Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  Down in the abbess’s kitchen, the kitchener kneads dough with her sleeves unpinned, and the flour has risen to hover like a mist in the air and a servant eats nuts that she cracks with her strong hands and tosses the shells into the fire and gossips about the new abbess, how though of royal blood and for many decades prioress, Tilde yet seems uncertain in her role.

  The servant says that, in fact, Tilde could not be more unlike the old abbess. Oh ancient Abbess Marie was the strongest woman she had ever met in her whole life, they say a seraph had lain with her mother, hence Marie’s excessive height and the light that leaked from her. No, the old abbess brooked no fools. Made the air of a room go taut as a drum when she walked in. But catlike on those giant feet, nimble as a girl of ten even sickly in old age and creaking. Scared the piss from all the servants more than once.

  Ah yes, she was a crusader as well, the kitchener says sagely. They say dozens of infidels were slain by her great lady’s hand in Jerusalem, hundreds, even. She made blood pour knee deep in the streets. Awesome, terrifying, the great domina was. Holy, holy. A saint.

  But the chit of a new washing girl says that she had heard here and there that in fact there was no woman hid under that great habit of the old abbess’s, no woman at all, and that on top of all that she also heard that the old abbess Marie was either a witch or the devil taking the form of a nun, and did anyone look under the headcloths and see the horns?

  The kitchener throws a rolling stick at the girl’s forehead, shouting that she will cut out the girl’s tongue, nobody won’t be blaspheming her sainted Marie, who plucked the kitchener and so many of the others from the mud when she was a grub and saved them from their starving families. A better woman the world has never seen. She pants.

  The girl mutters she never said nothing about nothing, rubbing the knot on her head.

  Out in the orchard, small, quick Sister Petronilla catches up to Sister Alix on her way to the abbess’s house with a stack of clean linens in her arms, and darting her eyes about to ensure nobody is watching, she kisses the young blushing nun swiftly on the mouth and runs on.

  In the sheepfold, young Sister Rohese hides from her chores with a lamb on her lap, weeping for her sister who is sickly at home and will soon be called to the lap of the Virgin.

  Soon a small figure is seen pulling the bell rope to ring all the holy women to Terce. The nuns hear the peals and finish their labors and conjugations and private weeping. They stream out toward the chapel.

  Slowly, as they come, their thoughts turn to prayer.

  And the works and the hours go on.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Dr. Katie Bugyis, whose lecture gave me the first spark of this story, and whose book The Care of Nuns: The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages provided further inspiration. Her intellect and thorough notes kept me on track during the composition of this book; all mistakes are of course mine.

  Thank you to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, for the extraordinary gift of a fellowship, which allowed me the time and ability to begin this book. Thank you to my undergraduate researcher, Patricia Liu, for the excellent work and friendship.

  Thank you to the Guggenheim Foundation, for a further gift of time.

  Thank you to my gentle friends, the nuns at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, for welcoming me so gracefully to their guesthouse, masses, and work, and for showing me the astonishing beauty of monastic life. Special thanks to Mother Abbess Lucia and Mother Angele for our openhearted conversations. Thank you, J. Courtney Sullivan, for the referral.

  Thank you to Dr. Paul Rockwell of the Amherst College French Department, who tutored me for two semesters in ancien français, and who first introduced me to my beloved Marie de France.

  Thank you to my readers Laura van den Berg, Elliott Holt, T Kira Madden, and Jamie Quatro, whose notes cracked the book open again and again.

  Thank you to my family at Riverhead, especially Sarah McGrath, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Claire McGinnis.

  Thank you to Bill Clegg and Marion Duvert and everyone else at the Clegg Agency.

  Thank you to my parents for sheltering us in their tiny New Hampshire utopia while the pandemic raged on in the wider world.

  Thank you to Rebecca Ferdinand and Maria Clevenger, for taking care of us.

  Thank you to Clay, Beckett, and Heath.

  Thank you to my readers.

  This book is for my sisters, those of the flesh, and those of the spirit.

  About the Author

  Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and else­where, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists.

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