Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen

by Mary Sharratt

  “The holy anchoress,” he murmured, his eyes spilling tears.

  Leaving him to mourn, I turned to my sisters. Adelheid took my one hand, and Guda the other. Squaring her shoulders, Adelheid led us out into the cobbled yard crowded with monks, their heads bowed in reverence at Jutta’s passing. Not letting go of my sisters’ hands, I gasped, arching my face to the winter dawn. The pale sun painted the clouds pink and yellow, more beautiful than even Guda’s embroidery. Fresh air bathed our faces. So much sky above us.

  “Are we in heaven?” Guda asked, laughing, then weeping.

  I staggered on my weak prisoner’s legs, but I had to be strong. A little farther and we might reach the gates, go out into the forest. Did we dare? In the dead of winter—what was I thinking? Without food or shelter, we would perish within days.

  Egon, who had become prior when Cuno became abbot, planted himself in our path. “Sisters, where are you going?”

  “To the mortuary,” I told him, thinking fast. “Surely our lord abbot would agree it’s only proper that a woman washes our sainted Jutta’s body.” I turned to my companions. “Sisters, let us gather what we need to lay her in her final resting place.”

  I barely had a chance to accustom myself to the freedom of the open air before the morgue’s gloom enclosed me. Wishing to spare my sisters the spectacle of what I was about to behold, I worked alone.

  After hacking away the soiled hair shirt, I gagged to see the rusting chain wound three times around Jutta’s torso. Spikes cinched her waist and ribs. They crushed her withered breasts. They bit deep into her festering, oozing flesh. This was Jutta’s last admonishment to me, her undeserving protégée. She had wanted me to see how her pain proved her holiness. She had expected me to reveal this to Cuno himself.

  Gulping back my bile, I washed and bandaged her seeping flesh.

  Gray and shrunken, Jutta von Sponheim lay on the mortuary slab, clad in the gown she had first arrived in as a fourteen-year-old girl. It hung loose on her skeletal frame. Her hands crossed over her bony breast in prayer and her bald head was veiled in Damascus silk. At her side lay her severed braid of soft auburn hair.

  My work completed, I called in the monks. Silent and dry-eyed, I stood by while Cuno sobbed into his hands. Volmar’s spine threatened to snap under the weight of his distress. The men who had loved Jutta crowded round, touching her sleeve, her cold hands, the hem of her gown, as they never would have dared while she lived. I listened to them convincing each other how they could see the holiness rising from her. Their adoration covered my dead magistra in silver and gold.

  Blinded by his tears, Cuno nearly trod on me. But then his eyes snapped open, as if horrified to find me still standing there. I confess I needed to breathe deeply and gather my strength to face my abbot, face these milling monks that I had only ever viewed from the other side of a screen. After thirty years of seclusion, I found this strange and new. My eyes sought Volmar’s. My hands burned to touch his, to offer him consolation. Only I understood how he had loved Jutta, and how she had loved him, as much as she was capable of loving any human being.

  Abbot Cuno loomed before me, his disapproval written on his face. Unlike Jutta, I was no saint, no martyr, no ascetic, but a mature woman of little beauty and middling breeding. And yet I was his last link to his great love.

  “Did our holy woman tell you where she wished to be buried?” he asked, not looking me in the eye but past my left shoulder.

  I spoke the truth. “She wanted to be laid in a place where people would tread over her.”

  “Such humility,” Cuno said, his face flushed and lost. “She humbles us all.”

  My head bowed, I kept my own thoughts private. Even after death, Jutta wanted to make a display of herself and be buried where her self-abnegation would attract the most attention.

  “We could bury her beneath the floor in the chapter house,” Brother Otto suggested. “That way she’ll be with us in spirit every morning during chapter meeting.”

  “But do we want pilgrims traipsing into our chapter house at all hours?” Prior Egon asked, eager to trounce his brothers with the authority our abbot had vested in him.

  “We could house her relics in the church,” Brother Udo suggested. “At the Lady Altar, perhaps.”

  “Relics,” Egon said, latching on to the word as if it were a golden coin—Jutta’s relics were sure to draw pilgrims with their fat purses. He turned to Brother Otto. “Before we lay her in her coffin, could you not amputate a finger bone or two?”

  “How dare you!” Cuno placed himself between his prior and his saint. “You shall not despoil her corpse.”

  “But it is customary,” Egon began to argue.

  Then even he shut his trap when he saw Cuno reverently lift Jutta’s severed braid to his lips.

  “Her hair shall be placed in the reliquary,” our abbot said with finality. “That shall suffice.”

  Their backs to me, the men continued their discussion, leaving me to vanish back into my invisible existence. Instead I planted myself before Cuno so that he had no choice but to acknowledge me.

  “Let those of us who were Jutta’s disciples”—I picked my words judiciously—“attend her funeral. I have composed songs in honor of our holy woman.”

  I strove to sound as docile as they would have me be, when, in fact, I wanted to spit and scream at the thought of being bricked inside that anchorage again. What was the use of our isolation and suffering? What purpose could it possibly serve?

  “Lord abbot, leave the doorway open, I beg you. Give my sisters and I leave to accompany our beloved magistra to her final resting place.”

  “Very well,” he said. “The doorway shall remain open until after her burial.”

  So he planned to brick us back up after Jutta was laid to rest. I swallowed, arranging my face to mask my true emotions. If I was to win this game, I would have to play it with cunning.

  Prior Egon had to stick his nose in. “But the funeral might not be for weeks.”

  I stifled a smile as my heart raced in hope.

  “We must send for the archbishop,” Egon went on, “not to mention our saint’s relatives. In the meantime, are we to have females wandering around the monastery, gabbing about like market wives?”

  “My lord abbot,” I said, my head bowed to the floor so the men could not glimpse my rage. “I give you my word that my sisters and I shall not disturb the holy brothers.”

  “You may go,” Cuno said, as though dismissing a servant.

  “Reverend father, wait just one moment,” Volmar said, before I could depart. “There is one other matter of business. Hildegard, you and your sisters must elect a new magistra.”

  My head brimmed with a thousand thoughts as I stepped into the glittering sunlight, my sandals scraping the crust of snow in the courtyard. How like Jutta to choose to die in December, which made any notion of escape daunting. I was thirty-eight, older than my mother had been the last time I’d seen her, well past my prime. If I reneged on my vows and attempted to live once more in the secular world, I’d be unlikely to find a husband, not that I wanted one. My thoughts turned to Trutwib, proud and alone, how she’d survived in the woods. Did she still live, I wondered, and how did she survive the winters? I doubted I could survive such a rustic life. My only choice would be, as before, to throw myself at my brother’s mercy, beg him to let me live out my dotage in some nunnery in Mainz, where I would sew his vestments and learn to keep my mouth shut.

  Reaching the courtyard where I had left Adelheid and Guda, I saw no trace of them. Sandals slapping the snow, I ran into the anchorage, my voice echoing through the abandoned cells that reeked of hopelessness and death. Had my sisters absconded while I was washing Jutta’s corpse? My heart raced, caught in a place between terror and elation. What if my girls had indeed broken free? Those brave souls. No doubt Cuno would hold me responsible and assign some unspeakable penance.

  Unused to such freedom of exercise, I was soon winded, staggering through th
e warren of monastery buildings and courtyards in search of my sisters, part of me praying that I wouldn’t find them, that they were already miles away, never to see this place again. But in the cloister garden I found Guda, her fingers tracing the figure of a siren carved onto one of the pillars as a warning to the monks to shun the temptation of women.

  “Hildegard.” She spun to face me. “I can’t find Adelheid.”

  Bolder than Guda and I, Adelheid must have taken to the road. Fiercely intelligent, she had studied many a map. She would find her way, following the Nahe to the nearest hamlet where she might seek shelter. Of the three of us, she had the best chance, so practical and courageous was she. Then, as I held Adelheid’s face in my heart, another possibility occurred to me.

  A novice monk came down the cloister walk, took one look at us, and stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Brother, can you take us to the library?” I asked him.

  The boy seemed flustered. I doubted that he had stood face to face with a woman, much less been addressed by one, since he’d arrived in this place. Though I was old enough to be his mother, Guda was lovely enough to make him blush. Stammering and blinking, he reeled off the directions to the library before backing away, beating his retreat without giving me a chance to thank him.

  “He might be shy, but he’s not bad looking,” Guda whispered with a smothered giggle.

  Turning a corner, we mounted a stairway. I felt as weak as a convalescent, my muscles wasted from the confines of my prison. How could I even contemplate life outside this place if I could barely manage to climb a single flight of stairs?

  At last we reached the door to the sanctum that housed the many books that had kept me from going mad. Guda opened the door and stepped through, tugging me behind her as she flew to the glassed window that looked over the abbey walls to the winding Nahe River below. Tears moved down my face at my first glimpse of the outside world in three decades. How my eyes feasted on the forested hills stretching as far as I could see. The emperor himself wouldn’t have been able to pry me from that window, but finally Guda did.

  “Hildegard, there’s Adelheid.”

  Our sister sat with Herodotus’s Histories open before her. Oblivious to everything else, she was in the transports of ecstasy, her mind wholly engaged.

  Brother Matthias, the librarian, appeared content to let her read to her heart’s desire while he contemplated the miracle of the woman at his table.

  When the bells rang for None, we dragged ourselves back over the shattered threshold of our anchorage to observe the Divine Office, the three of us kneeling behind the screen as though nothing had changed. But as we sang the psalms, Guda’s voice rang out with an exuberance that reminded me of a reeling lark.

  Adelheid elbowed her. “Careful,” she whispered. “We’re meant to be mourning.”

  Afterward, as we shared our sparse meal, I told my sisters of my discussion with Cuno.

  “So after Jutta’s buried, they’ll just brick us up again?” Adelheid’s voice shook.

  When I saw the fury on her face, I feared she would indeed run away, but this time the picture of her exodus was far from romantic. How easily she could freeze or starve in that winter forest.

  “I’ll find a way, I promise you,” I told them.

  “You’re powerless,” Adelheid said. “Cuno will do what he likes.”

  “We must elect a new magistra,” said Guda, as though anxious to keep us from quarreling.

  I looked at Adelheid, her face alight with brilliance going to waste. “I would vote for you, sister. At a real nunnery, you might have become a great abbess.”

  “No, Hildegard,” she said. “You are our magistra. Who else is there?”

  Guda took my hand and kissed it. I quaked to see the trust in her eyes—she seemed to truly believe I had the power to end our cap-tivity.

  8

  ON JUTTA’S FUNERAL day, my hammering heart awakened me long before Lauds. This was to be our last day of freedom before they bricked up the anchorage once more.

  Guda and Adelheid’s faces revealed that they, too, had hardly slept. From Compline to Matins, the three of us had held vigil, stitching by candlelight, at work on the secret plot I had hatched. This was to be the gamble of our lives. In preparation for this day, our one and only chance, I had implored Cuno to let us open Guda’s dowry chest, filled with damask, brocade, and golden wire.

  “My lord abbot, allow my sisters and me to sew a banner to honor Jutta, our magistra who is now a saint in heaven.”

  Outside our broken doorway, the courtyard brimmed with dignitaries. As our many visitors squeezed into the church for High Mass, I searched the crowd for Meginhard. Would he show himself? Part of me, I confess, longed to see Jutta’s tormentor brought low in shame, a wasted stick of a sinner. Let him cower under the glares that Volmar, Cuno, and I would hurl at him, we who knew his crime. Let him take that spiked penitent’s chain he had given his sister and wind it around his own neck to strangle himself. But the hypocrite kept out of sight, pleading ill health and hiding in his castle, though he had sent Cuno the gold to pay for Jutta’s burial.

  Peering through the screen, I located my brother in the archbishop’s train. During his last visit, Rorich had revealed how Adalbert had come increasingly to rely upon him, making my brother one of his most trusted men. I prayed that this would work to my advantage, though I’d neither the opportunity nor the courage to confide to Rorich what I would do this day. For now, I remained hidden behind our screen, not daring to set foot outside. No, my sisters and I must appear as meek as mice until we made our move. Only an hour or two remained.

  The Margravine von Stade approached the screen, her arm entwined around her only daughter, a girl with black hair rippling to her waist. Now widowed, the lady was richer than ever and her own mistress with no husband or master. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth betrayed her age of forty-one, but her ice-blue eyes were as piercing as I remembered them.

  “Sister Hildegard, please accept my condolences.” She sounded restrained, no doubt owing to the somber occasion. How was she to know that her Christmas visit would coincide with Jutta’s funeral? She had set sail down the Elbe and the Rhine before the news of Jutta’s passing could reach her. “Your magistra was fortunate to have so loyal a disciple.”

  “Lady, I am unworthy of your praise.” I bowed my head lest she read in my eyes how disloyal I truly was.

  “This is my daughter, Richardis.” She drew the girl at her side closer to the screen.

  In her younger days, the margravine had been a beauty, but this thirteen-year-old was a jewel. She stood slim and straight, and her dark blue eyes had depths in them, like the starry sapphires encircling her white throat. No cloistered life for her, I reckoned. Her beauty and title, coupled with her family’s riches, would make her the most desirable bride in Saxony.

  “It was good of you to come so far to meet your kinswomen,” I said to the girl.

  She only stared at me and said nothing.

  As if to cover her daughter’s discourtesy, the margravine spoke in a rapid, breathless voice. “Her brother, my second son, Hartwig, is the newly elected Archbishop of Bremen.”

  “What an honor,” I murmured.

  Her son couldn’t be much older than twenty, which left me to wonder what role the margravine’s money and influence had played in his appointment. At that, I withdrew from the screen so that Guda and Adelheid could greet their godmother. Though my sisters offered their warmest greetings to their beautiful young cousin, Richardis remained silent, her eyes downcast. The girl was either painfully shy or dreadfully rude.

  “Sister Hildegard!” The margravine called me back to the screen.

  The lady’s eyes couldn’t quite meet mine, but her daughter gawked at me shamelessly, in harsh examination, as if to uncover what sort of person I was. Could she tell that I was less grieved at Jutta’s passing than terrified about my sisters’ future? Could she sense that my stomach filled with ice when I though
t what my sisters and I must do in the next hours? That child had the eyes of an inquisitor. What a strange young person. With her youth, beauty, and good fortune, she should have been sanguine and light of heart.

  “There is a private matter I must discuss with you,” the margravine told me.

  “Tomorrow, noble lady.” I bent my head in apology. “We must make ready for our magistra’s last rites.”

  When my sisters and I emerged from our prison to join the procession of mourners, the margravine and her daughter gaped, their hands cupped to their mouths. Cuno froze, as if God had turned him into a statue. Prior Egon’s face purpled, his neck thickening like a mastiff’s. Archbishop Adalbert’s eyes flamed with astonishment. When my brother’s gaze met mine, it was as though he were staring at another woman, for I had become a brand-new person.

  This was our gamble, our way of engraving ourselves forever in the assembly’s memory, so that we could never be forgotten, never again be consigned to dust and a quiet, slow death. Even if we lost the battle, this moment would live forever. The legend of our deed would endure.

  My sisters and I had shed our black Benedictine habits and donned the jewel-colored damask from Guda’s dowry trunk. As well as sewing the banner in Jutta’s honor, thus keeping our promise to Cuno, we had wrought gowns for ourselves grand enough to grace the margravine’s court. We were brides of Christ—why should we not adorn ourselves for our Bridegroom? Like the maidens of Saint Ursula, we processed unveiled, our hair flowing long and free, crowned in circlets of woven gold wire that Guda had fashioned into the shapes of lambs and doves. I will never forget how lovely Guda looked with her golden hair and emerald gown, or how Adelheid shone with her wise brown eyes and her gown of deepest garnet. Even I was majestic, clad in amethyst, my flaxen hair falling nearly to my waist. We are daughters of the King. I smiled at Volmar’s transfixed face.