Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  The deacon began to recite in a singsong scholar’s lilt: “Canon Fourteen, your grace, of the Council of Gangres rules that ‘If a woman abandon her husband and spurn the nuptial state in which she hath lived with honour on the plea that she who hath been joined in wedlock shall have no part of the glory of the celestial Kingdom, let her’”, the boy hesitated, got a nod from Medardus and finished quickly, “‘be accursed’.”

  “Thank you, Criadus. We must, you see, preserve the family. Extraordinary conduct is disruptive. Obviously, people cannot be encouraged to leave their station in life on the pretext of a call from God. Coopers must make barrels, cobblers shoes or the farmer would have nowhere to put his wine and we should all go barefoot. Women were created to bear children and care for their husbands. Those whom their parents dedicate at an early age can pray for the rest. Widows too. Everyone to their place. What would happen to humanity if serfs deserted the land and wives their husbands? We are all equally bound, my lady, priests and bishops, kings and counts. The foot supports the body and the brain thinks for all. This is elementary but you oblige me to spell it out.”

  The bishop’s voice had grown mild and speedy as though he were, in the old saying, saving his breath to cool his porridge. It was his duty and interest to get all this said. His eye however was wary. Radegunda was waiting. Her mouth was set, her stare stark and she was clearly not one to be swayed by common sense however cogently presented. She was extraordinary and would disrupt. The deacons watched her and wondered why. She knew they were wondering. No matter what she said, they would be puzzled and others would too, for people were not convinced by words. Only by acts. Acts were as real as stone walls. You could get round or over them. You could knock them down but you did not question their veracity.

  “I can see”, the bishop had reached the stage for conceding, “that your case is hard but I cannot advise you to go against Church law and what may well turn out to be against the royal will, because Clotair … my best advice is for you to return to him. Can you not make the sufferings of your conjugal life into an offering which will certainly be more pleasing to God than a broken marriage-vow?”

  Radegunda stood up. So did the bishop.

  “Bishop Medardus,” she said, “I came to you for holy counsel and you gave me human advice. My mind was turned towards God’s kingdom, yours to Clotair’s. You quote a recent Council but I could quote the gospels’ advice that we should leave all for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. You know the texts. I will not bore you with them. Instead I shall remind you of something Clotair’s henchmen say: ‘You cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. The peasants have an even clearer way of putting this: ‘You cannot,’ they say, ‘side with the cow and the clover’. I, my lord, am the clover. Will you let me be devoured? You hesitate. Very well. I shall leave. Not for Clotair’s court. I cannot return there. However the Church may view it, we have dissolved our bond. By refusing me protection, you condemn me to a lone and dangerous existence.”

  She walked towards the door. The bishop moved quickly to cut her off.

  “You know I cannot let you go.”

  “I will stay on one condition.”

  “It is unrealistic,” the bishop told her. “Deaconesses are not being consecrated any more. Church policy in the West is against it. Several Councils have pronounced on the matter. As early as twenty years ago the Council of Orléans expressly forbade it. How can I defy the voice of a Church Council?”

  “Other Councils allowed deaconesses?”

  “Earlier ones. Yes.”

  “And God’s truth is one and indivisible?”

  The bishop’s voice was gentle, almost seductive. “Lady, these sophistic questions are beneath us both. We are, I believe, two honest Christians devoted to our faith and submissive to God’s will. It would be unworthy if we were to examine the day-to-day measures of those entrusted with Church government with an eye to discovering contradictions. These are matters not of faith or morals but of administration. The power of all governors comes from God. We must trust their acumen. It has proven inexpedient to allow women to receive even minor orders in the Church. Moreover, how minor an order was that of deaconess? In the East, from what I hear, they are turning into priests in petticoats. Women are distributing communion and hearing confessions …”

  “Is it better for men to hear women’s confessions?”

  Medardus shrugged. “I see no need to confess to a particular person at all. Public penance for a great and public sin, private penance for a private sin is the tried rule of the Church.” He put his hand on the queen’s arm. “Will you not take off your cloak and allow me to extend to you the hospitality of my poor house? This matter you have brought me cannot be settled like the sale of a horse.”

  “I shall show you, my lord, that I am neither rigid nor unsupple in my resolves.”

  She allowed him to lead her back through his tapestried atrium to an open terrace warmed at this hour of the afternoon both by a lemony winter light and several braziers. Plants hung in pots suspended from the arches supporting the terrace roof. The walls were frescoed. She was on the point of sitting down when a clash of voices broke out in the vestibule she had just left. The bishop’s servants were trying to prevent someone entering. Radegunda returned to the atrium in time to see a tall Frankish nobleman push past, stride forward then, on seeing her, pause. He was not a dozen ells away. A tufty, high-complexioned man, brightly dressed and hung with a clutter of appendages: dagger, sword, purse, keys, a necklace, bangles, a swastika-shaped belt-buckle and a shoulder-fibula in the form of a hound whose head was turned back towards its own tail. These, like the bristling or swelling by which certain beasts express alarm or aggression, gave the man a heightened presence. Radegunda knew him. He was the local count whom she had seen several times at court. A drinker, fighter and wencher. Vigour sprang from his flesh like drops from a wet dog or sparks from an anvil. Clotair’s flesh had had the same property and, like Clotair’s too, this man’s muscles moved under his skin like bubbles under the scum of a pot of simmering soup. Radegunda could feel that the male in him was alert to her female awareness of this. She turned to the bishop.

  “Your Grace, with your permission, I will go and pray in the basilica. I do not wish to meet Count Leudast.”

  The bishop accompanied her across the hall so that they passed within feet of the count. Radegunda gave him a chill nod, then walked quickly behind a tapestry which the bishop had drawn back to let her pass. From the corner of her eye, she saw the count suppress a movement towards her. Then the tapestry fell and hid him. The bishop told her the way to the basilica which adjoined the church house.

  “I shall come for you there”, he promised, “as soon as Leudast has left. You know, of course,” a look of wavering complicity, “why he’s here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I”, said the bishop bitterly, “am between two fires.”

  “One is the devil’s,” Radegunda told him. “But you are unsure which. You distrust my resolution! You think that what I take for God’s call may be a female whim!”

  There was a sound from the room they had just left. The bishop made a silencing gesture, lifted the tapestry and withdrew.

  Radegunda was now in a corridor one end of which led to the basilica, the other to the inner apartments of the palace. Behind the tapestry she could hear the count’s voice raised in vehement, half-jocular reproach. Then her own name.

  To the right was the way to the basilica. On the left, she caught sight of a small lamp burning before a reliquary: the bishop’s private oratory. She went in, stood before it and tried to pray. But her limbs were trembling. Her temples hammered. Pulling a stool against the wall, she sat and leaned back. Had Clotair sent Leudast? Surely not? His remorse should be good for a few more weeks. Days anyway. No. News of her arrival had most probably leaked out of the bishop’s kitchens where her attendants were undoubtedly eating and talking their heads off. It had reached Leudast who would feel it his duty
to stop the queen running away from his lord and hers. A king with horns, even mystical ones, was a diminished king. Or was his coming here sheer coincidence? Radegunda’s mind blackened. She was hungry, tired, uncomfortable and beset by an obscure distress. Whatever had brought him, Leudast’s irruption in the place and at the moment when she was seeking sanctuary was surely a warning! His smell lingered in her nostrils. She had caught a whiff of it as she passed him and been reminded of Clotair’s. King and count were the same sort of meaty man who eats and drinks heavily and whose hair, skin and mouth smell even when freshly rinsed. Knowingly or not, Leudast was Clotair’s emissary, an emissary from the world and the flesh.

  She stood up and walked back to the reliquary. It was gold cloisonné ornamented with geometrical motifs and could not be more than a few generations old. The pagan lares would once have stood here. She held out her hand to the casket and felt the power of the dead saints whose relics were inside move like a current up her arm.

  She left the oratory. As she passed the tapestry covering the entrance to the atrium, the count’s voice arrested her. He was shouting and must have been walking up and down, for the sound ebbed and returned. She heard her own name, then: “Come down from heaven, bishop, you and I know…” She could not catch his next words. Suddenly his voice boomed so close that she could feel her heart jump. “…especially while the king is bound for Germany … political consequences. The lords will agree with me. Every man Jack … His legitimate queen. Not a concubine. If you try anything on we’ll surround the building and carry her off. What’s more, we’ll …” Leudast lowered his voice, whispered something, then finished with a roar of laughter.

  Radegunda ran towards the basilica as fast and silently as she could. Her way led through the sacristy, a small room filled with coffers. She paused here and, drawing the entrance curtain carefully behind her, proceeded to turn the keys in the coffers one after the other and to lift their lids. The first was full of sacred vessels, gold chalices, ciboria and the like. She closed that and tried another. It was full of vestments. A third held rough, sackcloth habits of the sort worn by public penitents on Ash Wednesday. Radegunda quickly pulled off her outer garments and put on one of these then walked into the basilica. A small boy was lighting tapers before the high altar. Radegunda called him but he took no notice. She walked over, pulled his arm and showed him a ring which she had not thought to remove.

  “It’s gold. Would you like it?”

  The boy gaped. Dressed in sacking, her face still dirty from the journey, she did not, she realized, look like someone capable of distributing such largesse. Besides, wouldn’t possession of a gold ring be beyond such a boy’s coveting? But she had nothing else.

  “I’ll give it to you,” she said firmly, “if you take a message to Bishop Medardus and bring me back his reply.”

  “Who says the bishop will let me in?”

  “Tell him Queen Radegunda sent you.”

  Again the stare: slow, suspicious, servile. The boy shifted his feet and gave her the passive glance which numbs fear and conceals—what? Nothing perhaps, a waiting, a calculated passivity which soaks inward from the look on the face so that appearance becomes reality. The boy was a church serf, an orphan or the son of serfs; he could not easily be moved to cause trouble or present himself at the bishop’s house. Radegunda made up her mind quickly. She went back to the sacristy, dressed once again in her own clothes and returned. She arranged her face and displayed the jewellery which she had concealed from caution during her journey. She called to the boy:

  “Now do you believe I am Queen Radegunda? All right then. Take this ring and show it to the bishop’s doorkeeper. Tell him the queen sent you and tell him to say this to the bishop.” Leaning so that her face was on a level with the boy’s, she pronounced very slowly and clearly, “Tell him that if he does not make haste the bull will have eaten the clover.”

  Pressing the ring into the child’s hand, she made him repeat the message.

  *

  [POITIERS A.D. 569]

  Fortunatus has been questioning me. Again. I answer. Sometimes innocently. Sometimes with caution. Either way I see my past take shape in his mind, held fast there like the fish which froze last December in our pond. I tell him this and ask: what if the fish, under the pressure of the fall which feeds the pond, had been about to explode when the ice enclosed it? Your gloss is the ice. I don’t recognize my life in your Life, Fortunatus. He brushes this off. He wants to write an edifying book and tailors my past for his purpose. He doesn’t tell me the shape he intends to impose on it but his questions tell me what it is: sanctity. When I first understood this I was outraged. Now—an exercise in humility—I have resolved to let him do it. After all, why should my truth matter to anyone but God? Maybe—a knife-thrust of despair—there have been no real saints? But people need to believe there have. Still, each time Fortunatus has been questioning me, I return to my memories like a housewife to possessions which have been disarranged.

  He leaves out the play with costumes—too wily for a saint—when, like a circus actress, I played myself, the great and glittering queen, so as to cow the little serf into doing what I wanted, then changed promptly back into the haircloth habit in the hope of cowing the bishop. It smacks a little of comedy and Fortunatus doesn’t like mixing genres. He has gone off now with the scene between me and Medardus neatly set out on his tablets: an encounter between two saints. He may be half right. Medardus was a holy man: shrewd and possessed of some fortitude although in his dealings with me it took some time to show itself. Since his death he has been credited with a number of miracles. Perhaps I saw him at his worst? He was afraid of Clotair and Leudast, devoted to order and knew little of marriage. I remember how long he kept me waiting in that basilica. I was by the high altar dressed in the habit and determined not to move until he came. I knew he must come sooner or later to celebrate benediction, but he did his best to tire me out. I could not be sure he had got my message but I knew he knew I was there and what I was up to, for small boys and old women and junior clerics of every description kept pressing their noses against the grille of the rood-screen then trotting off in the direction of his palace. It was considerably past the hour established for the ceremony when he turned up with Leudast and several ruffians pushing behind him. I was half frozen for the habit was loosely woven and draughts whistled through it. I was afraid to let go of the altar lest Leudast try to have me dragged from the sanctuary, yet it felt like ice. It was a great slab of cold marble and my bones were paining with the cold. I had by then no particular certitude that God wanted me there. I only knew I could not bear to return to Clotair and that only the Church could protect me if he chose to get me back. Earlier, I had been sure of God’s approval, but there, in the cold, my certitudes began to run out. I began to think I was mad to try and goad a bishop into defying a king. Mad to believe any one woman’s existence mattered. Mad above all to spend one more moment in that cold. If only I could be warm. My mind numbed. My God, I kept saying—and that was all I was saying to God—if only I were less cold! Cold: the word anaesthetized thought, anaesthetized fear and even the impulse to leave and get warm. I simply clung on there, my teeth clattering like shaken dice, my body rippling with shudders. I had been tired already by the journey from Soissons and by hunger, for I had refused to eat until Medardus would agree to consecrate me. I was saddle-sore, too, and my bladder was swollen. The cold held my flesh like iron pincers. It held me there—maybe it was sent by God? When Medardus turned up, it numbed my fear of Leudast who came up behind the bishop shouting to the people that the bishop was trying to steal their king’s wife from him and shut her up in a monastery. A crowd edged up the nave. Weapons were drawn and, at one point, the count’s men were trying to pull the bishop backwards while he clung to the rood-screen and tried to edge past it into the sanctuary of the presbyterium and the altar itself. He told me later that he was not doing this with any idea of consecrating me as deaconess. All he hoped for was
to reach the altar so as to address the crowd from a position of relative safety. Of course the count’s men had no intention of letting him do this. It was while this scuffling was waving back and forth that I remembered the words I had planned earlier and brought them out loud and pat as a prayer: “Oh bishop!” I shouted and all the people began to yell: “It’s the queen! Let her talk! Silence for Queen Radegunda.” I waited for their silence, numb still and stiff as the fish in its frozen pond. “Bishop,” I recited, “if you hesitate to ordain me and show more fear of this violent man”, I pointed at Leudast, “than you do of God, know, Shepherd, that you will be asked to render an account of the soul of your abandoned sheep!”

  It was short and sharp: the sort of speech that sticks in people’s heads. I knew that. After all, I had spent fourteen years as a king’s wife. I knew how speeches are made. But I couldn’t have altered it if I’d needed to. I was numb. I just drew it out like a refrain or lesson learned by rote. It would have to do. It did.

  When I had said my say, my mind went black. I noticed no more until Medardus was laying on his hands and reciting the prayer for consecrating a deaconess: “Oh God, Creator of man and woman, who didst not disdain to let your only son be born of a woman …”

  After that, power surged into me. I felt warm and strong and it was many months until it left me again. The people had saved me. They had turned on the count and he had had to give in to them. At once I called one of my servants and sent for a gold belt I had brought in my luggage and demanded that it be broken up there and then and the gold sold so that its price might be distributed among the poor. I laid several jewelled garments as an offering on the altar and, later, in the course of my journey to shrines which lay on the way to my villa at Saix, near Poitiers, I offered up the rest of my wardrobe.