Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  She watches Philomena all the next day. Something under the young woman’s face has quickened, her shoulders are straighter, a warmth has seeped into her where her unhappiness has lain these years as cold and heavy as a stone.

  As confessor Marie has come no closer to god. She feels disappointed by this. She had hoped to discover the root of her vocation here.

  And yet as consolation, with each secret shared, she feels her nuns’ love of their abbess growing, she feels it warm and bright as a sun circling her days. They cannot revolt now, she thinks. She knows too much of them.

  And when their sadnesses weigh so heavily upon her that she cannot sleep, Marie likes to go down to the scriptorium and change the Latin of the missals and psalters into the feminine, for why not when it is meant to be heard and spoken only by women? She laughs to herself as she does it. Slashing women into the texts feels wicked. It is fun.

  * * *

  —

  Eleanor writes Marie that she has heard from her little spy that Marie has assumed for herself another heretical role. Not simply confession but also Mass? She is putting her hand in the fire. Marie should not be surprised when her flesh burns.

  As ever, mention of the spy nettles Marie. Appalling that Marie could not discover the traitor among her daughters. A chink in her armor that lets Eleanor’s arrows in; and this one lands true, for she knows of her own risk. But also of her own rightness.

  The queen drops her archness, and writes gravely that she cannot see how Marie will evade punishment for this, and from this place where the queen finds herself, she cannot protect Marie.

  The letter comes from Fontevraud, where the queen is considering retiring for the rest of her life. Still, she exaggerates her feebleness. Everyone knows that she pulls the strings of her royal and papal puppets from there. So much war, so much money flowing out of Angleterre to defend Normandie, Anjou, Poitou, Aquitaine from uprisings. Siphoning from Angleterre to protect other distant lands cannot be sustained; the English will revolt, and Marie believes the revolt will be soon. And there remains the question of succession.

  It is wearisome, the queen writes, but Marie feels behind her words an unwritten energy; the queen is a great and subtle political mind. It is not surprising to discover that all along, Eleanor had been the force behind the Angevins, this empire just now on the verge of falling.

  Later in the letter, the queen writes: And it was quite a surprise to find the cellatrix here at Fontevraud was Marie’s twin in body. She thought she was dreaming or was imagining things when she saw Marie’s great massy bulk and heard her deep voice in the French abbey, and not in that queer little English abbey hiding behind its maze. At last, the queen was able to hunt down Marie’s double and discover that, no, this tall muscular nun is none other than Marie’s aunt Ursule. Oh, the queen says, she remembers Ursule young on the crusade. So beautiful in her face, with those golden boots, one of the greatest huntresses in her Ladies’ Army, nearly everyone was in love with her, but back then she was even less tractable and civilized than Marie had been, great rustic gallowsbird, when she came to Eleanor’s court! And how shocking what time does to the beautiful and young, now Ursule was as massive and broody and plain-faced as her niece. That two such unthinkable viragoes exist in the world! In any event, the queen writes, Ursule has prayed Eleanor to send her love to Marie.

  And Marie clutches the letter and presses it to her, because she believed her aunt must have died long ago, she is at least sixty-five years old, and it is an unexpected gift of god to find she is not alone, that there is someone else on this earth alive who knew what it was to swim in the willow-hidden bend of the river, what it meant to gallop after a doe’s tail springing through the forest, to love the great calm intelligence that had been Marie’s mother.

  * * *

  —

  The day of the diocesan’s visitation arrives; there is pomp, solemnity, there will be a whole roasted sow with her roasted piglets at collation, the good meat smells are already seeping about the buildings. The blindfolding of her superiors was tricky, but Marie moved so smoothly and swiftly she did not give the opportunity for protest and so there was none.

  The abbey has been made to shine everywhere for the visitation; atop its hill it is a thing made of abalone.

  There is a play the novices and young nuns have put together: the Virtues and the Vices. In their innocence, the Virtues show the beautiful flesh of their plump arms and chests, and swim in masses of unshorn hair loosed from cloth and binding, and Marie knows, without looking at the faces of the visitors, that she will have to spin and spin over their shared meal to make this entertainment at last seem not only acceptable but holy.

  Later, after eating, Marie watches from her chair in the refectory as the nuns, starting with the child oblates and progressing through the novices, the sisters of the fields, the sisters of the choir, the obedientiaries, singly go in for their interviews. One hundred eighty sisters in all. And when they exit the room, Marie can read the Omnia bene written on their faces. All is well. Not a single soul, not even those who still refuse confession, have told of their abbess’s presiding over the Mass. Some are loyal. Some are frightened.

  But then it is Goda’s turn. The subprioress goes with her hard step toward the door. She slides a knotted look toward Marie and thrusts her chin out and the door closes behind her.

  Marie thinks that now there is nothing to do but wait and see.

  And when Goda comes out, embossed upon her face too is Omnia bene. She has faltered at the last minute. Her small eyes water, pink-rimmed, her shoulders slump.

  Tilde rises and looks slightly in Marie’s direction. No; the prioress poses no threat. A sad Omnia bene is on her face when she comes out.

  Marie herself stands, goes in.

  She says Omnia bene in her deep grave voice, and her heart is clear because it is not untrue, all at the abbey in her firm grasp is indeed very well.

  6.

  One day, Marie looks at her hands and sees them spotted, knobby. She is old, she thinks with surprise.

  To keep the wolves that come down from the hills from stealing the lambs, Marie has her nuns build a wall of stone around the sheep’s meadow, so tall it is unleapable. This takes a lazy autumn.

  Elgiva, passing through the kitchen with a bushel of onions, comes too close to the fire and her habit goes up in flames and she is mostly consumed by it before the kitchener can put her out with slopwater. She lives until just before Sext, and it is Marie who closes the woman’s blistered eyelids. She touches her red and swollen hands, but under the pressure of her fingers, the skin slides off as easily as the skin of a roasted beetroot.

  The fields are scythed, her dark nuns spread out and swinging.

  The winter is a sheet of parchment that the small feet of birds, of vixens, of hares, write upon.

  Simple Sister Duvelina, out walking in the fresh tilled spring furrows, hears a tiny noise and kneels to discover a nest of baby rabbits, half of them mashed to pink pulp, the other half trembling, naked. For weeks afterward she moves her body with extreme care; until one day in the lavatorium, Cantrix Scholastica holds Duvelina back while the other nuns hurry away, and looks in her pocket to find in the darkness there four twitching noses, eight brilliant eyes. Such tenderness, Scholastica thinks. How warm it must be for these orphaned babes against Duvelina’s body. And then it is as though she is held inside Duvelina’s mind for a breath, a wordless place full of wonder, sharp beauty, a love so pervasive it can only be felt bodily, a breathing heat, a thrumming joy. Scholastica pretends she has seen nothing. And when in the night, not long after her discovery, there’s a thump then four tiny bunnies sleeking down the night stairs, and Scholastica rises out of her bed to run after them, she can tell by the barely contained smiles of the nuns pretending to sleep that although others, perhaps all, knew Duvelina’s secret, not a single one told.

  A hot summer,
and Asta has built, with the blacksmith and carpenter nuns, great strange spinning things that they then embed at each end of each row of vines. Even with small wind, these contraptions spin and catch the sun, which they throw dizzyingly back on the vines, and make a constant woman-voiced singing that the cantrix with her perfect pitch has modified so it sounds like voices raised in unending song, a song low and comforting even in the night. Some nights Marie sliding to sleep has the impression she is a child on her mother’s lap, rocked into drowsiness. And these singing and light-flinging structures are meant to frighten the birds, and they work so well that the grape harvest is nearly too vast for the nuns to handle, and the carpenter nuns are busy making wooden tuns, and even Marie comes down to the wine-pressing vats where there is general hilarity when she takes off her clogs and sinks her feet in the luscious sweet ooze of burst grapes. The villeinesses sing, clapping their hands, and Marie removes her dignity and dances with the other nuns, young and old, slipping and laughing until she is weak in the stomach, and must be helped, covered in the guts of grapes, from the press.

  She bathes and comes clean and happy into her chambers to find a letter from Eleanor. It is a strange letter, a frenzy beneath the calm surface of her words.

  The rumors that the spies have sent along are correct: The queen’s favorite child, at last ransomed and freed and rampaging in royal wrath against those who took advantage of the long absence, has been killed by accident, an arrow returned to the English at random and finding the royal spine. A great lion brought down by the lowliest worm. The queen’s favorite daughter, Joanna, former Queen of Sicily, has died penniless and abandoned, a hasty nun, vows taken even as she died in childbirth. And shortly before Joanna went to the hand of the Holy Virgin, the queen’s two eldest daughters died, whom she left behind when she fled the bed of France for the bed of Angleterre, but whom she cherished.

  Of the ten children born of Eleanor’s womb, there are only two remaining, and those two by far the least beloved. And the very worst of them, the eaglet with no scruples or strength or love of god, is the inheritor of the great English island. It will be disastrous.

  The old queen will see her last living daughter, Eleanor, soon; she is nearly eighty but is being sent south to Castile, where her daughter reigns, to choose one of her own granddaughters to be the young queen of France. Redoubtable old Eleanor. Only she could pull this off.

  But Marie sees so much sorrow in Eleanor’s words that she shivers with them.

  Eleanor is nearly broken; nearly but not quite yet.

  How human the queen has become in her age; or perhaps only in intimacy to Marie. Once she was radiant as the face of the sun, impossible to see; now Marie can see through her face and into her. She had sought Eleanor that she might feel her way toward her and find her; but Eleanor is actually not far from Marie.

  This is what Marie wanted. It strikes her as a loss.

  Eleanor writes in a hastier hand at the end of the letter that she has dreamt that she will die on this journey, that she will be captured again and die of the grief of it, she begs holy Marie to pray for her queen, tell with her blessed insight if her dream will come true.

  And Marie looks down the long corridor of her vision, and sees no death for the queen on her trip to Spain or back. She writes this to the queen, but sternly, telling her to buck up and do her duty. She makes a joke designed to infuriate Eleanor with its stupidity. Eleanor is named after her own mother, Aenor: alia Aenor, the queen whom no woman has ever equaled has, as a birth name, the Other Aenor. Marie calls the second Eleanor the Queen of Castile—Eleanor, Eleanor’s daughter—Alia Alia Aenor in her letter. Better an irritated queen than a desperate and panicked one.

  Finally, Marie says that she does see that the obvious granddaughter, the elder and more beautiful, is not the one to choose to bring back to France with her. Urraca is too fine; she would die of all that would be required of her. The girl who will birth generations of royals and saints will be the lesser sister, Blanche, who is not the obvious choice, but who has inherited the queen’s spirit and wisdom.

  She does not say that this is not a vision; this is what she has been told by a beloved friend, a girl she’d educated at the abbey and who married well in Castile, and who knows both royal girls intimately.

  And perhaps Eleanor sees this in the girl herself, because it is in fact Blanche and not Urraca whom she brings northward with her, whom she sends on to Paris to become the queen of the French. Then, feeling weak, the old queen returns to the abbey of Fontevraud.

  * * *

  —

  But too soon, Marie’s aunt Ursule writes, saying that the queen has ordered her to do so. Only Ursule must write and not the abbess, for the queen is preparing to die, and her mind is beginning to slide in time. She believes in some moments that Ursule is Marie. Ursule had been unaware that there was such a great friendship between little Marie and Eleanor, how strange that it might be so. In fact, the queen told Ursule the other day in a strange voice that she loves her too, but only like a sister, and this is why she has to send her away. What hidden things there are in Marie, in Eleanor, in the relations between them. Ursule wishes Marie were here in her own place, her aunt says. She wishes they were sitting together at the pond before dawn, so young, waiting for the animals to creep forth in the night to drink.

  And something is cutting off the air to Marie’s lungs and she briefly considers getting up and running to the stables and riding off and hiring a barque to take her across the channel and riding swiftly down from Normandie to put herself at her queen’s side and serve her as handmaiden unto the great woman’s death.

  But then she looks up and sees Tilde waiting with the manuscript commissions to approve of; Goda impatient with the news of a mysterious murrain in some of the cows, heat rising out of them, abscesses on their thick, damp gums.

  And a bee with sidesaddles of pollen bats its body against the wall.

  Marie sighs and passes a hand over her face. She sends her love home. She keeps her body in muddy Angleterre.

  * * *

  —

  Marie waits for the queen’s death. The waiting is terrible.

  She comforts herself as much as she can by luxuriating in the space and whiteness of the plaster in the abbess house, her fireplace to warm her even on nights with a slight chill, the excellent kitchen and her own staff to feed her at her will, the sweet voices of the oblates and schoolgirls singing where she placed them, in the classrooms directly below her apartments. From her glass windows, frightfully expensive, she can look down upon the cloister and gardens and spy upon her little nuns.

  But her appetite leaches from her. She stops eating the larger part of the meals her kitchener sends up, and her muscles begin a slow collapse against the bone. She is still tall but no longer massive, and her habits need hemming because they drag against the ground.

  In these years of waiting, there comes to the abbey one Sprota, a novice of remarkable beauty: her lips are full in her round face, her fairness a gold seemingly touched with pink, both skin and hair, her eyes enormous and a blue so pale the irises hide themselves; they bring to Marie’s mind yolks whipped into their whites. When Marie first meets her at the cathedral in town, she is moved by the girl’s astonishing beauty and the delicacy with which her family weeping and lamenting bade her goodbye. A bolt of anxiety runs through her; all these years, she has been afraid of another Avice arriving, another shock to the foundations she has so patiently built at the abbey. But the way the girl receives the love of others with jutted chin and calm expectancy, lifting her pale hand and holding it in the air until they each in turn kiss it, something about the girl begins to grate upon Marie, and she soon sees this is no echo of Avice, but its own thing entirely, a different kind of threat. And when the girl’s mother, a woman with an avid face and enormous bosoms, dares to come close and whisper in the abbess’s ear that her daughter is blessed, holy, likely
in time she will be proved a saint, she must above all be treated with the respect due one blessed by god’s hand, she must be treasured as the very pearl of the abbey, something still darker moves within Marie’s spirit.

  Marie looks from the mother whom time has coarsened to her fresher likeness in the girl, and does not say that beauty is the great deceiver, that it is harder and not easier to become saintly when one has been born with it, that ordinary women become more holy only when the dew of youth has passed from their bodies and the small humiliations and stamps of age have pressed themselves through the skin and into the bone.

  She says only, drily, that, yes, Sprota will be treated as well as all the novices are treated. All holy sisters at Marie’s abbey are treasured as pearls.

  Now that Sprota has taken the white novice veils, she speaks little, in a high breathy voice and only in phrases from the Bible. She wears a constant smile; sometimes Marie sees a hardness there, the very fleeting edge of mockery. Young nuns and schoolgirls and her fellow novices follow her, clinging. When Magistra Torqueri sets her to scrubbing the refectory floors with the other girls, or going early to the heifers to milk, the servants have been seen to take the work out of Sprota’s soft hands. And when in punishment for this laxness, Torqueri gives the girl harder work, and she wears the yoke on her fragile shoulders to carry buckets of water to the lavatorium and trips and spills half the water—perhaps, Torqueri will say privately later, not so accidentally, perhaps meant to lighten her load—the other novices see her suffering and protest at how the lovely reed of a girl staggers under the weight. But Sprota raises her soft pale hand and says that, no, she delights in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when she is weak, then she is strong.