by Lauren Groff
But at night, in the dortoir, doubt steals into her, the bitterest blackest feeling that she has made a wretched mistake by submitting to her own living death. She lets her tears drip from the corners of her eyes to her temples, to be absorbed by the cloth that still smells of the sheep that grew it and the hands that spun and wove it.
* * *
—
Now, it seems Marie is always struggling, that she cannot catch up. The longer she is at the abbey, the faster time spins.
No space for breathing; Marie’s first years’ struggle is simply to keep her nuns alive. All day she rides out to the nobles, the renters, the fields. Rats have gotten into the groats, the heifers grow goiters and their flesh shrinks against their withers, half the apple harvest is lost with a late freeze that snaps the blossoms off the trees, there is a bitter aftertaste to the cheese, someone is seeking her, always seeking her, there is no aloneness except upon the back of the horse. She sleeps little. When she wakes, her mind is already galloping. She stops returning to her bed after Matins; these hours, she writes her letters to cultivate her garden of friends in the greater world. She gives favors, for every family has an extra daughter or niece, a girl who revolts at marriage, every household would be glad for abbey honey or soap or ale and prayers for their beloved dead.
Sister Ælfhild dies of scrofula, her poor neck swelling until it chokes her.
Marie has seen other bodies. There was her mother’s, and during the crusade, there was her aunt Euphémie’s, who had been too thirsty to have patience, and she dipped and drank infected water at a simmer, not a boil, and for three days shat herself out until on the fourth day she lay on her cot with skirts hiked above her waist and a fly crawling across her eye, for she was dead. And then after the women had given up the crusade—there would be no Jerusalem in their lives—and they were waiting for the boat back to France, her aunt Honorine, of the peregrines far above her station, absently reached down to scratch a bite on her leg and nobody knew the extent of the mistake until they went to a bathhouse and undressed and the attendant, screaming in her language, drove them out. Honorine’s leg had gone yellow and black and red with pus and rot and for three days in the hot disgusting inn, this aunt who had been so silent in life raged and blasphemed and they had to put a horse bit in her mouth to silence her. At the moment the breath kicked in her chest, her birds flapped their great wings and screamed a scream like two women keening. Then Honorine too was dead.
Still, Marie is shaken seeing Ælfhild, who has huge black lumps upon her neck, and she has to steel her stomach and hold her breath to wash the woman’s body.
As though Ælfhild were a harbinger, it is that very afternoon that Marie is sent a short letter from the court with the announcement, in an anonymous hand, saying that Empress Matilda is gravely ill.
You know Matilda? Emme says, incredulous. She has always been my favorite queen, you know. A warrioress. The stories! She once fled all night on a frozen river to avoid being captured. Oh I loved those stories, I loved the rebellious queen. She hums with happiness.
Know her, no, Marie says. I don’t know her. She is the wife of my. The one who. In a sense she is my stepmother, but. Well, never mind. I came to her once after I was thrown off my mother’s lands.
And she tells the abbess that when her maternal family had come to roust her from her mother’s estate, which she couldn’t be allowed to keep, being bastard, she had fled with all the family treasure she could take in her trunk, with her bird, her horse, her Cecily, her aching orphan heart. Through the countryside they went at night, and it was glorious.
Too soon, they came to Rouen. Hunched, suspicious, leering city. The entrails of some large animal glistened purple in the street, guarded by an enormous cur showing its teeth. The palace of the Empress Matilda in the royal park of Quevilly. Frightfully small, overly neat.
Inside, the wall hangings were moth-chewed, the furniture thick and dark.
The empress rustled in at last after long waiting: a dried-up husk of a woman with tiny features squeezed into the center of her face. In the days when Eleanor had hopped from the bed of France to the bed of England, it was this empress—Eleanor’s new mother-in-law, Marie’s almost nothing of a stepmother—who instructed the queen in the subtler statecraft needed. Marie felt astonishment that such a tiny trembling woman could have led armies, courted allies, been crowned in both Rome and London, withstood sieges, crossed frozen rivers on foot to keep herself from conceding to defeat. A hard wind could have somersaulted her like a leaf. A sneeze could have.
Empress was what Marie would call her, the old lady said without asking Marie to sit. Not stepmother, never stepmother. She was in no way a relation of Marie’s and yet here the girl was, bastardess, made of rape. Well, the empress did not hold bastardy against a person, some of the best people were bastards, most of her own siblings, in fact. The best of her siblings, in fact. She did, however, begrudge the money spent, which she did not want to spend and did not ask to spend and had to spend for she was the only one with any money at all at the time of the, well. The violation. At first when Marie’s mother wrote asking for aid for when she was dead and gone, the empress thought she would keep Marie with her, but now that Marie was here, she was quite glad she would not. Such a great rustic with leaves in her hair and a stink that frankly affronted. Come closer so she could look, the empress said. No she must stand in the light, turn toward the empress. Oh bless her, sweet mother of god, Marie would not do at all would she, not at all, so tall, it was frankly obscene. Three heads taller than any woman should be, crown brushing the beams, bony as a heron. Flap those wings and take to the skies. No, it was right Marie was going over to Angleterre, which, to be absolutely clear, if not for the empress would be a country entirely lost to the wild pigs and the Celts and the devil, the empress was the one to have saved that awful place. No, no, in her old age she could never have kept Marie or taught her to be a lady, exposed as she had always been to those famous unwomanly aunts. Those horrors. How fortunate that the empress’s daughter-in-law, Eleanor, oh she would civilize Marie and quick-quick, she could not abide a rube, she would slap lily-root powder on that face and line those eyes and put that awful body in decent dresses, Marie did swim in these awful old dresses, she looked simply ridiculous. What a waste of fine blood, what a waste of the blood shared by the empress’s own children. No Marie had nothing of her siblings save for the jaw perhaps and the height and the nose and the forehead and the hair and perhaps those eyes. Never, Marie would never make an advantageous marriage, it was hopeless. To imagine Marie in jewels! A scarecrow dressed up, impossible, ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, she said, she must order wine to recover and a great deal of it, this child looked as though she could eat three cows snout to tail and still have room for a goose. The empress shouted at the door to bring food and more of it than one thought four hearty souls could eat. Irritatedly, she asked why Marie was standing. Marie sat. A long silence of waiting and the log crackled in the fireplace.
At last the empress said into the silence that perhaps she had been hasty and she had given it more thought and who knew, why should an old empress say what was possible and impossible in this world, perhaps Marie would dazzle some fool, no telling what strange tastes existed in the world. Oh she could tell some tales of pairings she had seen, that Clotilde with a hog’s face and hump on her back become a sudden duchess. Duchess for a humpbacked hog-face! And so on. Perhaps Marie would marry and bear a great brood of nobles. Marie did have in her veins the blood of the fairy Mélusine, after all, as did her siblings, and they all had a magic to them that was visible, something under the surface shining. Like moonstone. Marie too shone with it, the empress now saw that wicked underglow. And the more the old lady’s eyes were accustomed to Marie’s face, although she was of course entirely devoid of beauty, in fact she was truly quite-quite ugly, really rather remarkably ugly, she could see that those eyes of Marie’s were not at all ugly. They w
ere full of fire. And that was not nothing, the inner fire. Oh what a pity for Marie that she was born a woman, though not a pity for her own children, of course. No, no. She was quite glad for her own children’s sake.
The table was set, the servant withdrew, they ate. With her mouth full the empress said suddenly that she forgot Marie was a recent orphan. Well, the empress was an orphan too. It was most lonely, to be an orphan. Marie’s mother had little to admire in her but she was persistent, she at last made the family agree to take Marie.
Marie said quietly that her mother was the best of women.
The empress hissed in displeasure and bits of chewed bread sprayed at Marie. She said quickly that Marie’s mother was indeed not at all the best of women, oh no, there were far, far better. But she was fine, at least, fine for a ruined woman. Fetching in her maidenhood, even. So fetching she seduced one who couldn’t belong to her. Yes, well, perhaps not seduced, although it is true that a woman’s blood is often hotter, everyone knows this. Eve’s sin was that of passion. No, Marie’s mother’s fault was that she was fetching and a fool, for she didn’t run fast enough. The empress was fetching too, there were songs about her beauty, but at least she wasn’t a fool, she knew how to run fast. She ran very fast and no one caught her and therefore she was not violated, not even once. Despite Marie’s ugliness, the empress hoped the girl knew that it could happen to her, sometimes it was not beauty but rather power that stirred the blood. The empress said she hoped Marie was more like herself than her mother. She hoped Marie knew to run fast-fast.
The empress waited. Marie said, very slowly, that she did indeed run quite fast.
Marie could not possibly run as fast as the empress, the old lady said, eyes bright; and Marie had the dizzying sensation that the ancient empress wanted to be challenged to a footrace. Out in the torchlit streets of Rouen, skirts gathered up, the dirt road dark drawn swift beneath. Marie would have been beheaded for winning.
Marie said that no, it was true, she was surely not as fast as the empress.
The empress smiled. She was glad Marie had some diplomacy in her, a nice thing to discover. Oh, well, fine, she would help Marie, she was surprised to find she did not dislike the girl though to be frank she fully expected to hate the very face of her. But no matter she would provide an armed escort across to the court of Angleterre. This was what she could do for the girl. Though she had already done quite enough.
Marie said thank you but her servant and she could make their way across the channel alone; after all, they had found their way to Rouen alone.
The empress laughed girlishly, and Marie saw now that she had lost her central teeth upper and lower and her molars were black at the hearts with decay. Foolish girl, the empress said, now it was known everywhere that she had been the guest of the empress, that she was blood relation to the crown of Angleterre. Though she was nothing at all to look at, still she was worth some kind of ransom; that or a forcible marriage as conduit to bring some family closer to the throne. What a child Marie still was, to not understand this.
Marie breathed in and out, and thanked the empress humbly for her protection.
The empress said, standing, that, well, to kin of kin, perhaps some kindness was owed. She laughed at her own quip then said suddenly that now she must toddle off to sleep. She gave Marie a slap of affection on the cheek with her dry small hand.
Then with a rustle of silk and a smell of moth-herbs, the empress was gone. This is the last Marie saw of this woman great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in offspring, or so her stone in the Rouen cathedral will read after she goes to her eternal reward.
Marie puts away the letter.
No, she tells the abbess now, Empress Matilda cannot be gravely ill; she cannot die. She will live on perennially in Marie’s mind, only desiccating in her vanity and bitterness year by year until at last she vanishes, the size of a flea, leaping and biting, into the folds of her voluminous skirts.
But all along the abbess has not been listening. What I wouldn’t give for a gooseberry tart, she says, smiling like a child, and Marie sighs and rings the bell for the abbess’s kitchener, who runs up, already grumbling.
* * *
—
The pressure of her diocesan superiors on Marie intensifies. They demand a conference, so Marie sends them Abbess Emme, who sings until, bewildered, they bundle her off.
An abbey servant steals a wagon and is apprehended three leagues away. Marie fights to prevent the hanging, arguing the punishment down to only an eye scooped from the socket and a patch worn over the woman’s fair soft face, which Marie has always liked the looks of, had wanted to stroke with her hand.
News of Eleanor comes in drips, through what gossip those seeking alms bring, through lines in letters from her friends and spies: now the queen is in Aquitaine, now she is whipping up the royal blood to set siege to Toulouse, which she considers hers, now she is furious for the siege has failed.
Marie knows such events of the world, seen in the distance like a dark cloud in a clear sky, will one day come and bring rain and thunder even upon her nuns so removed from the world.
Then a dry spring, parsnips and turnips coming up weak and wrinkled. This will be a hungry winter, she thinks, kicking at one withered plant, and wants to weep, for there is no way Eleanor will recognize Marie’s competence and require her advice, when year after year the nuns have hungry times, when she must sell her nuns’ prayers simply to have enough to eat. There is no way that she can become known all through Europe as a great leader when struggle is all she does all day long, all year long. The daily kills her greatness.
As if god hears her, the reading at the meal that very day is Proverbs about how with pride there is disgrace, but wisdom for the humble.
Marie laughs to herself, stricken to the core.
* * *
—
The third spring of Marie’s tenure, Sister Pomme, the gardener nun, puts the apricot seedlings in wicker cages and gives them manure, and they leap to Marie’s height quickly.
* * *
—
The fifth year of her life at the abbey, they are twenty-six nuns, and more will arrive, dowries having become far better, Marie slowly, painfully becoming known for her competence, her strange long face and virago bearing reassuring the nobility that their daughters are well placed with her. They would hesitate if they knew she is only twenty-one, but her height and austerity and years of worry make her look far older. Sometimes when rising too fast from her bed or desk she is dizzied with sleeplessness. If she does sleep, she dreams of money because there is never enough, it melts from her hands.
This is the year that Marie stops the silk work. In its stead, she creates a scriptorium. The four newest novices can all read and write. Sister Gytha, who sees fairies zipping about on birdwings and her own mother’s face in the moon, cannot write or read but can make stunning little illustrations and paint them in vivid colors. Marie clears out a room with windows and has standing desks made, then quietly bruits about the nuns’ copying services being at a quarter the price of the monasteries’ same work, for women are not supposed to be scriptrices, they are not thought able or wise enough. In a single year, copying brings in more than ten years of silk spinning and weaving ever had, and the alms at Christmas even include twelve good wool tunics for the freezing poor.
* * *
—
But her seventh year at the abbey, as though to erase Marie’s small gains, there comes a summer of miasma and the child oblates die one after another, these last least daughters of the nobility, pitifully dowried, unloved slovenly mewling sickly, perishing of an evil look or cold draft from a window.
Then one day, in a peat-smelling hovel where Marie is invited to eat, she sees a freckled, long-lashed child of six years old keeping her six younger siblings in line. Wulfhild, daughter of Wulfhild, a long line of Wulfhilds as far as memory stre
tches back into the Saxon shadows and who knows the paternity, the mother shrugs, they bear her family name, which is Thrasher. How are seven children possible when Wulfhild herself is no more than six years old? Marie asks the girl while the mother, red hair frizzed wild, scoops pease pottage into an unclean bowl for Marie. Wulfhild says softly that her mother had litters like a bitch, two sets of triplets, only Wulfhild the lonely eldest. And this she tries in a mix of English and Latin, because Marie’s English is still bad; this small girl had somehow picked up enough Latin through the church to converse.
Marie looks for a long while at this child with the long thick eyelashes, and in her head there blooms an army of child oblates all of whom are endowed with intelligence or vast strength or family knowledge; girls who have absorbed from the family businesses glassblowing, cobbling, coopering, carpentering, who can calculate without beeswax tablets, who can learn languages, who will grow to be powerful nuns or female merchants caring for the abbey’s needs or marry higher than their stations and become among Marie’s host of spies she has dreamed of planting in the rooms of quiet power throughout Europe.
She asks the girl in Latin how she would like to come to the abbey; but Wulfhild’s face goes dark and she says she would not like that at all. Marie says that Wulfhild would never be hungry again and she would sleep in her own bed and not in a pile of children, but the girl again says no stoutly, and Marie smiles at the adamant of her will.
Marie makes preparations, finding three other girls, a blacksmith daughter of thirteen, a cobbler daughter of twelve, a nine-year-old so astonishingly tall and strong she can lift a cask of beer by herself. Marie rides herself to fetch Wulfhild, whose mother weeps at the thought of losing her, but agrees that a life at the abbey is higher than any she could give her daughter. The girl trembles on the pommel of Marie’s warhorse all the way back through the night to the abbey but is stalwart and does not cry. Apple cakes begin to be stolen from the kitchen; a dog’s rear leg tied to its stomach so it hops around crying, other small mischief sparked up, until Marie pulls Wulfhild into her lap and says she knows the child is making a nuisance of herself and asks if a devil has gotten into her or what.