by Lauren Groff
A chorus of voices shout No, for if the larger church were to sniff this out, the consequences for the abbey would be so severe, they would be punished by the church superiors, all their carefully built power and wealth would be stripped from them, it is not unlikely Marie would be cast out of her position, and how could they survive then?
Kind Sister Ruth suggests they keep Avice in the misericord with ample food and milk until she gives birth.
Oh but the misericord is so cold and drafty. Nest says she can keep her in the infirmary with the dotard nuns. It would be a punishment but not a painful one. Nest’s shoulders are up to her ears with anxiety. Beatrix squeezes Nest’s hand and she consciously lowers them.
Goda blazes with this, saying that the girl needs a severe punishment as a lesson for the others, that they should whip her on the bared back, that each nun of the abbey should whip her once. It is not too much to ask that Avice bleed for her sin.
But Cantrix Scholastica with her crystalline voice says that there will be no whipping a pregnant girl. It is simply cruel. The girl would give birth to a stillborn or a calf or a goblin.
Goda says fine, they can lash her hands and knees with an ash switch. It hurts just as much. And rules exist for a reason.
They decide on twenty lashes on the hands and knees, and for the girl to be kept captive in the infirmary until the birth. If the baby survives and is female, it will be an oblate given to the abbey. If it is not female, they will give it to a villeiness to raise until the age of sending it away. If Avice survives, her family will be told that she has run away, in language so careful it will not be a lie, and she will be sent to be a servant in one of the houses of the loyal donors, they cannot give such a sinner to another house of holy women, and if they were to excommunicate and banish her to the world without a penny, it would be condemning the girl to a brutal short life of begging or, more likely, whoring.
With this word, a shiver goes around the room.
Nest says in her gentle Welsh voice that it shouldn’t be long. The poor child has kept her condition wondrously hidden. It is a marvel they only discovered it now. Nest’s face is no less lovely, pale and stricken as it is.
And Avice, in whom anger visibly built as they spoke about her, now bursts into a horrid screeching so shrill it is without words.
Nest says that is enough: the council has been merciful and if Avice does not silence herself they can change their minds. And she escorts the girl out and down to the misericord to await her lashes.
Soon from the window the obedientiaries watch all the white veils of the novices being driven like lambs into the infirmary. Beatrix comes out, and with a face loosed into relief, she shakes her head: none else have been so terribly compromised as Avice. And when the novices come out again, pale and wobbly, Marie calls the nuns of the abbey into the refectory and gives a short speech.
Then out into the chill November evening, and Avice is brought into the cloister with no headdress, in her thin shift, and is made to kneel. In the last light the fabric of her shift is translucent and her sin is obvious to all. Her pale hair grows filthy at the ends where it touches the dirt.
The scrutatrix gives the rod to Marie, as it is her duty and right as abbess to punish. But Marie’s resolve fails, she cannot hit this girl who is a mirror of the queen when young, that rebellious blaze, she looks about her for another to do what she cannot. It cannot be Tilde or Goda for their fury, not Ruth for her sweetness, not Nest for her goodness and mercy. And so she hands the rod to Torqueri, hoping that the magistra’s failure to protect and guide the girl will stay her hand from great severity.
Marie forces herself to watch when it does not.
* * *
—
The walls of the vast new abbess house are being plastered and painted. The roof is on. Teams of nuns work on the inside.
The house sits grandly on its rise, elegant and strong, with the new arches, great windows, high ceilings. The rooms are full of light. It is where the oblates and novices live and it is filled with their young voices raised in laughter and singing, it is where the scribes have located their desks, where the new corrodians have their apartments, rich ladies come to live out their retirements at this abbey, and such ladies are used to finery, little dogs, birds, music, secular servants. With all these women together, the abbess house is a place rich in spirit. At last, a building worthy of its abbess, Marie thinks as she looks from the cloister up at the smooth stone building. A building worthy of Marie.
A holy rite: the edifice is asperged with lustral waters.
There comes to Marie’s dreams a dark foreboding: she is galloping on her horse down the hill toward the forest, and clouds and thick darkness are all around her, and lightning lights up the world and the earth trembles and behind her she hears the sound of the abbey’s stones cracking and falling in thunderous disaster, the screams of her nuns as the roof falls upon them, but Marie cannot look behind her for now she feels pressed against her back a shivering warmth, thin arms tight around her. She awakens lonely.
Avice goes early into labor. Screams rise from the infirmary. In the garden, the nuns gathering the last of the coleworts and the turnips and parsnips from the cold dirt draw into a circle, kneeling and folding their hands to pray. Choughs sneer, perched in the medlars.
Even beyond the orchard in her chambers on the ground floor of the new not-yet-finished abbess house, which smells of plaster and paint, Marie can hear the screams. At last, she rises and Prioress Tilde tries to talk to her but the abbess cannot hear a word. She goes out into the cold and walks first into the sheepfold but the sheep stare back at her with their dumb, astonished faces and say nothing. Then she turns along the stream and begins to run and comes swiftly through the cloister and into the infirmary.
It is close and hot in there and smells of rust and sweat. Avice is panting with her hair slick and eyes feral in the dark of the bed. Goda is feeling between the girl’s legs. She is saying that the human body appears to be more delicate and far more poorly constructed for birthing than the bodies of the beasts she administers to; that she has often wondered why human females so frequently die in childbirth, but now she has discovered it’s because their hips are so small and the babies’ heads so disproportionately large, and why god would make the human beast so unfit for birthing is a mystery. Or perhaps not, she sighs, I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.
Nest says in a tight voice that Goda should probably keep such observations to herself.
Beatrix snaps when she sees Marie, huge in the doorway, that they do not need the abbess’s help, but Nest tells her to hush, that it is good and right to have their Mother’s light with them.
And Marie carries a stool to Avice’s side, and lets the girl squeeze the blood from her hands. She prays to the Virgin, fervently.
Terce, Sext, None pass. It seems a moment in the huge suffering of the girl.
Avice’s breath is shallow and her face deathly pale. It is a relief when she loses her conscious mind and her screams silence all at once into sleep. She bleeds so heavily they spread a cloth impregnated in oil beneath her to save the third pair of sheets.
And in her sleep, Avice’s body convulses and the head of the child emerges, purple and horrible between the thin thighs. Another convulsion and it is out, slick and dead. A little girl.
There is no one to shrive Avice, Marie looks toward the door with anguish but no one comes, and she is indignant, this is a terrible sin of withholding mercy; and in her panic, her weariness, Marie does not think to do it herself.
In the new gush of blood from between Avice’s legs, Goda is painted red up to the shoulders, red on her forehead, and Nest and Beatrix press cloths to the flood but in moments the cloth too grows red. Avice’s hand in Marie’s gives a twitch. Her breath sighs out of her body and does not enter into it again.
&nbs
p; * * *
—
In the evening, Marie calls the obedientiaries to her. A ring of faces grave in the candlelight.
She says that they will decide together what to do, and she does not lend her voice to the disputation but at last calls for a vote.
Goda stands after the vote is taken and says righteously, her face flushed with her victory, that they take this action only as a warning to the other nuns who may be swayed in weakness and commit the sin of lust. Oh, Marie thinks, she will never again make the mistake she had with the stoneworkers, she will never again allow anyone but a woman to set foot here. But Goda needs to punish someone, and so the grave is dug in the unconsecrated ground outside the churchyard, under the farthest arms of the malevolent yew. In the morning, without ceremony, Avice is lowered into it in her shroud facedown with her babe at her feet, so that in the Revelation her bones will never be able to rise to the hands of the Angels of the Resurrection. Such pitilessness, Marie thinks, for a sin of the flesh.
Avice, dead. A garden shut up, a spring stopped, a fountain sealed.
They had agreed upon no rite of committal, but Marie cannot stand the silence and she steps forward and says the short prayer aloud, her voice too quiet and swift for the first words to be heard but growing louder with . . . whence pain and sorrow and sighing have fled away, where the light of thy countenance visiteth them and always shineth upon them. Amen.
The other nuns’ faces flare into anger with her for praying over the disgraced sister, and for their abbess, a woman after all, saying such words. When the dirt falls on Avice and her little babe and obscures the shroud, they turn their backs and go away to their work. And a great coolness rises between the more vengeful nuns and their abbess, which no intensity of light from Marie could ever burn off.
* * *
—
Eleanor writes. Her letter is an act of extreme delicacy; she writes about the abbey’s fruiting fields, how she had heard that blight was found in one. Beware, the queen says. Should word of your blight get out, your best fields may be seized by the greater church.
Marie replies that it is true, but that the field burned down and did not infect any other, and that she relies on Eleanor to praise the abbey’s harvest and not spread news of the blight of one tiny, inconsequential field. It is in the nature of some fields to be blighted. Eleanor, with her wise understanding of agriculture, knows this better than anyone.
The queen’s fields, Eleanor writes snippily, have never been blighted, despite what Marie may have heard. The richer the harvest, the more false news is spread by those looking to drive down the price at market.
Of course, Marie writes back, this was not Marie’s implication, but rather a gesture of solidarity, Eleanor’s fields are rich, as are Marie’s, they both know how it goes, they both work against the old carrionbirds Gossip and Rumor. Perhaps someday Eleanor can visit the abbey and they can ride Marie’s fields together. Marie has made the most beautiful apartments, with a tapestry of a unicorn woven by her own nuns, and is reserving it for her regent. Perhaps the queen would like it so much she would come here when she wants to retire from the world.
Marie feels as though she is unable to breathe during the month she waits for the reply.
Oh, dear Marie, Eleanor writes at last. Even now, when both are so old, Marie is up to her tricks. Can she not remember? They are not the kind of friends who love each other best when they are in the same place, riding the same fields. They, the queen writes, must be friends at a distance.
5.
Letters fly to Marie’s hands, letters like flocks of starlings, wild commotion, stripping the grain.
In the letters of her spies and friends, Marie sees evil settling on the world, an evil overcoming the goodness in the hearts of even the holy.
The brightest and best of Eleanor’s children, that royal warlike lion, is seized and held against the laws of Christendom. Crusaders, by holy dictate, should be exempt from kidnapping. If there is no ransom set and accepted, the Angevin empire is finished, shriveled and feeble and easily overcome. But the ransom asked for is staggering, four times the English royal income.
Eleanor’s letters are now signed Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of Angleterre.
The queen sends Marie her demands. When Marie reads the sum required of the abbey, she gives a single wild laugh, and Tilde looks up and wonders if something in the flesh behind Marie’s face has caught fire.
In a tight voice, Marie reads the letter to the prioress and subprioress. Goda blanches and says doubtfully that she supposes they can sell the new lambs, what a shame, they were so remarkably fine this year, Goda herself went three nights without sleep to yank them from their mothers and thought at the very least she’d get in payment a bite of lamb with mint but alas, as always, her efforts will go unrepaid. And Tilde thinks and says that perhaps they can sell their farthest estate, for it is great enough to bring in that sort of coin. Marie will not even look at the prioress when she tells her not to be stupid, land is power and no one is less powerful than a woman religious, and it would be madness to sell what power they have slowly and painfully built in the world. Her words are so unaccustomedly savage that they strike Tilde like a box to the ear.
Marie thinks, then stands, and finds the staff of the abbess Emme and her predecessors, which is fine silver filigree and horn and could be bought by a patron to bestow upon another, lesser, abbey. Tilde watches it go with sorrow in her face. Marie sees her expression and is struck to the center of her that there lives in the prioress expectation of her own eventual elevation to abbess. Tilde’s arms of course are too feeble to lift Marie’s heavy staff. From the chapel, Marie takes a recent gift from a family of crusaders, the elbow of Saint Anne in its little reliquary chasse shaped like a cathedral and glistening with chalcedony and onyx. Goda cries when she sees it will be leaving the abbey; she has spent long hours on her knees praying to the saint, the mother of the greatest mother of all. And this still will not be enough to pay the abbey’s part of the ransom, so Marie goes heavily to the trunk she brought with her so long ago, which is empty save for a very ancient Byzantine ring of jacinthe, which had belonged to her grandmother. It can only fit on the final joint of Marie’s pinkie. When she wears it she sees golden birds diving through fields, a muscular river, and a springy gray-haired woman with no face but a soft voice, her grandmother. A thickness fills her throat that she cannot swallow away.
She will go to London alone; she will be faster this way, because she needs no rest, and can fight easiest and best if beset in ambush, and she can trust no one to get the prices she can. Her horse groans softly when she mounts her before dawn, and Marie scolds the mare in a stern voice that she must be very tough because Marie will be asking quite a lot of her. The horse reconsiders and stomps at the ground. They move off at as quick a pace as the horse can sustain, a shattering pace for any frame less solid than the abbess’s.
Marie is famous in the countryside, the huge abbess with all that inherited magic in her, all that radiance given by the Virgin, and when the workers in the fields see her riding by they kneel and bow their heads in fear.
But she feels her power waning the farther from the abbey she goes. Her letters do influence the most powerful in the Christian world; yet to these commonfolk beyond the abbey lands who do not expect to see the famous warlike abbess, she is only an enormous nun on an enormous horse, stern and strange and old.
Before twilight, Marie arrives in London, into smoking stinking fog that permeates the skin and lungs, the babel of voices shouting and arguing disembodied out of the close tight alleys, the milch goats leaping suddenly at the horse off dungheaps in shadow, the barges on the river tangled dark and high with osier wattle. A headache of constant overlapping bells. Straight to the shop, where she wears her majesty so hugely it presses all other bodies in the room to the wall. She uses silence; she is bestowing a tremendous favor by choosing t
his place to sell her precious goods. She negotiates like swordplay and leaves the shop having bled everyone in it with fine stinging swipes that show how precisely she can cut, how lucky they are that she restrained her hand. She does not show on her face how pleased she is, for she is very pleased, there will be some coin left over for future emergencies or perhaps the projects to fortify the abbey that have begun to brew in her. She sweeps into the dark and walks the horse straight to the exchequer house and pounds upon the door with her fist and enters pushing past the yawning servant girl, waking the household in their nightshirts and confusion. She is immobile, gracious, wearing her Angevin face, she frightens all. She will not leave until the book of levies is taken down and Marie’s entry—more generous than the queen had demanded—is entered into it.
Now it is late. She feels light, divested of money and duty. Above the river, a sick wan moon hangs its yellow head. She is supposed to sleep at a patron’s house where there will be rest for the horse and good food and a fine bed for Marie, but she cannot take this seething city into her anymore, being in the proximity of so many of the far worser sex is filling her with aggression and fret. She thinks she is taking evil into her very body with each breath. So she whispers to the sainted horse who holds her eyes closed against Marie’s chest in weariness for a time; then opens them and is ready also to go. Back through the black stink of streets, and at last into the open fields at the edges of town, where the free rebellious wind strips the devils of the city off Marie’s exposed skin.
A voice in her says that she will never again see the city that burns so darkly at her back. She is glad of the release of it. Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.
