by Lauren Groff
Marie warns them that if she lets them do this, she is allowing them to commit sins on the part of the abbey.
Young Wulfhild smiles and her eyeteeth are sharp, like her mother’s. Here she is, Marie thinks. The darkest piece of Wulfhild is alive in this one.
Young Wulfhild says isn’t it lucky, then, that Marie is their confessor.
* * *
—
A fever falls on Marie in the middle of Vespers the next day, and her linen underclothing is soaked through by the Magnificat. She feels the crown of her head steaming. Food revolts her. She stops a servant who is rushing by with a bucket slopping with dirty water and tells the frightened child to warn the stable hands to saddle her horse, she needs to ride to town.
The fever, she trusts, is drawing her to Wulfhild.
The cool air feels good upon her cheeks as she rides. The town is quiet in the dusk, all have gone home to their families to eat and rest for the night. Someone gallops by whose face Marie cannot see in the dark.
She throws her reins to whoever will catch them at Wulfhild’s house, and runs inside to the room that shines above with candlelight. As she runs up the stairs, she hears a rasping like a metal file upon an anvil, and knows it is her poor Wulfie’s breath.
In the chamber, Nest is pressing a wet cloth to Wulfhild’s swollen purple face; she looks up, amazed. The abbess must be as magic as they say, she tells Marie, she must have flown there on the wind. Nest had sent Beatrix to fetch her only a few minutes ago.
From her pillow, Wulfhild looks at Marie with panic.
Wulfhild’s daughters are in the shadows, they too have just come in, there is a stink of horseflesh and sweat, a dark stain on Hawise’s stockings, a spatter across the hem of Milburga’s tunic. Marie’s eyes flick at them. Hawise nods, grim and pale. It is done.
Marie bows her head. Their attention returns to poor Wulfhild.
Marie removes her clogs, and climbs into bed close to the wall, her huge feet dangling off the edge. She holds Wulfhild, trying to draw the woman’s pain into herself. Wulfhild’s breaths grow less labored; her bulging eyes close. The daughters come forward, the youngest, small rosy pretty Ydon, brushing her mother’s hair back from her cheeks.
Marie looks insistently at Nest. The infirmatrix shakes her head at first, then when Marie does not relent and makes her face into an order, at last in silence Nest bows her head to the abbess’s will. She turns to pour out her whole vial of opium into the cup. She holds a white cloth near Wulfhild’s mouth to catch the spill, but there is none because Marie brushes Wulfhild’s throat and with eyes closed the woman laboring to breathe swallows the whole draft. Wulfhild’s rasping slows as the drug seeps in.
Young Wulfhild, her face hard but her cheeks wet, asks that Marie shrive her mother now, and Marie does in as clear a voice as she can manage, the holy water she carried against her skin too hot with her own flesh’s fever.
When this is done, Wulfhild’s daughters kneel and rest their heads on their mother’s body.
There is such pain in the room, Marie can hardly stand it. Prayer helps, but what helps more are stories. She tells the girls that when their mother first came to the abbey as an oblate, there was another oblate who hated her. This girl was twice their mother’s age, and much, much bigger. For about two weeks, she would pinch Wulfie during the divine office, wait until she was asleep then push her out of her bed, trip her so she fell in the dung heap, things like that. Wulfhild took this so calmly, and didn’t complain even once, that everyone thought she was a paragon of humility.
Now the girls begin to smile; they know their mother well.
But, Marie goes on, in fact, their mother was waiting. Finally, one night when the wind was blustering so loudly that the nuns could hardly hear their own voices, and everyone was on edge because mad Sister Gytha had stood during the readings at collation and confidently said that it was the night of the full moon, when the wolf-people change into their great dog-forms and pant at the windows to watch Christians sleep in their beds. And from her bed in the dortoir, Wulfhild watched the nasty girl get up and light the taper stub to go to the garderobe. She stole behind her outside with bare feet, even though it was monstrously cold. When the other girl was inside the garderobe, Wulfhild quietly took the horseshoe she’d hidden in the weeds for this moment and wedged it into the door so that the girl was stuck in the stinking filthy place. Then she waited patiently in the dark as the other girl kicked at the door and shouted, but the wind was so loud nobody could hear her. And then when the girl’s taper burned out, Wulfhild took a broom and beat at the walls, scaring the girl inside until she fainted. Wulfhild went back to bed and slept. The poor girl in the garderobe was set free, half frozen, when the magistra woke shortly before Matins and saw she was gone from her bed. In the morning, when the magistra lined all the girls up to discover who would do such a sinful thing, Wulfhild stepped forward and said in her little voice that she did. Now they were even. And though the magistra beat her savagely for this crime, Wulfhild didn’t repent.
The girls laugh. Hawise says it sounds like their mother.
Milburga says that she once watched her mother stand up from nutcakes and good mead being served by one of the abbey’s renters and all of a sudden leap out the window, having realized that they were only trying to waste her time while their servants took half the sheep to a distant meadow to hide their true wealth.
Young Wulfhild says that she was there too that day, and their mother was of course correct.
Ydon asked what happened to the mean girl, did they make friends at last? Because nobody can be mad at her mother for long. Have the girls ever met this nun?
Marie rests her hand on the girl’s head and smiles at her. She does not say that it is a sad story, that the poor child was bucked by a horse only months later and died of a crushed head; and that Marie, who forgets none of her daughters, who forgets nothing, has forgotten the name of this child who had so hurt Wulfhild.
The candle gutters and Nest lights a new one, her face weary. Ydon has fallen asleep with her head on her mother’s chest when Wulfhild gives a rattle. Her long eyelashes are clumped on her cheeks. Marie holds her breath, waiting for Wulfhild to breathe in again. Perhaps, she thinks wildly, and presses her hands upon Wulfhild’s heart, sending her force downward into the still body, every thought a plea. Come back, she thinks. If ever the Virgin has shown Marie a miracle, it must be this, Wulfhild’s breath returning to her lungs, the blood rushing into her face, her eyes opening, the great sunburnt chapped hands touching Marie’s face again. But the silence stretches. The panic dies out of Marie and she at last removes her hands from the woman’s heart. Well, she thinks, it hadn’t worked to bring her mother back, either. All this force inside her, and yet her hands are not the kind that can raise miracles of life out of dead bodies. She watches Wulfhild’s daughters’ faces as the understanding arrives slowly in each, one and then the next, that their mother is gone.
We will see her in the next life, Marie says. The pain is too great for her not to believe it.
Nest returns to the abbey. The daughters go in their sorrow to their sleep.
Marie sits in Matins over the body of the last of the women she has loved with her own heart; not with the borrowed heart of an abbess. All gone: her mother, five aunts, Cecily, the queen, Wulfhild.
Slowly as the night ekes on and her own fever withdraws there occurs in Marie a transfiguration. No raiment shining white as light, no clouds speaking sternly from above; only the death of this daughter of her soul, and the endless dark.
She has known prayer in her life, but before tonight it has been prayer like sending a coin with a wish into a body of water, it was hope dispersed vaguely outward. She sent it not toward the stern trinity imposed upon her, but toward the Virgin Mother who wore her own mother’s face. Even in prayer she was rebelling.
She sees now what should have bee
n apparent. She has made her life holy, she has lived sinless, she has said all the right words, but deep within she has coveted her own rebellious pride.
Marie’s arrogance brought this final illness upon Wulfhild. Her endless hunger ate up the daughter of her spirit. The need to enlarge this abbey she has thought of as an extension of her own body. Her actions always in reaction to the question of what she could have done in the world, if she had only been given her freedom.
Now, sitting beside the dead woman, Marie renounces the hunger that has always lit her from within. She will maintain what she has been given. She will learn contentment. This repentance will prove to one so ambitious to be an effort of will, a constant wrestling match with the devil who wears her own face.
She will renounce her long struggle against the central beauty of the abbey, she will let ego be swallowed by noes.
Oh, she thinks, she is already so old and weary.
And that very morning, riding in her grief back to the abbey, for the briefest of flickers she sees looming above the trees a great stone eagle the size of a mountain. And though the day is soft and bright in the forest where Marie rides, there hangs over the carved eagle a black and raging thunderstorm veined through with lightning. And under the weight of the pouring rain the bird’s carved feathers swiftly melt, the beak and eyes dripping in gray streams from its face as though it is made of loose dust, not stone.
The horse walks on, the vision fades, the blue of the sky seeps back. Marie blinks and breathes again. Her vision is about the empire, the Angevin striving coming at last to its end; very soon, everything that Eleanor had so carefully built will crumble into nothing.
Marie sighs and rubs her weary face with her two hands. Collapse is the constant state of humanity, she tells herself; the story of the flood and the great ark that saved the creatures two by two is only the first refrain of a song that is to be sung over and over, the earth’s gradual and repeated diminishment, civilization after civilization foundering to dust, until the final death of the children of Eve with the apocalypse, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven bowls. In the end, the earth will crack and the wicked will be cast into the lake of fire. Marie suspects this fiery end would be the stone and the soil and the waters of the earth itself, through human folly and greed made too hot for it to be willing to bear any more life upon its back. So it will go, and so it would be; and Marie cannot stop it, even if she had the force of will any longer to do so.
7.
Life slows. Time is wheels within wheels.
Postulants arrive tender and young; work and prayer. Nuns escape their bodies in death.
Temporale, the proper of time, the cycle of Christmas, the cycle of Easter. Sanctorale, the proper of the saints. The seasons with their colors: dove gray to green to floral prismatic to gold. The Kalends Nones Ides of the month. The days of the week, the Sabbath. Night and day.
Matins Lauds Prime Terce Sext None Vespers Compline.
In the choir as the nuns prepare to sing a particular psalm, Swan-neck, who has returned from the leprosarium to confer with Marie, can feel the eyes of the child oblates, their just-contained hilarity. At the moment when they sing of the frogs that descend and destroy, she tucks her chin into her chest, blows out her cheeks, bulges her eyes, flicks her tongue. A great fit of coughing comes over the oblates, the novices, even the young nuns. This is Swan-neck’s joke with this psalm, decades old; a tiny thing that the young wait for in the cycle of the liturgical calendar, that they love her fiercely for.
Such comfort in knowing all the old cycles will turn again.
* * *
—
Old age falls upon Goda, a thunderclap. She comes to Nest for a salve for her swollen red knuckles. As Nest rubs it in, the subprioress sighs and closes her eyes. Nest looks at Goda’s tight small pleated mouth, marveling at the distance between now and when Nest herself first came to the abbey as a grief-blasted young widow, and was cowed by Goda, her snappishness, the authority of her position, her swift English and French, her fine noble blood. But over these years Nest has come to understand that if you minister enough to any adult body, you will discover the frightened child hiding within it. The greater the protestations of power, the smaller the child. Goda, a raw infant. The salve should be working already, but Nest does not drop Goda’s hands. She rubs gently until at last the bells for Terce ring.
* * *
—
Now a new darkness touches the island, led by incompetence and madness and greed, and up rises a fight between the crown and Rome.
In 1208, a papal interdict falls over the land. Penance is to be inflicted as well on the healthy as the sick; for in the midst of life we are in death. No Mass can be celebrated, no bodies buried in sanctified ground. Only babies can be baptized, and extreme unction given at deathbed. There will be sorrow, horror, everywhere, and in all the cities the people will suffer, they cannot be confessed, they cannot take communion, the beloved dead will be left to rot and the air fills with the stink of their putrescence.
When Marie reads the awful news—days before the messenger can arrive with it at the royal court, for her network is swifter and better—she puts the parchment down with rage gnawing black at the corners of her vision.
These people who think of themselves as her superiors, how foolish and unnecessarily cruel they always choose to be. Throwing blows at the innocent people to hurt the crown. Thus does power corrode the mind and the soul, she thinks.
Down below in the abbess house, a servant is singing a small sad song in an off-key voice, and Marie listens for some time to the brush upon the stones, the singing, the cows lowing in the pasture.
The old hatred stirs in her, rises.
Well. She will tell none of her daughters of the interdict. They will know nothing of it, it will have no bearing upon their lives, it will not disturb their peace. They will live as they always have, happily, and knowing they are the best beloved of god.
The island of the abbey will recognize as highest authority only Marie.
She finds even herself a little thrilled at this thought.
From the diocesan there comes a letter days later, shaken: Oh, noble virago, you who in wisdom are exalted above all other exemplars of your sex, it begins, then goes on to ask her to set her nuns to constant praying that the anathema be lifted.
She senses Tilde behind her, reading, and though her first impulse is to throw the parchment in the fire, she allows the prioress to see.
We have been under papal interdict? the prioress asks Marie with extreme crispness.
Well. Angleterre as a whole, yes. But the monasteries are still allowed divine office, Marie says, as if that explains all.
The prioress sits and slowly tilts forward until her face rests against the surface of her desk. Marie waits. The rasping brush cleans the stones of the abbey below, the voice sings. But Tilde doesn’t stir.
I am the shepherdess of all the abbey’s souls, Marie says at last. I am the mother, here to protect and guide all of our sisters and our servants and villeinesses. We are whole in ourselves.
Marie, you are very far from being the head of the church, Tilde says, muffled by the desk.
As the hierarchy see it, perhaps. But holy sisters in our humility and meekness sit nearest of all humans to the hand of god. And our abbey is known as the most powerfully pious in the land. And if there is any intermediary on the earthly plane, that intermediary is me, Marie says. Ergo, I recognize no anathema.
Where is your vision that told you so, Tilde says, lifting her face, and she has such rage there on that soft and timid face that Marie’s heart skips. No? No vision this time? Tilde says. Perhaps it is not real, what you’re saying.
It is real, Marie says. She has never been more sure.
Tilde sighs and puts her head down again. She says oh well that it is as it will be, but that the nuns a
ll have families out in the rest of the world, suffering under the interdiction. And they should know at least what their families are suffering.
And with a pulse of victory Marie sees that she has won; that Tilde won’t stand in her way, that though her nuns will know of the interdict on England, they will not be touched by the dark papal cloud that has descended upon the greater island, they will stay in the bright warmth of Marie’s protection, alone, together.
* * *
—
But death, as always, strips even this victory from Marie.
Asta reaches her hands into the workings of a pump in the kine barn, but a rat that has taken up residence there bites her on the thumb. How unexpected, Asta thinks, staring at the bite, growing angry as she does when events of the day fall outside her calculations. She ignores it, continues on. In a week, poor skinny staring Asta slavers and froths and speaks wildly of the devil sitting astride her, and she thirsts so terribly her tongue sticks out huge and black in the hours before she dies. Marie weeps, preparing the knock-kneed body.
Then a servant unhappy to find only women around her flees in the night with a round of good cheese and the finest of the altar cloths, studded with pearls. Months later she is discovered in a tight lobe of the labyrinth, a mess of stained cloth and picked-over bones, having likely died of loneliness and fright. The cheese is gone into the gullets of wild animals and sunk into the soil, but the nuns find the altar cloth has remained as new. A miracle! the other servants say, though Marie hears that some have whispered it was not a miracle, but a binding curse the abbess herself had laid upon the girl when she stole the holy cloth.
