulls Marie’s hands away from her face and says sternly, no no, oh prioress, there is no shame in this bodily release, that it is an expression of the humors, not unlike bloodletting, it is utterly natural, it has nothing to do with copulation. She will still meet her god a virgin. It’s simply that some of the nuns require such expression of the humors more than others. Some as often as once every two days, some once a year. Nest has often wondered that Marie might be one who required it rather frequently. There is sometimes, well, a wild look in Marie’s eye. She tells Marie to come back to the infirmary when she feels the need.
