The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘But what of Sister Onora?’ asked another novice. ‘She sees things that we cannot see. I have an aunt on Exmoor like that. It’s not self-vaunting at all, with her. She just sees things, she cannot help it.’

  Sister Onora saw an angel last week, floating over the Park. When we rushed out, there was nothing. But she had seen it and she is not a liar.

  ‘Some people do have special sensitivities,’ said Mother Monica. ‘They are receptive to signs and omens. There can be holiness in them. It is thought that what they see, and others cannot, is a way granted by God’s grace to convey what may not be perceived directly. They see in parables.’

  She paused.

  ‘Such powers can do harm, if abused,’ said Mother Monica.

  ‘Like witches,’ I said.

  We speculated that with witches, their special powers had been harnessed by the Devil. We agreed that Sister Onora was certainly not a witch.

  Mother Monica steered us off the subject of Sister Onora. ‘This is beyond your greenstick understandings. It is for priests and bishops to determine the nature of visions in any particular case.’

  She brought us back to our duty. Each of us, she taught, will be leading with our sisters a life in common, under our Rule, in this place, for our whole lives.

  ‘This is the Rule of Stability. No roaming about the town, no travelling, no visiting friends and family, no going on pilgrimages. You will be living until you die within this House.’

  We might not leave the precinct, ever, without permission. This community was our family and Shaftesbury Abbey was our only home.

  ‘The Abbess is your spiritual mother, and your authority under God. Like a wise mother, she consults with her family over all important matters. Like a wise mother, she meets with her family who are free to voice their inquietudes. Like a wise mother, she makes the final decisions.’

  She explained about the Chapter House. Once a week the whole community meets ‘in Chapter’ with the Abbess or, when she is away, with the Prioress. She delivers herself of any items of news, and gives her views on them, and invites us to speak. Any sister can raise any matter to do with the community, or make complaints about the behaviour of others, or report injustices, or disagreements between individuals.

  ‘But this should not be an occasion for unreasonable grumbling and tale-bearing.’

  And the Abbess herself, Dame Elizabeth Zouche – she was away for some of that summer on Abbey business, and her sphere is a million miles from mine. Before I knew her I imagined a witch, or an angel, or sometimes a loving mother such as I never had.

  When I saw her for the first time it was after nightfall. She was expected. There were cries and a crashing unlocking of bolts, and her coach rumbled in through the gatehouse. I had not seen a coach before. Carts, wagons covered or uncovered, yes. It must be strange to travel in a closed box, as if one were a wild animal. The Steward, Father Pomfret and the Obedientiaries hurried out to greet her. So did we all, at a distance.

  The oxen were led away, and then I saw her in the light of the flaring torches. She was wearing a fur-lined coat with the fur turning outwards to make a collar, like a man’s. Her veil was held far back and raised by a gable hood, showing her grey-fair hair. Behind her fluttered two nuns carrying bags in one hand, extending the other to help her over the rough ground.

  As her coat swung open I saw a curving figure under a dark gown. Her face is pale-complexioned, with thin features, wide eyes. I could not in that unreliable light discern any lines on her face. She looked divine. Slowly she walked with her attendants, followed by men hefting boxes and baskets, down past Holy Trinity and the Abbey Church to the cloister and thence into her own house.

  I heard her say to the Prioress, ‘I am so very tired.’

  She presided in the Chapter House the following day. Someone – I did not yet know the names of many of the nuns – complained that there had been maggots in her mutton at the previous night’s supper. There was a silence.

  I said, and not in a whisper, ‘Blowflies.’

  Everyone turned to look at me, black veils and white, old and young.

  Wishing I had kept silent, I explained that blowflies lay eggs in a sheep’s fleece at the rear end and the maggots hatch out within about three days, and a week later they have entered the flesh and begun to consume it, destroying the meat and the animal herself. ‘She will die.’

  I did not say how I knew. When my father was deciding whose sheep to buy in the market, he made me search through the fleeces in search of maggots and their eggs, my fingers being more nimble than his and my eyes sharper. I only had to do this with the sheep of strangers. It is only ill-kept sheep that become infected.

  The Abbess thanked me without a smile.

  ‘The mutton comes from one of our own farms, and the matter must be looked into at once. I will speak to the Steward. The Rule of St Benedict did not require us to submit to maggots in our meat.’

  One of my fellow novices does not like me. Her name is Sister Eleanor Wilmer. I was an object of interest in the Abbey because I was a new person, the most recent arrival. Before I arrived, she had been the most recent arrival. Perhaps she is jealous. She does not like Sister Onora either. She may be jealous of her too, because of the visions. I am not sure that she really likes anyone. When I first joined the instruction classes with the Novice Mistress, I saw Sister Eleanor staring at my face, my hands, my body under my habit. When I met her eyes she looked away but was soon staring again. Whenever I speak to her, thinking to make friends, she puts her hand over her mouth when she answers, and does not meet my eyes.

  Eleanor Wilmer is short and sallow-skinned. Her best feature is her large dark eyes, which are often upturned in prayer, because she is very pious. She is also educated. She is quicker than I at calculations and numbers. She is a fluent reader and writer. Really we should be friends. But she looked daggers at me in Chapter when I spoke up about blowflies. As we filed out, she whispered to me:

  ‘You seem to have a high opinion of yourself, Agnes Peppin.’

  I was nettled, and whispered back, ‘And you? You imagine that you do not have a high opinion of yourself, Eleanor Wilmer? You and your precious holiness?’

  This was very wrong and childish. But there is something infuriating about her public prayerfulness. She kneels in the slype so that one has to step around her. There she so frequently is, with her hands clasped at her breast and her great eyes upturned and often welling with tears. The Novice Mistress, Mother Monica, encourages us to speak about the progress we feel we are making in our inner lives. I talk about what I am reading, and what I conclude from what I read. Eleanor Wilmer talks about her spiritual development, which is all that she is interested in.

  ‘You have no idea how I suffer,’ she said, looking around her at the group of us, ‘I suffer unbearably, night and day, when I think of my sins and of the sins of the world and the pain caused to Our Lord Jesus Christ. I share His agony, I feel His wounds. And then my love for Him overwhelms me. My only desire is to grow ever closer to Him.’

  Eleanor Wilmer looked towards Mother Monica, seeking approval. Mother Monica sucked on her splintery teeth and contemplated Eleanor Wilmer.

  ‘There are many ways of growing closer to Jesus Christ,’ she finally said. ‘We must remember that our love for God, and God’s love for us, is also our source of peace and joy.’

  ‘Perhaps I am not praying hard enough,’ said Eleanor, sighing, casting her eyes down in humility.

  Feigned humility, in my opinion. My lack of charity towards Eleanor knows no bounds. Just being with her is an occasion of sin, for me. I must avoid her company as much as possible. This will not be hard as she does not seek mine, though I still feel she watches me. May not ‘suffering’ as she experiences it be an indulgence, even an avoidance? Eleanor is never anywhere to be seen when there is some dull or unpleasant job to be done. She never offers to fetch or carry.

  I am back in the conundrum of Martha and Mary. I myself probab
ly do not suffer enough, spiritually or in any other way. I flow, I adapt.

  ‘We have first and foremost our duty to God,’ says Mother Monica, ‘but also our duty to our fellow-men, and in our case, to the community.’

  Yet we have little work here, not in the home sense. No nun searches sheep’s fleeces for maggots. No nun flails spent vines to beat out the dry beans and peas. The essential duty of a Benedictine nun, says Dame Monica, is the communal daily saying and singing of the Holy Office at the proper and regular hours of the day and night, psalms and prayers in praise of Almighty God.

  That is what we are here for. It is more important than anything else we can possibly imagine doing. It is the Work of God, Opus Dei. The Novice Mistress’s voice trembled as she said those words. I was momentarily proud that I too would be playing my part. I can perhaps be Mary, not Martha. I cannot believe that Mary was anything like Eleanor Wilmer.

  I knew already the order of the seven services – the Hours, as in the Books of Hours. The night Offices, Matins and Lauds, are sung together at two o’clock in the morning. Everyone finds this the hardest, though we don’t have to go out into the cold to enter the church. There is a night-stair built into the walls, curling down from the dorter directly into the chancel. Then we creep back up to bed without speaking until Prime at six or seven in the morning.

  There is a light burning all night in each quartile of the cloister, and one at the foot of the dorter stairs. They don’t use rushlights, but blocks of stone with little hollows carved out and filled with tallow, with a wick. In the Abbey Church itself there is always one tall wax candle in the nave, one at the entrance to the choir, and one on the steps of the Sanctuary. This does not give enough light to read easily. We learn by heart from the Primer the words of the night Offices.

  We have breakfast after Prime. Three more morning services – Tierce, Sext and None – and the daily hearing of the Mass, and then dinner, with reading aloud. Vespers are at five o’clock, which comes fast or slowly depending on the season. Supper is after Vespers.

  An hour of the clock I think is just made up, as you might say ‘a handful of hazelnuts’. We do not have clocks at home, and we don’t speak much of hours. There is a modern thing, a mechanical clock, here in the Abbey. It is a pointless artifice, although I see it has its uses so far as discipline is concerned. It is adjusted to calculate time differently in winter and in summer. The clock’s hour is longer in summer, because daylight end comes later. In summer, the hours between dinner and Compline are stretched to take advantage of the long evenings. We are meant to go to bed straight after Compline, and to get some sleep before the bell for Matins breaks into our dreams. As the days get shorter, the hours between services become shorter.

  Outside the Holy Office, our occupations must be useful, quiet, and conducive to meditation. Serious study is not expected. ‘We do not expect scholarship from you, few of you have been raised for that, but we like you to study the lives of the saints. We will all be helping one another to achieve self-discipline, and the eradication of self-will.’

  After the acceptance of the Rule of Stability, our first work on ourselves must be what Mother Monica calls conversio morum, a conversion of our manners and habits towards regularity and detachment: poverty, chastity, obedience. On being professed, we will take a vow of poverty – personal poverty. All that we have will pass into the possession of the Abbey – our money, our clothes, the keys to our boxes and to the door of our old home, our jewellery. (I thought of the boxes, baskets, chests and crammed closets I’ve seen in the dorter but said nothing.) The Abbey provides us with all the necessities – including a little knife.

  ‘We appear simple and frugal, but not like beggars. We do not wear our clothes until they are full of holes and in shreds, or they would be no good to the poor to whom we pass them on.’

  We must avoid occasions of sin, and never give scandal. Particular friendships, and cliques of intimate friends, she said, are to be avoided, as offending against the family life of the Order.

  ‘You may never go into the town on Abbey errands alone, but always with one of your sisters. Within the Abbey, we must never be alone with any man, not even one of the priests, except when making our confessions.’

  I suspect that at that moment in all our minds, including Mother Monica’s, was the face and figure of Father Robert Parker. He is one of the chantry priests. Most of these are either elderly, like snuffling Father Bucket, who smells of sheep’s cheese, or raw youths with pustules on their necks. Father Louis Pomfret, the Abbey chaplain, is fat and crafty. But Father Robert Parker is well-shaped, and so pleasing to look at that it is hard to avoid resting one’s eyes upon him. He wears his curling dark hair long. He looks rather like Peter Mompesson only taller.

  There is a chasm between what must not happen, according to our Rule, and what actually does happen.

  It is easy to slide into what Mother Monica calls ‘laxity’. What is not put into words is not happening. Our Great Silence, usually observed, is between Compline and Prime. There is another silence, fragmented into little silences, composed of matters never spoken of.

  No one mentions that one pair of sisters talk and walk always and intimately with each other and no one else. Everyone knows it. The Prioress and the Infirmaress, Dame Agatha Cracknell and Dame Alice Doble. Their saints’ days fall on consecutive days. They celebrate together in the Prioress’s house with strong ale and honey cakes and invite their favourites to join them. The two call their favourites their ‘little family’. I am not of their number.

  Their favourites come from a group of novices and young nuns whose families must be interconnected. They all seem to have known each other since childhood. They all look much alike. I call them the Fairheads because they are all blonde-haired. They are well-grown, with clear skin and strong teeth. This is how rich girls look and they are rich girls. Except in the Chapter House, where they are under the Abbess’s eye, they wear their veils far back and raised in front, showing not only their foreheads but bands of shiny hair.

  Unlike the rest of us, the Fairheads do not live in dream and fantasy. They are not in denial of anything. The Rule does not seem to apply to them. If they are reprimanded, they are contrite and lower their eyes and then go on as before. In the dorter they have cubicles close to one another at the far end of the chamber. Before they go to bed they clean their heads, combing out their hair from scalp to ends, over and over, with fine-toothed ivory combs. They rub salves into their hands to keep them smooth. They pare their fingernails into points. In their cubicles they keep overflowing baskets of bright ribbons, embroidered shifts and coloured gowns. I know, because I have looked, like a spy.

  I have seen them reading letters brought in by messengers. I have seen them slip out into the town by side doors wearing their coloured garments. So many lay persons come and go freely in and out of the Abbey that it is not hard to escape notice. Two of their gentlemen friends actually found their way up to the dorter one autumn night while we were in Compline. Coming up to bed in the dark, the rest of us heard squeals and laughter and the whispering rumble of male voices, then a clattering of boots down the stairs and the downstairs door banging. The Great Silence took over. No one brought the matter up in the Chapter House.

  I do not dislike the Fairheads. I would like to be one of them. They never talk to me. They chatter among themselves in light voices about their friends in the outside world. Conversation, the Novice Mistress taught, should be limited to essential communication. No idle gossip in the cloister or over domestic tasks. At mealtimes requests should be indicated wherever possible by gestures, or in whispers.

  *

  There is a woman about five years older than me who lingers on the edge of the cluster of Fairheads. They tolerate her. I think now that they must have known who she was. She wears the veil of a novice, but not always the full habit. She has a blue gown, and a grey one, and her eyes are greenish. She attends the Holy Office and has a sweet singing voice w
hich holds the pure line. She eats with us. She does not sleep in the dorter but in one of the houses within the walls occupied by old retainers, boarders, widows, Court pensioners from London and Abbey dependents, both men and women, waited upon by servants. They are called ‘Corrodians’. Most have paid a hefty sum down to secure shelter and subsistence for the rest of their lives. For the Abbey, it is a gamble. Some die off wonderfully quickly while others linger for years, eating and drinking their heads off.

  Among them lives this young woman. She is called Dorothy, like my mother. Dorothy Clausey. I learned about her from Sister Anne Cathcart. Anne is a nun professed already for several years, but she had a London life when she was young and she knows everything. If one were uncharitable one would call her a nosey parker and a gossip. She is entertaining, and her ways are so warm and winning that any one sitting with her in the slype or walking with her in the orchard willingly reveals her private thoughts and secrets. She lives in and for the everyday world and is the complete opposite of Eleanor Wilmer.

  Anne sought me out, baiting her hook by telling me something intimate about herself, apparently confidential but in fact quite inconsequent. Another day she shared with me a disobliging truth about the Novice Mistress. I became compelled, even desirous, to reciprocate with some revelation about myself. I told her about Peter and Peterkin. She is a sympathetic listener. Later, in my bed, I cursed myself for a fool. If she told me other people’s secrets, she would surely tell other people mine. There is nothing exclusive about Anne Cathcart’s friendship.

  I even showed her my dolphin. In return she fished out from under her habit a ring which she wears on a ribbon round her neck. It is thick gold, set with what she said was a diamond. She told me it had been given to her by someone who loved her. Then she said no, that was not true.