Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  He shrugged, annoyed at her insistence. “Look Agnes, my substitute can talk to her. I have to … oh well, all right. I’ll say a few words myself. I disapprove of this sort of thing anyway. People who aim to high go for a fall. The sin of Lucifer. Angelism leads to its opposite. I think I have a sermon on the subject. I’ll look up my notes.”

  “Notes!”

  Agnes’s breath stuck like a lock of wool in her throat. She coughed, felt the tears in her eyes and knew she had never been less compelling. “Not a speech, Fortunatus!” she managed to say. “Find out what’s the matter with the girl. Something is. I can’t … she won’t confide in me…. Fortunatus,” Agnes nerved herself, “do you know who she is?”

  “A novice, fourteen years old. Agnes, forgive me,” he sighed, gabbled, “but I, very much against my will I assure you, am embroiled in urgent enterprise. Great interests hang on it. There are risks. Thought of it chills me. Worry addles my brain. I’ve been meaning to ask you for your gargle of ginger and oregano to purge the head passages. I … I’m constantly upset, nervous. This matter weighs on me. Teases my nerves. I think for that matter of your novice, my substitute would really do a better job, handle things better. He has more time. Shall I send for the gargle or will you send it to me? I’m leaving in the morning.”

  *

  Agnes went to see Radegunda. But Radegunda was now impermeable to appeals. Words bounded off her like hail from a polished surface. Only a very few subjects could hold her attention. Her face was blank, her use of language different from other people’s: she trafficked less in immediately intelligible meaning than in clangorous symbols and allusions to what could not be said but must be allowed imperative significance. To Agnes, all this was like the empty movements of a conjurer’s hands. Radegunda claimed to have visited hell and perceived its reality with all her senses: taste, touch, smell.

  This was not someone from whom Agnes could expect sympathy for her view of Ingunda’s decision. Even if Radegunda had known—perhaps all the more if she had known—the girl’s parentage, she would have approved of her immurement.

  “Radegunda, I’m worried for her!” The poor everyday words cowered on Agnes’s tongue. “I’m in anguish,” she blurted.

  “Attachment to creatures”, Radegunda replied, “is as much to be dreaded as hell itself. Creatures are frail and fleeting. I mean particular attachments, Agnes. We may work to bring peace and justice to earth but finally it is in God alone that…”

  Agnes turned and rushed out of Radegunda’s cell. It was in one of the turrets of the old city wall which had been incorporated into the convent building and the stairs leading down from it were twisting and narrow. Agnes lost her footing on these. She threw out her hands, clawed at the wall, missed it and slid the rest of the way on her back, banging her head on several jutting steps as she did so. She knocked herself out, injured her spine, and had to be taken to the convent sick-cell where she lay for weeks.

  When she came to herself and was sufficiently recovered to receive visitors, a number of nuns—some with malice, others with sympathy or innocence—described the ceremony she had missed when Ingunda had been bricked up in a hollow of the cloister wall. The nuns had held lanterns and sung hymns while the masons worked. Radegunda had presided and the girl herself had kissed all her friends and taken her leave from them with exemplary steadfastness. Others had wept but not she. Her cell, by her own wish, was much smaller than Sister Disciola’s: too small to allow her to lie down.

  Chapter Sixteen

  [A.D. 586]

  Agnes was different when she recovered. She looked older. Her temper was short, her mouth sharp and she was sometimes so unreasonable the nuns whispered that she was going through an odd phase and that, really, Chrodechilde was not so wrong in saying she should be replaced as abbess. Not wrong at all.

  But who was to do it? Radegunda was now completely cut off from convent life and the chaplain, Fortunatus, spent more and more time away. When he was around, he shuttled between Radegunda’s tower and a cottage on the convent estate, where some wondered if he kept a woman. The nuns grew lax, ate meat, played chess, backgammon and other board games, gossipped and wondered was something in the wind.

  Rumours seeped into the cloister through the kitchens—to which tenants brought soap, wax, honey and garbled news—and from the steward, who had recently returned from Marseilles with a load of spices and some odd stories picked up along the trade routes. The Bishop of Rouen, famous for having stood up to Queen Fredegunda and treated her without fear or favour, was stabbed in his own church on Easter Day. During the Divine service. Fredegunda had come to gloat and, as the bishop wasn’t dying fast enough, offered him the services of her physician. The bishop had cursed and accused her of having armed the assassin’s hand. All churches had been closed throughout Rouen in protest.

  “Queen Fredegunda”, said Justina, the prioress, to Agnes, “has never been so unpopular. All Gaul is indignant. Killing a bishop! They say when she offered her own physician, the bishop said ‘Now I know that God means me to die!’ The woman’s mad. She must have the devil’s help to have survived so long. They say she sent assassins, too, to kill the monarchs of the other kingdoms but they were discovered. That shows her guilty conscience. She’s afraid.” Justina lowered her voice. “Now”, she said, “would be a good time for a move.” She knew something of Radegunda’s plans.

  “Shsh!” said Agnes.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say a word. But my uncle was saying …” Justina’s uncle was Bishop Gregory of Tours.

  The two were working in the dispensary, making up medicines. There had been an epidemic and other signs and portents had been observed. “Which is no wonder,” said Justina. “Priests and not stones are the foundations of the Church. Priests know God’s meanings. They make Christ’s body with their words. With their mouths they make it. If they are to be killed and the killer go free, what will we all come to? They have the key of heaven. Without the keys no man can reach it, or woman either.”

  Agnes could not deny this. It was orthodox. But Justina’s certitudes grated on her. Fortunatus was a priest. And to what had he ever held the key? She shook herself, trying to empty her mind of the images gnawing at it. Like vermin they gnawed. Her dreams were more bearable than her waking moments. Something always happened in the dream. Some precipitation of event, some change, even a horrible one was better than the endless nullity of her waking hours, the endless knowledge of that suffering mad presence in the convent wall.

  The painful thing was that, looking back, it had become clear to Agnes that her life had for years been narrowing until now she was caught in a vice: truly and finally unfree. It was only now that she saw how much freer she had once been and that there had been moments when she might, with more grit and nerve, have saved herself and Ingunda from the impasse to which prudence had led her. Like a sheep nipped at the hocks, she had let herself be nudged and pushed into this dead end, this negation of life which was worse than death. It was not only the waste of Ingunda’s life which tormented her for that waste was the result of her own. She was forty-six: old. Everything was over and what choices had she made? She had backed away from choice. Crouching in her haven, she had imagined Gaul stretching around her menacingly: tumid with blood, greed, a bristle of dark forests and malevolence. But the haven itself was poisoned. She should have struck out. Weak, penniless women had come in off the roads to the alms-house where she had once worked and had set off again. They—some of them—survived. And was survival so desirable anyhow? Life had played an ironic trick on her. She had been given survival and safety, the things she had seemed to prize, in their most naked misery. “If”, she thought, “I had had five years with Ingunda and then died, wouldn’t it have been better? One year.”

  “Queen Fredegunda…” Justina was whispering. Her voice slithered in her throat.

  Fredegunda excites people, thought Agnes. Just as Radegunda does. They would say that one horrifies and the other exalts but that is no
t it at all. People—the nuns—watch life as they might a chess game. The black queen thrills by her blackness. Each of our queens has her own sort of power. Radegunda’s is concentrated on herself. She can reverse reality, starve herself and taste honey on her lips, freeze herself and feel heat around her heart. Heat and honey are the rarest things in December when last year’s stores are low—but she has them. Might Ingunda too? Perhaps she is more Radegunda’s daughter than mine? Perhaps she can find what she wants in her wall? I don’t believe that.

  Justina had stopped speaking. Interrogative echoes hung in the air.

  “Yes,” said Agnes.

  “How ‘yes’?”

  “I thought you said…?”

  “What I said was…” Impatiently the voice chugged on. The note of annoyance with Agnes who had not been listening gave way to a more general outrage and the pleasures of indignation. “That Fredegunda…!”

  The black queen! Their counter idol! They protested but, underneath, were perhaps excited at a woman killing a bishop. After all, no woman could be a priest and make Christ’s body, as Justina had just said, with her mouth. But she could kill one.

  Agnes was tired. She tired easily nowadays and did nothing but the most mechanical tasks. Now she was grinding cloves in a mortar. The smell was hypnotic. It sent her faculties to sleep. Only her nostrils were active and drew in the hot, powerful spice-particles. Probably she had failed to answer some question. The prioress was weighing measures of cos turn and galingale and putting them in bowls with a suffering air.

  “Did you say something?” Agnes asked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch.”

  “Nothing,” said Justina then, unable to let it go: “They say she killed a nobleman who dared reproach her. Killed him there and then with a poisoned stirrup-cup.”

  Death was the most exciting theme of all. Naturally. Behind death’s curtain lay everything the nuns had given up in this life, all the pleasures thriftily postponed in the hope of getting them back a hundredfold. Death was their dominion. Radegunda dreamed of it constantly, claimed to have seen her own place in heaven in a dream. Would Ingunda be better off dead? Killed? Dispatched to heaven? Now?

  Agnes had got up from her bed several times in the last weeks and months and walked downstairs to the cloister. Passing the chapel window, she had stared in to where a few tapers glowed on the altar and a nun was keeping vigil. The window was wet with rain and the light from inside broke through the drops, shattered and spun lacey symmetries in each. When she left, the pallid patterns came with her so that she was looking at the sky through a damp, glass-like grille. She had walked over to Ingunda’s window. It was unglazed, no more really than a slit practised diagonally in the thick stone so that Agnes could see nothing. She had stood there until her pulse subsided and she began to hear the girl’s sleeping breath. “She is less wretched now,” she had whispered to herself. “She is dreaming perhaps. I shall not wake her. What would be the use?” She stood so long listening to the breathing that it began to seem as though it was coming from her own body. Then she had left, moving her numbed limbs with difficulty. Each time she came the girl was asleep. Anyway what could she say to her now that she had not said before?

  “Chrodechilde…” said Justina.

  “What?”

  “She’s on her high horse again.”

  There was criticism here. Not only of Chrodechilde: of Agnes. Agnes had gone too far, the prioress considered, or not far enough or too far to then balk at going further. She should be on her guard. “She’s dangerous,” said Justina. “I can’t begin to tell you half of what she’s up to. Ever since…”

  Agnes shrugged and poured yellow pimentos into her mortar. She worked the pestle around and the thin dried pimento skins broke like parchment, the pith soaked into the pestle. She had whipped Chrodechilde—to both their astonishment.

  “You let things go,” Justina criticized with gentle persistence. “Then suddenly you swoop! That enrages them. They grow confident and then they’re indignant if you stop them at all. A tight rein would be better: tight but steady.”

  Yes, Agnes was no longer steady.

  “It was while you were ill, of course, that they grew unmanageable. I said it to Father Fortunatus, but…”

  “Yes.” He would pay no attention. He was absorbed in his larger intrigue and had no eyes for the small ones being played out in the convent. Chrodechilde had tried to draw him in but he had paid her as little attention as he had Justina or Agnes. Only Radegunda could rock him and, on Easter Sunday, had.

  On that day Radegunda had spoken to the nuns in chapel.

  “Ordinarily,” she had said, “nuns are called on to keep their vows and…”

  Agnes had seen Fortunatus’s anxiety. His mouth twitched and she, who had been letting the words flow over her, was alerted to their oddity. Why “ordinarily”? A “but” was implicit.

  The foundress’s speech wove on in classic phrases which crested with the regularity of waves. Only Fortunatus and Agnes waited for the sudden reversal, the turn in the tide. The other nuns were passive, perhaps not really listening? Agnes watched with curiosity. Radegunda had changed over the years. Growing thinner, she looked even taller and had taken on a mannish air. The virile silhouette of her warrior ancestry jutted beneath the white veil. Stiffened by will-power, bent as an old weapon which has been leaned on too much, her body was all points. The candles on the Easter altar threw shadows from every angle so that her great white frame looked riddled with holes. Her voice had grown hollow too and, in moments of excitement, wheezed.

  “There are times”, she said, “when what appeared to be a life-long vocation turns out not to be, when a noble choice proves to have been countermanded by God and when the needs of our poor world must be satisfied at the expence of remoter spiritual ones. If we could bring the Kingdom of God to earth,” said Radegunda, toppling towards her congregation of nuns as she fixed them, one after the other, with her zany eye, “should we not do so?” The eye blazed like the small pure blue flame which sometimes appears in a coal fire when a cracked fragment has released a puff of gas. “If a dying man”, she cried, “were to be flung by soldiers at the door of our church, should we not leave Christ on the altar to bring help to Christ in the man dying at our door?”

  Even now, Agnes noticed with detachment—since she had suffered all the suffering life was likely to hold for her, she had grown detached and now, with detachment, noted—that the nuns seemed to observe nothing peculiar about Radegunda’s speech. Hearing what they expected to hear, they did not hear that Radegunda was inviting them to break their cloister-Rule, if need should arise, and sacrifice heaven-in-heaven to heaven-on-earth. Mildly, they stared at their ecstatic foundress. Harmoniously, they sang the hymn at the end of her talk. Persistently, they denied, when Agnes questioned them afterwards, that Mother Radegunda had said anything memorable at all.

  “She said we should observe our Rule, pray, be charitable,” said Justina. “Yes, she was passionate. But she is often passionate. Eloquent. I was moved.”

  “You needn’t worry,” Agnes told Fortunatus afterwards. “They didn’t understand a thing.”

  “How many did you ask? How can you be sure? They may not say what they think. Besides, next time it may be worse. She’s mad,” said Fortunatus violently. “Mad, mad, mad!” He walked to the sacristy door—they were in the sacristy where he had not yet removed his vestments after saying mass—opened it, inspected the corridor, closed it, lifted a tapestry, delivered a violent punch at a hanging curtain.

  “Madness”, Agnes shrugged with some malice, “is close to godliness. Divine folly you yourself once…”

  “There’s folly and folly. This sort is dangerous.” He dropped his voice and gabbled in a furious whisper, “Senility perhaps? Who can tell. But she’s different. Perhaps she’s tormented her body to breakage point? She’s transformed anyway. She frightens me. She keeps pushing me to hurry the bishops. She’s afraid she’ll die before the…” Again his voic
e dropped, so low now that he was hardly making a sound. His face writhed like a clown at a fair. “The prince,” he mouthed and tilted his head.

  Agnes stared at him dispassionately.

  “What does she say?” she asked.

  He washed his hands in invisible water, walked back and forth, ground his teeth. “What does it matter: cogent things enough but that the premise is mad … That God helps those who help themselves—that’s what she says when I tell her it’s the wrong moment. That there’s personal cowardice in hiding behind a spiritual stance—that’s her reply when I say that the whole thing is a matter for laymen. Pride, she says then: there’s pride in electing to live and act on a spiritual plane only. What use, she says, is there in nuns accepting humiliating tasks—cleaning kitchens, etc.—if they will not accept direct participation in worldly events? ‘The world’, she says, ‘is grubby and we should be prepared to get our hands dirty.’ And so on. She’s never at a loss for argument. Words flow out of her. There are moments when I think it’s the devil, the father of lies, who has deluded her. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happened. Saints are vulnerable. They’re tuned to dangerous regions, inhuman. We know that. What she wants really is power, power in this world, in this country, now. Oh, how did I ever get myself involved in all this?” He was sweating. A reek slunk from him. He wiped his face with his stole. “I can’t back out now. The others, naturally, would protect themselves.” He turned to Agnes. He was trembling. A tic twitched in one of his eyes. “She may do anything—and when I tell the others, the bishops, they don’t believe me. They have no confidence in me. They think I’m an alarmist and inventing this to give myself an excuse for backing out. They think I’m a coward—well, I am. But what we heard this morning would worry them! Only they wouldn’t believe it if I told them. I’m caught between her and them.” Fortunatus munched his lower lip. “Oh, I could beat myself. How did I let this happen?”