Agnes opened her mouth. Fortunatus put a monitory finger on his own lips, handed her a small piece of charcoal and indicated that she should write a reply.
“Why”, wrote Agnes, leaning on a chest, “should the bishop do this?”
Fortunatus took the scroll and charcoal and wrote:
“Keeping in with both sides. The boy, Clovis, is now heir to Chilperic’s throne.” He grabbed the paper back almost before Agnes had read it. “The thing is”, he said aloud, “that the bishop has left me no choice. It is not possible to back out of a thing like this …”
“I shall show your poem to Radegunda,” Agnes said as Fortunatus put his scroll back in his pouch. “I shall have to interrupt her retreat anyway to tell her about Basina—but you of course know all about that. The two things are …”
“Yes,” Fortunatus jumped up nervously. “Let’s not talk about that now. I do know about Basina. Bishop Bertram told me. Yes. No problem there, surely? I mean comparatively.”
“I have to think of the convent,” Agnes told him. “I always have! Your suggestion is totally …”
“Not now! Not now!” Fortunatus was putting so many fingers to his lips he seemed to be applauding or warming them or to have gone utterly demented. His eyes rolled. He made silent grasshopper leaps in his anxiety to stop Agnes speaking. “We’ll,” he mouthed the word ‘speak’ then finished aloud “tomorrow. Show Mother Radegunda my poem.”
“She won’t like it.”
“We’ll see. We’ll see. You never know. I have to get back. You may imagine.” He spun out of the parlour.
Chapter Twelve
“… tedium … is akin to dejection and especially felt by wandering monks and solitaries … disturbing the monk especially about midday, like a fever mounting at a regular time, and bringing its highest tide of inflammation at definite accustomed hours to the sick soul …”
Cassian
[A.D. 580]
Radegunda had been waiting for some years for the mission which the Bridegroom had told her would present itself. It had not done so. This was a trial. She accepted it. However, it had jolted her calm. Since the mission was to endanger and perhaps destroy the convent, she found it hard to give the convent her old devoted enthusiasm. She tried to divert her energies towards prayer, but here too met with obstacles. She suffered from morose delectation. Her mind, in seeking to dwell on God, found itself approaching him by a path littered with disagreeable impedimenta. She felt driven by a force in which the carnal was, to her dismay, intimately entwined with the spiritual. She struggled to separate these elements and to conceive of the deity in fleshless terms. But the recipes of the Areopagite and St. Cassian were not geared to her sensibility. She tried valiantly to leave the senses and the intellect only to find herself, by some process as irresistible as gravity, forced down when she would have gone up. She did lose herself in ecstasy, did achieve trances which burned, thrilled, even made her swoon with delight but, afterwards, she was humiliated at the precision with which she was able to detect the sensual element involved. If she had been a virgin she might have been deceived. At the same time, was it not the height of arrogance to have a revulsion against the form taken by the divine favours? Was she not in the position of one who says “Take these away, Lord, I prefer another variety”? At this point in her reasoning, she would start to torment, and frequently reduced herself to such a state of frenzy and exhaustion that she began to fear for her sanity. It was then that she felt most need of reassurance from the outside world and that, coming full circle, her mind began to munch and chew on the notion of the mission which was to be hers. Why had it not come? Could she have failed to recognize it? When? Where? Should she have sought it actively? How? Her letters to the kings of Gaul had not mitigated the wars and ravagings to which these monarchs continued to subject the population. Yet they were her own stepsons. Clotair’s charge that she had brought good to no one but herself and a few well-born women rankled. It was many years since she had washed lepers or administered charity. She longed to perform some labour which would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth. She prayed for an opportunity.
Agnes came to Radegunda’s cell shortly after noon. The nun was standing at her narrow window staring out at a plane of vineyards and crops. She looked caged. Autumn again. Trees were tattered and brown like old aurochs. The horizon, dissolving in illusory liquids, flamed and broke in a scatter of bright sherds. Planes of light shifted. A pair of goats cropped in the foreground and a child herded geese away from someone’s lettuce patch. The sun was a raging disk. Last week the grapes had been gathered and crushed to make wine. I too, Radegunda decided, I too must be crushed so that I may ferment.
Agnes told her about Basina and her brother. “My own feeling”, she ended up, “is that this is something with which we should have as little to do as possible.”
“Where is your charity?” Radegunda turned a dazzled face towards Agnes. “If God sent us these children it is so that we may save them. Did you say the boy is the heir to the throne of Neustria? And in need of nursing?”
“Yes and hiding. But I don’t trust …”
“Trust, Agnes. Trust in God.”
“But the only really safe hiding place would be within the convent,” said Agnes and waited in mounting panic. “That surely”, she hoped, “is unthinkable?”
“Why, Agnes, why? Special circumstances call for special measures!” Radegunda’s eye-sockets brimmed with reflected sunlight. The eyes themselves were lost in the great scoops of glitter which overflowed and fractured on a bubble of opalescent spittle on her lip. Agnes felt unable to argue with her. Holy certitude and good sense had no common ground. She turned to leave. “I”, Radegunda called after her, “will nurse him myself.”
“Where?”
“Here. He’s a boy, isn’t he? We mustn’t be narrow in our interpretations of rules, Agnes. We mustn’t be like those Byzantine monks who refused to have nanny-goats or cows within their cloister! Even hens!” Radegunda laughed ecstatically. “How old is he, anyway?” Her head as she turned to the retreating Agnes was lit by the sun pouring from behind her. It fell and broke through the folds of her white veil. “He can dress as a girl. A postulant. We can give it out that this postulant has the plague. That will keep people’s curiosity in check! We will keep him isolated,” Radegunda planned craftily.
“As you wish,” said Agnes to whom this mixture of glee and exaltation was distasteful. “He may still be beardless,” she admitted, “and being a royal prince will have long hair.”
“You see!”
“Yes.” She paused. “It won’t be for long?”
“We must take things as they come.”
“I suppose then we keep the girl too?”
“Well, for now, don’t you think?” Radegunda seemed to have forgotten the girl.
*
So two new ‘postulants’ joined Holy Cross. One was officially plague-stricken, both, in Agnes’s view, were tainted by an obscure worldly contagion. Not that Basina was not exemplary. Too much so. At every turn of path or corridor she seemed to lie in Agnes’s way, looking pious, diligent and always equipped with reasons for being where she was.
“Sister Disciola sent me with a message to the bell-ringer … I was going to the field to collect autumn crocuses for saffron … to help Ingunda pick hazel-nuts … Chrodechilde card wool … to the chapel to say a prayer … to Sister Justina for a reading lesson …
They all made too much of her. Could she be blamed for making as much of herself? Her piety was theatrical. Sobs were heard at night in the dormitory and when Agnes came to see what the trouble was, there was Basina lying prostrate on the freezing stone floor.
“Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I was praying for my mother.”
Well, her mother had been murdered. One could not deny that Basina had been touched by fate. Yet she did nothing to make herself inconspicuous.
“If you get ill,” Agnes told her chillily, “someo
ne will have to nurse you. You are part of a community, Basina. Peculiar conduct is not tolerable. Get into bed.”
Basina did. But the ordinariness and routine which Agnes wanted to impart to the workings of the convent did not return. Perhaps it had not been there in the first place? Perhaps Basina’s presence was not the disturbance which threw it off keel but merely an indicator, something like a mason’s plumb-rule which reveals departures from the true vertical? There were currents moving in the convent and they gathered around her. These women, who called each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Sister’ and were neither, were so many stoppered bottles. Emotion fermented in them. Their tenderness was turned on a distant, inconceivable infant: the babe of Bethlehem, an image just persuasive enough to set the milk of human affection moving in their body ducts. They longed for reality. Any reality. Basina, young, plain, and menaced, was a godsend.
Five minutes after Agnes had left the novices’ dormitory, a figure slipped across it and into Basina’s bed.
“Shshsh!” A hand pressed on her mouth. “I’ve come to comfort you. Don’t make a sound.”
Basina wriggled but didn’t.
“I”, whispered the girl who was lying with her chin pressed against Basina’s shoulder, her mouth funnelling reassurance through Basina’s hair, “am your cousin, Chrodechilde. Not cousin the way they say ‘Sister’ in this place! I’m your real blood cousin. I’m King Charibert’s daughter and you and I have the same grandfather: King Clotair. We must be friends, Basina.”
Chrodechilde talked. Basina listened. Other ears in the dormitory did too but nothing was said or reported of this to Agnes. Chrodechilde, although only fourteen years old, was a force among her peers. She was six feet of pallid flesh, freckle-flecked as though she had exposed herself to sieved sunlight as she perhaps had in some forest. There was something feral about her: a spikiness, an obtuse, potential violence. The other novices were afraid of her. She had the reddish hair and the temperament of King Clovis’s descendants—though what had reached her was perhaps even a peculiarly fierce fermented strain of this. Her father, King Charibert, had had many prickly dealings with the Church, having been excommunicated for marrying Chrodechilde’s mother, an ex-nun and, on another occasion, sending a recalcitrant bishop trundling home to his diocese in a cartload of thorns. He had died, as Chrodechilde now informed her cousin, leaving her no inheritance at all.
“Just like yourself, poor darling! We’re in the same leaky boat: birds of a feather and our plumage sorry at that.”
Inherited land followed the spear not the spindle.
Females had no claim and, after the kingdom had been divided among her uncles—“Your papa got the lion’s share! But I don’t hold that against you!”—Chrodechilde had been tossed from pillar to post, being brought up haphazardly and more or less heartlessly by a succession of foster-families. They found her unendearing—“Well, maybe, I was!”—and foreseeing small return for any affection they might have given, gave none. “So I owe nobody anything!” finished Chrodechilde with satisfaction. “It’s the other way round!” By law, all a female could hope to inherit was “the spoils of her mother’s neck”.
“They even robbed me of most of those! Gold collars … rings … Well, what good would they be to me here? Unless I were to offer them on the altar as Radegunda offered her jewels. The miracle is that I’m not dead. I’m telling you this to show you how much we have in common.”
Basina wept in sympathy and self-pity and the strong hands caressed her neck, her back, her bottom.
“But you didn’t die?” Basina was entranced, taken out of her own woes, gathered into this new cousinship. “Tell me”, she begged, “more.”
No, Chrodechilde had not died. Regard for her royal uncles—“again: one was your papa!”—who, though they had forgotten her existence, might at any point remember and be displeased to find it ended, had made the foster-families minimally careful of her.
“He forgets my existence too!” Basina whimpered.
“Fathers do.” Chrodechilde, an aged fourteen-year-old, had watched life from inside too many families to be anything but cynical. It was in no sacrificial spirit that she had decided to enter the convent at the age of eleven. Her current fosterer had been relieved. Her uncles had put up the spiritual dowry and that had been that. She did not mention the hopes she had concealed on entering Holy Cross, nor give the less flattering facts about her background. Her blood was mixed, for her mother’s father had been a weaver and that mother had died as a result of the excommunication pronounced against her by Bishop Germanus, after her sacrilegious marriage. Since Germanus was now a saint, there was no gainsaying his judgement nor the spiritual stain which lay on Chrodechilde. Her looks, too, were mixed. She had a badly undershot jaw which from some angles made her look grotesque. From others it was countered by her bright abundant hair and the compelling mackerelled eyes which swam above her cheek-bones like lazy fish. Early on she had learned that hierarchies are precarious. She who had been brought low might yet rise as her mother had. Since this looked unlikely to happen by marriage, she had decided on a spiritual career. Radegunda’s story had influenced her. It struck her as encouragingly close to her own. Radegunda, a king’s daughter, had also been brought low but was now acknowledged on all sides as a living saint. Chrodechilde pondered the aspects of this satisfying tale. To her it represented the triumph of the meek by a bending of unpromising rules. She discounted its spiritual implications. If she became a saint it would be in order to triumph first in this life and get her own back on the saint who had excommunicated her mother. After thinking lengthily about this, she began to believe that her plan was fated to come into effect, and reached Holy Cross fully imbued with the expectation that Radegunda would know and recognize in her a spiritual sister endowed with a destiny parallel to her own. She expected the foundress to make some sign that this was so. Later, looking back, Chrodechilde felt acute relief that she had confided this hope to no one. What she had done, one day when she could bear to wait no longer, was to leave some tedious task which had been assigned to her, climb the stairs to Radegunda’s cell and walk in without permission. It was an unheard-of violation of convent etiquette, for Radegunda was the community’s link with God. Other nuns had strict timetables and when summoned at any hour of day or night were expected to drop what they were doing, whether job or prayer, in deference to the obedience which was the nerve and sinew of the whole monastic enterprise. Other nuns but not Radegunda. She was felt to live as much in eternity as in time. Nobody interrupted her. Ever. But Chrodechilde, then eleven years old, had come to believe that she too lived outside time. She was a child of strong imagination and no discipline at all. She pushed open the door and saw Radegunda sitting very ordinarily on a chair.
“Hullo,” said the foundress in a matter-of-fact voice. “Who are you? A new novice? What’s your name?”
“Chrodechilde,” she said, shocked and wondering was this some sort of test, “Mother.”
“Well, Chrodechilde, were you curious about my tower?” Brisk but indulgent. “Nothing much to see here, is there? I suppose it would be a good idea if I were to meet all the new novices but, recently, I have withdrawn rather from the community. I have”, Radegunda prevaricated outrageously, “been ill. However we’ve met now, haven’t we?”
They had. On a humiliatingly mundane level. In her state of overstimulation, Chrodechilde could only suppose that the foundress—who of course had supernatural insight and knew all about Chrodechilde—had deliberately staged this scene so as to humiliate her. She began to blush the maddening, prickling blush of the red-haired. “I’m sorry,” she said inadequately.
“Don’t be,” said Radegunda. “I’m glad we met. Pray for me. The prayers of the innocent are precious.”
Chrodechilde genuflected, kissed Radegunda’s hand, mumbled something and fled.
She did not hold this failure against Radegunda whom she continued to admire. Later, however, when an attempt to win Agnes’s affect
ion—Chrodechilde, like a stray dog, tried for allies wherever she could—had also failed, she turned fiercely against Agnes. What happened was that she intemperately courted the abbess and, when it was pointed out that ordinary respect for convent rules, which she despised, would be more pleasing, took bitter offense. She was lonely, desperate for immediate approval and now, since the two women who represented authority, had refused this, resentful. They had better look out. She would bide her time. She was their enemy, she decided, and had survived through the next years in the convent very satisfactorily, living a life which was half real and half in her head. The real part had to do with the other novices, some of whom she cowed by violence while others she won by charm. Basina was being treated to the charm.
“You’ll be all right here,” Chrodechilde told her. “It’s not perfect but it’s safe and we’re trying to make things better. You must help. We’ll explain. Oh, don’t be alarmed. There’s nothing here as bad as in your stepmother’s court. What an animal that woman is!” she whispered, stroking Basina’s neck and terrifying her by her daring. “An obscene beast! They must have a hot place waiting for her in hell! No, nothing like that here. There are just little things that need changing—like our having to take orders from a woman who is neither royal nor even of our own race. You know who I mean. A Gallo-Roman nun. Well, who runs Gaul? Who conquered it? Mind you, while the foundress is alive you could say that she’s only relaying her orders and so we—you and I who are of royal blood—are not demeaning ourselves by obeying since the foundress is a queen. But when she dies? Did you know that she burns holes in her flesh with live coals and … oh, am I frightening her, little squirrel? All right, I’ll say no more. But the point is Radegunda can’t live long at this rate, can she? And then we’ll be left with old Agnes. Some of us are thinking of complaining to our relatives. You could help there. We won’t write to your father, perhaps, since things are tricky for you in that quarter, aren’t they? But we could both write to our uncle, King Guntram of Burgundy. I wouldn’t mind Agnes not being of the blood royal if she had any leadership, but she’s just a stickler for rules. So dull. No feeling. Feeling—for me anyhow—is the very pulse of religion. I can tell you’re the same. Passionate! The spirit kindleth and the letter killeth—or something like that. I can never remember words. I’m not a word person at all. I’m too spontaneous. I think that’s a strength. I mean, instead of looking up old words in books—and I see you have as much trouble as I do learning to read—instead of that, we look into our hearts. We invent for ourselves. I think that’s better. I’m sure I’d make an excellent abbess. You know Agnes was about my age when she became abbess? Radegunda didn’t want power herself, you see. I admire her immensely. A passionate woman! Have you heard how she burnt herself with coals? They say the smell of burnt flesh came right into this dormitory …”
Women in the Wall Page 20
