To my mortification, the margravine sank to her knees before me.
“She’s my only daughter. I’m not washing my hands of her. I have your abbot’s permission to stay in the guesthouse for as long as necessary, to see that she’s settled and content. Here she shall live with her kinswomen.”
My heart in my throat, I knelt on the floor beside her, took her arms, and drew her to her feet.
“Of course Richardis is welcome here,” I said. “She may live with us as a postulant. But she cannot make any vows while she remains voiceless.”
“By God’s grace, she might regain her voice at Disibodenberg. Cuno said that the relics of holy Jutta might cure her.”
I smiled grimly, imagining my abbot making just such a claim to convince the lady to entrust the girl and her wealth to him.
“But to hear the story from my nieces, Jutta wasn’t quite the saint of your abbot’s imaginings, was she?” The margravine turned to me with shining eyes. “I put more faith in your prayers and goodwill, Hildegard.”
Flustered, I bowed my head. “I am no miracle worker, my lady.”
Before I could say anything more, the margravine tenderly joined my hand to her daughter’s. “Do you see, Richardis? Sister Hildegard cares only for your happiness.”
“At least make a sign if you want to stay with us,” I begged her.
The girl regarded me for a long moment, as though testing my patience. At long last she nodded, squeezing my fingers.
PART II
The Greenest Branch
O noblest greening, who have your roots in the sun.
—Hildegard von Bingen
9
SUDDENLY WE WERE free, my sisters and I. In place of the bricked-up passageway stood an oak door that bolted only from the inside. With Volmar as our guide, we learned to find our way around the abbey and its grounds, not only in the church, library, and scriptorium, but in the kitchen gardens, medicinal gardens, pastures, and fields. After my hours of work and prayer, I burst out of the gates and made for the forest, that living Eden where I felt myself renewed, greening like a willow in spring. Though I was thirty-eight, a second youth came upon me, the many sad years I had accumulated in that anchorage-hell melting away.
But I also served, spending hours in the hospice and infirmary helping old Brother Otto, who passed his wisdom on to me. It was one thing to study books of medicine, quite another to work with patients under the guidance of a master physician who had devoted his life to the healing arts. My head sang with the new knowledge. I was giddy, the whole world opening to me.
Likewise, my sisters found far more useful employment than they had in the confines of our enclosure. Guda tended the altars, arranging them with the cloths and banners she had sewn, and she sweetened the rushes on the church floor with dried lavender and rosemary. Adelheid spent her days in the scriptorium, copying texts in her excellent hand. She only regretted never having learned the alphabets of the Greeks and Arabs. As much as I coveted scholarly books, I myself would not have been able to bear spending all the daylight hours inside stone walls—I couldn’t allow a single day to pass without the sun and wind on my face, something growing and alive touching my hands.
Then there was the matter of our new postulant, that voiceless girl living in our midst.
The first gift I gave Richardis was her own wax tablet and stylus, so she would always have means to communicate. Other than that, instead of trying to mold her as her mother had perhaps tried too hard to do, I let her be. After all, she was neither oblate nor novice, and I questioned whether she had a religious calling. Neither did I deem it necessary to saddle her with too many restrictions. The mute girl, by her very nature, obeyed the most important rule, which was silence during the hours of contemplation. Yet I confess it was unnerving to see her standing there, as soundless as stone, while Guda, Adelheid, and I sang the Divine Office. Richardis refused to even move her lips in the shape of the words. So I taught her to play the psaltery, which seemed to soothe her. She could spend hours plucking those strings, inventing her own melodies.
I expected Richardis to find friendship and affinity with Guda, who was closest to her in age, but Guda never seemed at ease around this strange girl with her otherworldly beauty. Yet she made a long-suffering attempt to employ Richardis with embroidery—a thing for which the girl only seemed to bear contempt. Perhaps it reminded her too much of the accomplishments her mother had expected her to master back home in Stade. With Adelheid cocooned in the scriptorium, Richardis took to following me on my daily rounds. That voiceless girl became my shadow.
When the white of winter melted into spring’s verdant tide, Richardis was at my heels as I stole out of the gates into that realm of shoots and blossoms. In the forest I gathered fresh herbs for the hospice and infirmary.
How much more peaceful Richardis seemed out here, beyond those walls where her mother met with Cuno daily to discuss her spiritual progress. Since the girl was unmarried and had made no religious vows, she walked unveiled, her black hair snaking in a thick braid down her back. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her slyly kick off her sandals so that she could tread barefoot in the moist April loam where violets and white wood anemone bloomed.
How stifling her life at home in Stade must have been, how her mother must have paraded the lovely girl around court to be appraised by potential bridegrooms, how that girl’s very existence had been warped to serve her mother’s ambition, that margravine whose second son was an archbishop. But Richardis had refused to dance to her mother’s tune, retreating inside her bulwark of silence instead.
“Your mother named you after herself,” I mused aloud. “But the name doesn’t suit you, does it?”
The girl shook her head.
“What would you name yourself, I wonder, if you could choose?” I thought I might tempt her to communicate, to scrawl something on her tablet, but her face closed like a shutter.
Not pressing her with further inquiry, I gave Richardis my basket to carry while I stooped to dig up a primrose, roots and all.
“The primrose takes its power from the sun. And so it cures melancholy.”
The girl stared at the plant with its buttery yellow flowers that I held in my outstretched palm.
“When melancholy arises in people, it makes them agitated and sad, so they rail against God. Demons of the air notice this and surround the poor soul, turning him toward insanity.”
I thought of Jutta, of the thirty years of misery we had shared, how I had been an unwilling witness to her self-annihilation.
“The person should place the primrose near her heart. The demons of the air will flee before the plant’s power and cease their torment.”
Out here, surrounded by burgeoning life, Richardis’s silence became companionable. She seemed to love the forest as much as I did, her fingertips skimming a filmy sweep of forget-me-nots. Raising her eyebrows in inquiry, she pointed to the tiny blue flowers.
I shook my head. “For all their beauty, they are not useful as medicine. If someone should chance to eat them, it would cause more harm than good.”
The girl nodded, ducking beneath branches and gazing around with starry eyes, her hair crowned in a diadem of spider silk. Something inside her reminded me so much of the rebellion that had simmered within me when I was her age. This was why I chose to confide my secret that I had previously only dared confess to Volmar.
“My whole life long, I have borne an affliction not unlike yours.” My voice was as hushed as the wind in the tender new beech leaves as I described the visions that had haunted me since earliest childhood. “Jeweled trees came floating down inside golden orbs. My mother didn’t know if I was blessed or mad. That’s why she packed me off to the monastery.”
Richardis seemed to hang on my every word.
“Yet the curious thing is that since you arrived and we began to live a freer life, the visions ceased. Isn’t that extraordinary? What do you think, Richardis? Have I been cured of the visions? Or
has my life itself become the vision?”
I swung my arms wide in my longing to embrace this entire forest that rang with cuckoos and the rushing waters of the Nahe.
“God is not just in heaven, but in every living thing. You see it, too, don’t you?”
Reverence overwhelmed me as I knelt to cradle a sweet violet, so pulsing with holiness that I was almost afraid to sever the plant from its roots.
Only when we were walking back toward the monastery did I dare ask the question that had plagued me since I first learned of her muteness.
“Tell me, what made you stop speaking?”
Her eyes hardened. How zealously that girl guarded her secrets. Still, I hazarded a guess. She was eleven when it happened, a common enough age for betrothal ceremonies.
“Your mother is very forceful, is she not? Did she attempt to betroth you to someone you didn’t like?”
The look she gave me then, at once wounded and murderous, seemed to prove my hunch had been accurate.
“Richardis,” I said, reaching out to her, but she reeled away from me.
Grabbing her wax tablet, she worked the stylus, her face set in trancelike concentration. Breathless, I waited to see what she would reveal. When at last she thrust the tablet into my hands, I found myself staring at a caricature of a veiled woman, her face rendered comical for being so overly inquisitive. The young are given to insolence. I could only conclude that she meant to mock me, yet I was enchanted. Since the age of eight, mirrors had been forbidden to me, but this voiceless girl had revealed my image with grace and skill.
“Is that what I look like?” I asked, grinning until she returned my smile and nodded.
“God has given you this gift. Now we must find you some parchment, ink, and pigments.”
The girl flushed, as though suddenly shy. My basket in her hand, she sprinted across the grass, her steps becoming more measured only when she slapped her sandals back on her feet and entered the abbey gates.
“You need to find a task that will give you meaning and purpose,” I told Richardis the following morning. We sat in the scriptorium, among the many scribes and illuminators submerged in their own silent worlds that mirrored hers.
Volmar showed her how to grind pigments to make paints. He lent her herbals and bestiaries so she could copy the pictures, first on wax before committing them to precious parchment and illuminating them in color. By early June, Adelheid had Richardis illustrating a newly copied psalter. The margravine looked on while her daughter ground malachite to a powder so she could adorn the margin with brilliant green leaves. Though the margravine hovered over her for hours, it was as if she weren’t there. Nothing could shatter the girl’s concentration or disturb her serenity as she painted ivy, fern, and oak leaf.
Finally her mother departed home to Stade, but not before bidding me to send for her at once if her daughter needed her.
As summer blazed on, I ventured deeper and deeper into the forest’s emerald hush. From time to time, Richardis tagged along.
Just before the midsummer feast of John the Baptist, we were winding our way through a shadowy glade when she seized my hand and pointed. We stood face to face with a young hind. For a moment that seemed to last forever, the creature held us with her liquid brown eyes. Then she wheeled and leapt away, sailing clear over the underbrush, leaving us to marvel at the power of her springing limbs. As the wind whispered through the oak leaves, Richardis bent over her tablet, the stylus swift in her hand before she passed the tablet to me. She had written a verse from the Eighteenth Psalm.
HE MAKES MY FEET LIKE HIND'S FEET AND
SETS ME UPON HIGH PLACES.
Looking at the light shining in her eyes as she gazed off in the direction the hind had fled, I thought how this girl was a mystery to me. I wondered if I would ever know who she truly was.
Abundant with fish, the Nahe and Glan flowed on either side of the abbey promontory. Richardis insisted on accompanying me as my self-appointed scribe when I ventured forth to catalogue each creature that lived in those rivers, from the trout to the beaver to the pike that was as fierce as any boar. This was for the infirmary’s use, so we would have a record of which river inhabitants were wholesome for the sick to eat.
Standing on the shore or wading through the shallows, I observed the creatures for an entire year, during which they revealed their natures to me. Some loved the day while others preferred the night. Pike and perch adored the shining sun and lived in the light-filled waters. Sturgeon came to life beneath the splendor of the moon and stars. The crawfish loved both night and day in equal measure, walking forward with the sun on its face and backward following the moon. Some fish poured out all their roe and milt at once, weakening and debilitating themselves. Others kept a greater interval between their effusions, which preserved their vitality.
“The fish that feed on clean foods and that dwell in the clear waters of the upper or middle depths are the healthiest to eat,” I dictated to Richardis, who inscribed my words on her tablet. “But the bottom-feeders, or the carp that dwell in stagnant marshes, should never be eaten by the sick.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, her affliction, the girl seemed infused with a breathtaking innocence. She was a margravine’s daughter, who might have worn gold brocade and danced in the arms of some princeling. Instead, here she was, hunkered barefoot on the riverbank, peering through the water at those darting silver shapes. Grabbing her tablet, she began sketching.
“Those will inspire some fine illuminations,” I told her.
The girl ducked her head, as though my praise both pleased and embarrassed her.
“Stade is very close to the sea. You must have laid eyes on all manner of marine creatures that I can scarcely imagine.” I spoke breezily, in hope that the sun on the waters and her love for the wild life around her might coax her to speak.
She scribbled at the bottom of her tablet.
ONCE I SAW A WHALE-FISH. IT WAS BIGGER THAN A CASTLE.
Beside this, she had etched a leviathan spouting a huge plume of spray. Then she wrote:
I HAVE SEEN DOLPHINS THAT CAN LEAP OVER TALL-MASTED
SHIPS AND SEALS THAT TURN INTO MERMAIDS
BENEATH THE LIGHT OF THE MOON.
Before I could frame a suitable response, she cracked a grin, as though laughing in silence.
I laughed along, sharing her joke before asking her, as gently as I could, “Do you miss home?”
The girl pulled a face and flipped her braid over her shoulder. Fleet as a hind, she launched herself into cartwheels down the riverbank. Kicking her legs heavenward, every part of her seemed to revel in the freedom previously forbidden her—her mother, no doubt, would have thrown a fit to see her marriageable daughter indulging in such infantile play. Her joy was so infectious that I could only think that God had liberated me in order to give this girl sanctuary.
Richardis became my steadfast companion. Although she made no vows and remained as mute as she was the day her mother delivered her to us, she matured into a stately young woman of seventeen, an accomplished psaltery player and illuminator. In the scriptorium, she worked with Adelheid and Volmar, embellishing their manuscripts with her trumpeting angels and fruited vines. She grew even more beautiful, a fact not lost on her mother, who visited each summer and seemed crestfallen that such an exquisite girl remained unmarriageable.
As for my other sisters, Adelheid seemed well-contented with her scribing. Only Guda seemed unhappy. Of the three of us, she seemed to like Richardis least, perhaps because that girl’s arrival had displaced Guda from her position as youngest and loveliest. Now even golden-haired Guda was thirty. In the secular world, she would have had a great brood of children by that age. As she grew older, Guda appeared to regret her vocation more and more. Her deepest misgiving, I thought, was that she would never experience the joy of motherhood. This loss only seemed to deepen her resentment of Richardis. She muttered that the girl’s supposed muteness was something she had freely chosen in order
to spite her mother—had Richardis deigned to utter even the simplest of words, her mother would have whisked her away and married her off with every honor. In Guda’s view, her cousin was a spoiled, over-indulged child who frittered away her youth, beauty, and fertility by painting pictures and tramping through the forest with me. My worst fear was that Guda would grow into a bitter old woman.
I myself was happier than I ever dreamt I could be. Studying God’s wild creation, the river and forest teaching me more than any book, my days passed in bliss. Cuno had no love for me and yet he was prepared to suffer me, he who had loved Jutta with his entire soul, who lifted her up to the shining pinnacle of womanhood. Since I was only six years younger than my dead magistra, perhaps he didn’t expect me to outlive her by much.
It could have ended there, with my spending the remaining days left to me at Disibodenberg, enjoying the fruits of friendship and study, taking over the hospice duties from Brother Otto as he aged. Ora et labora, work and prayer, devotion to God and service to others, set the rhythm of my days.
One balmy May afternoon in 1141, I set to work on a new lapidary with Richardis as my scribe. We sat in what had once been the anchorage courtyard, its formerly high blank walls now lowered to reveal sweeping views of the Nahe and the forested hills beyond.
Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen Page 15
