Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  Justina saw the two nuns back away in fright, turn and run around a corner out of sight. As they disappeared, Basina clutched her companion’s elbow and Justina had the impression that she was panting out information. Fortunatus followed the prince.

  “Mother Radegunda!” Justina stepped down from her lookout point. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” Radegunda rose from the bed and, moving unsteadily, joined Justina at the window. She looked out.

  “A cindery sky,” she remarked. “We must be prepared for further suffering.”

  Justina asked, “Are you in pain?”

  “I welcome pain,” said Radegunda. “I welcome disappointment. I offer it up. It may be my last offering. What matter whether I see the success of our plans so long as they do succeed? As they will,” she told Justina. “I know it. Sooner or later Gaul will be united under one king annointed by the Holy Church. The project is a seed. It will take root.” She lurched and Justina caught her.

  “Sit. Please, Mother. I can tell you’re dizzy!”

  “Pain keeps me lucid. I shall stand.” Radegunda clutched her chest and stared at the empty doorway. “Are they coming?”

  Justina walked through it and down the stairs. “They’re coming,” she called.

  When the two came in from the well of the dark stairway, the light from the window was in their eyes. Radegunda was standing with her back to it so that reflections mirrored in the open pane fell on her veil and rippled redly down its folds. She seemed to have difficulty directing her tongue. She clutched herself, panting as though the air were burning her throat. “Prince Clovis,” she managed in a scorched voice, “I shall not live to see you King of Gaul nor even … Neustria. I shall not …” Her breath came in gulps. She staggered, motioned the others to keep away and said, “guide you, but I want to say … Clovis, I am your spiritual mother. I am the mother of Gaul, I … no don’t stop me, I … must say this …” There was a long pause. “Beware”, she managed finally, “of pride. It is the most corrosive sin. Her breathing was growing rougher. “Do not”, she croaked, brutally forcing her voice, “think of God as a source of … power or a … counterpower who may help you … on this earth. Clovis…” Her hands still repelled the others’ dancing, tentative impulses to advance and help her. Outstretched, palms forward, they might have been those of someone wondering how to swim or eager perhaps to test some new, quite unfamiliar element. “I willingly renounce,” she said, “I … will … Clovis, remember always that we sacrificed the greatest—sacrificed oneness with God to try and … help you. Clovis … I, I…”

  Her breath strangled. “Fortunatus!” she called. “Justina!” She fell forward into their arms.

  Chapter Eighteen

  [A.D. 587]

  Radegunda’s body was being taken for burial to the church of St. Mary Outside the Walls. The bier was moving slowly, borne by clerics in vivid vestments. It was cold. Windless. Sunlight spattered piercingly from the metal cross at the head of the procession. Ceremonial order prevailed. The procession wound down among orchards which had only lately shed their blossom. Late-blooming pear-trees were still fluffed with white and, high on the convent walls, the community of nuns clustered: white too like a gathering of gulls.

  Outside the basilica, lunatics and cripples had been waiting all night in the hope of a miracle. Excitement and a sense of their public had sent several into fits. At word of the procession’s coming, these increased in extravagance. Disordered movements shook the patients’ limbs. Heads rotated. Spines contracted, froze in concave arcs, then clapped forward in convulsive spasms.

  Fortunatus, light-headed from worry and fatigue, had a momentary impression that all were dead and this place hell. The faces of the sick poor—dry as papyrus, grey as old sticks—had a raw animation alien to any faces he knew. Wens, warts, boils and nasal hair sprouted with fierce strength from skin no hand had touched with cosmetic intent. Nature surged here untrammelled and cankered with its own excess. Weakly anarchic, they disgusted and horrified him. Gauls or Franks, they were alike in that their minds had abandoned the struggle to quell their flesh. He drew away from them, reproved himself for his lack of charity and attempted to sustain the blistering, sucking stare of a woman holding a child out to within inches of his face. Obviously, she wanted him to touch it but it was deformed, had no fingers and smelled so terribly that he almost fainted before managing to get by. Another creature—how human were they?—had crawled forward between the legs of the crowd and managed to park herself on the edge of the path where the bier-bearers must pass. Suddenly, with a dog-like leap, she was up, touching and then clinging to the bier. She was pulled off, laughing then roaring that the devil within her was vanquished, must go, was going back to hell. “To hell,” she yelled in the voice of the devil, a hectoring, furious, male voice. “I’m going back to the stink and pain!” It bellowed and spilled from her in globules of spit and sweat as though she were a boiling pot shedding the spirit within her in a steamy overflow. The voice cursed the saint, then the woman fell quiet and, moments later, in a thin, doubtful, reedy whine asked, “What happened? Where am I?” Bystanders reassured her. “You’re delivered, Leuba! You’re yourself again. The saint…” They were shouting “A miracle! A miracle!” as the procession moved away from them and in through the basilica portico.

  Fortunatus turned to look back at the convent before going in. The nuns were still on top of their convent walls. His eye ranged over them, over the garden below where he had so often sat with Radegunda, down past further walls to the road which led out of the city. A group of white-clad figures moved along it, identical to the ones above. Nuns? Impossible. An optical delusion? He screwed up his eyes, trying to focus better. They did look like nuns. Perhaps two dozen of them. They couldn’t be. How could they have got out? The abbess had the key to the only gate. The sun glowed. Perhaps it was a mirage? A reflection of the white figures above? He was holding the procession up. He turned and walked into the basilica.

  By the time he came out again it was early evening. The sun shot oblique rays through a copse of young larches luminous as a cut lemon. Low-flying swallows portended rain, darting like shuttles through a warp of dusk. The ceremonies were over. Radegunda had been placed in a double sarcophagus, an old Roman one scraped and reused. It would be scraped some more.

  “Bishop Thaumastus’s sarcophagus”, a priest remarked to Fortunatus, “is perforated. Literally. They’ve scraped holes right through it. Like Vandals! They”, he nodded to the crowds of pilgrims cooking and eating in the basilica atrium, “make medicines from the scrapings. They drink the stuff, gargle it, make poultices and fomentations. It’s supposed to be sovereign against toothache and fever.”

  “And why not, why not?” A monk had overheard. “You’re not doubting, I suppose, Father? You’re not doubting our holy saint’s powers?”

  The priest shrugged. “Do you think, Brother, that all the people’s beliefs are to be taken seriously?”

  “Who said ‘all’? But Bishop Thaumastus …”

  “Is in your parish! He brings trade, pilgrims … I know.”

  Fortunatus moved off. He had not slept in days, had been keeping vigil before the body of Radegunda. Now his head was light. Words shot through it and refused to knit into coherence. He was tired, might well say something imprudent if he wasn’t careful. He had, of necessity, pushed his anxiety to the back of his head but the vigil with its smoking lights, giddy-smelling herbs and endless gazing on the dead woman’s face had reduced his mind to a kind of gentle frenzy, a waking dream. Parts of this had been nightmarish. At one point, the nuns had crowded into the dead woman’s small room, filling the narrow stairway since only a few could actually squeeze inside and Fortunatus and others nearest the bed had had to hold hands and press backwards to try and keep from being precipitated onto the corpse. Later, the nuns had begun a wail which gathered momentum as they beat their breasts with clenched fists and stones which some had brought in for the purpose, calling out that
they too wished to die so as to reach heaven under the guidance of the saint who had first assembled them here. Agnes and Fortunatus had been obliged to resort to physical force to quell the hysteria. The nuns had been sent off and told to get on with their regular tasks which were, or should have been, prayers in themselves. Only a few had been chosen to keep vigil. Among these was Chrodechilde, picked so that she might be under Fortunatus’s eye. Justina had undertaken to keep watch on Basina.

  Some time in the small hours of the second night while they were alone together by the dead woman’s corpse, Chrodechilde had spoken to Fortunatus. About the succession. She wanted to be abbess. Now.

  “I warn you,” she had whispered. “I have suffered sufficient ill-treatment in this convent to justify anything. I warn you, Father Fortunatus, that you would do well to come to an agreement with me. I think you know why.”

  “How”, he whispered, “can you talk like that in her presence?”

  They were standing on opposite sides of the bier where the dead woman lay.

  “I have waited”, she answered him, “until now from respect for her. She was a holy woman and a queen but she did not know what was happening right here…. I am warning you. I have discovered things which some might not like revealed in high places. I am of the royal blood. I can talk to my relatives and …”

  “Hold your tongue and pray.”

  “It was a friendly warning.”

  “Listen,” he whispered. “We have put up with you until now from respect for her, but I swear that if you make one single move to disturb the peace of this convent which she worked all her life to build, if you lift a finger to disturb it, I will lay violent hands on you. Would you”, he whispered through his teeth, “care to be the convent’s third recluse? A reluctant one? To be walled up in a small cell? If it seemed necessary for the wellbeing of the rest of the community, I would not hesitate to advise the abbess to have this done—and I, Sister Chrodechilde, am the convent’s spiritual adviser. Think about that and stop harping on your royal blood which is as cheap as the waste seed of your goatish relatives.”

  She had not replied. He saw a quiver in her undershot jaw, a pressure in her fists. It was open war now. God knew what she was meditating. He had been sick with anger against her and against himself for letting her provoke him into an outburst disgraceful in such a place and at such a time. The strength of his fury had astonished him. He had sometimes believed himself incapable of sustained feelings but lately they had been lodging in him as parasites will that slip under a man’s skin so that they suck his blood and grow and can only be removed by surgery. There was the black private anguish which he had swept into the murky corners of his mind where it boiled and threatened to break out. There was his fear and now, flaming in him with the same sour vigour as it did in Chrodechilde, there was rage. Perhaps some of the energy which had been stored in Radegunda’s body was seeping into his? He hoped it was not seeping into Chrodechilde too. He tried to calm himself by staring at the dead saint. Nobody questioned her sanctity now that she was dead. Her clothes were being preserved as relics. Her hair, nail-parings and even objects she had touched were being saved for distribution or put in reliquaries. Several minor miracles had happened within an hour of her death and news of others kept coming to the convent. Stone-cutters on a nearby hillside had heard angels arguing as to whether she should be restored to life to placate the grief of her wailing nuns.

  “No,” the angel carrying her soul upwards had been heard to reply. “It is all over now. We cannot bring her back. It is consummated. She is already in the Paradise of the Spirit. Her friends must not mourn. They must rejoice that she is at last with Him towards whom her soul was straining all the years of her life.”

  The stone-cutters claimed that they had heard the angels’ dialogue coming from a low-flying cloud-formation which some of them described as chariot-shaped and others as like a boat.

  Palladius was signalling to him.

  “Let’s walk back together.”

  “All right.”

  The two men had had no chance to speak since Radegunda’s death. Palladius had officiated at her funeral as Bishop Maroveus was, by chance or design, absent from Poitiers. They walked in silence until they had left the basilica and its outbuildings behind. When they were in open country, Palladius said:

  “The kings are cracking down on all prominent persons suspected of disloyalty. A purge. So far all affected have been laymen. The bishops’ rôle is not known.”

  A cleric from Trèves who had come for the funeral had, however, brought fresh and disquieting news. Three of the conspirators had taken refuge with bishops. Sanctuary. There was nothing suspicious in this. But the sanctuary had not been respected. One of the men had seized Bishop Magneric of Trèves and, barricading him with himself in the church house, declared that he would hold the bishop hostage for his own life. The king, caring nothing for the bishop’s safety, had set fire to the house and the clergy had had the greatest difficulty rescuing their leader.

  “Which”, said Palladius, “shows how the wind lies. That was an innocent bishop. Think what they would do to a guilty one!” The prince, he repeated urgently, must be got rid of. “Could you do the job?” he asked Fortunatus.

  “What kind of a job?”

  “Get him out of Gaul.”

  “And into heaven?” Fortunatus spoke with blunt and nervy heat. “If you’ve got another Rauching lined up somewhere you’d better say so. I won’t be part of such a scheme.”

  Palladius touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Nor will you be asked to. Just get him to Marseilles, Fortunatus. There will be a boat waiting. It can carry him to Byzantium where all good pretenders go and grow. He’ll be safe. We have connections there. He may even live to try another day.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ll have to think fast.”

  “Yes.”

  They were inside the city wall now. They fell silent again, walking slowly, taking the wall when they passed people. Fortunatus held a crushed bay-leaf to his nose. He had taken it from the bier and was sniffing it to drown the stench rising from the open sewer which flowed with a stale, scummy slither down the middle of the road.

  There was a message awaiting Fortunatus at his house. It was from Bishop Maroveus and urgent. Fortunatus was to come to him at once.

  He found the bishop in an unusual state of agitation.

  “What in God’s name”, he wanted to know, “is going on in that so-called convent?”

  Chrodechilde, it appeared, had broken out during the funeral. A score of young nuns had followed her—it seemed they had managed to steal Agnes’s key—and had presented themselves boldly at the bishop’s house.

  “There they were when I got back from my diocesan tour! Forty or so nuns from an enclosed order, having broken their vow of stability, sitting under my portico like so many trollops!”

  “What did they say?” Fortunatus felt himself invaded by a despair which was curiously relaxing. He felt numb, cold and at the same time at rest for the first time in months. So it was all up then! Chrodechilde would have told what she knew. Maroveus would inform the kings. Wouldn’t he? Of course he would. He hadn’t been invited to join the conspiracy and now had a chance to prove his loyalty to the triumphant kings. Besides, he had never cared for Fortunatus or the convent. What a justification for him! Why didn’t he get on with it then? Was he trying to torture Fortunatus by his delay, to play and torment him as one plays a fish? Curious that the torpor Fortunatus could feel in his own senses seemed to have seized the bishop too. He seemed to move like a man walking through water. His lips nibbled air and no sound came. “What did they say?” Fortunatus managed to repeat.

  The bishop’s answer took some moments to reach Fortunatus’s understanding. When it did, it dispelled the numbness and brought back the itch of fear.

  “Say!” the bishop had exploded. “You don’t imagine I listened, do you? I told them I’d have them whipped through t
he town like public women, since that was how they were behaving, if they didn’t get back inside their convent within half an hour.”

  “You didn’t listen to anything they said?”

  “Not a word, I …”

  “And did they go back to the convent?”

  “That’s what I want you to tell me!”

  Maroveus was intending, it seemed, to take the convent in hand. He did not, however, want to be blamed for the mismanagement he expected to find there. He would not involve himself yet.

  “I’ve never had dealings with them, as you know. Their choice, not mine. Their decision. I let them have their heads. If something’s gone wrong it’s no responsibility of mine. They should have been under my authority, of course, but Mother Radegunda claimed that St. Caesar’s Rule carried an exemption from episcopal jurisdiction. A very questionable claim. Very. In St. Caesar’s own diocese of Arles he could make what exemptions he liked but you can’t export things like that. Mother Radegunda of course—well, she’s dead. Better not speak ill of her. I hear she’s credited already with as many miracles as St. Hilary?”

  “She was a saintly woman.”

  “No doubt. No doubt. She was also a queen. Her successor isn’t. I shall have to look into convent affairs more closely in future, but I want to know the lie of the land before I intervene. I am told there are factions? Very disagreeable. Two of those trollops say they are related to the kings?”

  “They are.”

  “And it seems they are threatening to go lodge some complaint with their royal relatives. I wouldn’t listen but that’s what they told my deacon. I should have had them locked up. Sorry I didn’t now. I wanted to avoid a scandal, but if they head for one of the courts we’ll have a worse one.”

  “You could”, Fortunatus suggested anxiously, “send a party out to look for them. Mounted men would catch up with them easily in an hour or so.”

  “Because you don’t think they went back to the convent?”