The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

  36

  Chartres

  In November, it was Sister Laurence’s fiftieth birthday. There was a tradition at the convent that on significant birthdays the Sisters were permitted to choose a treat, or ‘jaunt’, as Sister Camille called it. After much wavering and changing of her mind, Sister Laurence decided that what she would like best was to make a visit to Chartres.

  ‘I’ve never seen the cathedral. People say it’s most remarkable.’

  ‘It is the very apex of the Gothic style,’ pronounced Mother Véronique. ‘I should like to see it again myself. And of course the Holy veil.’

  She booked two rooms at the Hôtellerie Saint-Yves by the cathedral, deciding that it was as well it was Laurence’s birthday since this was sufficient excuse for them not to have to share.

  There was a good deal of excitement, and not a little envy, at the idea of the visit and a certain amount of muttering among the Sisters that Laurence had got lucky with the Chartres trip only because the Mother fancied going too. The pair set off in a coach with their stout but modest cases, Mother Véronique’s heavily packed with historical guides.

  During the journey, Mother Véronique lectured Laurence on the history of the cathedral. ‘The first known cathedral was in 876 and we know that it was dedicated to Mary because . . .’

  Sister Laurence, gazing out of the window at the long avenues of yellowing poplars, let the Mother’s words drift past her ears. Every so often she nodded, affecting agreement, or made feeble stabs at seeming to comprehend.

  Mother Véronique’s voluble sighting of the twin spires roused her colleague from a doze. ‘The farther spire,’ Mother Véronique gestured magisterially, ‘was built by Bishop Fulbert, who founded the famous Platonic School of Chartres. It was part of the cathedral saved by the Blessed Virgin from the great fire of 1194. The nineteenth-century architect Viollet-le-Duc considered it the most perfect spire in Europe. The other spire, nearer to us, do you see it? – quite ornamental in what is called the flamboyant style – is of a much later date. Sixteenth century. The roof, as you can tell from the green colouring, is copper . . .’

  ‘Jesus,’ said a man behind them. ‘We haven’t even got there yet.’

  Mother Véronique’s face darkened and Sister Laurence suppressed a giggle.

  The coach disgorged its passengers and the two Sisters trudged up the hill towards the cathedral, dragging their cases over the cobbles. Mother Véronique, released from the restraints of impertinent fellow travellers, resumed teaching mode.

  ‘The north side of the cathedral, as you will be seeing, Sister, represents the Old Testament. The significant figures King David, the Blessed Virgin’s Mother, the prophet Isaiah are there. The south side celebrates the second coming . . .’

  Before them the great Western Front, pale honey in the afternoon sun, faced her down, mildly reproaching anyone who sought to reduce it to a lecture. Sister Laurence, who was not without poetry in her soul, stood and stared. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  ‘The statuary is known for –’

  But here Sister Laurence rebelled. ‘I’d like to just look at it for the moment if you wouldn’t mind, Mother.’

  • • •

  The Hôtellerie Saint-Yves, now a commercial enterprise, had been the old lodging house of the pilgrims. ‘We are still pilgrims,’ said Mother Véronique on being imparted this information.

  ‘But of course,’ the polite girl with the green specs who was showing them around agreed. ‘It was only to explain that the association with pilgrims in the house is a historic one.’

  Sister Véronique said she was quite aware of this and asked if her room was en-suite.

  ‘All our rooms are en-suite, Mother. Yours, I think, also has a TV and Wi-Fi. The other Sister, I’m not sure . . .’

  Sister Laurence hurriedly interjected that she needed neither a TV nor Wi-Fi.

  ‘I must have the Wi-Fi for my emails,’ said Mother Véronique, though no one had challenged her right to this privilege.

  It was maybe fortunate for Sister Laurence that among the emails that Mother Véronique had to attend to was an especially irksome one – a long-running dispute on a matter concerning a land drain – which brought on one of her headaches, for which she had forgotten her homoeopathic remedy. Unable to blame Sister Laurence for this omission, she nevertheless dispatched the sister to find Nux. Vom. for her at one of the local pharmacies.

  ‘The powder, mind, Sister, not the pills.’

  The clement weather was generously spilling over into November. Sister Laurence succumbed to a stifled gaiety as, choosing the further afield of the pharmacies recommended by the green-bespectacled girl, she walked down cobbled streets which had retained an air of their medieval past.

  The purchase of the Nux. Vom. powders was almost too easily accomplished and Sister Laurence dawdled back – in a quite unchristian spirit, given the severity of the Mother’s ‘head’. Coming up from the place de la Poissonnerie via the rue de la Petite Cordonnerie, where one of the nine great gates to the close had once stood, she passed a dolls’ clinic and stopped to read the article about it posted in the window.

  Above and before her, framed by the houses which lined a narrow alleyway, she saw the imposing pattern of the South Rose window, the surrounding stone, in the glow of the midday sun, appearing the palest chalky pink. Walking up the alley, charmingly called the rue aux Herbes, Sister Laurence’s eye was caught by a tall, dark-skinned woman standing – as Mother Véronique, had she been present, would surely have explained – beneath the tall figure of Christ as Teacher, sentinel on the trumeau of the Central Door of the South Porch.

  The woman was wearing a distinctive skirt of tawny orange beneath a jacket of chrysanthemum yellow. Caught in the sunlight as she descended the wide stone steps, it seemed to Sister Laurence’s heightened sensibility as if the woman were surrounded by an aura of shimmering gold.

  The woman walked towards her as if to make her way down the alley from which Sister Laurence was now emerging into the cathedral close. To her left the spire so much admired by Viollet-le-Duc was calmly piercing a cerulean sky.

  The woman approached, now in the shadow of the buildings and out of the sanctifying light of the sun, and Sister Laurence, with a shock, recognized her. ‘Agnès?’

  Agnès stopped still, her expression as frozen as that of the stone figure of Christ behind her.

  ‘Sister Laurence, remember me? Agnès, child. Little Agnès. What a miracle to find you here.’ Excited beyond measure, Sister Laurence seized Agnès’ reluctant hand. ‘What in the world are you doing here?’

  ‘I live here, Sister.’

  ‘But this is marvellous. Quite marvellous. Mother Véronique will be thrilled.’

  ‘Sister Véronique is the Mother now?’

  ‘Mother Catherine left us. It’s quite a story. She met an old flame and they fell in love, all over again it seems, and now they’re married.’

  ‘Heavens,’ said Agnès, though she was not in fact so very surprised. She remembered the former Mother’s underwear drawer.

  ‘Such a shock when we heard, but I think it’s very romantic. And we hear now that Father Ignatius, as was, of course, has secured a position teaching theology at the university in Tours. I shouldn’t say this but Mother Véronique was livid when she heard. We – she and I – are here for my fiftieth birthday. What a piece of luck. To find you is the best present of all.’

  (Madame Beck, above in her watchtower, observed Agnès talking to a gesticulating nun and felt an animating curiosity.)

  Mother Véronique if anything felt annoyance rather than pleasure at the news brought back by an excited Sister Laurence. If Agnès was to be rediscovered, it was more fitting that she, and not Sister Laurence, should have found her. She covered her irritation with a forensic foray of curiosity. ‘How did she come here? What does she do? Is she married? Childr
en?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mother. I was anxious to get back here with your powders.’

  ‘You took her number, I suppose.’

  • • •

  Agnès, who was on her way to Professor Jones’s, had given Sister Laurence her number most unwillingly. The sudden appearance of the nun had more than startled her. It seemed to give substance to a superstitious feeling that to recall her past was in some sinister way to summon it up and cause it to rematerialize. The news of Sister, now Mother, Véronique’s presence alarmed her. She had happy memories of the stories Sister Laurence had told her and the bon-bons she used to slip her from her habit pockets. Her memories of Sister Véronique’s unpredictable rages were of another order.

  Preoccupied with these forebodings, she hardly listened to the chapter of The Secret Garden, which until then she had found unexpectedly absorbing. She had been drawn to the querulous, lonely Mary Lennox with her fiery temper. But today, when it came to her turn, she read badly, stumbling over words she had already mastered.

  ‘Not feeling too good today?’ the professor asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, Professor.’

  ‘Tell you what. I’ll read on. The secret of reading well is being well read to.’

  He read on in the droning voice and funny accent she had grown to enjoy – associated as it was with so much good will – about the robin, which had shown Mary the key to the hidden garden which belonged to the cold house in England.

  There had been robins nesting at the Dupère farm, she remembered. She had watched one summer as the fledglings grew into round balls of freckled rust-coloured fluff with droll, down-turned mouths, and had finally seen them fly tentatively off, only to return as smart red-breasted adults with black, beady eyes. She had pointed the young birds out to her ‘father’, who had sat outside in his old cane chair delighting in watching them grow.

  • • •

  Mother Véronique had some criticisms of the hôtellerie to air when she and Sister Laurence met for breakfast the next morning. Her room was, she complained, too near the lift, which apparently had been going up and down all night.

  ‘Like a whore’s drawers,’ suggested Sister Laurence under her breath.

  ‘What was that, Sister?’

  ‘Nothing, Mother. An old joke.’

  ‘It’s no laughing matter, Sister. I slept very badly.’

  For all that, Mother Véronique’s fund of knowledge seemed undiminished as she strode up the stone steps to the cathedral, almost elbowing aside a beggar, who, abject with her scallop shell, requested alms before the door.

  On gaining entry the Mother released a cascade of information. ‘The blue of the West Rose derives from a special variety of cobalt oxide. The same blue can be found in the window of the Virgin on the Seat of Wisdom, which unfortunately’ – Mother Véronique admonished the boarded scaffolding behind them – ‘appears to be hidden behind this.’

  Entranced by the great dim bejewelled space, Sister Laurence gazed about her in silence.

  ‘The North Rose’ – the Mother turned now to face the amazing harmony of peacock tails and lozenges of coloured light – ‘was donated by Blanche of Castile, then Queen of France and granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine.’

  She continued, as they moved along the south aisle of the nave, to expound on the themes of the windows.

  ‘This here, Sister, is the parable of the Good Samaritan. It illustrates the well-known exegesis by the Venerable Bede.’

  Sister Laurence did not perhaps feel the shame that she might that she had neither read nor heard of this ‘well-known’ commentary. Nor was she too sure, when she considered it, about the dates or even the identity of the Venerable Bede.

  ‘The Good Samaritan, as you will be aware, Sister, is a symbol of Christ rescuing our sick and wayward souls from the desolations of the wayside.’

  Some part of Sister Laurence began to wonder if there might be a latter-day Samaritan to rescue her from tedious explanations.

  ‘Observe, Sister, up there in the central section of the window, the Lord creating the world and Adam, and there’ – stabbing the air with a stocky forefinger – ‘see, no, no, not there, there, the Good Lord is pulling our grandmother Eve out of Adam’s rib. And there, you see Adam choking on the apple – we get the term “Adam’s apple” from this. The fruit in Eden was quite other than an apple, naturally.’

  Sister Laurence nodded her head to express enthusiastic agreement.

  ‘You know the origins of this misconception, Sister?’

  Sister Laurence shook her head energetically.

  ‘A wordplay on the Latin for apple and malus – “evil”.’ She afforded her colleague a rare and, to Sister Laurence’s eye, slightly terrifying smile.

  They moved up the aisle to examine the two windows celebrating the death and assumption of the Virgin Mary and the many miracles she had wrought at Chartres. These, Mother Véronique pronounced, were her favourite windows. If she was familiar with the butcher donors’ slaughtered pig in the bottom corner, favoured by Robert Clément, she made no comment on it.

  They moved back down towards the South Transept to inspect the Holy Nail. ‘You see, Sister, at the summer solstice the sun strikes the spot right here. Of course we are not at the right time of year to witness the miracle but if you bend down . . .’

  But here a welcome distraction for Sister Laurence occurred. A party of English visitors were being shown around by a learned English authority who had lived and discoursed on the cathedral for over sixty years. His audience milled about him, distracting Mother Véronique from her examination of the Holy Nail.

  In a low voice he described the history of the cathedral and the story of the Holy birthing gown. Mother Véronique heaved herself up to listen. Describing the ravages of the terrible fire of 1194, the authority made a small joke. ‘After three days the priests emerged from the crypt with the gown intact. They called it a miracle; we might call it marketing.’

  ‘Impertinent nonsense!’ exploded Mother Véronique.

  Sister Laurence had taken the opportunity to escape to the north aisle of the nave. When Mother Véronique tracked her down, Sister Laurence declared that she had decided that her favourite window was Noah and the flood. She particularly liked, she said, the pink elephants and striped pigs.

  ‘Boars,’ corrected Mother Véronique.

  ‘Oh yes, of course, “boars”,’ repeated Sister Laurence with seeming meekness but with enough of a treasonous glint in her voice for Mother Véronique to embark on a lengthy account of the life of St Lubin.

  St Lubin’s window had been donated by the vintners, whose trade was advertised on panels depicting scenes of merriment connected with wine. Sister Laurence, trying to absorb the details of the life of the saint, wondered if, given that it was her birthday, she dared suggest to the Mother that they too might enjoy that evening a convivial glass of wine.

  For the moment, however, she confined herself to wondering if they might maybe ascend the tower, from which vantage point, a notice advertised, a magnificent view of Chartres could be seen. But her request was refused. Mother Véronique had had, she said, since adolescence a horror of heights and always feared she might succumb to the temptation to throw herself off, a temptation she went on to compare with that of Jesus, similarly tempted by Satan in the wilderness.

  37

  Chartres

  Although she didn’t always understand the words, Agnès tried each evening to read as much as she could manage of the Abbé Paul’s schoolboy book. It had grown to be a ritual: supper (she always cooked herself something) and then her reading.

  She had started with Theseus and the Minotaur. It was slow work but from what she could make out numbers were important. Seven Athenian children of each sex were sent every nine years to Crete to feed the Minotaur. It was, she reflected, what Alain had been telling her about.r />
  ‘It’s all number here,’ he had said only that morning. She had followed him up to his eyrie again for an early breakfast of sausage and coffee and had noticed a sleeping bag.

  ‘You do sleep here, then? I thought that was a joke.’

  ‘The rooms in the hôtellerie have thin walls. There’s someone snoring like a herd of swine in the room next to mine so I thought tonight I’d stay here and get a better night’s sleep.’

  ‘Is it allowed?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who’s to notice?’

  ‘What about washing?’ she wondered.

  He laughed, showing his pointed eye-teeth. ‘You mean where do I pee? Plenty of buckets around. I don’t pee in the font if that’s what you’re imagining.’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘Are you more interested in my ablutions or what I was telling you?’

  ‘What you were telling me, of course.’

  ‘OK, so, this place is all number. Three is the number of the spirit, the Trinity to Christians, but it’s a holy number in many faiths. Four is the physical number – four elements, earth, water, fire, air, four corners of the earth –’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Yes, I know it doesn’t have any – but it did – the four winds and so on. And if you add them together, spiritual plus physical, you get the number seven, which is wholeness. The medieval –’

  ‘Stop, stop.’ She was laughing again. ‘I’m only a poor uneducated cleaner.’

  ‘That’s rubbish and you know it.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  He gave her one of his long looks. His eyes, she noticed, moved very slightly slower than those of most people. ‘I’m sorry. I’m an arrogant beast. I’m dreadful when I get into lecture mode.’

  ‘No, no, I like it.’ She did like it. She liked his airy confidence. ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK. But stop me when you’re bored. So, what was I saying? Seven. Well, the medieval curriculum was divided into two parts, the Trivium – grammar, rhetoric and logic – and the Quadrivium – geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. This is where the seven liberal arts come from – you can see them over the right door of the Western Front. Seven is a magic number: the days of the week, the seven deadly sins, and virtues, seven last trumpets at the end of time. Three times four is twelve, three times three is nine, and twelve and nine are also important here.’