Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  “I doubt it very much indeed, my lord bishop!”

  Maroveus gave him an appraising look. “I think you’d better tell me what has been going on there,” he commanded. “Frankly, Father Fortunatus, and in full. You, too,” he thought fit to remind him, “will be working in closer association with me and my authority from now on.”

  *

  “And so?” Bishop Palladius’s toe, leatherclad and nervous, followed mosaic designs on the floor: interlocked squares which deceived the eye or perhaps were not regular. “What did you tell him?”

  “The minimum. The necessary.”

  “A lie?”

  “No. Too risky. An incomplete truth.”

  “What?”

  “That the girl’s dangerous, a bit mad, likely to create unsavoury scandals—as bad for him as for the convent. He has neglected his duties towards Holy Cross. The kings wouldn’t like that. He didn’t even attend Radegunda’s funeral and she was a relative of theirs. They’d take it as a slight. He has to be careful. He asked me,” Fortunatus paused in astonishment, “did I mean the girl was ‘some sort of saint’?”

  “Meaning that Radegunda …”

  “Was herself a bit mad? Precisely. Maroveus is oddly impervious to the spiritual. For a bishop … Well …”

  “He intends to take things in hand?”

  “Yes. He’s sent out men to look for the runaway nuns. He is ignoring Agnes. He should, normally, have consulted her. He may be thinking of supporting a change of abbess. A clean slate, you know.”

  “But Radegunda left a testament naming her.”

  “Yes. I don’t think he could go against it. He will try to interfere more than he did though. The abbess, whoever she is, will be under his authority.”

  “The prince”, said Palladius, “has to be gone when those nuns get back. All trace of him. Then Chrodechilde can say what she likes. We’ll say she’s mad. Malicious. You must leave tonight. I’ll tell Maroveus you’ve gone on a mission for me.”

  “What mission?”

  Palladius twitched his supple spine. “I’ll think up something. You could have gone to receive a relic coming from Byzantium. Off a boat. At Marseilles. That way if you’re seen …” He didn’t bother to finish. “I’ll lend you my own retainers. No time to find others. Besides, they’re reliable. If Maroveus feels slighted I’ll calm him down. He’s going to need episcopal support when he starts trying to bring the convent under his rule. I’ll promise mine. Quid pro quo.”

  *

  Later, in the dark, Fortunatus, on his way to the prince’s cottage, passed close beneath the stricken convent wall. A sour blast of kitchen air exhaled from a grating and assaulted his nose with fumes of woodsmoke, fat, soap, turning milk and burning oil. Two nuns were sitting at a window. Pale silhouettes, they were puffed, he could tell in the starlight, like a pair of anxious hens. Rustling. One held a bowl of something—nuts? Grain? She was whispering and eating and nudging her companion. Continuously: nudge, eat, whisper, nudge. The hand flew from bowl to mouth. The elbow pulsed and poked like a striving but ineffectual wing. Talk burst from her in vehement congested clots and although Fortunatus could not hear a word he had a fair idea of what was being discussed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  [A.D. 587]

  It was eight days since the fugitive nuns had left Holy Cross. It had rained. Mud foamed in every hollow and had yellowed their woollen habits to the knee. Soiled below, white on top, they struggled across country, advancing with the gait of bedraggled and frightened fowl. They avoided main roads. Not daring to present themselves at inns, much less at the religious houses along the way, they had slept one night in a pile of hay, another in a shepherd’s hut. Only in Tours, where it had been assumed that they were going to return to their convent, had they had decent lodgings. Once they had been lost for half a day while they tramped doubtfully back and forth through fields of soft mud. Later, they managed to get a boat down the Clain. Chrodechilde paid for their passage with a piece of cloth taken from the convent, but had not much left for bartering now. Bishop Maroveus of Poitiers had given them short shrift; Bishop Gregory of Tours shorter still.

  “Which we might have expected!” Chrodechilde observed bitterly. “A friend of Fortunatus’s! But we had to try. We tried the proper way first. That’ll be remembered in our favour.”

  “What other way is there?”

  “We’ll find one.”

  The nuns wept from vexation, cold and fear. Their feet were blistered, their hands chilblained and several had had to throw away their broken shoes.

  “Holy Christ, we were mad to follow you! Raving. Mad as poor Nantilde.”

  One nun had lost her mind. It had been a weak fluttering thing at best. Now it had flickered out. She became incontinent, subject to fits, and drooled and babbled. But they tolerated her. They must stick together. Chrodechilde had persuaded them of this.

  “If we leave her and she’s found, how long do you think it’ll be before they find us? Besides, she might do anything! We’d be blamed. Best keep an eye on her.”

  By now the Counts of Tours and Poitiers must have set men on their trail. Bishop Gregory had threatened that they would be rounded up like cattle if they did not return to Holy Cross.

  “You can bring whatever charges you have against your abbess before a properly set-up Ecclesiastical Court,” he told them. “But until you return to your convent and obedience to your superiors, I won’t listen to one word you say!”

  But they were afraid to go back and as for appearing before an Ecclesiastical Court—who knew what penalties it might inflict on them? Their voices dropped, muttering in morose, horrified excitement. Thoughts of the soldiers who might be seeking them along the main roads both thrilled and appalled.

  “What do they do to people like us?”

  No one knew. They could speculate though. A nun who had lived in the royal palace as a child remembered how “One Ash Wednesday the bishop preached such a violent sermon against the sins of the flesh that it was decided all whores were to be whipped in the palace courtyard. The men who had lain with them were forced to hoist them on their shoulders. The women’s skirts were thrown over their heads and they were whipped until they were as raw as butchered meat. I was six but I’ve never forgotten the sight.”

  “If you’d been more than six maybe they’d have had you up there too!”

  “Whipping’s the least we can expect. They might brand us with a hot iron!”

  “They might immure us!”

  “Cut out our tongues!”

  “That’s enough of that talk,” said Chrodechilde. “We’re on our way to the court of King Guntram who is uncle to Basina and myself. If we can reach him, he’ll see we get justice. He’ll protect us from the bishops. He’s never been afraid of them.”

  “Well, why are we going south then? Isn’t his court in orléans?”

  “Didn’t you hear them say in Tours that he is staying on his estates near Avignon? Once we get to him, he’ll load us with gifts and new clothes and see we are properly treated.”

  “But meanwhile we have to pass back through the Poitou! What if we’re caught?”

  “We’re out of the Poitou now,” said Chrodechilde who was not sure of this. In the last day or so things had leaped out of her control. It was as though she had started a precipitation, something like a mountain slide when all she had meant to do was to dislodge some small stones. In the first place she had not planned to leave the convent at all. She had tried to get the ear of the bishop who had come to officiate at Radegunda’s funeral—a thing she had a perfect right to do by convent-Rule. In the case of grave infractions, an appeal, it stated, might be made to a bishop. And the infraction was certainly grave. Basina, on recognizing her brother in the convent garden, had realized that she must have seen him once or twice before dressed as a peasant woman. At the time she had dismissed the notion that the tenant seen delivering produce to one of the convent kitchens could possibly be her dead brother even thoug
h the resemblance was striking. Now she knew better. He—he had been unable to conceal his emotion—had recognized her.

  “Why didn’t he let you know before?” Chrodechilde had wondered. “Are you sure?” she insisted, being eager to establish this major irregularity as firmly as could be done.

  Basina was sure. “What I think”, she decided after considering half a dozen other explanations, “is that Clovis is having a love affair with some nun. That means he cares for her safety more than he does for me! Oh,” she had cried with vexation, “to think how I cried for him when I thought he was dead! I could hit myself. But maybe it’s not that. Maybe there’s some other reason? I can’t think of one which would keep him from telling me he was alive though. Blood’s blood. Who do you suppose is his paramour?”

  “The abbess.” Chrodechilde chose the most dramatic hypothesis.

  “She’s too old.”

  “Old meat is gamey! Anyway who else could make all the arrangements to have him hidden?”

  That was what Chrodechilde had tried to tell Bishop Palladius.

  He had pretended not to hear. Astoundingly, he had walked away. Chrodechilde had run after him and he had turned on her and hissed between his teeth:

  “Sister, I advise you to keep your mouth shut if you value your own safety!” Seeing her astonishment, he had produced with speedy unction “Woe to her by whom scandal cometh! I say to you it were better that a millstone were hung about her neck and that she were drowned. Or”, he leaned his face venomously into hers, “that her evil, babbling tongue were slit!” Suddenly, he put his forefinger and thumb into Chrodechilde’s gaping mouth, caught her tongue and gave it a harsh little pinch. Then he turned, with a swish of purple silk, and sped off at top speed.

  It was only then that Chrodechilde knew the matter was grave. Up to now she had been half playing a game, testing her luck, groping and guessing her way around a world in which she was not quite at home and whose rules she had not quite learned. There had always been something of a game in her opposition to Agnes. Always, she had expected that at some moment one or other would call ‘pax’ and come to an agreement. She had boasted that one day she might be abbess but clearly the boast had something theatrical to it—like the stigmata which she had persuaded the other novices to join her in faking when they were children. She was twenty-one now but her life had experienced no break. The events which shake a girl out of childhood had not come her way. Betrothal, marriage and motherhood were not for her. All she knew was the convent and life there was lived at one or more removes from reality. Brides of an invisible Bridegroom, the nuns wore white and wedding rings as little girls do when they play at being brides. Religious ritual prolonged childhood play. The convent was full of correspondences. Radegunda’s burning Christ’s initials on her flesh was more violent but of the same order as other rites aimed at finding sensory symbols for the secret rapture of the soul. Inner outer, hidden public: opposites called to each other and, as the nuns were assumed to be taken up by a perpetual inner dialogue with their Spouse, so their calendar was a succession of meaningful ceremonies, and their sacristy as brimful of props as a circus tent. Wednesday was Christ’s birthday, Friday his death day but also—since paganism had not been forgotten—it was Venus’s and Frigg’s day and a bad day to start anything. When everything had as much meaning as this, doubt could not but arise as to whether anything had any meaning at all. Reality, Chrodechilde felt, was fugitive as a fish. She reached for it and it wriggled slick in her grasp. She played with words, but was never sure quite how serious they might be. “The abbess has a paramour,” she hazarded, “there is something going on in this convent!” When she discovered that indeed there was, she could not cope. She tried to talk to Bishop Palladius and he threatened her. She turned to Bishop Maroveus and he refused to listen. Unable to let go now, she urged her following to make the trudging trip to Tours to see Bishop Gregory. Only when she got the same response from him did she begin to measure the cynicism of the world outside the convent: the world proper. In that unknown ‘world’ she had one asset: her blood. How good was it? She did not know but had to find out. She persuaded her following to turn back, after heading north to Tours, and head south for Avignon and King Guntram. Guiding themselves as best they could by the sun—since they were keeping off the roads—they were hoping to reach the Garonne and a boat.

  “Chrodechilde! Water! A river! Look!”

  “The Garonne!”

  “Or the Dordogne!”

  “Surely we passed that?”

  “Rivers wind. This might be another loop of it.”

  “Pessimist! Death’s head! God, I have a thorn in my foot. Someone help me get it out. Please.”

  “Holy St. Caesar, how hungry I am! Are we to beg or what when we reach a town? One where we’ll be safe I mean?”

  “I hear men! Hide! Quick!”

  The nuns scattered. Most reached the cover of dense undergrowth. A few laggards plunged and crouched precariously inside a near-by hazel thicket. Moments later a boar hurtled past, belly to ground: a bristling streak of terror so close they could have touched it. It was followed so hard by dogs that one seized its hindleg as it passed the thicket. At once another—a bitch, as they were able to see in a moment—had the animal by the neck and then the whole pack were fastened into it and rolling like a tug-of-war team as the creature rushed and charged in its last, hopeless efforts to rid itself of its attackers. The stragglers among the dogs failed to gain any purchase for their jaws and raced about yelping and being trampled as the compact mass ebbed and heaved like a single multi-limbed creature. The nuns clutched each other.

  “Holy Saints! It’s coming in here!”

  “Sushsh!”

  “I’ve got blood on me! I’m bitten!”

  “Shut your mouth, will you?”

  But their shrieks had betrayed them before they realized that the pack of dogs had been followed by a pack of huntsmen. These, turning their attention from the dead boar, were now staring with interest at the thicket.

  A fur-cloaked rider nudged his horse sideways towards the thicket and slowly thrust a long lance into the middle of it. The girls backed away from the weapon, pushing and toppling over onto each other. Chrodechilde, being in front, was pitched out of the bushes so that she landed on hands and knees almost under a horse’s hooves. The horse’s rider reined back, stared at her and began to laugh.

  “Well by God we’ve come on odd game!” he told his companions. “Are there any more in there? Haul them out!” He jerked his chin towards the thicket. Several men had dismounted and were already probing the greenery which was soon a turmoil of shrieks and scratches, squirms and hisses, lunging and spitting like any moil of maddened cats.

  Chrodechilde stood up, brushed her skirt and lifted her over-prominent jaw.

  “I”, she stated, “am the Princess Chrodechilde, daughter of the late King Charibert and a nun at Holy Cross convent in Poitiers. I am in search of sanctuary. Who are you?”

  The rider looked amused. “I am Duke Childeric the Saxon and no respecter of rank or sex as you would know if you knew anything. No respecter either of trollops who make up fancy lies.” He stared with curiosity at the women who were being dragged out of the bushes.

  “I think they are nuns, my lord!” said a huntsman. “Maybe we’d better not make too free with them?” He nodded at a man who had lifted one of the nun’s skirts and was sliding his hand along her thigh. The nun was in tears, wild-eyed and clearly too bewildered to try and defend herself.

  Another man laughed. “What if they are nuns? Nuns aren’t snails. They don’t carry their cloister on their backs. Outside their convent they’re fair game.”

  A third made an appreciative noise, smacking his lips together as the first one found and showed off the nun’s crotch.

  Childeric lifted a long-tailed whip, swirled it and fetched the man assaulting the nun a smart cut on the cheek. “Enough of that,” he said.

  The man clapped his hand to his
cheek. When he removed it, his fingers were dripping with blood.

  Chrodechilde grasped Basina’s elbow and propelled her towards Childeric. “If you’re duke here,” she told him, “you owe allegiance to King Chilperic’s son. This is his daughter, Princess Basina.”

  The duke looked at her. “Basina?” he wondered. “Ah yes, Audovera’s daughter. Yes. I remember the story. She was forced into a convent all right! I suppose you might be she. Well,” he grinned, “you can’t blame us for your reception. Who’d expect to find a herd of holy ladies hiding like conies in a thicket?”

  He stared at Chrodechilde. “You needn’t be so afraid,” he mocked.

  “We could not fight you,” Chrodechilde told him contemptuously and her jaw rose like a weightless scales. “But you don’t frighten us. In our convent there was as much bravery as you could know. Our foundress was the holy Radegunda who burned her flesh to the bone with live coals for Christ’s love. Would any of your men do that?” She stared fiercely around her. “Why”, she poked a disgusted toe at the boar’s dismembered carcass, “did you not whip off your dogs? Can’t you even discipline them?”

  “We like to remind them what the chase is about lest they forget the function for which nature made them,” Childeric’s grin widened, “as happens to women in convents!” He roared with laughter and the men around him took up the roar. Through his laughter, the duke kept trying to outstare Chrodechilde. The nuns watching felt the two glances lock like fists. Chrodechilde’s nostrils flared. Her eyes were pale, wide and steady. The duke stopped laughing. “Proud,” he remarked. “Sinfully proud for a holy nun. Well, we may have interests in common. We’ll have to look into that. If you’ll forgive the impetuosity of my men just now and agree to ride one with each of them, we may just have enough horses to get you back to my villa. What do you say? You needn’t be afraid. You said you were seeking sanctuary. My wife and her women are there. Will you come with me?” he asked Chrodechilde.

  She scrutinized him, trying to understand what was behind the noisy challenge of these men and what value they put on her. It was Basina whose title had impressed the duke but it was herself he had invited to mount his horse.