Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  Basina rose the next day aware that she was sought after and that there were little poles of power, nets of intrigue, all that was needed to give life zest within the convent walls. Although weaker than her cousin, although utterly passive in her affections, she was less easily won than Chrodechilde might think. Precisely because she was passive, she was faithless. She began to wonder did she prefer the abbess to her cousin. Would she not rather be in the camp, since camps there were, of the woman who was abbess than of this clearly dangerous cousin of hers who only aspired to be?

  Basina began to court Agnes, the only nun who held out against her. That it was a question of holding out and not of indifference she was sure. She had seen something on Agnes’s face when she had asked her whether her love of God had never wavered. The question had been random—but not innocent. Basina was not innocent. She had been reaching purposefully though uncertainly for a weapon and Agnes’s reaction had shown that she had found one. Now she set out to see could she break through the abbess’s defences.

  Agnes took over the duties of the mistress of novices. It was in a writing class a few days later that she discovered that several of the girls were unable to hold their pens. Why?

  “Show me your hands.”

  A show of shyness. Then the palms were shown: bleeding and scabby in imitation of the stigmata.

  “Where else?”

  Their feet of course. Scratched more or less vigorously with a nail. One child had yellow pus on hers.

  “What about the wound on Christ’s side? Did you imitate that too?”

  No. They hadn’t thought of that. Or perhaps, since the fifth wound would not have been visible, had not felt it to be worthwhile. Imitating the exploits of great saints—as small boys did those of great circus performers—they stuck to externals as actors must. It was a form of homage. There was no mockery here. Agnes saw that. More than a game, it was a rite. As other children might play with dolls, these, reared for the cloister, were seeking an equivalent. The equivalent though was dangerous. Nobody can take a doll for a baby but a nail-scratched palm can deceive an imaginative girl into believing she has been marked out by heaven.

  “Whose idea was it? Who did it first?”

  Silence. Solidarity. But she could guess.

  She made mild fun of them, preached sound sense—and was undermined by Radegunda. The children declared they wanted to confess their sins. Publicly. A deputation went to Radegunda, explaining that the abbess, because of the mildness of her nature, was being too lenient with them. They themselves felt the need to unburden.

  “For the sake of our souls, Mother Radegunda, prevail on the abbess.”

  Radegunda prevailed. The game intensified. Among the shadows of the draughty chapel where oil-fumes mingled with the rankness of evergreen garlands, the little girls, ceremonially, one by one, prostrated themselves on the mosaic floor and cried out their guilt with the art of practised actresses.

  “I blasphemed. I pretended to have received the favours of Christ. I scratched my own palms and feet until they bled a bit and then pulled off the scab when it formed. It didn’t even hurt much. Now I am afraid I have endangered my soul. Please give me a penance.”

  “I used menstrual blood.”

  “I didn’t copy the others but my refusal came from pride. I felt superior. My sin is worse than theirs.” This from Ingunda.

  “I”, Chrodechilde confessed, “thought the whole thing up. I am the worst sinner of all.”

  And on and on. Boasting. Competing. An orgy of it. Radegunda sat listening, her face stiff with charity. How silly she is, thought Agnes sadly. She encourages zeal and all she gets is theatre. Some of the older nuns looked bewildered, even stunned. This sort of thing was new to the convent.

  “All right.” Agnes stood quietly in the chapel. “We’ve heard your confessions now.” She turned a quelling look on the flushed excited faces. Eyes glinted; lips were licked; tremors passed among the adolescent herd. They had intoxicated themselves, keyed their nerves to a pitch of collective expectancy and were ready for anything—except to be let down. The bright, drugged eyes implored Agnes: “Something,” they pleaded. “Prescribe something violent. Strange. Anything. Only don’t, please, force us back into our imprisoning separate selves.”

  Agnes spoke in a dousing voice. “There is nothing,” she told them flatly, “which prevents feeling like shamming it. Pretence”, she insisted, “dries up the heart. Now I cannot be sure but what I think is this: that you have been playing with religion and that the repentance you all expressed just now was also play: a sham. If it was, you had better admit this to yourselves, because the hearts you dry up”, she warned, “will be your own. You may go.”

  There was a silence. More: a kind of vacuum as the girls grappled with the probability that nothing more was to come, nothing to happen after all.

  “That”, said Agnes, cruelly mild, “is all. We shan’t discuss this incident again.”

  They left, slowly, shrunkenly, dragging themselves and she, touched by their dejection, felt distaste for what she had done. Wasn’t it like rubbing soot into the eyes of a peacock’s tail, sham eyes but which have delighted many? She had broken the current uniting them, quenched and shown up the sad spuriousness of their fantasy—and what else had these girls got? Why had she done it? In the name of a genuine but perhaps unavailable experience? She, certainly, had never enjoyed religious ecstasy and had no tips as to how to achieve it. Or had she been aiming for order and the sort of conduct with which community administration could best cope? And was refusal of sham emotions—resignation to a narrow life not just as likely to dry the heart? Hadn’t it perhaps dried up her own?

  “Well,” said Chrodechilde to Basina. “You saw. She has no temperament.”

  “I’d have said”, Basina answered, “that she won that game.”

  *

  Next day she went to see the abbess who was making wreathes for the altar.

  “What you said about pretence, Mother,” she said, “moved me. I think I have tendencies to be pretentious. I …”

  “Think of your work,” Agnes told her coldly. “And think three times before starting a sentence with ‘I’. Work will save you if you want to be saved.”

  “May I help with yours?” Basina picked up some laurel branches which Agnes was bending into circles.

  “You’d do better to practise your writing. If you’re going to stay with us, you’ll have to learn to write.”

  “If?”

  “If.”

  Basina began to cry. Deliberately? She was a great crier. But what difference did that make, Agnes asked herself. She knew the root complaint of these little girls who alternately disguised and paraded it: a need to be loved. Small birds thrown early out of whatever cold nests had hatched them, they grabbed what cover they could. Like rejected nestlings too, many were unappealing. The God in whom convent-Rule invited them to sink their separateness was a comfort to the very few. For others he fell apart in the mind: a scarecrow-lover put together from scraps and hazy images of a world in which they had no place. The best thing for them would be to love each other in a mild and not too individual manner. Or so Agnes felt—and failed to act on, for she picked up the crying child, kissed her and told her she could stay.

  Basina kissed her back, noted the smell of verbena from Agnes’s clothes, fell in love with her and thought she might warn her against Chrodechilde.

  A bell rang.

  “That’s for me. I have to go,” said Agnes. And so was not warned.

  *

  Later that day Agnes and Ingunda finally met to work on the sacristy vestments. Agnes was shy of the girl and at first planned to let her talk. But the girl did not talk so Agnes had to start questioning her if she was not to let the hour go by without either of them opening their lips.

  “Do you get on”, she asked, “with the other novices?”

  “Not well,” said Ingunda. “They’re from better families than I. You know—I speak bad German and wo
rse Latin. I’m improving … but slowly—besides, they remember what I was like before.”

  “Did they ask you to join—to pretend you too had the stigmata?”

  “Oh, they asked me all right. They were all doing it together. In the dormitory.”

  “Weren’t you tempted?”

  “No.” There was a pause. “Don’t think I’m better than they are,” said Ingunda. “It’s more the other way round. I’m more down to earth. I mean, can you imagine the family that brought me up, my foster-sisters, doing a thing like that? They’d think it daft. It’s like fasting. They never heard of it. When you had food you ate it—or saved it. You don’t think of depriving yourself of something you don’t have half the time!”

  “Are you … happy?”

  “I’m content.”

  “But you miss Fridovigia?” Agnes fell back on the acknowledgeable link. “Don’t you?” she begged.

  “Oh, I was sorry for a bit when she died. But, after all, she was old. She’s better off dead.”

  Agnes felt rebuffed. How much easier it would be to get close to Basina who came rubbing up against one like a spoilt cat. This girl … Agnes looked at her: intent face, closed. A touch of the peasant who gives nothing away. Well, what had she expected?

  “Time for compline,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you come again tomorrow?”

  “All right.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  [A.D. 580]

  “I tell you,” said Fortunatus, “I have lost my appetite. I can’t eat.”

  Agnes was impressed.

  “Not a thing. I can’t swallow!” Hand to recalcitrant throat.

  “That is bad!”

  It was. She knew. The seat of his energies was his mouth. Its functions combined beautifully.

  “I”, he complained, “have never aspired to be important. Or heroic. Or saintly. You know that, Agnes. My God!”

  Was God nodding, one wondered? He was supposed to note the fall of a sparrow and here he was sending a lark on a hawk’s errand!

  “All this about”, Fortunatus lowered his voice and cupped a hand funnel-like about his mouth, “the prince is not my kind of thing at all!” They were standing by the convent wall which dropped sheerly below them into empty open countryside. On the inside was the garden which did offer some cover for possible eavesdroppers but Fortunatus had checked every bush.

  “Well,” said Agnes, “Radegunda has things well in hand. I mean: nobody sees him.”

  “How long can that last? I ask you. With two hundred women fluttering around. He’s like a cock in a barnyard. They’ll smell him!”

  “She’s with him all the time. And she has marked the door of his cell with the tau cross: the sign of the plague.”

  “And suppose she goes off into a trance? What then? What worries me is Bishop Bertram. What’s he up to? Which side is he on? What’s his game? He’s an intriguer, a tricky customer, slippery, deep. God knows what he’s up to. Anyway he left me no choice. Can you imagine my feelings when he arrived in my place with the wounded—for all I knew, dying—prince? I couldn’t throw him out. That might cost me my life—he is Chilperic’s son. But keeping him was almost as dangerous. Bertram has a hold on me now. Do you think that’s what he wanted?”

  “Why should he want a hold on you?”

  “There’s always dirty work to be done. They always need someone to do it. They could have anything up their sleeves. Anything. Saints Hilary and Martin guard us! It’s all very well for Radegunda. She’s a queen. She’s a saint. She probably wouldn’t mind being a martyr as well. Might welcome it. Though you probably don’t know it—it’s shocking how little people do know of their religion!—self-slaughter has been condemned by two Church Councils. Two, wilful martyrdom is a form of self-slaughter. Ergo—but women never understand theory.” Fortunatus walked up and down, gulping in air as though it might save him from drowning in some element which his splashing movements made present even to Agnes. “Oh,” he cried and was so clearly aghast that she would have caught and calmed one of his hands as one does a bird which has strayed desperately indoors—but how could she? Safety, she knew, haunted his mind. He had left Italy in search of it.

  “Fortunatus, is there something you want us to do?”

  He flung up his hands prayerfully. “Agnes, for your own sake, for my sake, for the prince’s sake, be careful! Have you got him dressed as a nun at least? Shaven?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “He’s not dying I suppose?”

  “He’s recovering. Radegunda has applied poultices and …”

  “Mmm!” Fortunatus waved away medical detail. “Now comes the tricky decision: do we get him out of the convent and slip him off somewhere and, if so, where? If any harm came to him, we would be responsible—and he is heir to the throne of Neustria. On the other hand, if Fredegunda ever heard that we had helped him it would be the rope and pulley for me.”

  “We can pray.”

  “Oh, by all means pray. Pray. We can ill afford to forego any available support!” He spoke with violence. “The question is where could we send him? It’s a bad moment. Usually the kingdoms are at each other’s throats and refugees from one safe in the others. Not now. Right now there’s a reshuffle of alliances. Everything’s up in the air. Until lately, it was clear enough.” Fortunatus sliced the air into segments. “Chilperic was on one side, Guntram and Childebert on the other. That was after Guntram adopted Childebert as his heir. But the latest word is that Chilperic is also thinking of adopting Childebert as his heir. Great family spirit, what? Childebert may be an orphan and a minor but no one can say he lacks fathers. And Chilperic’s fatherly feelings have evidently been saved for now. After all, it’s largely his own fault if he’s heirless—or thinks he is, since he doesn’t realize that you know who is in the land of the living. If that little fact were to leak out, Fredegunda would soon make it past history. In the twinkling of a knife. She’s more of a man than he—he only plants the royal seed; she reaps it. She’s trying to grow some more of her own at the moment, according to reports. She’s desperate to get pregnant. Going to witches, sorcerers and Syrians of every stripe. Rubbing herself with ointments, dosing herself with potions. She doesn’t neglect the saints either. They say she prepares steam infusions and—saving your presence—vaginal douches with scrapings from St. Denis’s tomb. A woman of eclectic belief. She’s on a diet of she-rabbits and dandelions from what I hear: sympathetic magic. Maybe she’ll produce a buck rabbit.”

  “You sound well informed,” Agnes spoke with distaste. He sounded, it occurred to her, in better spirits too. Gossip restored him. “Well,” she said, “what now?”

  “Nothing,” decided Fortunatus, “for the moment. We’ll have to sit tight.”

  Radegunda had become attached to her patient. He was not the child she had supposed. Time flew. He was fifteen and a veteran of several campaigns, but weak now, harmless and amenable to good advice.

  “Peace”, she told the prostrate prince as she dressed the wound in his chest, “is something we would all enjoy if young men like you would refuse to fight.”

  “Refuse? I”, he told her, “spent most of my wars running away.”

  “That’s nothing to be ashamed of. The Bible says …”

  “Who’s ashamed? It’s a matter of luck. I mean if an army suddenly surrounds the place where you’re sitting with your stepmother drinking perry—well, you run. Or take the time I was sitting in Bordeaux over my lunch when a fellow I’d never seen in my life appeared outside in the street roaring that he was going to hunt me like a deer. He was an ally of my late uncle, Sigibert, who was on bad terms with my father and he swore he’d chase me across Gaul with horns and trumpets like a deer. Did you know that stags used to be tutelary animals—no, I suppose you wouldn’t be interested. Anyway, he didn’t say ‘stag’ but ‘deer’ and like a deer I ran. And he followed. Just as he’d said. With horns and trumpets. I still dream of them at night. Painful. I
t would be doing me a kindness, since you don’t sleep much, to waken me when I bell.”

  “Bell?”

  “Like a deer. Like this.” The boy began to roar.

  Radegunda clapped a hand over his mouth. “For God’s sake. You’re in hiding here. You’re supposed to be sick.”

  Clovis apologized. “I’ve hurt my chest,” he complained.

  “Did you try to poison Fredegunda’s sons? Did you poison them?”

  “Those poor brats? Why should I? They were never meant to live. She smothered them in affection—as well have smothered them between two tics. She has the evil eye.”