by Lauren Groff
Light shines into the novices’ faces; and Marie, overhearing Sprota’s words in passing, is struck by the fear that a cult is springing up at the abbey. Some of the old strength returns to her. Marie is always at her best when there is someone to fight.
And then one afternoon, Sister Pomme, still head gardener though so old she is bent outward from her hips, hears the girl quietly preaching to the bees. She speaks of the desert, of the smoke of aromatic spices and all the perfumes, she speaks of lilies among brambles. Of all things, she’s preaching from that wicked old song, Pomme tells Marie, breathless from climbing the hill.
Oh but it is a very holy song, not wicked in the least, Marie says. It is my favorite of all holy texts, the Song of Songs.
Well, it makes my stomach feel strange, Pomme says. And that strangeness is the wickedness of my body. And I do not like it.
I feel this way also, but I very much like it, Marie does not say.
From her window Marie sees Sprota with her arms outstretched and palms open to the sunshine, the hives, the massing of Sprota’s followers behind her, only five, but they are clutching each other’s hands, their shoulders together, in adoration of the girl.
Marie comes down to the garden and stands on the other side of the wall from Sprota and listens. The girl is an excellent speaker, clear and calm, her message hardly revolutionary, to love the world in work the way the bees love the meadow flowers, but she uses her voice like a lute, drawing emotion out of the listener. When Sprota is finished she drops her palms, and seems to awaken from a trance, blinking and smiling shyly when her followers crowd her, pet her, saying oh dear the last she remembers she was in the bleachfields, she does not know how she arrived at the honeybees, what it is that she has done.
But Marie can see, as clear as her sight extends, that in time Sprota will have her own visions. And her visions will have as object her elevation, for surely the rumor of the beautiful girl with visions will spread, it will bring strangers to try to come to see the holy girl, and to keep them from finding a way into the abbey, the girl will have to be brought to town to speak, she will blaze before her listeners and her name will become louder in the world than the name of the abbey that holds her. When Sprota has gained enough power from her fame and the money brought in from the pilgrims, her visions will begin to war with Marie’s visions. The abbess bends and touches the spiky purple heads of the rush leeks, considering what to do.
Patience, she tells herself. Strike in rage, and all that you have built in this place could collapse.
At supper a week later, Sprota will not eat. She sits still and silent. When her fellow novices sign, asking if she is fasting, she signs back with her hands to say, No meat of four-legged beast. Against the Rule.
The next night, the spiced mutton in almond sauce goes untouched by the entire novice table, as well as by some of the younger nuns. Swan-neck, Marie’s old friend, protuberant eyes closed in praying, is also abstaining.
This is certainly a blow. But Marie might have taken this new development in her own slow time if she hadn’t looked out at her nuns’ silent faces and seen the smiles suppressed, the insolent glances at her, Sprota gazing at her with eyes narrowed.
Marie gazes back, testing, but Sprota does not look away, and Marie sees that her will is a wall, high and strong, one that Marie’s more liquid will must surround if she is to overcome it.
Worse, the next day when Marie goes out to the garden to tell the kitchener her plans for the week’s meals, she watches the kitchener glance at Sprota, who is pretending to pick the spinach, and who gives a tiny nod. Only then does the kitchener rise and come to Marie and show her a plan entirely devoid of meat.
Pity that the oxtails will rot, Marie says, raising an eyebrow. The kitchener is pale with fear, her hands shake, but she whispers, Ah, but you see, Sprota has been preaching more adherence to the Rule, she finds it all so frightfully lax among these supposed holy women. She foresees a great punishment if we do not correct our ways.
Clever, Marie thinks. Any bad thing that will inevitably befall the abbey will be made Sprota’s proof: the hay struck ablaze by lightning, a lamb swallowed down by a bog, a hole in the roof to let the rain in. And bad things happen constantly; it is the reality of such a vast estate.
Marie summons the servant to saddle her horse and rides to town to confer with Ruth, almoness and hostellerix. Ruth is wise, but also furious enough with Marie to speak plain. Marie finds her old friend sitting in the sun under the blazing red roses that have grown up over the hostelry’s wall. Ruth’s belly has usurped her lap. Her face is so full it is extruded from her wimple.
Ruth does not seem to see Marie. Marie stands closer, until she is nearly touching the other nun. She lowers her face to Ruth’s. Ruth gazes calmly at nothing. At last, Ruth mutters to herself that something is blocking the sunlight from her cheeks, she came out to breathe the fresh air and watch the people passing on the streets, but a witch must have cursed her, or perhaps the black cloud of the devil is hanging invisibly before her and stopping the light.
Marie checks her smile and says that, no, she is no black cloud of the devil. Rather Ruth’s mother and a friend who loves her dearly. How strange that Ruth was not even so childish when they were novices together and Ruthie made secret little poppets of thistledown and rags to cuddle in the night.
Ruth’s eyes snap to Marie’s face and she says, Oh, well, childish, if the abbess wants to speak of childishness, there is nothing more childish than dressing in priestly vestments and serving one’s sisters false sacrament, as though Mass were merely a play and not utterly vital for the eternal soul. For shame. She is trembling with fury.
If Ruth felt so strongly, Marie says mildly, she should have written letters to the superiors—
But Ruth interrupts her, saying that, as Marie knows very well, she did write letters, many letters, and somehow every one came to Marie with seal intact. It seems even the most unlikely people are in Marie’s pay. That even the ones placed directly in the intended hands went awry.
Then perhaps, Marie says, Ruth must find her solace in prayer. In fact, perhaps she would sit with Ruth and they would pray together that all evildoers receive their eternal reward. Or they could save the prayer for later and just enjoy the pleasures of the day, the warm sun upon their skin, the roses, the company of an old friend. For such enjoyment of earthly delights is a form of prayer also.
Despite her anger, Ruth smiles at Marie’s heresy.
At last she says, It’s always strange to find such carnality in such a renowned holy woman as the abbess.
Marie sits beside Ruth and together they breathe in the fragrance of the roses.
Marie begins to talk of Sprota. Though Marie can feel Ruth’s spiky anger, she can also feel the other woman listening. As she speaks Marie sees the slow movements of the street: the white goose marching forth with her retinue of goslings, the child crouching to shit behind a bundle of sticks, the carts loaded with turnips and rags, the horses intent on their own forward movement, the massing of those seeking alms at the almonry gates. In the alley at the edge there is a brown movement, which Marie fixes on, thinking an enormous rat or perhaps a swarm of rats, then when it moves into the light she sees it is a pair of lepers crouched to hide, the mother advanced in her illness, her fingers and toes shortened, her nose dissolved, and great lumps upon her face, the child with an eye whitened in blindness and the eyebrows gone. They cling, human heaps. A woman in fine black linen, passing upon the street, sees the pair now creeping into the sunlight and spits a great gob upon them, and behind her the two small girls trailing in tiny copies of their mother’s dress also spit as they pass.
Marie goes silent, watching. Ruth, in whom long friendship has built a window between them, can briefly see inside Marie’s mind. Suppressing a smile, she says that this inspiration of Marie’s seems more devilish than divine.
Marie says
that she cannot doubt it is divine, for how else does one explain the abbey’s difficulty in finding a good renter for that little house with its gardens on the far side of town? It is providence. She has been shown their path.
And the women stifle their laughter with solemn faces, and watch the alms being given out, and the lepers, the last to creep to the gate, holding out their bowls and bowing.
Before Marie returns to the abbey, she leaves instructions with Ruth. She embraces the other woman, who does not embrace her back. When Marie has swallowed her hurt and mounted her horse, Ruth at last says, carefully, that she loves her friend Marie, but she hates the devil that has possessed her abbess with all her eternal soul.
At evening meal Marie can look with calmness again upon Sprota, who glows with the conviction of her own inner divinity.
In the morning, Marie calls for a special gathering. So many nuns, Marie thinks, looking at those faces arrayed before her; perhaps the abbey has grown to touch its limit. More nuns will have to die before she accepts new ones. Well, if anything, death is a constant here.
She rises, they hush. She speaks. She tells movingly of what she has seen in town, the poor mother leper and her child, the spitting, the human life lesser than that of street bitches with their teats scraping the earth. How in the Bible, the lepers are healed with love. How it is the nuns’ duty to care for the most wretched of the earth.
Her nuns’ faces blaze with goodness, oh how she loves them.
She says at last that after much prayer she has been given a vision to found a house of lepers with its own gardens at the edge of town, and that the abbey shall undertake to care for these most wretched souls. And with this news, the faces of her nuns are eager, for most are truly women of god, devoted to their faith.
Marie goes on. And after the vision, she prayed all night to seek guidance to choose the one who will be installed as the mistress of lepers. She knelt in the chapel and by morning, she was given her answer.
She pauses to build tension.
She says that new mistress of lepers will be the dear novice Sprota.
Marie watches as the pink drains out of the girl.
The girl stands. She says in an admirably steady voice what a great honor the abbess has laid upon her head. But alas, Sprota finds herself still but a novice and has not yet taken the veil and has so much to learn before she has made herself equal to her holy sisters. She is devastated that she must stay and learn for years more to come before she could deign to pick up such responsibility.
Marie says that she has prayed about this too and it was told to her that Sprota’s special radiance will allow the nuns to overlook the depths of her ignorance. Everyone here has seen it, has seen the way Sprota ministers even to the insects of the earth. Because of such godly radiance, she will receive her profession this afternoon.
Sprota demurs, oh no, but she is but a worm, she is a dung beetle, she is not worthy of this great honor. Perhaps a nun who has already proven her strength should be Mistress of Lepers. Surely, Subprioress Goda would be fittest in holiness and propriety for this position.
Goda juts her chin proudly at being spoken of with such fervor.
Marie thinks, smiling, of the sudden vacancy of the subprioress role, and the election that would need to be called to fill it. She admires Sprota’s wiliness, the chess pieces she moves in her head.
Well, doesn’t Sprota’s modesty reflect well on her, Marie says. Such humility and grace! But they must remember: For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
And because there can be no further protest, the girl’s eyes fill with tears. Those who love her read the tears as pious and are moved.
Before None, a cart is loaded with ale and wine and flour and other foodstuffs, linens and ticking mattresses, the girl’s followers gathering around overjoyed to see her elevated, and so quickly too. Beside Sprota sits a skinny dun servant who after the announcement leapt at Marie, pleading to go along, and now trembles and flushes in waves to be sitting near the beautiful girl.
The servant will later report to Ruth with a face drawn that as soon as they arrived, Sprota closed herself in the back room—to pray, she shouted through the door—and when the servant was making the pottage in readiness for the first lepers to arrive, she found the girl’s window open and the horse gone from the shed.
Swan-neck comes to Marie weeping, furious. She could not shout if she wanted to, but her whisper is worse. You did this, her old friend says. You and your ungodly pride. You could not have another prophetess here. You had to rid yourself of competition.
How silly, Marie says lightly, I did not open Sprota’s window and kick her horse to walking.
Marie writes to the family in sorrow about their apostate nun. The one glimmer of fortune is that Sprota is not infected with leprosy; alas, however, she has been instead infected with false ideas of her own holiness, which have been proven to be ideas sprung into her mind by the devil.
The silence she receives in response is evidence that they are harboring the fugitive, as well as forfeiture of the handsome dowry, which Marie dedicates to the maintenance of the leprosarium.
It is Swan-neck, plain and quiet and old now that her anger has left her, who volunteers to be mistress of the lepers in Sprota’s stead. Privately, she says she had a sister who died of the disease. It is an ugly thing to be tormented as one’s body rots. It is far worse for most lepers, cast out into the elements and hungry and hated, than for her sister, who was cherished and loved until her death. She will keep their lepers clean and fed and beloved and safe, she says.
Marie says that Swan-neck is truly good, touching the woman’s hands.
Swan-neck smiles. Alas, she says, of course she is no saint. Only an old woman with pity in her heart. A rather common form of goodness.
Marie tells her gently, so as to take away the sting, that such goodness can seem common only to those who see holiness in places where it is not.
* * *
—
On the Kalends of April, Marie wakes to a hush—it is like the stillness of the air just after a bell has rung into silence—and she knows that Eleanor has died in the night.
* * *
—
Everything spins; and Marie is falling. Out of what? A hand that had long held her. Moonlight daggers in. All around, her sisters are rising, praying, baking bread, she can hear she is not alone in the world. She is terribly alone.
For some days, meaning takes leave of the world. Marie lies in the abbess’s bed and thinks, absurdly, of her body as a feather mattress with the down pulled out in handfuls.
She never did discover who Eleanor’s spy could be; and this lapse now fills her with rage.
A week later Marie finds herself at her desk. The letter confirming the queen’s death is open before her. Tilde squints at the account books but Goda stares at her from across the room. She raises her head and sniffs. Something of the hound in Goda, smelling out invisible emotion.
All people are like grass, the subprioress says suddenly, and their glory is the glory of the field; the grass withers, the flowers fall, but the Word lasts eternal. Her voice quivers. She rolls her eyes to the ceiling of the abbess’s study, which Marie hates just now for being so perfect, so high and uncracked and white.
Thank you, Goda, Tilde says, surprised, but Marie doesn’t bother to answer.
* * *
—
Perhaps, Marie will later think with wonder, after the queen dies, her grief drives her a little mad.
She is told she lifted a table and threw it, scattering manuscripts, candles, ink, but this she does not remember. In crossing the cloister, her foot reaches out independently and kicks a cat over the wall. She feels no remorse. She has always hated a cat. Once, she stops reading to her nuns and stares above their heads unblinking for a slow count of
a hundred, and they wait, for this is how she looks when visions overcome her; but instead of shining the intensity out at them and proclaiming, she closes her eyes and falls over like a tree.
When, suddenly, only a few weeks after Eleanor dies, Wulfhild is made a widow—and a tragic story it is, a bird’s nest in the eaves, a rickety ladder, a fall into the street, a trampling by a dung wagon passing at speed—Marie rides to her and takes the weeping woman in her arms and kisses the crown of her head, feeling sorrow redouble the grief of this child of her heart. Wulfhild’s daughters crowd around. She prays with them, for them, until they all fall asleep upon her and Wulfhild speaks all night of her loss, her dearest companion, the gentlest soul the earth has seen. Marie listens, though a small piece of her is comforted that Wulfhild knows something of what Marie feels, that she is not forced to bear her own desolation alone.
She takes to riding between Sext and None every day, no matter the weather. Through the constant rain of April and the fogs of May, through the fields and around and around, wishing she could broach the forest. She dreams of days-long hunts, following a trail of blood to where a wounded beast hides itself in its exhaustion, the frenzy of the kill, the hot blood on the hands. The poor horse plods on.
She tries to touch her sorrow in words, but it is like grasping at a cloud.
Instead as she rides, she thinks of god. It strikes her now that god must be most like the sun in the sky, which rises for the day and sleeps at night, endlessly renewing itself; and it is warm for it pours out its warmth and light, and yet at the same time it is coldly remote, for it continues on even as humans who equally fill the earth with life live and die, and it does not care either way, it does not alter its path, it does not listen to the noises on the earth beneath, it cannot stop to notice human life at all, it shakes off what absurd stories we try to pin to it and exists in calm as only itself, radiant and distant and meaningless.
