Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  He was a coarse-faced creature with a nose as fat as a fist knuckled into the flesh of his cheeks and as thickly riddled with blackheads as a March seed-bed is with grain. He began to speak with some ceremony—a purely vegetable ooze or crackle might have surprised less—but without conviction and as though he had been hastily drilled in fine phrasing which he did not find congenial. He scratched himself once or twice during his speech, gabbled it through at speed and reserved his considerable power of expression for the grunts and groans which must have been his own addition.

  “Mother Agnes,” he began, “as you so usefully reminded me just now, your convent is cut off from the world and you probably do not know the latest news from court? No? … I thought not! Well, it’s not good. It is particularly painful to the princess here, so, if you’ll allow me, I’ll make my account of it brief. Yes: this is Princess Basina, King Chilperic’s daughter by his ex-wife, Audovera, who, you will recall, withdrew into a convent on the princess’s birth. The reason for that was that she had been imprudent enough to baptize the child herself—the usual story, she had taken bad advice. Well, that made her her own daughter’s godmother, her husband’s godsip and thus, by Church Law, ineligible to continue as his wife.” The bishop waved a hand impatiently at these theological niceties. “There was controversy about all that but the upshot was that she chose to renounce the marriage leaving His Majesty free to marry Queen Fredegunda. I remind you of all this because there have been some … developments. Audovera has just been murdered in her convent. The assassin’s identity is unknown. You will appreciate the shock this was for her daughter here. Indeed for us all. A terrible thing. It has contributed to the girl’s distaste for the world and her eagerness to join your flock, Mother Agnes. There are other circumstances, too. The girl’s brother, Clovis, has killed himself. He was found with a dagger in his chest and his own hand on the hilt. An unstable family, as you see. He was her last remaining brother. Two others had already ended violently. I would rather not go on with all this in front of the princess. It must be painful for her to hear. Perhaps she might withdraw? I say this purely from sympathy, Princess Basina, though I know I’ll get no credit for any with you. May she withdraw?” he asked Agnes.

  Agnes nodded and Justina took the girl out, then returned alone.

  The bishop immediately dropped his official manner. He continued in a confiding gossip’s voice with which he was obviously more at ease. It was a voice which evoked winks, cynical leers and digs in the ribs, but the bishop managed to keep his ponderous face straight.

  “The truth is”, he told Agnes, “that the step-family—this girl and her mother and brother—are suspected of having poisoned Queen Fredegunda’s sons in the hope of obtaining the succession for themselves. True or untrue,” the bishop shrugged, “what matters is that the queen believes the story. She had several maids tortured when her sons died. The doctors said the boys died of the plague but royalty”, again the sly insinuating tone, “don’t like to think their own kinsmen can die as serfs do: of natural causes.” He paused as though expecting a laugh. “Well,” he resumed briskly, “some of the tortured maids were persuaded to blame the step-family and say that they had paid them to poison the children. This may be true and it may not. Either way the girl is unsafe at court and Fredegunda doesn’t want her there. The maids”, said the bishop meditatively, “took back their story before dying—but what does that prove?”

  “Are you seeking”, Agnes wondered, “a sanctuary or a prison?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes. If the girl doesn’t want to stay, I shan’t have her.”

  “And what if she ends up like her brother? With a dagger in her breast and her own hand on the hilt?” The bishop waited a few moments, then: “It will have, in part anyway, Mother Agnes, been put there by you!”

  “All these stories”, said Agnes in some agitation, “bring in here a world which we do not understand and with which we do not know how to deal. You’re trying to make use of us, Bishop Bertram. I don’t know if it is a good use. I don’t know at all. We did not leave the world and its …” she looked for a strong word, “sewer in order to have it follow us here. Our office here is to pray. We attempt to live in harmony—I wonder if you know how hard that is, Bishop Bertram. We offer our harmony to heaven. We recite eighty psalms a day. We try to mediate between God and those who have less leisure to pray than we do. We pray for our own sins”, Agnes told him, “and for others’. That is our function. If we begin to act as the prisons of the realm we will end up performing both functions badly.” She panted nervously—angry at her own anger. She should be in better control!

  “You prize your peace! Mmm! It is true”, the bishop remarked, “that you’re lucky here. You have never, I believe, been pillaged by one of those ragged armies our kings are forever hurling into battle against”, the bishop rubbed his fat nose in amusement, “each other,” he finished disbelievingly. “Remarkable luck really! Have you even seen any of our soldiery close up? No? Horrifying scum, Mother Agnes. Not paid at all of course. They are expected to pay and feed themselves with whatever they can grab from the populations whose lands they pass through. They tend not to distinguish between Church property and the rest. A convent is no different to them from a bordello. A lupanar. Forgive me, mother, the word slipped. Yes. We bishops have to deal with matters of the world, you see and—what was that word you used just now? ‘Mediate’? Yes, we mediate between such holy persons as yourself and the world. We can become somewhat foul-mouthed. I do hope you’ll forgive me. Pray for me even.” The bishop shook his jowls. “As I was saying, these armies are quite uncontrollable. You’ve no idea. The officers follow as a huntsman does his dogs. When they’re too late they find the hounds have torn the prey apart. You’ve been lucky here!” He drilled his glance into hers. “You’ll agree you have?” he harried her.

  Did he think her a fool? Probably. Agnes refused to react. “We pray for the soldiers too,” she said.

  The bishop shook himself. “Prayer…”

  “My lord,” she interrupted him. “It is almost time for our next service. Do you want me to question the princess.”

  He shrugged, nodded, closed his eyes. “Why not?”

  “Justina?” said Agnes.

  The prioress left. The bishop and the abbess stared in different directions. The prioress returned with the girl. Agnes beckoned her. She moved forward, crabwise. Her face was tight with a look of dislike which she turned impartially on the abbess and the bishop. Agnes guessed that she was about eleven.

  “Do you know”, Agnes asked her, “that convent life is austere and often disappointing?”

  The girl considered her own foot. “My mother”, she told it in a flat voice, “was in a convent. She kept me with her for a while. I know about convents.”

  “You may not know about ours. We make no exceptions for persons of royal blood. Our foundress is Queen Radegunda whose husband ruled all Gaul, but she treats herself more harshly than anyone else here. We own nothing. There are no chests with keys. Nobody has any personal possessions. Everyone sleeps in a dormitory. There is no privacy.”

  “You don’t want me?” The girl sounded surprised.

  Agnes scrutinized her: dull-eyed, dull-haired, pale, suspicious, sly-looking, possibly stupid, certainly unhappy, presently in a state of shock. Hardly a good recruit for community living. Poor child! Yes, but it was Agnes’s business to look out for the community.

  “Do you think you’d fit in here?” she asked. “We are two hundred sisters. We live and work together. Each must take her place and no more than her place. Each must move at the pace of the others. It can be a harsh life if one has not a vocation. Boring.” She fixed her eyes on the girl, “difficult if one already has difficulties of one’s own.”

  “You don’t want me either then?”

  “Either?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “We want you if God wants you. Only you can know that. Has he called you?” />
  Another shrug. Basina’s face was as expressionless as a plate of porridge.

  The bishop was tired of this. He crossed the room. “Basina,” he put a professional hand on the girl’s arm. She looked at it as though it were a slug. “The abbess”, he said briskly, “is not trying to discourage you. All this is routine. She would not”, a faint grunt of amusement here, “want you to be able to say … afterwards, that you didn’t know what you were taking on. The vow”, his voice hardened, “is binding.”

  Mute, Basina stared at the floor.

  “You will be safe here,” he encouraged. “You can pray for your mother and brothers.”

  The girl whipped from his arm and into a corner. She dug her back into it and screamed, “Why don’t you kill me too? Be done with it? Aren’t those your orders? Shove her into a convent and turn the key. Kill her if she refuses. Or are three murders too much for even Fredegunda—and my father?”

  Poor child! Yes. The girl’s own father—Fredegunda’s husband after all—must be involved too! Agnes repressed her impulse to comfort the girl. All this would have been planned by Bishop Bertram and with neither the girl’s nor the convent’s good in mind!

  “My dear,” she remarked instead, “if there had been an intention to murder you, it would be more difficult now to carry it out. Besides, your way back to Soissons leads through the kingdom of King Guntram. You could seek refuge there.”

  The bishop gave Agnes a furious look.

  “It seems to me, Mother, that you are curiously ready to encourage this child’s delusions! They have been malignantly and deliberately induced. Surely such receptivity is dangerous in an abbess. It makes me wonder do you have many mad nuns here? Many who receive visits from demons? Incubi?” He bared his teeth. They were yellow, waspish, veined with black.

  “We do”, said Agnes insolently, “have unsolicited visits we might have preferred to forego. Perhaps this one might now be terminated? The girl has clearly no vocation.”

  “You refuse to take her?”

  “I do.”

  “The queen will be curious to know your reasons.”

  “Tell her the girl has no vocation.”

  “The queen is convinced she has.”

  “With respect, this is a matter over which the queen’s jurisdiction does not extend. I must be allowed to decide for myself.”

  “Might I remind you…”

  “No, my lord. You have reminded me already of too much. You have brought with you the smells and schemes of a world we pity but in which we do not choose to live. Please convey my obedient respects to the queen and tell her we remember her in our prayers.”

  Agnes turned away. She and Justina were leaving the parlour when there was a thud on the floor beside her. She felt her feet being clutched. Basina had flung herself across the room and was now prostrate, groping and scrabbling at Agnes’s skirts.

  “For God’s love,” she whispered, “let me stay.”

  Agnes glanced at the bishop but could not detect any complicity in his face. It was caught as though in undress: halfway between the rage of a moment earlier, surprise and a slow, congealing irony.

  Agnes tried to raise the girl but she refused to budge. “Keep me,” she begged. “Please keep me here. I want to stay. I’m sure I have a vocation.” Weeping, whimpering, her nails scraped the stone floor and her body seemed as flat to the ground as a sheepskin rug.

  The bishop challenged. “Well, Mother Agnes?”

  Agnes hesitated. “You may leave her”, she told him, “for a few days. I shall look further into this. I warn you: I am giving no undertaking at all that I shall let her stay longer.”

  He inclined his head and left.

  The two nuns took—they had almost to carry—the shaking girl to the store-room where an infusion was prepared for her from herbs, cinnamon, pepper and cloves. Several nuns gathered round murmuring the news to each other and trying to sooth Basina.

  “Hush now,” they whispered. “Drink up. It’ll do you good. Don’t cry. You’re safe here. Safe.”

  Her anxiety reassured them. The world was as bad as they had hoped. They had made no mistake in giving it up. The good life was really here behind the high convent walls with the tidy flower-beds, the scant food and furniture, and the day divided perhaps too symmetrically by canonical offices. The flatness of their life needed just this contrast to give it flavour. This shuddering resonance from the harsh storms outside enhanced the value of their own bland existence.

  “Poor, poor child,” they repeated. “Think of it: Fredegunda’s stepdaughter!”

  Here in their own store-room was a creature of fable: a princess ill-used and menaced by the jumped-up serving-maid, Fredegunda, who was a probable murdress and possibly even a witch. Basina’s story was interesting too with suspense. What now? Agnes, who had other things to do, left the girl to relax a while with the younger nuns.

  “And had you no friends at all at the royal palace? No one who was good to you?”

  Several of them were crying in sympathy. Basina was dissolved by the lens of their tears into a denizen fit for their utterly fanciful notion of a royal palace. They had all entered the convent when they were little girls no older than ten. Their imaginings must have been vaguely liturgical, based on the way the chapel looked at its best when gold cloths were draped on the altar, wreaths of spruce stuck with flowers hung on the walls and lights massed on every available surface: a brilliant, flickering place dangerous with dark corners and condensations of passion.

  “Had you no one?”

  Basina sobbed. “There was a maid … Austrechild—but Fredegunda had her tortured. She had them shave her head and tie her to a pole and whip her until she said … said my brother had asked her to poison Fredegunda’s sons. Afterwards she said it wasn’t true, but no one would listen to her then. She was burnt.” More sobs. “She looked,” whispered Basina, “… in the end, like … a hunk of butchered meat!”

  “And your brother?”

  Basina lifted her head and wailed like a hound.

  It was almost too good. Here was evil undiluted and ill-used innocence available for rescue and comfort. The nuns were euphoric. They petted and caressed Basina, raided the dispensary-room’s stores of dried fruit and fed it to her. They took delight even in her appearance. Her dull hair and pale, shifty eyes were more satisfying than beauty.

  “You’ve only to look at her to see how she’s suffered!”

  Her fears lest she be sent away became the fears of all.

  “Would the queen really have her killed?”

  “We’ll put in good words for you with the abbess.”

  “We’ll pray for you.”

  When Agnes came back the girl’s resolution to remain had been stiffened many times over. Agnes’s warnings about the austerities of convent life no longer frightened her: were if anything a spice added to the welter of sweetness with which she felt surrounded. When Agnes repeated that royal blood earned no privileges at Holy Cross, Basina was undismayed. Her interesting story, as she had already seen, would.

  “But what made you change your mind?” Agnes guessed vaguely at the unhealthy excitement the girl had aroused, sensed, as she had from the beginning, that she was not a good element to introduce into a community. She was violent—that scream at Bishop Bertram, that thudding fall at Agnes’s feet—and violence clung about her. An aura of blood, by her own fault or not, of drama, of disturbance followed her. Agnes could feel the change of temperature in the convent, knew that Basina’s was an explosive presence, regretted already having allowed her to stay even as long as she had. “Why?” she asked.

  The girl shot a glance at her: furtive, Agnes noted, leery.

  “I saw you were on my side.”

  Agnes was stricken. The child was defenceless. Her mind shifted to Ingunda, blending the two girls’ histories, then tried to anchor on the undoubted fact that her duty was to think first of the convent as a whole. But her affections were in a receptive state. A crack, thin
as a hair, had been opened in her defences. Her usual good sense had to struggle with a maternal secretion lately released and unfamiliar enough still to throw her off balance.

  “Child,” she appealed, “we will help you reach sanctuary if that is what you want. You would be safe at the courts of your relatives, Queen Brunhilde or King Guntram. They are Queen Fredegunda’s enemies. But you must not try to make use of God. If you become a nun, you will be his bride. You must love him unwaveringly. He can’t be second best to you, you do see that, don’t you?”

  Basina looked quickly at and then away from Agnes. “Can anyone be so sure, Mother? Were you? Have you never wavered?”

  Agnes staggered. She looked hard at the girl wondering where she got the intuition to deliver such shafts? Could some supernatural voice be speaking through her? But the girl had the same obstinate, lumpy look as before. She expected hostility, had always lived with it. Probably, she could be—very gradually—won out of it. Her pale eyes gave nothing away. Like individual globules of frog-spawn before the tadpole has developed, they lay scummy, torpid but, Agnes suspected, secretly alert, in the ambush of her face. Agnes made some vague answer—she could not afterwards remember what—and put off the rest of the catechism for another day.

  *

  It was evening before Fortunatus appeared in answer to Agnes’s summons. Since he was now a priest, his connection with Holy Cross was more official and visiting-hours flexible. They met in the parlour. He apologized fussily for the delay. It had been caused by Bishop Bertram. Fortunatus’s voice was peculiar and he had a hunted look.

  “The bishop”, he said, “arrived at the same time as your messenger. I had to entertain him. He just left. He’s spending the night with Bishop Maroveus. He has landed me with a … a problem. Shall I tell you about it or do you want to tell me yours first?”

  “Tell me yours.”

  “It’s confidential. We’ll have to be alone.”

  Agnes nodded to Justina who was in the room with her as usual. “You may wait outside the door,” she said.

  Fortunatus licked his lips, took several breaths and suddenly spoke in a loud, unnatural voice. “First let me show you a poem I’ve written.” He produced a short scroll and handed it to her. She recognized his handwriting but it was shaky and the papyrus was covered with blots. “Basina’s brother”, she read, “is not dead. He is wounded, may recover and is presently in my lodgings. Nobody knows this except Bishop Bertram, myself and now you. Basina mustn’t be told or Queen Fredegunda get wind of it. Can you hide him somewhere on the convent estate? He’ll need nursing. This is highly risky!”