Women in the Wall (21 page)

Agnes turned away. She and Justina were leaving the parlour when there was a thud on the floor beside her. She felt her feet being clutched. Basina had flung herself across the room and was now prostrate, groping and scrabbling at Agnes’s skirts.

“For God’s love,” she whispered, “let me stay.”

Agnes glanced at the bishop but could not detect any complicity in his face. It was caught as though in undress: halfway between the rage of a moment earlier, surprise and a slow, congealing irony.

Agnes tried to raise the girl but she refused to budge. “Keep me,” she begged. “Please keep me here. I want to stay. I’m sure I have a vocation.” Weeping, whimpering, her nails scraped the stone floor and her body seemed as flat to the ground as a sheepskin rug.

The bishop challenged. “Well, Mother Agnes?”

Agnes hesitated. “You may leave her”, she told him, “for a few days. I shall look further into this. I warn you: I am giving no undertaking at all that I shall let her stay longer.”

He inclined his head and left.

The two nuns took—they had almost to carry—the shaking girl to the store-room where an infusion was prepared for her from herbs, cinnamon, pepper and cloves. Several nuns gathered round murmuring the news to each other and trying to sooth Basina.

“Hush now,” they whispered. “Drink up. It’ll do you good. Don’t cry. You’re safe here. Safe.”

Her anxiety reassured them. The world was as bad as they had hoped. They had made no mistake in giving it up. The good life was really here behind the high convent walls with the tidy flower-beds, the scant food and furniture, and the day divided perhaps too symmetrically by canonical offices. The flatness of their life needed just this contrast to give it flavour. This shuddering resonance from the harsh storms outside enhanced the value of their own bland existence.

“Poor, poor child,” they repeated. “Think of it:
Fredegunda’s
stepdaughter!”

Here in their own store-room was a creature of fable: a princess ill-used and menaced by the jumped-up
serving-maid
, Fredegunda, who was a probable murdress and possibly even a witch. Basina’s story was interesting too with suspense. What now? Agnes, who had other things to do, left the girl to relax a while with the younger nuns.

“And had you no friends at all at the royal palace? No one who was good to you?”

Several of them were crying in sympathy. Basina was dissolved by the lens of their tears into a denizen fit for their utterly fanciful notion of a royal palace. They had all entered the convent when they were little girls no older than ten. Their imaginings must have been vaguely
liturgical
, based on the way the chapel looked at its best when gold cloths were draped on the altar, wreaths of spruce stuck with flowers hung on the walls and lights massed on every available surface: a brilliant, flickering place dangerous with dark corners and condensations of passion.

“Had you no one?”

Basina sobbed. “There was a maid … Austrechild—but Fredegunda had her tortured. She had them shave her head and tie her to a pole and whip her until she said … said my brother had asked her to poison Fredegunda’s sons. Afterwards she said it wasn’t true, but no one would listen to her then. She was burnt.” More sobs. “She looked,” whispered Basina, “… in the end, like … a hunk of butchered meat!”

“And your brother?”

Basina lifted her head and wailed like a hound.

It was almost too good. Here was evil undiluted and ill-used innocence available for rescue and comfort. The nuns were euphoric. They petted and caressed Basina, raided the dispensary-room’s stores of dried fruit and fed it to her. They took delight even in her appearance. Her dull hair and pale, shifty eyes were more satisfying than beauty.

“You’ve only to look at her to see how she’s suffered!”

Her fears lest she be sent away became the fears of all.

“Would the queen really have her killed?”

“We’ll put in good words for you with the abbess.”

“We’ll pray for you.”

When Agnes came back the girl’s resolution to remain had been stiffened many times over. Agnes’s warnings about the austerities of convent life no longer frightened her: were if anything a spice added to the welter of
sweetness
with which she felt surrounded. When Agnes repeated that royal blood earned no privileges at Holy Cross, Basina was undismayed. Her interesting story, as she had already seen, would.

“But what made you change your mind?” Agnes guessed vaguely at the unhealthy excitement the girl had aroused, sensed, as she had from the beginning, that she was not a good element to introduce into a community. She was violent—that scream at Bishop Bertram, that thudding fall at Agnes’s feet—and violence clung about her. An aura of blood, by her own fault or not, of drama, of
disturbance
followed her. Agnes could feel the change of temperature in the convent, knew that Basina’s was an explosive presence, regretted already having allowed her to stay even as long as she had. “Why?” she asked.

The girl shot a glance at her: furtive, Agnes noted, leery.

“I saw you were on my side.”

Agnes was stricken. The child was defenceless. Her mind shifted to Ingunda, blending the two girls’ histories, then tried to anchor on the undoubted fact that her duty was to think first of the convent as a whole. But her
affections
were in a receptive state. A crack, thin as a hair, had been opened in her defences. Her usual good sense had to struggle with a maternal secretion lately released and unfamiliar enough still to throw her off balance.

“Child,” she appealed, “we will help you reach sanctuary if that is what you want. You would be safe at the courts of your relatives, Queen Brunhilde or King Guntram. They are Queen Fredegunda’s enemies. But you must not try to make use of God. If you become a nun, you will be his bride. You must love him unwaveringly. He can’t be second best to you, you do see that, don’t you?”

Basina looked quickly at and then away from Agnes. “Can anyone be so sure, Mother? Were you? Have you never wavered?”

Agnes staggered. She looked hard at the girl wondering where she got the intuition to deliver such shafts? Could some supernatural voice be speaking through her? But the girl had the same obstinate, lumpy look as before. She expected hostility, had always lived with it. Probably, she could be—very gradually—won out of it. Her pale eyes gave nothing away. Like individual globules of frog-spawn before the tadpole has developed, they lay scummy, torpid but, Agnes suspected, secretly alert, in the ambush of her face. Agnes made some vague answer—she could not afterwards remember what—and put off the rest of the catechism for another day.

*

It was evening before Fortunatus appeared in answer to Agnes’s summons. Since he was now a priest, his connection with Holy Cross was more official and
visiting-hours
flexible. They met in the parlour. He
apologized
fussily for the delay. It had been caused by Bishop Bertram. Fortunatus’s voice was peculiar and he had a hunted look.

“The bishop”, he said, “arrived at the same time as your messenger. I had to entertain him. He just left. He’s spending the night with Bishop Maroveus. He has landed me with a … a problem. Shall I tell you about it or do you want to tell me yours first?”

“Tell me yours.”

“It’s confidential. We’ll have to be alone.”

Agnes nodded to Justina who was in the room with her as usual. “You may wait outside the door,” she said.

Fortunatus licked his lips, took several breaths and suddenly spoke in a loud, unnatural voice. “First let me show you a poem I’ve written.” He produced a short scroll and handed it to her. She recognized his handwriting but it was shaky and the papyrus was covered with blots. “Basina’s brother”, she read, “is not dead. He is wounded, may recover and is presently in my lodgings. Nobody knows this except Bishop Bertram, myself and now you. Basina mustn’t be told or Queen Fredegunda get wind of it. Can you hide him somewhere on the convent estate? He’ll need nursing.
This
is
highly
risky
!”

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.

[
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, “someone 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.