Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen

by Mary Sharratt

  With one backward glance at sleeping Jutta, I let the curtain fall back into place and crept to that door. Palms sweating, I undid the wooden latch, tugged it open, and rushed through. Scabby stone walls reared around me, as high as a tall man standing on another man’s shoulders. This was no passage to freedom, only a narrow courtyard with a smelly drain and broken cobblestones. But when I arched my neck as far back as it would go, I saw the pale morning sky, as blue as Walburga’s eyes. As blue as hope.

  My tears wet the ash still coating my face, making it run down my cheeks until I tasted the grave dust on my lips. If I stood perfectly still and pricked my ears, I could hear the two rushing rivers far below, the Glan flowing into the Nahe. Tree branches whispered secrets while the wind stirred my hair. Then, oh wonder, a rust-colored beech leaf swirled down on the breeze to nestle in my cupped palms, the most beautiful thing I would touch that day. The wild forest rustled and murmured, just out of reach.

  I broke down, wailing for my mother, pleading and sobbing until I thought my yearning would summon her out of the cold air. Mother would change her mind, bully the monks until they hacked open the anchorage entrance, allowing me to burst free into her arms. But the chilly place in my heart told me that Mother would leave this very morning, boarding the barge that would take her home. Her hand on Rorich’s shoulder, she would tell him it was for the best. Hildegard is in God’s hands now.

  What if Mechthild von Bermersheim wasn’t my real mother, I began to wonder. Perhaps she was just an imposter, or a wicked stepmother out of Walburga’s fairy tales. A good mother wouldn’t leave me to molder here. No, my true mother would have fought for me with the ferocity of a she-bear. She would have stood by me.

  As if in answer to my desolation, a golden orb came floating down and I saw her in the midst of that pulsing sphere. A face like Walburga’s but not Walburga’s. A face bathed in tenderness, the Mother of my deepest longing, she who gave me all the love I craved and more. Beloved, don’t give up hope. When the time is ripe, I will set you free.

  “Hildegard!”

  You are the seed. The anchorage is the husk. Here you will grow and grow until you grow too large for this place and then it will burst and you will step forth.

  “Hildegard, did God strike you deaf?”

  Whirling in a panic, I crushed the leaf in my hand. There stood Jutta, her face corpse gray from ashes and earth.

  A peal of bells burst through the quiet of dawn.

  Her voice raised to scold, Jutta snatched my wrist and dragged me back into the dank inner room. “I let you sleep through Matins, you lazy slug, but now it’s time for Lauds.”

  “Matins?” I remembered the chanting in the black cavern of night.

  Jutta knelt before the screen that faced the candlelit church where the monks assembled. Falling to her knees, her palms outstretched, Jutta joined her voice to theirs. Her song soared, high and ethereal, above the monks’ deep drone. A boy hurrying through the nave to join his brothers in the choir turned around to glance toward the screen, his eyes widening as though in wonder to hear Jutta’s singing, so beautiful and pure. Deep inside my heart, I offered up my secret prayer: Please, God, you who can work miracles, let me see Rorich again. And the forest.

  If Rorich was trapped inside this place, he would launch himself over that wall, falling down the cliff and landing in the river where he would swim to safety. But I was just a girl with weak arms and legs. My thoughts wandered to my days in the forest with Rorich when he chased me through the trees, making me squeal with laughter till we tumbled on the grass and gazed up at the sunlight sifting through the leaves.

  When at last the monks filed out of church, Jutta slammed the shutters, blocking my only view out of the anchorage.

  “You weren’t singing along,” she accused. “You hardly paid attention.”

  “I don’t know the words.”

  “Your family never gathered in the chapel for Lauds?” Jutta seemed scandalized.

  “Mother’s headaches,” I stammered. “We never saw her face until Terce. She wanted no noise before then. I’m hungry,” I added, thinking that if we were to be awake to pray at every hour, the monks must surely feed us in return. Last night I’d eaten so little. My throat burned with thirst and my hunger left me fuzzy headed.

  Jutta regarded me in scorn, as though I were a spoiled child demanding honeycake after I’d just stuffed myself with roast venison. “Our meal comes after None.”

  That wasn’t till afternoon. My hollow stomach rumbling up a storm, I sank to the floor, my head drooping between my legs.

  “The spirit comes before the flesh, child. We have left worldly things behind.”

  Ignoring her, I tried to conjure up the orbs of light, anything to ease my misery. My hair shirt scratched every inch of my skin. How I longed to tear the cursed thing off.

  Jutta rummaged through a trunk in the corner and returned with a pair of glinting blades. Before I could even gasp, Jutta seized a lock of my hair and sliced it off, as close to the scalp as she could manage without cutting my skin. Ignoring my shrieks and sobs, Jutta hacked away until I was as shorn as a male serf, the flaxen curls that had been my only beauty lying in a heap on the floor. Deftly, Jutta gathered up the tresses and braided them into a blond rope, binding each end with a silk ribbon.

  “Keep that safe. One day, if you succeed in living a holy life, it will become a relic.”

  As I stared dumbstruck at my own severed hair, Jutta began to slice off her own shining auburn mane. Dropping my braid, I fled to the courtyard where, pretending I was as sturdy as Rorich, I stuck my fingers and toes into any little dent in the stone. Back home I’d climbed a willow tree, just to show him. Perhaps I could scale this wall. But it was useless—I only broke a fingernail.

  Jutta appeared again, her face still smeared in ash, but now she was as bald as a woman being shamed for adultery. Her auburn plait coiled like a snake in her arms.

  “Earthly vanity must be left behind,” she said. “The monks have their tonsures. Holy women must have their heads shorn four times a year—the Rule of Saint Benedict demands it. No one will see us here anyway.”

  Disconsolate, I explored the two small rooms, my entire world. The innermost room, with its screen facing into the church and the revolving hatch, was furnished with a brazier, two narrow beds, and Jutta’s trunk. The outer room, with its window and door onto the courtyard, had a table and two chairs. Each room I could cross from one end to the other in five long paces. Mother wouldn’t even keep her horses in so narrow a space. Had Jutta chosen me because only a small child could fit inside these tiny chambers with her?

  “Do you want to see something exquisite, poppet?”

  Jutta opened her trunk to reveal ells of silk in fantastical hues that seemed to glow in the murky cell. Sapphire, saffron, vermillion, deepest violet shot with silvery threads, and emerald adorned with golden threads. I fevered to touch the sumptuous fabric, yearning to yank off my hair shirt and wrap my itching body in the smoothness.

  “My father sent these back from the Holy Lands,” she said. “Silk and brocade from the city of Damascus.”

  Using the same shears she had employed to slice off our hair, Jutta cut the damask that might have made her wedding gown and a dozen other gowns besides.

  “Will we be allowed to wear it?” I asked, hoping against hope.

  “No, silly. We’ll fashion altar cloths and banners. And vestments for the Archbishop of Mainz.”

  Jutta set down her shears and turned to me. Her teeth as white as seed pearls, she smiled as though inviting me to trust her, share her friendship.

  “Are you thirsty, my little one?”

  When I nodded, Jutta fetched me a cup of water from the jug the monks had passed through our hatch.

  “I promised your mother I’d give you a noblewoman’s education. I shall teach you to play the psaltery and to read and write the psalms in Latin. I’ll teach you to embroider as well as my own mother can.”

 
; So I was emboldened to draw close to her while we worked, stitching the splendid silk.

  “Do you miss life back at court?” I asked, imagining Jutta swirling in a gown made of the selfsame garnet damask she sewed. “The music and dancing? My sister Clementia said your mother once brought in a tame bear and one of the servants saw it and ran screaming from the hall.” I giggled to picture the scene.

  Jutta regarded me with a face like stone. “Silence, child. Gossip and empty prattle are forbidden here.”

  “We can’t even talk? But we were talking just a moment ago.”

  Her cornflower eyes were huge. “Did no one ever tell you that when two females engage in idle chatter, the demon Tutivillus appears and pushes their heads together so they jabber all the more? Then he copies their every vain word on his scroll and reads it back to them on Judgment Day.”

  If such a thing was true, I worried that the demon must have an endless scroll with Walburga’s name on it, for she always had the most scandalizing gossip rolling off her tongue.

  Jutta composed herself once more, her serene face bent to her sewing, and so we worked on without another word, as though we were two mutes, but from outside the anchorage we could hear a tumult of sawing, hammering, and stone-breaking. The monks had wasted no time in putting Jutta’s fortune to use rebuilding the abbey. The racket grew louder and louder, making a mockery of our silence until Jutta seemed to grow bored. Then she returned, as she always did, to the virgin martyrs. Dreamy-eyed, she spoke of Catherine of Alexandria who matched wits with a thousand philosophers and won each debate.

  “Noble virgins, consecrated to God, can achieve things no commonplace girl can dream of,” she told me.

  Ursula and her eleven thousand maidens traveled, free and joyous, through the Holy Roman Empire, not bound by their parents or anyone. The pope himself followed in their train. Ursula and her virgins had their own navy of girls just like Jutta and me. At least they had a merry time of it, I thought, before they were hacked to pieces. And Catherine! I tried to imagine myself arguing with the abbot and archbishop, the words flowing from my tongue until the men bowed to my wisdom and didn’t know what to say anymore. I’d dazzle them with my wit until they knocked down the anchorage walls and let me walk free. To make Jutta happy, I’d take her on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. Rorich would come along and, somewhere on the journey home, he and I would run away and live in the forests of a faraway land. We’d find an abandoned castle and feast on wild boar every night.

  As my needle passed through the silk, my fingers guided by Jutta’s, I allowed myself to dream of happy things.

  The one daily meal the Benedictine Rule allowed us in the winter months came through the revolving hatch. Famished, I fell upon my trencher of millet and beans, cheese, onions, and wrinkled cellar apples, and gulped down every last drop of the sour apple wine in my beaker.

  But Jutta left her own food and drink untouched, fleeing the room in disgust, as though the sight of me stuffing myself sickened her. Too ravenous to bother about Jutta, I devoured every last morsel, even the doughy trencher that, at home in Bermersheim, we would have thrown to the hounds or given to hungry beggars. When my own food was finished, I looked around the empty room with the curtain drawn shut over the doorway before I launched myself at Jutta’s portion, eating as much as I could cram inside myself. If this was going to be my only meal of the day, I wanted my belly good and full. At last, I hid the leftover apples, cheese and the trencher bread beneath the blanket the monks had given me. Placing the empty wine beakers back into the revolving hatch, I turned it so they faced the outside again, thereby concealing my crime.

  I found her in the courtyard, pacing in the shadows, her hands rubbing each other as though she were trying to wash away some invisible stain. Her bare feet were blue against the stone. From the tang in the air, I guessed it would freeze that night.

  “Come back inside.” I tried to take her hand, but she shrugged me off.

  “Leave me, child.” Her eyes were worlds away.

  Jutta only came in at Vespers, when it was too dark to sew or do any useful work. Her veil covering her shorn head, her hands knit over her stomach, she huddled on her pallet until Compline, the last devotions of the day.

  Afterward we lay on our pallets to sleep.

  “Don’t undress,” Jutta said, as I prepared to pull the hair shirt over my head. “The Rule of Saint Benedict says we must sleep clothed.”

  Crawling under my blanket, I waited until Jutta blew out the taper. Then I silently wriggled out of the sackcloth and shoved the thing to the foot of my bed. My hands rubbed my naked skin, now covered in an angry rash. I wanted to scratch myself until I bled. But most of all, I was still hungry, hungrier than I ever imagined I could be.

  Biding my time until I thought Jutta must surely be asleep, I found the food in its hiding place and nibbled the cheese and trencher dough as quietly as I could, but when I bit into the apple, I gave myself away.

  Jutta whipped the blanket off me and snatched the fruit from my hand. She had drawn back the curtain so that the shivery moonlight revealed everything—my gluttony and my nakedness.

  “Horrible child! Do you think you can hide your wickedness from me? I could smell that cheese a league away.”

  Jutta crammed the bitten apple into her own maw, then spat it out, sobbing, and began to beat herself, falling to her knees with such a crack that I thought she had smashed her bones against the stone floor.

  Clutching the blanket to my chest, I could only stare in terror, my tears stinging my face. So passed my first day of monastic life.

  We are sealed in a tomb. We are no longer alive. Yet somehow life went on, though the two of us remained hidden away like the women in the glittering harems of the East that Rorich had told me about, except the only things that glittered here were Jutta’s tears as she flailed her soft white flesh with her knotted rope with its seven spiked tails for the Seven Deadly Sins. She whipped herself until the blood ran.

  The Hours of the Divine Office ruled our days and nights. In the pitch black, the bells summoned us to the screen for the Night Vigil of Matins, during which we sang the psalms for what seemed an eternity. The words of Psalm 129, sung every Wednesday at Vespers, burned themselves into my soul: De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine. Out of the depths I cry out to you, O Lord. I’ve been cast down a pit and will never rise again.

  Though Jutta didn’t expect me to flagellate myself as she did, my hair shirt did it for me, nettling my back and chest until my skin bled and wept of its own accord. I thought I would never again know what it was not to hurt or ache or suffer cold and hunger. God, take me. Just let me die. Real death had to be better than this never-ending pretend death.

  Jutta said the flesh was a thing to be abhorred. Suffering, she told me, purified the soul and purged it of sin. Indeed, our cell seemed arranged so that our bodies could be mortified every day and hour. Though we had a brazier to heat our inner chamber, I was always chilled, having to go barefoot even when snow dusted our courtyard. The Rule of Saint Benedict made us sleep in our separate pallets and forbade us to huddle together for warmth as I would have done at home, snuggling up to Walburga or my sisters on freezing nights. Hunger bit into me even more than the cold, leaving me to sob in my sleep and dream of plump pheasants crackling on the spit, of the warm honeyed wine that Walburga used to spoon into my mouth when I was ill.

  “Hunger is your weakness,” Jutta said. “You are but a slave to the desires of the flesh.”

  True saints, she insisted, could live on water and air alone. Fasting cured every disease. It dried up the bodily humors, put demons to flight, banished impure thoughts, cleared the mind, sanctified the body, and raised a person to the throne of God. Yet for all her lofty talk, there were bitter winter days when even she devoured every last crumb the monks gave her.

  I never knew which side of herself Jutta would show me next. She could be merciless, upbraiding me for the sin of being unable to sit still through the ho
urs of prayer. When Jutta told me I would burn in hell for fidgeting, I let out a shriek and tore through the tiny rooms and courtyard, banging around like a trapped bat until I winded myself. Yet even when I was a proper hellion, ripping in half a piece of the precious damask silk I was meant to be stitching, Jutta never raised a hand to strike me. Sometimes Jutta acted as though I weren’t even there. There were days when Jutta prayed herself into a swoon and lay like the dead for hours. Other times Jutta could act like the kindest soul I had ever met, teaching me to play her ten-string psaltery, patiently correcting my mistakes, and teaching me to sing in harmony with her so that our devotions became a thing of beauty that fed my soul even when I thought I was about to faint from hunger. Missing home in spite of herself, Jutta whispered about her life back in Sponheim—her dapple gray mare and merlin falcon—while we sewed altar cloths or mended the monks’ coarse wool habits. On the best days Jutta reached for her wax tablet and stylus, and taught me to read and write in Latin and in our native tongue, hour by hour and week by week, until at last the letters carved in wax came alive and sang inside my head.

  One dark winter morning, near the beginning of the fast of Advent, when cheese was denied us and we lived on turnips, millet, and scraps of fish, Jutta refused to arise for Matins. Lauds came, and still she did not stir from her bed. I shook her shoulders, slapped her cheeks as hard as I dared, even sprinkled water on her, but Jutta only lay there, her eyes glazed and unseeing, lost in some stupor.

  Panicking, I wondered if I should scream for help. What good would that do—the monks couldn’t enter the anchorage to help unless they tore down the wall. What if Jutta died and I was trapped here forever with her cold, rotting corpse?