Women in the Wall (3 page)

The nun stood up. She was tall, almost a hand’s span taller than the poet. She fell to her knees. “Forgive me,” she said. “I have been lacking in charity.”

The poet jumped. “Radegunda,
please
! Oh dear …” He crouched opposite her so that now they looked like lovers taking a vow. “Please get up!”

“Not until you forgive me. I failed in human
understanding
. I often fail.”

“I forgive you. I forgive you. Please get up!”

She let him help her up.

“I hate it when you do things like that.
Your
kneeling to
me
is so … disproportionate … almost mocking somehow.”

“I knelt to my offended fellow creature.”

“Yes.” Fortunatus felt around him on the stone seat for his nasturtium-trumpet. It was torn. He spread it flat and held it to his eye, staring through its flaming membrane at the sun. “It is true,” he admitted, “you have lived closer to action than I. Yet, I like to believe my writing is a form of action too. I explain my position on this in one of my poems. Perhaps you remember? The one praising Launebodus for building a church to St. Saturninus? No? Oh, well, the gist is that to record the acts of the virtuous spurs others on to imitate them. As you know, I am taking notes for the story of your life. This makes my curiosity a little holy, don’t you think?”

Fortunatus closed his dazzled eyes and put the bruised nasturtium on his tongue, hoping to revive it with his saliva.

“By the same token,” said Radegunda, “if you wrote down the bloody doings of Queen Fredegunda you might deter your readers from indulging in vice. Have you ever, when at court, asked her to satisfy your holy curiosity?”

The poet swallowed the flower. He coughed, hawked it up and spat it out: a red glob. “Sorry!” He wiped his mouth. “I write about martyrs. I don’t aspire to join them. Each to his trade. Forgive me, but that sort of talk makes me nervous. Even here you never know who … Besides, there is something distasteful about the queen: fleshy.” The poet made a prim mouth. “I prefer to lie about her, to present her as she ought to be.”

Radegunda stood up.

“I was fleshy”, she said, “in my youth. Carnal. But wanton kittens make sober cats. Don’t despair of
Fredegunda
.” She smiled without embarrassment. “I have to go,” she said.

He had been bracing himself for a withdrawal but was disappointed.

“Compline,” she explained with careful courtesy. Convent offices provided endless pretexts for retreat. “God be with you.”

“And with you,” said Fortunatus. “You will”, he could not resist begging, “tell me later about what went before: your marriage with Clotair, how he came to let you go … and anything else”, he begged, “you’d care to tell me. See what you can remember.”

Radegunda remembers.

[
A.D.
552]

She remembers lying beside Clotair, her lord. Outside the wooden dwelling which is called a ‘palace’ but is really no more than a hunting-lodge, she hears the wind. It whips like black wire. This lodge is one of many, for Clotair loves to hunt. On horseback he is as skilful as a Hun and when walking looks incomplete. His legs arch, straddling an absent mount. When he rides down a boar or stag, Clotair becomes that beast. He feels with it, relishing the clash between its cunning and his own. He knows its tricks, sees the snap of twigs and saplings with the creature’s own surprise, feels a vegetable
exhilaration
as he hurtles through the bush and, in the loamy giddiness of a green-tunnelled track, would swear the beast shares his eagerness for its death. When he has it cornered, its antlers, if it is a stag, enmeshed perhaps in a branch, it is with a hard, unwavering exuberance that he plunges his weapon in its flesh.

With the same authority he plunges in and out of Radegunda’s memory. Even here, she cannot control him. The innocence in the midst of his foulness—the scope of his crimes is biblical—makes him hard to reject, impossible to quite condemn. He slithers from definition, radiant in retrospect like some dampish satyr gambolling in the light. She tries to skimp and dim his image, but the merest touch of Clotair is like ginger in a stew. Its pungency swamps the rest.

Radegunda has galloped after her lord at the hunt and sat with him at table. Now she lies beside him on the feather mattress of their gold-balustered bed. He is kneeling up, his thighs bandy in their triumphant arch, his arms under her belly as he pulls her, backside foremost, towards him so that her buttocks rear into the space between his thighs. She can feel his hairy parts delicately brushing her skin as Clotair plays with her body. He plays gently, frolicsomely, nuzzling and teasing as a
soft-mouthed
hound will play with a frail young puppy. His touch is light. His fingers ripple along her spine with the movement of lake-waves on a beach. Face in the linen sheet, she imagines her own long white vulnerable back and wonders does it remind him of the back of the deer he killed at the hunt. She clenches her teeth and forbids her flesh to respond to his. She grinds her face into a goose-down pillow, bites her hand until she can taste blood and prays to the Christian God to deliver her from pleasure. Clotair rams his member into the recesses of her body and she screams. “Oh God!” she screams, “No,” she screams, “No, God, No!”

Clotair is laughing.

“
I
am your god,” he whispers. “You were on your knees praying to
me
!
You couldn’t help it, Radegunda! You are as proud as the boar in the forest but you can’t resist me any better than it can! I can feel your pleasure,” he says with lordly confidence. “I feel it as surely as my own.”

“I do my conjugal duty.”

“No, my pet, you do much more! Much, much more!” He caresses her and she lies rigid in the dark, hating her own response to his caress.

Hating it still in memory, she is glad to remember what happened next.

When he was asleep, she sat up very, very quietly, edged to the side of the bed and was stealing out of the room when he called:

“Radegunda!”

“My lord?”

“What is it? Where are you going?”

“I have to go outside a moment.”

“Even the saints piss!” He laughed. “Even my nun-like wife! Ha!”

A moment later he was snoring.

The man lying across their door was asleep. Radegunda stepped over him and walked downstairs and out through the hall where more men and serving-girls were lying about, many of them in each other’s arms. She opened the outer door and the black wind struck her body like the blow of a club. She stepped outside, pulling the door behind her with difficulty. She removed her heavy fur coat under which she wore nothing. Then she rolled naked in the snow, moving quickly lest the skin freeze to the hard, frozen ground underneath and be torn from her body. When she could stand it no longer, she put on her fur coat and crept back into the palace and through the hall. She was stiff with pain and her body was shaking violently. She did not return to where Clotair was sleeping but let herself into a small room containing a wooden kneeler and a chest. Opening the chest, she took out a folded garment, shook it out and, again removing her fur cloak, put it on. It was made of haircloth. She knelt on the kneeler.

But she was not alone for long. Her prayer was
interrupted
by a knock and a whisper from beyond the door.

“Radegunda, it’s Chlodecharius.”

“Come in.”

A young man wearing woollen breeches and a fur tunic slipped quietly in, kissed her, then sat on the chest.

“I saw you just now”, he whispered, “trying to freeze the memory of his touch from your skin. You still hate him.”

“He is my husband. I owe him obedience.”

“You owe him a short sword between the ribs. Or a poisoned stirrup-cup. Who chose him for your husband? Not you. Not your family.” The young man’s face was pale. His eyes were flecked like a trout’s belly. His hands twitched as he talked and there was a tic in his cheek. “The bloody murderer,” he whispered. Trembling and trying not to, he gripped the edges of the chest and his knuckles went white as ivory dice.

“God will judge his murders,” whispered Radegunda. She shivered.

“You’ll get a fever from these nightly outings of yours! That’ll be another murder God will have to judge.”

“He treats me well.”

“Well! I’ve seen the marks of a whip on your back. It was striped like a slave’s just now when you were out there! My sister’s! And I …” The young man trembled furiously.

“I whipped myself.”

“You must think I’m a moron if you think I’ll believe …”

Radegunda took a discipline from behind the kneeler and lashed herself with it on the back. Peeling down the haircloth dress, she showed the mark. The young man groaned.

“Why?”

“To subdue my flesh.”

Chlodecharius laughed without amusement. “A nun! They all say it! Washing beggars’ feet. Distributing alms, praying all night—and now this! Ha!” His sour laugh swelled cautiously. He didn’t want to be overheard. He whispered in a voice gasping with emotion, coughed, tried to stifle his cough and was shaken by dry, soundless, probably painful convulsions. It was clear that his own weakness maddened him. “You,” he managed at last, “you commit ad-adultery with Ch-Christ! You deceive your earthly husband with a heavenly one. The king with God! Nice, I suppose, the perfect slap to his pride—but, well, that’s no solution for me!”

“You?”

“He is going to have me killed.” Chlodecharius slipped off the coffer and began to walk silently about. His breath came in nervous gasps. “On the sly. An accident? A brawl? A highwayman? Poison? What do I know? I’ve been tipped off. I talk too much, it seems. My anger irks him. My silence too. I lurk. I look morose. My humiliation gives him no pleasure but some anxiety and Clotair doesn’t suffer any irk at all for long. I suppose he suffered as he did because
you
please him. He likes to violate your white, unwilling flesh. It must be a novel enough sensation to sleep with a would-be nun: cuckolding the creator as it were. It’s kept you in favour and me alive for fourteen years. Perhaps it’s losing its novelty? Anyway I’ve been tipped the wink. The thing is: where do I go? To
Constantinople
to join Hamalafred? It’s a longish journey in mid winter with the roads under ells of mud. But the danger is urgent. Also, there’s another matter …”

“Chlodecharius! You wouldn’t leave me?”

“It may be a matter of method, sister: whether I go feet first or with them firmly under me. From what I’ve been told I’d be unwise to delay. We both know Clotair. Not just a killer in war but—well, though there’s no need to go back so far, remember how he butchered his infant nephews!”

“Take refuge in a church or with his brother. There’s no love between them.”

“Radegunda, help me kill him.”

Radegunda made the sign of the cross. “Chlodecharius, you’re a Christian!”

“So’s Clotair. It’s never stopped him, has it? It won’t stop him killing me! Radegunda, you’re the last of my family. You’re my only ally here. Give me your fur cloak. With it on—we look enough alike—I can slip into his bedroom and avenge our family! Put an end to your martyrdom. Even,” he was leaning over her, gripping her shoulder, hissing with excitement, “even if they kill us both afterwards, Radegunda, we will die with honour!”

“Honour!”

“Listen, we needn’t die at all.” His breath was beery on her face. His eyes flickered like fish. Suddenly rigid, he listened for a sound at the door. Nothing there? “
Radegunda
!” tightening his grip on her shoulder-bone, “we can saddle horses and escape to the court of Metz or Paris or Brittany. The three of us.”

“Three?”

“Agnes …”

“Agnes?” Radegunda’s voice rose imprudently. “Little Agnes—you’ve been …”

“No! I’m in—I want to marry her. She wants it too.”

“She’s only … Agnes is only eleven! How could you? A
child
!”

“Almost twelve: the canonical age for matrimony. We could get married now. An understanding priest …” The flickering eye. He was irresolute. She daren’t trust him. Soft lower lip and besides … No.

Radegunda stood, gripping the arm-rest of the kneeler with fingers fierce as claws. “You’d take Agnes from me! You’d sully her flesh. Make her … into a … female! Chlodecharius, Agnes is my pupil. I was teaching her noble things. How to live alone! I spend hours with her every day, I trusted her and all the time you were
insinuating
yourself, worming in. How come she never spoke to me of you? Why was she ashamed?”

Chlodecharius let go her shoulder, stepped away. “There’s nothing wrong with loving, Radegunda. Or being shy about it. You chose Agnes because you were lonely, because she is innocent, gay … We are brother and sister. Is it so odd we should have the same tastes?”

“Taste!” Radegunda spat the word with contempt and a spray of spittle as though cleaning her mouth after it.

“In friendship …”

“
Friendship
, Chlodecharius! Do you truly mean ‘friendship’? ‘Amicitia’? How come then that she is ashamed of yours and hides it from me. You’ve aroused her senses, haven’t you? You’ve made her ashamed? How far have you gone? Tell me.”

The young man’s face was lean and pointed: a hound’s face. Now its pallor was unevenly suffused with pink. He stared angrily at his sister: “Radegunda, are you making a jealousy scene?”

“Jealousy?”

“What else?” He walked to the window, pulled back a shutter and peered out. “Dawn. I told you my life is in danger. There’s something going on in Thuringia. I’ve been waiting for news. But the roads are impassable. Maybe next spring—unless Clotair has intercepted a message? Listen, the matter of Agnes is unimportant. I wish to God I’d never mentioned … look, she’s just a
child
I’m fond of.” Chlodecharius spun round and hissed bitterly in his sister’s ear, “Don’t you suppose I get lonely in this court? I am kept under surveillance, spied on, expected to be in sight. Absence is interpreted to mean plotting, silence to mean bitterness. I must be seen to enjoy myself, to laugh, hunt, chase women …”

“So you choose my pupil, a girl whose spirit I have been trying to protect …”

“You are ungenerous, Radegunda! Maybe that was why I liked her. After all you brought me up too,
remember
? You infused a little of your sadness into us both. We console it in each other. You don’t ask what I meant about Thuringia. Now that something’s finally moving, after all these years, don’t you care? There may be a war!” Snapping his fingers in front of her eyes. “Radegunda! Are you listening?”

“Listening! Your mind stinks, Chlodecharius. I may have brought you up but you have escaped me! It stinks of sex and death: the double curse God inflicted on man when he threw him out of Eden. Fallen Man is subject to death and so must reproduce himself by sexual means. That is the meaning of the serpent that grows out of man’s loins and plunges itself into women: rot, Chlodecharius, puncturing, blood, pain! Our family is sensual,
Chlode
charius
! We must restrain our nature!” She licked the lathering anger on her lips.

Chlodecharius shrugged. “Is it life or death you hate? Are you reproaching me with wanting to kill Clotair or marry Agnes? Which?”

She turned away, sank back to the kneeler, let her face fall into her hands. “Both,” she whispered. “I want Agnes to be pure as I can never be again. Ever.”

Chlodecharius’s voice came from behind her back, cold now and very steady: “What about me, Radegunda?”

She raised and turned her head. He was trembling and his mouth was set in a mean, sour line. Hating her. Poor Chlodecharius! Twenty-four years old and nothing to be proud of. Weak in a place where weakness was shame. She loved him but her love was like lava inside a volcano. It did not easily emerge. “You must”, she said, “be patient. Listen, I will intercede with Clotair for you. If I ask him a direct favour he will never deny me. I will do this when he wakes tomorrow!”

Her brother walked back to the shutter. “It’s tomorrow now,” he said. “No use arguing then:
you
ask the favour on your knees and
I
get a reprieve—for the moment. His humour changes with the wind and we are at its mercy. We are like leaves stripped from a tree. We have no root, no place, no nourishing sap. Exiles. Is there any difference between us and slaves? I will talk to you of this again. Meanwhile be thinking. Think what it would mean if we could get away and reach Constantinople. To Hamalafred and Amalaberg!”

Radegunda walked over to him. She ran a finger down the hollow of his cheek. It was as much of a gesture of affection as she could manage. “We would be exiles still, Chlodecharius!”

“How can you say that?” The young man was congested. “Hamalafred”, he urged, “has made himself a position there. He has received titles from the Emperor. We would have a family there! Blood-ties, affection, security! My God, Radegunda, what else makes life worth living? Land, Radegunda, is not what makes a home! It’s kin, kin to defend you and back you up! Kin, Radegunda, kin! Blood-kin. If someone maims me or kills me to whom is compensation due? To my next-of-kin. And if I have none to demand it, am I not the most vulnerable man alive? Am I not weaker than a slave since a slave’s master will defend him? In his own interests! That’s what exile means, Radegunda. We’re dependent on Clotair’s whim! But in Constantinople …” His pale, mackerel-flecked eyes were sensuous with longing. “Constantinople,” he
whispered
urgently, “Radegunda …
think
!”