by Lauren Groff
Marie looks at the prioress and her mouth twitches as she says that in fact, the girl is Tilde’s own kinswoman. Third cousin? One Avice de Chair.
A musical name, Marie thinks, old Abbess Emme would have liked it, would have sung it under her breath over and over.
Tilde groans, dropping her pen. She says that it is impossible, Avice is wild, she cannot be contained. She once held her own sister’s face into a pile of manure until the girl thought to feign death.
Drily, Marie says that, well, she can only attempt to contain her, but it is god who will or won’t choose the ultimate containment.
Tilde says that mere mortals upon the earth cannot possibly succeed in keeping Avice in a nunnery.
Marie says that they have no choice but to try. And that is the end of that.
She has business in the town on the day of Avice’s arrival; and since the rain is spilling down at a windblown angle, when she is finished with her duties, she goes to pray in the cathedral. The prioress and subprioress have spent all morning praying; now they wait out of the wind, in the doorway, for the novice to appear on the street.
Later, after their return to the abbey, Tilde will shut the abbess’s door and tell her with strain in her voice how roughly Avice spoke to her retinue of kinfolk, how she stormed and raged and would not allow them to dismount, but screamed abuse until they paled and turned away without meeting with the prioress or subprioress. And when the girl could only see their backs, she shrieked at her family that now they’ve slaughtered their sacrificial lamb, they can go to the devil. Then Avice saw Tilde frowning at her, and called her a terrible vulgar name and demanded the abbess. But when they told her the abbess was in the cathedral and she saw Goda running to fetch Marie, Avice ran faster, passed the older subprioress, and ran up the steps of the cathedral first.
And this is what Marie sees when she hears the great heavy wooden door slam open and looks behind her: in the narthex there is a girl with pale hair plastered to her cheeks and neck and chest, in a dress far too thin and pale for propriety, soaked through so that every sharpness of her body is clearly drawn, and it is as though she is walking naked in the day. Not beautiful, no; features bunched and a forehead so shiny and large it is an egg, a gleaming Romanesque window.
But with the sight of her, something in Marie, something awful, rises up. It says softly, hissing, that this girl might be worth burning the abbey to the ground.
Now the girl is running toward Marie, her eyes hot, and the wetness on her pale sharp face is anything but tears.
Marie watches her coming fast, and she keeps herself in stillness. She keeps her hands folded in prayer. When Avice reaches her, the girl spits that they can go to the abbey, her prisoner is here.
Marie looks up at the girl for a long while as she pants, impatient, and Goda appears in the door, then withdraws. Marie says Amen and crosses herself. Then, as slowly as she can manage, she rises and straightens her back to make herself as large as possible and now towering over the girl she steps close to enfold her in her arms. The girl struggles but Marie holds her easily. She speaks quietly and at length down into the girl’s head; and as she speaks she watches the goose bumps grow upon Avice’s cheeks, the droplets fade into the hair, the last wetness drying on her ears and neck.
Through her skin, she feels the girl’s rapid heartbeat slow. The cold of her flesh warms under Marie’s warmth.
There is a great stirring in Marie that she understands dimly to be a warning; now the inexplicable attraction to this girl, her wild flame, the small angles of her face, the fairness of her hair, comes clear, Marie sees Eleanor as she had been once, young, stretched naked in a tent in Outremer, her lined eye opening, the only bright thing on the whole dark earth.
At last the girl, in something like a trance, murmurs, and Marie lets her go. The girl’s face is pale, her eyes nearly closed. She follows Marie down the nave to the door. Before going into the rain, Marie unpins her great thick woolen cloak, and puts it around the girl, and the fabric swamps Avice so completely that when she comes back into the wet day, she finally appears as what she is: a mere frightened and furious girl of eighteen.
After she kneels to pray in the night beside her bed, Marie discovers on her pillow a handful of purple rosemary flowers stolen in the day from the herb garden. An apology. She listens through the antechamber into the nuns’ dortoir, and can hear only the sounds of her sisters sleeping, the whistling in the noses and the sighing and the stuttering of farts; there was colewort in the stew in the evening. Not a body stirs but her.
Marie presses the flowers to her face and crushes them so her hands smell of rosemary. Then, disturbed by the heavy sweet scent, she throws the flowers out the shutters and washes her hands in the basin until the perfume is gone.
* * *
—
Rafter by rafter the abbess house grows.
The heat descends, dry lightning branches the night sky.
The Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, Apostola Apostolorum, who wears Marie’s face in the chapel, as painted by mad Sister Gytha. All around her above and to the sides have been painted scenes from Revelation. The whore of Babylon rides upon a dragon painted after Gytha caught a feral dog and shaved its face to see the way the bones of the skull were built beneath; the beast’s body is a roasted eel, its wings are extended chicken wings. Worse, the whore of Babylon has two faces, and both faces are the queen’s. Gytha had glimpsed her once, when she was painting a mural in the great room of the hostelry and the queen rode through town with her retinue on her way to somewhere else. When Marie first saw that the whore of Babylon wore the queen’s face not once but twice, she had the urge to cover the image with her body so nobody else would see it, then she wanted to grab up Gytha’s brush and paint quick swipes of black over it. At last, she laughed until she cried, and let the painting stand.
Marie prays desperately in the night when she wakens and feels something shifting loose inside her, she prays for help from the Virgin to make herself unmuddled with carnal heat again.
And she feels dread, darkness rising somewhere, either inside her or outside her, she doesn’t know which is worse.
In the thickest hottest part of summer, Marie devises great work to keep her nuns busy. They make enough soap to sell at the fairs, they expand the garden, they weave and make shoes and windows and furniture for the new building, they pluck the fruit and make preserves and they hardly have time to breathe. Nest and Beatrix, faces close, laughing at something on the ground in the herb garden, the touch of Beatrix’s hand to Nest’s waist. Marie feels sorry for herself and goes to the chapel and kneels on the stone to pray.
A sound of running feet; and Avice for a moment peers into the chapel, her headcloths slipping back and showing the white dazzle of her hair.
It is a sign, Marie understands, and she directs good Sister Torqueri, magistra of novices, that the seven novices will have no free time whatsoever. Torqueri makes them sing and write on wax and learn Latin and Greek and the French of France until they mutiny or cry.
When she can escape her work, Marie prowls the worksite and in the lavatorium before Vespers she scrubs stone dust from under her fingernails.
The complaints of her obedientiaries pour over her: the apples are bad for the cider this year; the bees have fled two hives; the coneys have gotten into the medicinal herb garden and have chewed up the rue, hellebore, savory, sage, pennyroyal, tansy; the smallest sheep has been carried away by an enormous eagle. All omens, mostly bad, but of what, exactly, Marie wonders. Perhaps the noise of building disturbed the bees.
Perhaps the queen bee knew of something evil coming and took her bees to a safer place. But an abbess is no true queen, she cannot take her hive and fly away.
Sometimes in the night, when the wind has stilled itself, low and indistinct voices can be heard singing from the encampment, and this is a sound that makes the hairs on the back o
f her neck stand, for such voices are unnatural in this place that for decades has known only women, and far more terrifying than the very worst thunder that has ever rolled up from the ocean and echoed between the hills, doubling, tripling, loud as the wrath of god.
Marie spends her time with her obedientiaries only; she is keeping herself separate.
Still, she looks up to find Avice’s eyes burning on her at mealtimes. Quick smile, flushed cheeks, eyes cut back to the wooden spoon in her hand.
Avice in an apple tree with two of the oblates, one from a family of alemakers, one from fine candlemakers, laughing down at poor Magistra Torqueri until Marie comes silently and stands frowning up at them and then they climb down, shamefaced.
Avice and the novices escaping to the pond to swim in their linen underthings, because it is hot. For this they each receive three lashes and kneel on unhulled barley between Terce and Sext in the misericord.
Marie did not see them swimming but the image is so bright in her imagination that she is haunted with it.
Avice and the six other novices running through the golden wheat grasses with their hands extended to feel the pelt of the field soft on their palms. The girls gather in a knot and swiftly disappear beneath the surface of the field. Marie feels their giddy happiness in herself until Torqueri runs out with a furiously red face toward them; and then the girls stand, most bowing their heads, repentant. But Avice has her headcloths off, and her hair is out in the open, waving in the hot breeze. And the hair that Marie had first seen transparent and clinging to her pink skull in its wetness is now nearly blinding white in the full sun, and the other novices have braided thin plaits into it that they have studded with small blue flowers like jewels. The wind licks the fine ends of it at the girl’s hips. Danger, something whispers in her. This girl could crush everything in her hand. Marie is shaken. She has to turn away.
* * *
—
Cellatrix Mamille complains; an entire milk-dried heifer must be bought every single week to feed all the hungry mouths at the stonecutter camp.
Her face, without its nose, so like a skull already, vanishes. It is replaced, for a moment, with an actual talking skull. Memento mori.
Marie blinks and the woman is fleshed alive again. One more month, Marie promises her, and then the nuns will be by themselves again. But her voice quavers with the foreboding given her by her brief vision.
The night is unbearably hot. In the solitude of her cell, Marie dares to take off her headcloth, her clogs and stockings and scapular, and she sleeps in her shift, in what hot air stirs through the window. And that night she wakens from inside her early dream, in which she sees, confused, a shadow detach itself from the deeper darkness against the wall, watches it come near. A pale face gleams beside her own, a mouth is pressed lightly upon her mouth. And as Marie believes herself asleep she presses back, and upward against the dream mouth. Upon her hand, which she thinks is a sleeping hand, she feels hair so soft it is indefinable like water, silk on her face, on her chest, and now there is a weight upon her body, a hipbone shifting against her, sharp; she moves in her pleasure against it. She smiles against the mouth and it smiles back and Marie slowly comes to understanding as the pleasure builds within her that she is not asleep, that she is awake, that there is a woman of flesh in her room lying and moving upon her. But, in horror, she cannot stop herself. She gasps and releases and when her heart calms and she dares to open her eyes, the other has vanished. Marie is alone in her cell, the sweat dampening her bared legs, her back. It is uncomfortable, it feels like shame.
She descends to the chapel to lie in a cross upon the cool stone but her body needs movement and she stands and prays as she walks in the cloister. She goes barefoot to make no noise. Out in the fields the glowworms cling to their stalks, flickering, a million blinking eyes looking upon her. Too soon, far too soon, the bell for Matins rings. She looks up into the window on the night stairs and there is a shuttering of the blackness there, the flickering bodies of her nuns descending, one after the other, toward prayer.
For seven days Marie sleeps with her body on the ground in her chamber, pressed to the door so that it cannot open, and on the eighth day, she returns to her bed.
She awakens to the same pleasure, the same lightboned moving succubus, the silence and swiftness in the dark, the rush and wild and pulsing release. Better than wine. As shameful as drunkenness.
After Prime, Tilde’s eyes rest on Marie’s face as the women go over the accounting books. She asks hesitantly if the abbess finds herself well, and when Marie asks why, the prioress says only that she has a darkness to her these days.
Marie says that she is well, and isn’t sure if she’s lying.
She returns to her sleep on the floor, blocking the door; penance, avoidance. September passes.
Marie hears someone calling urgently for her, Abbess Abbess Mother please wait, as she’s crossing the orchard toward the unroofed building, but she knows that voice and dreads it; though she is over fifty years old and of a great bulk and height, she hurries faster with her long legs until she is running. The voice pleads, there is hysteria in it, there is anguish, but Marie loses the voice in the trees.
On the rise, the crane of wood and boulder and rope shifts, groaning, as, in the bleary sunlight, the last of the great stones is laid. A roar goes up; Marie lets it die and thinks soon, soon, the abbey will be at peace again.
That night, Marie sends a tun of good Bordeaux wine to the encampment for celebration but also for the confusion of drunkenness, and walks out in the dark before dawn to say a blessing; there is vomit on the ground, a miasma of sour exhaled breath. Then the blindfolds, the carts trundling off, the delivery of the abbey back solely to women before the sun’s first finger touches the earth. Oh blessedness, relief.
It is the bathing day, and the children go first, then the novices.
The tubs are drained and refilled for the obedientiaries. Before Marie is called to her own fresh tub, Magistra Torqueri stands in the abbess’s door. She wears a rictus that the abbess has only ever seen on the faces of the newly dead. Torqueri says quick and low that there is a terrible problem.
Marie says softly to Goda to shut the door. But already, somehow, she knows what the calamity will be. It was the vision of Eleanor when she first held wet, shaking Avice in the cathedral that had put the certainty in her.
* * *
—
Marie calls the obedientiaries to the abbess chambers.
Prioress, subprioress, cantrix, sacrista, cellatrix, subcellatrix, almoness, kitchener, subkitchener, abbess’s kitchener, infirmatrix, subinfirmatrix, hostellerix, scrutatrix, mistress of scribes, magistra. There is no room in the old chambers, so they stand along the walls.
Though the bailiffess is not an obedientiary, Marie calls Wulfhild; she is at least as loyal and wise as any learned highborn lady nun.
Then, when all are assembled and are waiting quietly in the solemn room, Marie calls Avice.
The girl enters with a face full of contempt. Her chin juts. Torqueri was correct; the girl’s belly is enlarged. Someone sighs, someone begins to cry. She places the girl in a chair at the center of the circle.
The abbess’s sitting room is close with all the bodies of the nuns and soon it warms even without a fire.
Marie says calmly that their dear novice is with child. Some nuns gasp, others count on their fingers and see that Avice could not have arrived pregnant. Marie cannot look at the girl; at the sharp bones of her cheeks, at her delicate mouth, at the betrayed expression she is surely turning on Marie, who, if she had wished, could have saved her.
Avice says angrily that no she is not pregnant, but all the nuns’ eyes are upon her swollen belly, and she covers it with her arms.
Goda says it is a scandal, it is infamy, she is a wicked girl, the devil has taken her.
Ruth cries out in sorrow. She asks ho
w did it happen; Goda looks at her with her pinched face, and opens her mouth to explain the process, and Ruth blushes and says hurriedly, she understands how it happened, but how did it happen here?
Marie waits for the girl to speak, and the moments slide past and grow heavy with expectation and the girl at last bows her head and says, low, that, yes, she is with child, but you see it is a miracle, the angel came and spoke the Word in her ear.
Cellatrix Mamille’s face falls in astonishment, she crosses herself.
Marie cannot believe that she has to tell her grown nuns that this too is a lie. Avice laughs nastily, and Goda sighs and Prioress Tilde looks as though she would leap up in a moment and scratch her kinswoman on the cheek.
Magistra Torqueri begins to weep and, striking herself, says mea culpa, mea culpa. She says she is sorry but she sleeps heavily. She has often noted grass on the novices’ clogs at Lauds, but thought she was imagining things. She has failed in her protection of these poor girls.
There is a moment of shocked silence, and then Marie asks if she meant to say girls, plural, or just this one girl.
Avice says nastily that oh it wasn’t just her. She looks mean, cornered. Marie thinks of a badger caught by a dog against a wall, claws out.
Another silence as this sinks in.
Nest and Beatrix share a look and Marie tells them that they will examine the others as soon as the council has decided upon this poor miserable creature. The question is now what to do with Avice.
Whip her before the other novices. Bread and water in the misericord until she has her wretched bastard. Goda is the one to say this, though she would not suffer such treatment of even the least of her animals.
Wulfhild, the only mother of the flesh in the room, says angrily no, that the girl needs healthy food and milk to keep herself strong for the babe.
Prioress Tilde says that they must return her to her family in scandal and shame. She is red, and it has taken her great courage to say this, because Avice’s family is her own.
