by Lauren Groff
Marie is speechless in gratitude. If such things are medicinal, they are no sin. She had felt filth on her soul since the days of Cecily. In an afternoon, Nest has washed her of it.
Then she remembers where she is and says sadly, but alas there can be no special friendships among nuns. They are against the Rule.
And Nest swallows her smile and says that, as she said, there are others who come to her for relief from these humors. Such treatment is not as special as Marie may believe; it is quite common, in fact.
The idea that there are others like her makes Marie laugh. She goes into the daylight with her tongue darting into the raw new hole in her mouth.
And she sees then what she missed going in, the simmer of sun through the wind-shook branches, the hummingbird with its invisible wings darting among the flowers, the scoured hickory-bark skin of the faces of the old women with their eyes closed and chins tilted to the sun. Nest’s kindness to the fleshly body has brought about an inner shifting. Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.
* * *
—
Marie is thirty-eight.
There has been trouble among the villeinesses, and come summer, three of the unmarried women are swelling at the belly like rosehips. They are not nuns, true, they are not sworn to virginity, but Marie feels shame that she cannot control these bodies under her care, what the larger world would think of the abbey if they knew. Great scandal. She would be removed as prioress. Thank goodness she has trained her superiors well with her flattery and competency, they are never here at the abbey any longer to oversee. She speaks to Goda, who explains to her some finer points of procreation by use of animal metaphors, the moment exactly at which children ripen to adults. At last, she has the whole community, over fifty nuns and eighty-some others, gather beyond the garden.
It is the harrowing time, she tells them in her deepest loudest voice. From this day, the abbey lands enclosed here by the surrounding forest will be a place only of women. Everyone else must be gone.
All servants remaining shall be women, she says.
Beggars of all sexes will be given alms not here but at the almonry Marie is establishing in town, she says.
All visitors will remain at the hostelry next to the almonry, she says.
She takes a deep breath and delivers the last blow. At the age of twelve, none of the children of the villeinesses can stay if they are not girls; and should the villeinesses not want to be separated from their families, Marie can have them all moved to abbey lands outside the central estate to work there.
It is no sin to be born not female, she says to the downturned heads before her. It is no fault of any newborn babe to be the unfortunate sex it is. But sin is introduced at the time in life, around eleven or twelve years old, when the bodily serpent wakes and yearns to spread its venom. This is the true story of our first parents; this is the understanding of Eve.
There is great weeping and, privately among some of the nuns, rejoicing. Only four villeinesses trundle off to farther abbey estates with their broods. And for those who choose to stay, and let their children go, Marie finds four places in good pious households in town for their banished children.
* * *
—
Queen Eleanor sends a cousin to the abbey, a girl of twenty named Tilde, whose thin pale face belies a clever mind and a humble devout soul. Marie can see the girl’s true vocation written on her face, and feels a flare of envy. Tilde spends her days happily in the scriptorium, often has ink smeared on her chin. Marie watches her. The girl would make a fine prioress someday, she thinks. There is judgment there, gentleness, fervency.
And one day Wulfhild, having dropped off the rents with Marie, stops in the scriptorium to kiss Gytha on the cheek, to slide a packet of candied fennelseed into the mad nun’s pocket. Gytha smiles bluely. Later, when in weariness Wulfhild takes off her leather tunic at her house at night, out falls a tiny painting of a fantastical beast on a cut-up old letter, a green tiger with a human smile or a porcupine playing the lute, which her daughters will one day pin to their collection on the wall. Some nights, going in to kiss her girls in their sleep, she will stop and look and feel before these many beasts of Gytha’s something akin to what she felt as a child when the nuns sang their most beautiful, most awesome psalms, a slow internal pouring of ecstasy. Awe. If only she had time to examine this feeling, Wulfhild thinks ruefully; but she does not have time, she never has time, her children call, the business of the abbey calls, the hungers and fatigues of her body call. She will come closer to god when she is old, in a garden among the flowers and the birds, she tells herself; yes, someday she will sit in silence until she knows god, she thinks, lying down in her bed to sleep. Just not now.
* * *
—
Work. Prayer, which is the element of the abbey as much as the damp, the wind. The fields, the sows, the orchard.
And Eleanor, still a captive. The queen, forced into a cage, remains an open sore in Marie. She does not reply to Marie’s letters, still. Maddening.
A loud and arrogant novice arrives; she has black brows so huge they crawl across her face like caterpillars. She doesn’t bother to learn hand signs and shouts for what she wants at refectory: Lettuces! Fish! A warm day after weeks of rain and the novices take baskets and run to the forests to go mushrooming. An argument when they find a circle of little pointy mushrooms with upturned caps; these are poisonous, the other novices try to say, but the new novice says no, she picked them all the time at home, they’re delicious, her voice goes loud, louder, she is bellowing, she scoops up a handful of the mushrooms and crams them in her mouth. The other novices turn away. They pick baskets and baskets in silence. When they hear the bells of Vespers, they find the girl is missing. At last, they discover her curled dead between two great mossy stumps, face an angry bruise, her tongue huge between her lips, another pale mushroom.
* * *
—
Marie is forty-five. There are ninety-six nuns, twelve child oblates, all skilled. The abbey is rich.
And at last, one blustering afternoon, blind singing useless kind Abbess Emme takes to her deathbed, where she will linger, more music than body.
Marie is forty-seven. From Rome, from Paris, from London, her spies have written swift panicked letters: Jerusalem has fallen again to the infidel.
Marie weeps. She is angry that she had never beheld the city when she was a child crusader. Unseen, longed for, dreamt of, it has grown in her year after year until it is the ideal of cities, place of perfection, a city no mortal city could ever resemble. Cedars, fig trees, lilies, gazelles. And now with Jerusalem’s fall, there is ripped a rent in the earthly kingdom of her god. Through such rents great evil does creep. She does not sleep at night, fearing a dark cloud she feels approaching. It is all the more terrifying for remaining cast in shadows; none of her vision can bring what is coming into the light. It is also true that she is sleepless because the curse of Eve has been removing itself from her body in flames that cook Marie from the inside out.
Flames from deep inside, licking outward. Horrid. She rises in restlessness, she runs.
The pond at the abbey is dark, matte. The night is moonless.
The feel of the abbey on its hill at the back hunched and half watching in its sleep. Heat still rising from the soil, the frogs thumping their drums, some chirping bug in its millions, some single nightbird with its few notes.
Her body is inhabited, electric with heat, her skin has a roiling fire stuffed into it, the heat is unbearable, she is now running toward the low light off the water. Night in its heaps of darkness spins by. Off with the clogs and the stockings wet from night dew, and the mud cools her toes, the water is at her ankles, dragging hard
at the hems, at knees at shame at belly so cool at chest and the arms, the wet wool pulling her body down. The frogs hush in the disturbance. Only her head is aflame, water lapping through the cloth at the chin. A body like a dog’s in the dark water. A vision of the great dumb alaunt of childhood on an August afternoon with only her reddish nose above the surface. In remembering that long-dead dog, Marie’s laugh deep and low skids across the surface and resounds on the far side.
The heat is passing from Marie’s limbs and the coolness enters, a relief. Unbearable, these flashes, enough to drive a mind mad.
And with pain, because the clothes are heavy, a return to the shore.
But a figure is standing there. A hand seizes Marie’s heart. Dread: lashes on the back, a hungry stomach, a chute in the dignity of the prioress. So be it. She would not waste a prayer to the Virgin to stop it. Her steps are heavy wading up. The pale face in the dark habit comes clear, Sister Elgiva, freckled round cheeks, long pale eyelashes, old Saxon family.
Elgiva asks with a laugh in her voice if the prioress felt like a night swim. How strange the French remains in the mouths of these English, thirty years at the abbey and an ear raised on the continent could never grow used to it.
But Marie says that, no, it was mortification of the flesh. But now, mortification of the pride to know the sister had been watching.
Sister Elgiva extends a hand, helps pull the heavy body to shore. So short she is, well, they all are in comparison to Marie, her crown comes only to Marie’s clavicle. She reaches up to help off with the wimple, the veil, the coif.
Elgiva says that she heard the prioress running outside and guessed where Marie was going. Her own mother lost the curse of Eve early, also. Once, they found her outside in a storm, stuffing snow into her bodice.
So good the breath of the night blowing through Marie’s cropped hair, cool slide of air upon the scalp. Elgiva bends and takes the hem of the scapular and lifts it heavily over. The hem of the habit now. So free. Now a shock, because the sister bends for the hem of the linen shift but bodies are not naked here, bodies are bared only for the monthly bath, the night has eyes. But a languor has set in post-pond, the heat flash removed from Marie’s body is always like a deboning. What is the harm to let Elgiva help her. And so she lets her own bare skin be exposed, the sister’s eyes on skin like the brushes of fingers, the length of dry linen in her hands, in the night chafing on her. When Elgiva wraps the clean fabric around Marie, her veil brushes the bare skin of her chest.
But a surprise; and deeper, it is not truly a surprise. Elgiva’s lips are warm, her breath good, she has chewed mint on her way here in the dark, her skin is soft.
No, Marie thinks, stern with herself, already knowing the answer is yes. She is weak.
Elgiva’s own wimple and veil and coif are off now, the belt the scapular the habit, she laughs, she would not wait for the linen shift to fully be removed, she takes Marie’s hand so giant in her small callused hands and puts it at the center of her, a delicious damp give under Marie’s fingers, a sinking like touching the moss in the forest, rich and giving, the small sounds she is making under the pressure of Marie’s mouth. On their knees in the damp warm dirt. Elgiva smells down there like barley and chives and the sea salt and riverine mud. A small music of her breathing so close, and the frogs have forgotten the water’s disturbance and returned to their songs. Marie’s own fingers so expert. Perhaps Elgiva is another of the secret ones hidden at the abbey, there are a number here like them, after Nest awakened her, Marie has seen them stealing kisses in the shadows at the edges of the blackberry patch, waiting beside the garderobe in the night for another body to steal out under cover of dark. Slide into English in Marie’s mind, French no good for the animal body, hand mouth tooth breast lip thigh skin cunt, words that hold the hot blood of feeling. Under Marie’s mouth the humming in the girl’s white throat, the rising, the coursing in her, it is a tide, the wave itself, and soon a second whiteness gathers in the back of Marie’s head, the bursting outward. Her body slowly retakes her senses one by one, frogsong, sweet mud underneath, the taste of Elgiva’s mouth, numb skin ticking back into feeling.
And when Elgiva has caught her breath she says that she had thought so. She had heard the prioress also visits Infirmatrix Nest.
For a moment, Marie cannot breathe to imagine her nuns talking about her like so. A release of humors, like bloodletting, the infirmatrix has always said. Nest with her kind pretty plush very skilled mouth. There is no mention of female sodomy in any of the books, and the great angry moralists would have mentioned it if it were a sin, surely. Marie has searched; she has found only echoing silence.
Linen wrapped around again, wet fabric gathered up, quick steps across the dark ground. The scent of Elgiva she carries on her fingers, don’t wash, no one will know. No stars no moon tonight, this is good. There is the sense the bells for Matins are gathering their silence into themselves, readying themselves for ringing.
Elgiva hesitates, then whispers she is often alone in the creamery when all the others are at their chores.
Marie says that she has suddenly become interested in butter-making. A laugh. The hawthorn in the dark clothed all over in its shivering white flower. Final swift kiss. Then Elgiva goes into the chapel. Marie watches how in the darkness the other nun lays herself at the altar to Mary, face flat upon the stone floor, arms in a cross, to pray and await the night office.
She feels, watching, a sadness within, perhaps it is pity; there will be no taking what the pretty freckled nun has offered, Marie has lied to her. Love attained too easily, she knows from courtly romances, is not love. Love that flows from high to low, prioress to dairy nun, is counter to the laws of goodness. For Marie’s rigid heart, there can be no entanglements but those she has entered into long ago with Eleanor, impossible and distant. For the sating of her body’s hungers, these carnal and lesser appetites, there had once been Cecily and now there can only be Nest’s medicinal hands.
Inside swiftly to the kitchen then the cellar. No linen shift, the other is being laundered. The wet cloth spread on the drying rack and on the shelves the bottommost habit to the left, the only one great enough and long enough to clothe all Marie’s expanse of body. Hated thing, with its patches and its supplemental hem of thirty years ago. And scapular, stockings, headcloths, quick-quick. The bells are already ringing. There are the footsteps of half-sleeping nuns descending the night stairs.
Final pinning while running out of the kitchen. And across the cloister with its pillars standing naked as maidens in the darkness, oh hush mind, such wicked thoughts as these are unmeet, it is time for prayer. And the late entry the genuflection the seat beside the abbess’s empty one. In the single candlelight on the other side of the abbess’s chair, Subprioress Goda’s face turns, her nose sniffs, is it possible she can smell the pleasure upon Marie, the mud of the pond, what she carries on her fingers? Tiny smile. Perhaps. Goda works among the heifers and pigs. She knows the animal body.
Deus in adiutorium meum intende. Matins.
The downturned faces of the nuns, singing, hidden by the small light. Sleepy voices raised in the Venite, with antiphon.
And, what wonder. What miracle is this.
Because the deep heat is stirring again, unquelled; the devouring fire of the curse of Eve as it leaves this body beginning to pulse from the inside out to the skin. But this time as it circles, unbearable, within, the new habit already soaked with sweat, there is something strange that begins to happen: the sear of this flash rises out of Marie’s body and pours outward and descends upon each of the other nuns one by one in a luminous rush. And as the heat falls, it falls in new colors: within the child oblates in the front benches it strikes a tiny pale lick and in the novices so young a barely deeper red flame and it grows the richness of gold as it flows lapping outward to the older nuns, and blue and green within the nuns who are within their own times of losing the curse of Ev
e—the time of panic, the thoughts of throwing themselves out of windows for relief from the hot humors of the body—and it even pours gold and red to those bent and toothless nuns who had decades ago passed to the calm beyond the end of fertility. Upon the nuns’ heads one by one the heat descends; and when it rises again out of each, it builds a great sympathetic shining that gathers strength and speed as it goes along, a swirling of red white and hot blue flame. The heat spreading from the body of one to the other is shared as all things in this abbey of women are shared. Marie can see it passing body to body. She can see that even the abbess in her deathbed in the rooms above the refectory is made a tallow candle that shines against the dark.
And all souls as they sing shine radiant into the world.
THREE
1.
Marie stands in the twilit fields.
These too are winter rye.
It is 1188 and Abbess Emme is newly dead of her long illness. Marie has been made abbess in Emme’s loss. A box full of white clay balls for the election, a solitary black ball among them, and Goda turning her face into her sleeve at the announcement. For days the subprioress was rough with the milking, made the animals groan, until the bucket was taken gently from her and she was led into the vineyard to walk the long rows of vines back and forth, singing an entire slow Magnificat with each row. By the final row, she had stopped weeping and returned to herself again, if shrunken, if whispering her sorrows into the beasts’ warm ears in the mornings. Kind confessors, they blinked and forgave, no penance.
Then the great pomp of Marie’s consecration as abbess. The unbelievable expense, for so many had to be feasted, so as to show the abbey’s wealth and power, first in the town outside the cathedral and then again privately in the abbey for her women, her nuns and the servants. Marie sighed in her heart, considering the sum, all the kid goats and swans and pounds of spice and tuns of wine necessary. Luckily, she’d had the span of Emme’s illness to save up.