by Lauren Groff
Moths, Marie thinks. She is perhaps delirious.
Goda rakes the mud to the floor with her nails and removes Marie’s filthy headcloths, pinching her on purpose with the pins. A servant brings a bowl of steaming water. The abbess kneels, and takes Marie’s muddied useless slippers and the stockings off her frozen feet, and washes them.
Marie feels needles and the deep burn as her feet return to life. It is only now under the gentle hands of the blind abbess that the shock is fading. This colorless place may be the afterlife, yet under the abbess’s hands Marie feels she is becoming human again.
In a low voice, she thanks the abbess for washing her feet, she does not deserve such kindness.
But Goda hisses that Marie is not special, that all visitors have their feet washed here, doesn’t she know anything, it is in the Rule.
The abbess orders Goda to leave and bids her to tell the kitcheners to bring the supper up to her rooms. Goda goes, muttering.
The abbess tells Marie not to mind the subprioress, because Goda had had her ambitions, but they were dashed with Marie’s advent. Goda is of course the daughter of the most noble English families, some Berkeley, some Swinton, some Meldred, and she cannot see how a mere bastard sister of a Norman upstart throne-thieving clan should supplant her in the hierarchy. But of course, Emme says, Eleanor demanded the place for Marie and what could Emme do faced with the will of the queen? Besides, Goda would fill the role terribly. She’s more fit to lead the animals she cares for than she is to lead her sisters, with whom she quarrels and whom she torments with her tongue-lashings. The abbess pats Marie’s feet dry with a soft once-white cloth.
She leads Marie barefoot against the cold stone up the dark stairs. The abbess’s rooms are tiny, parchments and books haphazard where Goda has piled them, but there are expensive windows filled with transparent horn that casts a waxy light into the room and makes it glow. Already the merlin sits warming itself on its stand near the small birch fire, a pretty blue flame snacking on the white bark. On a table is set some food, hard dark rye bread with a thin sheen of butter, wine blessedly unwatered and brought in better times from Burgundy, a soup with four slices of turnip in each bowl. The abbess tells Marie that they are in a famine, the nuns starve, alas, but suffering purifies the soul and makes these holy meek women even more holy in the eyes of god. And at least tonight Marie will eat.
She considers Marie, looking beyond her head with her cloudy eyes, and asks what Marie knows of a nun’s life in an abbey. Marie confesses she knows nothing at all. The food is tasteless, or she has eaten too quickly to taste it. She is still hungry, her stomach rumbles. The abbess hears the noise and smiles, and pushes her bread and butter over to Marie.
Well, the abbess says, surely Marie will learn quickly, the queen told of no deficit of intelligence in the child. She describes the rhythm of the days. Eight hours of prayer: Matins in the deep night, Lauds at dawn, followed by Prime, Terce, Sext, chapter, None, Vespers, collation, Compline, bed. Work and silence and contemplation throughout. All they bend their bodies to is prayer; the daily office is prayer, the hard work of the body is prayer also. The silence of the nuns is prayer, the readings they listen to prayer, their humility prayer. And prayer of course is love. Obedience, duty, subservience; all is manifestation of love, directed at the great creator.
The abbess smiles serenely, then begins to sing in a high and wavery voice.
But no, love is not abasement, love is exaltation, Marie thinks, affronted. She feels her small dinner settling poorly. The nun’s life seems as bad as she thought it would be.
The abbess breaks off her song and says that Marie can keep her little merlin and the things that are in her trunk until she takes her vows, when all she has brought will be owned by the abbey. Marie does not know enough to understand this is a great kindness that no one else would be allowed.
A bell rings out in the wet nightfall. Compline. The abbess leaves Marie to rest in her chambers. Marie hears the voices of the nuns in the chapel singing the Nunc dimittis, and falls asleep. When she wakes, Emme is before her again, flushed with the glories of the divine office.
It is time for Marie’s bath, she says gently.
Marie says thank you but that she needs no bath, that she bathed in November, and the abbess laughs and says that cleaning the body is also a form of prayer and at the abbey all the nuns bathe every month and the servants bathe every two months, for god is displeased by bodily odors.
Now out of the shadows in the corner of the room there detaches a deeper shadow, an old nun with long white chin whiskers and a face as though hacked from a log. The bath is ready, this nun says in a whiny furious voice. Her English accent is so heavy that her French sounds like she’s chewing pebbles. It makes Marie wince.
The abbess starts and says plaintively that she hates it when people leap out of nowhere to surprise her. She tells Marie that this is the magistra, the mistress of novices. Her name is Sister Wevua. It is quite strange but though Marie has been hastily consecrated as a virgin at the cathedral in town and of course she comes to the abbey already prioress, she still is a novice until she has given the oath and taken the veil. Wevua is rather efficacious with the novices. Her methods are harsh, but under them, all novices learn so swiftly that they take their vows in astonishing short time.
The magistra nods. Dislike pours out of her toward both Marie and the abbess, a spiritual wind. She has a strong-weak walk like a heartbeat, because a horse stepped on her foot when she was a growing girl and crushed the bones and nerves there.
I saw the foot when she came to the abbey oh many decades ago and I had to wash it, it is a mangled horror, the abbess says, it is the stuff of nightmares.
Hurts to this day like the flames of hell, Wevua says with satisfaction.
And down they go, the three women, through the dark cloister with the cold wet stones on Marie’s bare feet and out to the lavatorium still rich with the voices and the mud of the nuns who had come in from the fields to wash for divine office. In the great wooden basin to the farthest edge of the room, steam is rising ghostly into the chill damp air. When they near, a scent of herbs arises so powerfully that Marie must breathe through her mouth or else in her weariness the odor would make her swoon. The herbs are for the lice and fleas that the court is infested with, Wevua tells her, as if biting off her words with her front teeth. She will hang Marie’s clothes in the garderobe where the nuns relieve themselves, the ammonia of the piss kills the beasties in the night.
Now the two nuns between them remove Marie’s remaining clothing, the silk dress that had been cut narrow from Marie’s mother’s billowing own, the underthings. Marie covers herself with her lanky arms, burning with fury. Wevua bends to look closely at the girl’s privies, then touches Marie with her cold hands there, saying that this new prioress is so large a person with hands so great and voice so deep and face so unwomanly, it needed to be seen that she is female, but now she is satisfied Marie is what she says she is and she pushes her shoulder to make her step into the bath.
Marie drops her arms and gazes at Wevua full in the face, and the old magistra takes a step back.
The abbess says mildly oh but the magistra did a needless violence to the girl. Then she gestures gently at the bathwater, saying that surely it will feel luxurious after the long chill ride Marie had borne. Marie steps in. The sear over her ankles, her calves, her knees, her thighs, her pudenda, her belly, up her chest, her armpits, her neck. The stench of the herbs goes up her nostrils and drives itself deep into her head.
Sister Wevua and the abbess cover their hands with sackcloth, lather them with wet soap, and rub gray worms of skin from Marie’s body, in some places rubbing to blood. And in the hot water, in the warmth and the overwhelm, in her tiredness and anguish, Marie’s body betrays her. She begins to weep into the water, though she vowed that she would never, she would bear all this loss with strength, no more court
, no more Cecily, no more future, no more color, no more Eleanor to look at from a distance and feel her longing accompanying her like an invisible friend. She weeps through the braiding of her dun-colored hair into a wet whip, through the standing out of the good heat into the cold, the drying of her giant bony body with a length of cloth, the dressing. Linen shift with a great brown stain from breast to hem; it is clear a dead nun once owned this one. Wool smock that smells of lavender and someone else’s body, which falls only to just under the knee. Wevua sounds angry when she tells the abbess it is far too short. The scapular too is far too short. And of course the shift under it all, which means those poor legs are bared to the evil weather of the end of winter, the sleet and angry wind.
The abbess sighs. She says that tomorrow, Ruth will cut the worst of the spare habits and sew the remainder to the bottoms of the smock and scapular. Marie will get three pairs of stockings to compensate for the cold weather. She will suffer, but suffering is the lot of humanity, and every moment of suffering brings the earthly body closer to the heavenly throne.
With her own hands, the abbess puts on Marie the white headcloths of the novices, coif and wimple and veil, while Wevua pulls on the three pairs of stockings roughly. She says in her screeling voice that none of the clogs will likely be big enough.
The abbess mutters something about the poor child, but then says well, what could she possibly do? The queen has not yet sent along Marie’s dowry and they have so little to spare, she has no money for clogs to be made just now. To which Wevua says that Marie cannot be barefoot, even the servants at the abbey are not barefoot, it is an awful sin to make their new prioress go without. The abbess says that indeed, Marie will wear what she came in with, and Wevua says that she came in with idiot court slippers of kidskin, which are useless, imagine the prioress out in the sloppy spring fields overseeing the sowing, how frozen and damp her feet would be in moments, she would die of the cold infecting her upward from the mud, and then they’d have to reckon with an enormous dead royal bastardess sister in addition to everything else. Now the abbess’s voice loses its song, it becomes cutting and she tells the magistra that then Wevua must add a prayer to her nightly devotional to provide a miracle of shoes, but until said miracle comes, Marie will bear her lot which is surely not the worst of the deprivations in the abbey right now. There is a very old hostility here between the women, Marie sees, a war of suffering between the mangled foot and the cloudy eyes. Decades thick, and visible, like the rings in a felled tree.
The abbess turns and through the dark she walks sure, while the other two take tentative steps, touching the wall. Into the night, through the cloister. The abbess goes back again up her stairwell, and calls down to Marie to sleep well, new prioress, for Marie will begin her good work sorting through the parchments and account books tomorrow.
Marie follows Wevua into the chapel, where one beeswax taper is left burning. The abbey in its distress has sold all its ornaments, and only a wood carving remains: skinny shanks and wounds and thorns and blood and rib-bones, that ancient story she knows by heart. Up the black night stairs to the dortoir, where a single lantern burns over the rows of twenty nuns already asleep in their narrow beds, wearing their full habits, for perhaps it is tonight that the Angels of the Resurrection will blow their horns and they must be prepared to fly into the arms of heaven. There is a sense that eyes are watching Marie but what faces she sees are smooth with sleep, feigned or real. There are whispers down the line, a rattling cough. Wind blows through the gaps in the window shutters, there are flakes in the dortoir’s air that melt before they touch the ground. Marie lies down on the bed that Wevua gestures toward. She is too tall for these bedframes and has no comfort until she slides down to bend her knees and put her feet on the floor, which meets her heel flesh with its implacable cold.
Oh for her mother’s large goodness, the rumbling laugh that made everything better, the verbena of her neck; but her mother has been dead these five years. Or for Cecily to warm her body, to speak rough sense, to share in Marie’s hatred of this frigid and awful place so she does not have to bear it alone. What Cecily would think of this place, who, as a child in the dust and stink of the chicken coop where thick light poured sideways from the chinks, reached under the hens for an egg, her filthy kitchen smock as her vestment, and, wearing her sternest face, swinging a bucket of ash for her censer, intoned gibberish in the girls’ play of Mass while cracking into Marie’s open mouth the egg still warm from inside its mother, the body and the blood mixed as one, and Marie crossed herself and could barely swallow the overrich viscous warm egg down. Then Cecily’s breath in Marie’s face, she’d been chewing the peels of the carrots she’d been paring, and her hard small tongue licking the spilled yolk on Marie’s chin. Second heresy, mouth on mouth. Her frank and knowing body; there was no privacy among the servants, where she learned such arts. The heat, the discovery within this stout dimpled girl with straw in her hair. The pulse of her body on top of Marie’s.
Marie clutches her own hands, but they are cold and bony, they are not Cecily’s.
Slowly, the dortoir warms with the breath and body heat of the nuns. The wind howls lonely outside. Marie stops shivering. She will never sleep again, she thinks; then she sleeps.
She dreams immediately and vividly. A memory, a dock steaming wet and a sea beyond, brilliant with reflected sun. An aching dry heat and the mouths of fish in nets silently screaming, a crowd, women bearing terra-cotta pots on their heads, smells of rot of blood of bodies of smoke of salt sea. Children swimming below through the dark thickets of legs. Everywhere, the white tunic and red cross of the crusaders. Hubbub of voices in ungraspable languages, distant flutes, groaning of wood, slap of waves. Under her haunches the feel of strong shoulders, a woman’s hand steadying her child thighs, oh it is her mother. A circle forms of the mob. At the circle’s bare center stands a naked woman shining oiled in the sun, so beautiful. Hair in loose black curls to her waist and puffs at the armpits and groin. She wears a silver chain around her neck, a slave. In her face there is contempt, she does not look at the gathering crowd, she looks above them at the distant heavens. There is shouting, a wheeling music starting up, a whip snapped in the air perilously close to the woman’s soft belly. Insolent as a cat the naked woman slowly steps backward into a wooden box that rises to her knees. She bends and is hidden. Then the box’s top is hammered shut upon her. Now a sword is held glinting up; with a loud roar, it is thrust into the box, and Marie’s breath is hitched, there must be a red puddle growing; don’t look, Marie looks, but there is no puddle at least not yet before another sword is brandished, thrust in, and another, another, swifter and swifter. What is frozen within the dreaming Marie thaws, and there is a struggle, a terror, someone must stop this, where is the authority to stop this, the box already bristles with hilts. Hush now, her mother’s voice now in her ear, hush, be calm, it is only a trick. Swords are slowly withdrawn. Lid prized up. A long pause of gasping horror. And then at last the woman slowly rises out of the low place where she had lain. So beautiful, still shining, still so full of spite and hate. She is alive and her skin is unwounded, not a cut is on its smooth and perfect length, all of her blood remains inside her skin. The hat is passed around, it is filling with coins. Shudders ripple Marie from the bones outward, and her beloved mother’s voice in her ear again, It’s all right, my love, that poor woman slithered herself around like a little snake in there.
* * *
—
Marie wakes to Wevua a great dark cloud before her, and a pain in her knees because Wevua is kicking Marie’s legs with the toe of her clogs, telling her to get up, lazybones, to get up great frail whingeing thing, that it is now Matins, up up up, blueblood lagabed rawboned unlovely shadow-hearted bastardess of a false prioress, up up up, the magistra spies no love for god within Marie’s wicked heart and Wevua will seed it there by force or see the girl perish unshriven.
Marie rises in a panic and
sees through the window the moon fat in the black sky and all the landscape swallowed in darkness. Ahead of her in the single lantern light the other nuns are disappearing down the night stairs, faceless in the dark. Marie, still in the vividness of her dream, hears their habits rustling dry and cold and can think only of the wings of carrionbirds descending in slow circles to their feast of death below.
2.
Marie descends the night stairs. She feels as though she has stepped from a blazing day into a dark room. She sees nothing around her but ghost fragments of the brightness of what she has lost.
Wevua shoves Marie down on the bench and sits beside her. Another novice is next to Marie, and with the back of her hand, she touches the back of Marie’s to comfort her. Marie steals a look at this girl who has bulging eyes and protuberant front teeth; this she will later discover is Swan-neck, and the novice on her other side is little Ruth, whose eyes are always telling a small joke. Both will become Marie’s deep friends.
The shadows at the edges of the chapel change shape threateningly in Marie’s fatigue.
Matins, she discovers, is singing prayer; it is shivering in the cold of the night beside strangers. It seems to last forever. The taper flickers, the wind howls across the raw countryside. She feels a pain in her chest that is the pain of a fist clenching all the meat inside her. She nearly cries out from it. The numbness that had held her safe has left her. She smarts everywhere.
And for a moment, the chapel wavers in her eyes and it vanishes, the queen’s court hangs before her as it had been, as though she were still solidly within it, and the great hall is warm, the servants are darting fireflies in the dim as they light the candles and as they go the shadows are chased out by the glowing, the mastiffs and alaunts and greyhounds trot in, and up to her nose rises the smell of good food carried on platters to the tables, and now the nobles enter singly and in groups in their bright fine clothing, the ladies’ voices are low and happy and the lutes begin to play in the corner, two voices weaving together in sad song of chivalric love, and she hears the pattern in this new thrilling kind of loving, sees it unfurling like cloth in the air: marriage is no excuse for not loving, one who is not jealous does not love, no one can be bound by two loves, love is always growing or diminishing, easy attainment of love is contemptible but impossible attainment makes it precious. On the table is a roasted swan with its neck twisted back, mutton, heaps of soft white bread, a wheel of cheese, figgy pork pies, ale and wine at intervals. And the great surprise, a gift for delight, a cockatrice made of a boar’s head greened in a parsley bake and a roasted peacock’s body, tailfeathers sewn back on, and rags in its mouth soaked in camphor and aqua vitae set alight so the monster is breathing green fire. The noise, the brightness, the colors, the warmth.