‘What do you mean, Sister?’ asked the abbess. The child had been in the nunnery for a week, and the sisters were in confabulation about her, sitting round the table in order of rank.
‘There was filth from the carcasses it had been eating, all outside the cave, at the entrance,’ said Sor Blancha, ‘but within not a scrap, not a bone nor a morsel lying around. And the cubs’ dung had all been removed – the mother wolf had cleaned it up. It smelt like a well-kept kennel. Quite clean.’
‘But what are you telling us, Sister?’
‘They say this child was reared by a wolf. Well, if so, it must have learned some cleanliness in that regard. We should give it the means to be clean, and see what happens.’
‘A litter tray, do you mean?’
‘And see what happens. Standing upright and wearing clothes and learning words will all be very difficult; but using dug earth . . .’
‘Josefa,’ said Sor Agnete, making Josefa jump out of her skin – she expected to be disregarded, not called upon to speak, being the newest and the least of the company – ‘you have spent most time with the child. What do you think?’ Then, when Josefa coloured and stammered, she added, ‘Give us the benefit of any observations you have made.’
‘She is unhappy,’ said Josefa.
‘Unhappy?’ said Sor Agnete in amazement. ‘That isn’t what I meant to ask at all . . .’
The abbess laid a gentle hand on Sor Agnete’s sleeve. ‘Tell us what you meant, Josefa,’ she said.
‘Not unhappy as one of us might be,’ said Josefa. ‘Not in the mind. But in the body, like a raging thirst. She hates us; she hates confinement; she longs to run free. I think we have no hold on her; only meat. She is hungry all the time, and if we were cruel enough, she would perhaps do things for meat.’
‘If we were cruel?’
‘If we withheld food, unless she did things.’
‘I don’t know how much scope we have for that,’ said Sor Blancha. ‘If she doesn’t give in and get food, she may starve in our keeping. She is nearly starving now.’
‘Have we any other way to try?’ asked the abbess.
Nobody knew of one.
‘Then we will try the litter tray, and we will try withholding food unless she is wearing a shift. One thing is certain – we cannot present a stark naked female to be questioned by a cardinal. She must wear clothes.’
‘Mother,’ said Josefa, greatly daring.
‘Yes, child?’
‘I think we should talk to her more. Whoever is with her, should. Talk. About anything except . . .’
‘What is the point of talking to a thing that understands not a single syllable?’ asked Sor Juana.
‘That is how babes are loved,’ said Josefa. ‘A mother sings and talks ceaselessly to a babe from its first hours. She has no thought of waiting for it to understand her.’
‘Did we undertake to love the creature?’ said the abbess. ‘Perhaps we did. Perhaps when we agreed to teach her, we agreed to that. Well, God will help us. If it is for his greater glory that we should succeed, he will show us the way. Talk to her, then.’
12
Everyone knew, of course, that Lazaro and Miguel had been promised gold by the swimmer. And of course nobody, not even Lazaro and Miguel, expected them to get it. Not, that is, until the swimmer had managed to get himself home again. All the while that Palinor had spent in the prefect’s lock-up in the citadel, the idea of the promised reward had been clearly in suspense; Esperanca, Lazaro’s mother, visiting and feeding the prisoner, had been the butt of extensive if not unkind laughter. Setting a sprat to catch a mackerel was what she was about – everyone could see that. But poor Esperanca could barely afford the sprats. The fish Palinor had eaten in prison had been easy, they had been taken straight from Lazaro’s catch. The loaf a day had been far harder to find, and although Miguel’s wife had done her best to help, she had children to feed and very little to spare. Esperanca had offered to make shirts for the baker’s children in exchange for Palinor’s loaves. The children were numerous, and she could not afford lamp oil to work after nightfall, so she had sat at her neighbours’ hearths, in the light of their lamps, for many evenings, while they teased her, and demanded to know what the gold, when it came, would be spent on.
‘Lamp oil of my own, first,’ she would say, smiling.
‘Why, but you won’t be sewing when you’re rich, will you?’ the householder would say. ‘You’ll be wearing other people’s needlework and lording it over us.’
‘I would never forget a kindness, even if I was as rich as the three kings,’ said Esperanca.
‘Come, tell us what you would buy if you had five gold solidi,’ her neighbour’s husband asked her. It was a good game; everyone wanted to share it.
‘A change of clothes for Lazaro, so he wouldn’t have to stand mother-naked while I scrub fish-scales off his trousers,’ she said, the darting needle held in suspense while she closed her eyes and dreamed. ‘And the same for me. Honey-plums for Miguel’s children – and for yours, of course, neighbour . . . a pane of glass for the window that faces north . . . I don’t know. What does one do with money?’
‘Money can breed money,’ said the neighbour wisely. ‘A new boat for Lazaro, and he would prosper.’
But Esperanca thought if he didn’t need to fish every day Lazaro would lie in the shade lazily mending nets. As she sewed, she plotted and planned. She had washed the clothes Palinor had been given by the townsfolk in the excitement of his first arrival, more than once collecting them from the prison and returning them at evening. But they were stained and filthy from the dirt of the lock-up. When his warrant to travel came through, she knew, he would need something decent. She had opened her dowry chest and cast a shrewd eye on her brother’s things. He had drowned a quarter-century ago, and she had never let her husband have them, but now she had thought she might be able to let them out a bit for Palinor.
When Palinor had ridden out of the town escorted by the prefect himself, the news had given both Miguel and Lazaro and their families a time of glory – Esperanca especially, since she had been the one who had kept Palinor alive all those months. They thought at first that the moment he reached Ciudad a rider would come galloping back with the purses of gold and rubies; but time went by and by and no such thing occurred.
Sor Blancha was right about the cleanliness of wolves. The moment she was provided with a tray of loose earth, the child defecated only there, and covered her turds at once, scratching loose earth over them. It became plain to Sor Blancha and to Josefa that she disliked urinating on the floor – she did not use the earth box for that – and that she scratched and whined at the door before wetting herself. They put a belt around her, and looped a rope through the belt, so that they could open the door and let her out at such times. She would resort to the nettles to pee in, seeming insensitive to the weals the stings raised on her buttocks and sides.
Over the wearing of a shift however, a long and terrible battle was fought day after day. She resisted it as though it were death. Day after day, as evening approached, two or three of the sisters would arrive to help Josefa. They would overpower the child and force her, rigid with fright and hatred, into the coarse linen shifts that old Sor Berenice cobbled up for her day after day. When the shift was on, Josefa would at once produce the dish of raw meat – the abbess had secured a supply of carcasses from the shepherds on the nearest pastures – and the child was so frantic with hunger that she would run, down on her hands and knees, shift and all, and eat. She put her face down to the bowl and bolted the food, throwing up her head and swallowing with convulsive movements of her upper body. When the dish was empty, she would tear off her garment and then curl naked in the straw and sleep, though the least movement towards her, however much asleep she seemed, would rouse her to a wakeful, baleful stare, and a rumbling growl.
Sor Berenice devised a shift of heavy canvas, buckled with leather straps. Though it took the child several hours to extricate hersel
f from that, she managed it by morning. Every morning when Josefa crossed the garth and opened the door of the wolf-child’s pen, the child was naked in her straw. Josefa thought she was thinner than ever, but dared not break the link between food and clothing by giving her any morsel to eat in the day. Fretting about the child’s stunted and starving appearance, Josefa tried mixing other things with the meat – some vegetable roots, some scraps of bread – but with an uncanny skill the child separated the meat and ate only that, leaving the mild and wholesome savours in the bowl.
Josefa was as good as her word about talking; she droned on hour after hour, calling the child by her name, Amara; telling her all about Margalida, and how she was sure her father by now regretted letting his daughter go; and about the little ups and downs of the nuns’ kitchen and kitchen garden; and then telling her the goblin tales and magic stories she remembered her mother telling, long ago. She kept well clear of the lives of the saints, in case God got into them while she was unawares. She had convinced herself, before the end of the summer, that the daily struggle over the putting on of the shift had become less desperate and that Amara was listening to her flow of talk – not, she had to admit, as a child might listen, but as a dog might.
The change of season at Sant Clara brought drifts of mist, floating in from the sea and engulfing the wooded heights and crags of the mountains. The nunnery was not dependent on the world beyond the mountain passes, and a sort of relief, a certainty of peace descended on them with the mist that isolated them for days together. The days were without distance and the nights without stars at such times, and dusk crept on by such small stages that the canonical hours went by guesswork.
In such a mist, and when they least expected it, the abbey had visitors. They were announced by the sound of baying dogs and the clatter of horses’ hooves on the stony path – an uproar of dogs and horses, neighing and clattering at the gates, the tinkle of harness and the sound of men’s voices. A hunting party, lost in the mountain forests, coming by accident upon the path to Sant Clara, hungry and damp and cold, were asking for shelter. The abbess went down to them, with Sor Agnete at her side.
‘I am Guillem Nagarri, Mother,’ said the hunt leader. ‘I and my friends are severely lost; we have been on the open mountain for two days. In Christian charity, can you shelter us till the mist lifts off?’
The abbess stared at him. With a more piercing gaze, Sor Agnete stared too. She saw a young man in the prime of youth, gorgeously dressed, though all his clothes were wet. A silver hunting horn hung from his buckler, and his horse was a fine mount, with chased and gilded harness. A merchant’s son, perhaps. He had a coarse and florid complexion to an eye used to gazing only on the faces of clerics, or women, but an expression of brainless benignity. Around him his hounds swarmed restlessly, swaying their great heads. Behind him his companions stood, gloomy and blue-lipped with cold.
‘This is a nunnery,’ said the abbess. ‘We cannot admit you here.’
‘We are desperate with cold and damp,’ said Guillem, ‘and very tired. A farm outhouse would do. A barn; any roof.’
The two nuns conferred together. ‘We have a guest-house with its own garth,’ the abbess said. ‘You may stay there; we will send firewood for you to have some warmth. Your dogs and horses you can put in the upper barn. But going between house and barn you must take the long way round; you must not set foot in the cloister. None of you. Not for one minute, not on any pretext. But if you give me that assurance you may stay.’
‘My word of honour, lady,’ said Guillem, pulling off his sodden hat and bowing gravely. ‘And my thanks.’
‘You are welcome, on those conditions,’ the abbess said. ‘Bread and herbs will be all we have to sup you on.’
‘We have killed a boar,’ said Guillem. ‘If you can give us a cauldron of water, we will boil ourselves a stew on that promised fire.’
Sor Coloma grumbled at lending her iron stewpot, but sent it in the end with a bundle of leeks and a head of garlic, and a handful of salt. The scent of wood smoke and boiling broth from the guesthouse chimney diffused in the mist and reached the forbidden regions where the nuns moved in their cloister, wakeful and keeping the hours of service long after the huntsmen had eaten and fallen asleep.
The huntsmen had been forbidden the cloister. But the cloister was not entirely enclosed. It surrounded its garden on all four sides on the upper storey, but on the ground level the fourth, the seaward side consisted only of pillars, with no ground-floor cells, so that the cool air of the sea might enter and refresh the garden and the colonnades. Esteban, the kennel boy, who had slept with the hounds and horses in the barn, woke early and, since the dogs were restless, he let them out and began sleepily to look for the saddle-bag of meat and oilcake to feed them with. He heard them, a little distance off, begin the raucous baying that meant they had picked up a scent and were summoning the hunt to follow them. The horses began whinnying, jerking their heads up to the limit of their halters, and kicking at the donkey stalls where they were tied. Cursing, Esteban ran outside. The dogs were running round the pillars of the colonnade, in and out of the cloister garth, howling. He saw the flutter of white wimples and dark garments in doorways as frightened nuns opened their doors and slammed them shut again, as startled faces leaned out of upper windows.
Esteban ran into the forbidden garden and, clapping and shouting and blowing on his little hand horn, chased the dogs out through the avenue of columns. A little cluster of affronted sisters ran after him, likewise chasing him. He was too late to head the dogs off towards the barn again; they were in full cry going towards the watch-tower. When they reached it they ran around, noses to the moist earth, circling the building and weaving along invisible trails, honking their soft baffled sounds. What had they latched on to? Reaching the tower, Esteban opened the door, hearing too late the cry of prohibition from the nuns behind him.
He had expected the dogs to run in and fetch out a fox or a rat or some such; he had not expected something to run out – passing him in a single bound and mingling at once with the pack. He ran with his dogs, blowing the feeding call on his horn, which brought them to heel, running along behind him, their brown and white backs undulating, their eager panting and the chink of their collar-brasses filling the morning with dog music, flowing back towards the barn. He could not see where the unexpected thing had gone, but he heard the cries of the nuns behind him.
There was a fenced yard in front of the barn, and Esteban opened the gate to it and hustled the pack in. He glimpsed a hairless sort of dog among them, and cursed. It would get torn to pieces, whatever it was. He ran to the side door of the barn to fetch the meat from his bag – not till they were fed would the dogs calm down once they got the wind up like this. The nuns were far too close; they were leaning over the fences, their unfamiliar high-pitched voices exciting the pack to frenzy.
‘Get back!’ he called, still running. ‘Stand clear! Away, back away! They are ferocious when they are feeding!’ And he tossed the feed into the pen. By now some few of the huntsmen, Guillem among them, had woken to the uproar and come up to see what was afoot. Only after he had thrown the meat into the pen did Esteban get a clear enough glimpse of the hairless creature to see what it was. He thought to see the child mauled to death.
The dogs were fighting over scraps, but it ran fearlessly among them, going on all fours. The king of the pack growled; the child crouched. Running round it the king dog sniffed its anus, and then returned to the fighting over shares in the meat. The child bolted a share, unopposed. Then, taking a bone in her teeth, retreated to a corner and settled down, calmly holding the bone under her arms as if they were paws and rubbing it on the ground to loosen the scraps of flesh.
‘Get her out of there!’ a young nun cried to him, tugging at his sleeve.
Esteban vaulted over the fence and, striking to left and right with his stick, attempted to quell the hounds and beat a path through to the child. The dogs defended her; he might as well have be
en trying to separate one of them from the rest. At last he reached the child and picked her up. He held her high, out of reach of the dogs jumping round him, and waded back towards the gate to the pen. He intended to pass the child bodily over the fence to the outstretched hands of the waiting nuns, but as he held her out she ducked her head and suddenly bit him hard and deep. He dropped her, and she fell outside the fence. Instantly, she bounded away into the scrubby herbage beyond the barn, headed across the path into the forest, and was lost to sight.
‘I am sorry, lady,’ said Guillem. He was in front of the abbess, on his knees. ‘It was a mishap; no harm was meant . . .’
‘Follow her and bring her back,’ said the abbess.
‘My men are mounted and ready to ride. The hounds have been given her rags for a scent. We will do what we can,’ he said. Something told him not to ask questions of this stern and formidable woman. It was clear he had wronged her.
‘Most solemnly I adjure you,’ she said, ‘if you find her, not to swear or pray in her hearing, or mention God to her in any way.’
‘Mention God?’ he repeated stupidly, staring at her.
‘Swear not to.’
‘I swear, if you like,’ he said, getting to his feet. Esteban was holding his horse’s bridle for him, waiting in the gate. The hunting horns were blaring, and the hounds were running free, surging up the steeps, leading the huntsmen upwards, deeper into the mist. Guillem left the nunnery at a gallop. The abbess was as mad as a mushroom eater, he thought, as his mount picked her way delicately over the detritus of needles and branches on the dark forest floor. Were all her nuns likewise deranged?
13
‘This is madness,’ said Palinor.
‘The Apostle Paul said it was better to marry than burn,’ said Severo. ‘Regard the project in the light of a courtship; embrace it as you would a bride.’
Knowledge of Angels Page 10