There was always a vague apprehensiveness about him, a halo of blackness such as clings to things after one has been staring at the sun, but Agnes wasn’t sure he hadn’t manufactured it himself by his own wild glaring at doom. He puzzled her and she always left him with a feeling of relief, giddiness and a sense of something left unfinished. The way back to her own apartment led past the courtyard where boys from the palace school took their recreation and sometimes she paused there to chat and cast slanting glances around her. Experimenting. If Chlodecharius enjoyed her company, why didn’t they? Usually, they laughed and told her she was too young for such games and that she should run back to her nurse. Once though—just a few days ago—one of them said:
“Well, let’s see then, little flirt. Let’s see just what you’ve got there!” He drew her into a corner where he began to do things which made her kick and scream until he put his mouth over hers—his tasted horribly of stale wine—and held her thighs and arms. As this kept both his hands busy, he was unable to go on doing what he had been doing before, but Agnes’s terror only increased as his body bore down on her with its menacing, uneven shape. She managed to bite his tongue, then his lip, tasted his blood and, as he wrenched away from her, screamed for Chlodecharius. Suddenly she was released. Chlodecharius was there and the two young men were fighting while the rest of the palace students stood around shouting and laying bets. The one Agnes had bitten was younger than Chlodecharius but bigger and much tougher. Chlodecharius took a bad beating. At the end of the fight he had to be taken to Fridovigia who applied poultices and gave him a specific against headaches consisting of wine in which she had dissolved eleven grains of pepper and several crushed worms.
“No need to bleed him. He’s done that himself.”
It was two nights later that he came to Agnes’s bed. Although it was dark she recognized his step and was neither surprised by his coming nor by the lurching hesitancy of his gait. If Chlodecharius came at all it would be hesitantly. She whispered his name to encourage him and show that she was neither asleep nor afraid.
“Ag … nes!”
“Yes? . . What is it?”
He stood swaying by the edge of her bed then lowered his weight heavily on to it and rolled bumpily towards her.
“Are you all right, Chlodecharius?”
He was heavy. Hoping to shift some of his weight, she got her arms around him. Clasping him, she felt one of her palms filled by a hard smooth protrusion. It took her several moments to realize what it was.
“Listen!” Agnes’s nurse was shaking her. “You’re contaminated too! The king doesn’t like to be blamed. You’re the one who went rushing about shouting the news so the death couldn’t be passed off as natural.”
“A knife,” said Agnes glassily, “it was a knife!”
People had said—even to her face—that she had now been ‘marked for life’ as a bad day is marked by a black stone. She didn’t feel marked, not connected at all really to the dead man. People thought he had been her lover but he hadn’t been.
“How could he?” Fridovigia had shouted, raging against the gossips, shooing them away. “She’s a child. Leave her alone. She’s not eleven yet,” Fridovigia had lied, making her sign against the evil eye. “She’s eight years old, young, young, just grown quickly, that’s all.”
“And don’t you cry”, she said to Agnes now, “too much at his funeral. Don’t cry at all.” She would have shooed his memory out of Agnes’s head.
In songs sung by the royal harpist, girls’ hearts stopped at the same moment as their lovers’ even when those lovers died in distant battles. Death found a quick and parallel path in each love-twinned body. But Fridovigia’s grasp on reality was clearly superior to the harpist’s. Agnes felt nothing at all. Like a drawing on sand rubbed out by the tide, like writing on a scraped tablet, Chlodecharius’s memory was already almost gone. Agnes, faced by the insignificance of any—and so of her own—life, again began to cry.
Her nurse could have slapped her.
“Now why?” she asked furiously. “Why?”
“Because I didn’t love him. Nobody did.”
“What rubbish! What do you know? His sister did, didn’t she? If she’s capable of love. That sort turn their eyes to heaven and their thoughts to themselves. You’d do well to do the same. I might as well save my breath to cool my porridge. Do you want to join him in the grave?”
“No.”
“Well then?”
They’d be digging it now. Sliding the spade in. Cutting sods. Tug of roots yielding as tiny connecting filaments snapped first serially, then all at once. Smell of pollen and rank greenery when she and Chlodecharius met in hideouts in the woods. The undergrowth was so thick that once Clotair’s hunt had ridden by without seeing them and another time a boar sow with her litter of striped cream-and-brown cubs passed so close that they could have put out a hand and caught one.
“Why doesn’t she smell us?”
“We smell of the forest,” he told her. “Earthy.”
Would his wraith haunt her now, returning in reproach with earthy smells, mouth clenched on the coin which must be placed in it before burial to pay his passage over death’s river? But why her? Was it her fault? She shrugged, intrigued yet impatient at her life’s thread having thickened so interestingly before she was twelve.
“Listen,” said her nurse.
Agnes put her fists over her eyeballs and rubbed them in a child’s gesture. “Oh, nurse,” she complained in a high babyish voice, “I’m so tired, you can’t imagine. So ti-ired. I want to sleep.”
*
It had been dark by the early afternoon and now, hours later, the terracotta oil lamps disposed around Radegunda’s bedroom had begun to smell and smoke. A servant came in offering to pinch off the burnt ends of the papyrus wicks, but the queen sent him away. Smoke wreaths snaked through the air and the light solidified their outline, hardening them into ropes and chains. The room was choked with coffers, for Radegunda’s possessions had been moved in from the marriage chamber where Clotair now slept alone.
“Not”, said his queen harshly, “that I expect that to last more than a night or so.”
Most of the coffers were open and the gleam of gilt embroidery and jewels cut like knife-tips through the smoke. The bed had been piled with tunics, mantles, sleeves, head-veils, silk bonnets and a variety of other garments. Coloured motifs—losanges, crosses—caught the light, floating like bright geometric fish on a dark underlying sea of fabric. Stools and benches bore translucent scent-bottles of glass and alabaster.
“I shall take everything,” said Radegunda. “Why should I go naked to my new Spouse? It will be my dowry and I shall give it to the Church.”
She walked briskly about the room, selecting and rejecting garments, talking excitedly. Occasionally, she shook out a long rippling length of silk or linen which hung like a memory in the firelight, then was folded away. A pearl-studded belt was uncoiled then rolled tightly up again with a clap.
Agnes sat on the small stool used for climbing on to the bed—it was the only one unencumbered—stared at the jewels, blinked in the smoke and listened. The queen had been talking since their return from the funeral. Occasionally she came over to Agnes, bent towards her and stared hard into her eyes. Her own were blue and bright like the paste inlay in her cloisonné jewel-box:
“I hope”, said she, “you are making a true sacrifice. I would not want you to come with me because you were afraid to stay at court. You must come because you want to make a gift of your life to God.”
Agnes did not reply.
“You may feel regrets”, Radegunda told her, “now and later. They do not matter. What concerns me is the purity of your intention.”
“My nurse, Fridovigia, says …”
“Take no notice of what she says. She’s a worldly woman.”
“She will come,” Agnes said, “if I do.”
“If?”
Agnes scraped her sandal against the side of her sto
ol. She leaned backwards and felt her shoulders sink into the feather tick behind. She wriggled back into its embrace, feeling it press forward around her like a nest. She would have liked to stay there forever.
“You are coming?” harried the queen.
Agnes said something about Chlodecharius but Radegunda was not deviated.
“He is with God,” she said. “We must be concerned now for ourselves. Death is the rule of this world. His was not exceptional. If you stay here you must expect to see murders. The manner of this one makes me believe God has special plans for you. He sent you a dying lover to point the way the flesh must go. The flesh, Agnes, is future carrion. If you stay, you will begin to crave its enjoyment with another man. You will marry. Your nurse is probably planning a marriage already.”
“Yes.”
“Ah! And is that what you want?”
“No.”
Radegunda looked pleased. “I had feared you might hope for a family. Are you sure you don’t? A family …”
Could not, Agnes decided, be counted on. People left you. Radegunda was leaving. Chlodecharius had and, before that, her parents dead so long ago that she could remember neither them nor the villa they had lived in except through Fridovigia’s opulent recollections: glimpses of malachite and porphyry glimmering and darkening like weed in the wall of a wave. Drowned vistas, they dissolved under scrutiny like reflections on water.
“It’s over,” Agnes had finally shouted at her that morning. “Can’t you see! They’re dead!”
Fridovigia wanted it all to begin again: ceremonies, painted rooms, a husband for Agnes who would provide babies and a household of solid figures. In Agnes’s eye-view the figures danced impishly away. The only one to be truly counted on was Fridovigia herself. And, because she could be counted on, there was no need to give in to her. Radegunda was far less reliable.
“Please don’t go away, Radegunda,” Agnes begged. “Don’t you leave me too. I love you, Radegunda!”
“That mustn’t be your motive. I am casting off all human affections. If you come with me as my sister in God I will love you accordingly. Will you?”
Love? Yes. “But”, said Agnes, “is it forever?”
“Would you play the harlot with God. Give him the gift of yourself then take it back?”
The queen was excited, looked for an excitement to match her own in the little girl. But Agnes resisted. When she was with Radegunda she saw her, some of the time, with Fridovigia’s sardonic eye. When away from her she missed her tenseness, the yearnings which burned in her—and decided she could not let her go. Instinctively, she bargained, held back.
“Must I decide now?”
“Yes. I leave tomorrow. We will need the night to pack. You may think”, persuaded Radegunda, “that your regret for the world means you should not make this leap. But without regret there would be no sacrifice. It is the nerve and core of it. I feel none and so my home-coming will be less pleasing to God than your sacrifice. Come over here, Agnes and sit with me.” Radegunda swept a row of gold ornaments off a bench. “You are nervous,” she smoothed Agnes’s hair which the girl had been biting and twisting through her fingers. “Listen, I know you are weak. It’s because I know it that I want to spare you the disappointments you’d meet if you stayed in the world. It is because I know them that I want you to escape them. Can’t you let me save you, Agnes?” The queen’s tone was tender, coaxing. She ran her splayed fingers gravely down the girl’s face and neck, then past her chest, waist, knees, right down to her sandals which were muddy. In embarrassment Agnes caught the hand. “Now,” said Radegunda, “while you are young and almost unhurt, fresh, now is the time to give yourself to God. Once you’ve taken the decision you’ll never have to think again. You’ll find peace.”
Agnes listened. The voice was mesmeric and very convinced. It talked of love, a haven, gentleness and how Agnes needed to feel secure. The words were comforting, persuasive. “God,” said Radegunda and the word, Agnes could tell, meant something violent and personal and satisfying to Radegunda. At the same time it was very vague, a chameleon word which sometimes meant ‘me’—as in “give yourself to God, love God”—and sometimes very elusive matters indeed.
“You are beautiful, Radegunda!”
“Yes!” Radegunda touched her own body quickly, fingers light and splayed, skimming it in the same gesture which she had used on Agnes’s. “I am astonished to find my flesh still fresh. When I am not looking at it I imagine it rotting off my bones like the flesh of game which has been hung too long in kitchens. It has been too long in human embraces. When I come from the bath I am tempted to go to the stables and roll my body in the dung. Its cleanness is so illusory.”
“Radegunda, don’t be unhappy! I’ll do whatever you want.”
Radegunda touched her cheek to Agnes’s. “My doe, my frail plant! All I want”, she whispered, “is to protect you. Can you trust me?”
“Oh, yes.” Caught up now in a thrilling fellowship.
The queen stood up. Other women must be invited into it, she declared. “Think how many are sacrificed to the brutish lusts of men! You”, she promised, “will be our first abbess when we found the convent I am planning. It may not be for some years, so you will be older but still pure. You, my dove, will have made the whole sacrifice. You will have come unsullied to Christ’s love so it is only fair that on earth as in heaven your place should be above my own!”
Agnes jerked her hand from the queen’s. “I don’t want to, Radegunda. I spoke too quickly. I’m sorry.”
The queen chuckled. She lifted her face to the ceiling, flinging up her chin so that all Agnes could see from below was the white trumpet of her neck rising in the lamplight like the corolla of a St. Joseph’s lily. “You are afraid,” cried the queen. “You are beset by regrets and doubts!”
“Yes, yes I am.”
“Don’t you see?” Radegunda fixed Agnes with an ecstatic eye, “don’t you see that that proves you have chosen the noblest and bravest course? Your doubts come from the prince of this world,” said Radegunda, “the devil, Agnes. It is when he is nearest defeat that he makes his strongest assault on God’s chosen ones! You will have regrets, but you must not look behind you. What lies behind? Nature. Natural love and that, I don’t have to remind you, is cursed by the curse God put on our first parents. Sexual love is linked with death. The dying creature leaves the product of its sexual couplings to take its place and so the race is continued—but why should it be, Agnes?”
“There is … happiness, Radegunda. People are happy sometimes!”
Agnes felt the weakness of her response, feeling the words which the queen had released into the air hanging still just beyond earshot. Their energy reverberated. Their conviction. They had come at her like swarms of palpable things, like insects perhaps, projectiles or small, fierce birds. She had paid only vague attention to their meaning—familiar, heard before—but an animal pulse in her quickened to the feeling behind them registering it as sustained and hard to resist. She could sense it building up in the small room, accumulating and surging in a wave destined to carry her off. The queen was flushed. She held her body tautly as though seeking to stretch and dip into herself to find stored inner powers. Agnes felt she was being treated to a display worthy of a larger audience, as though the queen had been trying out a new persona and Agnes had happened to be there and to see. But no: it was not as deliberate as that. Radegunda was driven, illumined by forces which Agnes could only know through her and at second hand. Maybe God spoke through her?
Radegunda was speaking again but more gently now. “Let us pray for guidance, child.” She drew the girl towards a jewelled reliquary in a corner of the room.
Standing in front of it, their hands stretched forward in the old Roman way, they prayed.
Chapter Four
[A.D. 569]
Help!
Daniel whom the Lord saved from lions, save me! Hilary and Martin make haste to succour me. May the Cherubim, Seraphim, Throne
s … No, no it’s all right. I’m awake! Intact. I think? Yes. Thank God, Hilary, etcetera.
I wasn’t sure. For moments there it seemed so real! Someone was shoving me into a pit of adders. I could feel the pain and when I woke up there was a hiss! It’s the damp wood smouldering in my fire! Cold! God, and I’ve got an ague! It’s these Gaulish winters. It was cold in my dream and it still is! The window of course. Pitted panes are so impractical in this climate. I’ll shove a cloth over it.
Dreams are omens. One should take notice. Who was shoving me into that pit? A patron? Yes, some patronly figure: impressive, faceless, long-haired. A king then? Or a woman? Who? Oh, rubbish. It was just a hodgepodge of memories turned turtle. After all, when I first came to Gaul I was often cold. I was so poor I had, as the saying goes, to put one hand in front and one behind to hide my shame. A draughty costume! Patrons clothed me then. The mind is like the water-mill the monks at St. Mary’s Outside the Walls have set up to grind their corn. It churns things about. I was probably thinking of patronage before I dropped off. Why not? I live on it—and that bread has choked many. To look no further, think of poor Boethius executed on his patron’s whim! I, born six years later in the same province, was brought up on the tale. Our grandchildren will be. It gives off a shock. If that could happen to a man of consular rank, what security is there for the rest of us? Hmm? Maybe there is an omen there after all? My patrons are less civilized than King Theodoric and wit’s a tricky commodity when patrons are barbarians. Fear the Franks, Fortunatus, even when they bear gifts. Oh, I do. I do. Ours is the age of suspicion which is probably no bad thing. Our ancestors, we are told, did not fear enough. Pleasure they lived for: sweet juice clotting on the burst plum. They even took a sick pleasure in their own end. What can all that have been like? I can’t enjoy pleasure at first hand at all. Only through books. Except for food of course—but that’s an elementary pleasure: the ABC of the flesh. A major assault on flesh’s citadel frightens me. I don’t think I’m unique. Fear nowadays lodges in the seat of pagan immortality: between the legs. I mean it does in men like myself, men with a sense of the past. Not in Franks who couple like aurochs, mindlessly. Do I envy them? “The rose”, says Ausonius, “lives on in the ages of her seed.” A sad, cyclic sort of immortality. As you spill your seed you spill some of yourself. You embrace death, burying yourself. “The roses at their birth consent.” To die. A freezing thought. But what Frank thinks like that or thinks at all? He just spills, tanks up, respills—and the future will indeed belong to his seed. To the seed of the worst Franks too since the best go into monasteries. God I wish I could sleep at night. There’s another animal function denied to me. Magpie mind, be quiet. It won’t. I did make love once and wish I hadn’t. Do I feel remorse or just regret? Hard to tell. I was punished so fast. God sent me a sign that this was not the path he had picked for me. Fortunatus was not meant to go gathering rosebuds while the flower and his youth were fresh. Ausonius again. He’s a bad influence. Hardly a Christian at all. If I could locate the poison he has injected into my mind, I would have it sucked out by leeches. I would have a Syrian surgeon remove it. If thine eye offend thee cut it out. Mine inner eye offends me. I am half a pagan. It comes from education which is insidious as St. Jerome knew. He loved the old books and feared them.
Women in the Wall Page 5
