Speaking Volumes

by Bradford Morrow

  In her melodious voice, the Virgin speaks of Jesus Christ her Son, his tears of ruby blood. The Virgin says her son will return to Earth in May to walk among flowers and bees.

  When the bell rings for matins, Wilda is still up, pacing, her braids unraveling. Somehow, she tidies herself. Somehow, she transports her body to the chapel, where three dozen sleepy-eyed virgins have gathered at two in the freezing morning to revel in Jesus’s love.

  At breakfast, Wilda drinks her beer but does not touch her bread. Now she is floating through the scriptorium. She has slept a mere thirty minutes the night before. She has a runny catarrh from standing in the freezing wind with her hood down, and she shivers. But her heart burns, a flame in the hallowed nook of her chest.

  You are all Christ’s brides, said the Abbot this morning. Do not break the seal that seals you both together.

  “I am the bride of Christ,” Wilda whispers as she sits down at her lectern. She opens her ink, sniffs the bloodred brew. She has a burning need to describe the voice of the Virgin, the frenzy of beating angel wings as the heavens opened to let the Sacred Mother descend. She wants to capture the looks on their faces, wrenched and fierce. But there’s Sister Elgaruth, wheezing behind her. Wilda turns, regards the sooty kernel of flesh that adorns Sister Elgaruth’s left nostril. Elgaruth is one of God’s creatures, magnificent, breathing, etched of flesh and bone.

  “Sister,” says the old woman, “mind the missing word in your last paragraph.”

  Elgaruth points with her crooked finger, deformed from decades of copying, too crimped to copy text.

  “Forgive me. I will be more mindful.”

  Sister Elgaruth shuffles off. Wilda eyes the shelves where the unbound vellum is stashed, noting the locked drawer that stores the choicest sheets, stripped from the backs of stillborn lambs. She has never touched the silky stuff, which is reserved for the three ancient virgins who have been penning a Psalter for an archbishop.

  Now, when Sister Elgaruth departs to the lavatory, Wilda tiptoes over to the old woman’s lectern. She opens the first drawer, notes a pot of rosemary balm, the twig Elgaruth uses to pick dark wax from her ears. The second drawer contains a Psalter, prayer beads, a bundle of dried lavender. In the third drawer, beneath a crusty handkerchief, is a carved wooden box, four keys within it, looped on a hemp ring. Wilda snatches the keys, hurries to the vellum drawer, tries two keys before unlocking the most sacred sheets. By the time Sister Elgaruth returns, Wilda is back at her desk, three stolen sheets stuffed in her cowl pocket. Her heart, a wild bird, beats within her chest.

  She turns back to Beastes of God’s Worlde.

  The goats bloode is so hotte with luste it wille dissolve the hardest diamonde.

  In the kitchen, Aoife chops the last carrots from the root cellar, brown shriveled witches’ fingers. Aoife is pale, freckled, quick with her knife. She sings a strange song and smiles. She turns to Wilda. In the Abbot’s pompous voice, she croaks a pious tidbit about the darkness of woman’s flesh—a miraculous imitation. For a second the Abbot is right there in the kitchen, ankle-deep in onion skins, standing in the steam of boiling cabbage. Wilda feels an eruption of joy in her gut. She lets out a bray of laughter. Sister Lufe turns from her pot of beans to give them both the stink eye. Wilda smirks at Aoife, takes up a cabbage, and peels off rotted leaves, layer after slimy layer, until she uncovers the fresh, green heart of the vegetable.

  Wilda kneels on bruised knees. She has no desk, only a crude, short table of gnarled elm. Tucked beneath it are sheets of lamb vellum, her quills, a pot of stolen ink. She faces east. Her window is a small square of hewn stone. Outside, snow has started to fall again, and Wilda, who has no fire, rejoices in the bone-splitting cold. She’s mumbling. Shiver after shiver racks her body. And soon she feels nothing. Her candle flame sputters. She smells fresh lilies.

  The Virgin steps from the empyrean into the world of flesh and mud.

  The glow from her body burns Wilda’s eyes.

  The words from her mouth are like musical thunder in Wilda’s ears.

  “My Son will return to choose a bride,” says the Virgin, “a pearl without spot.”

  And then the Virgin is lifted by angel throng, back into the realm of pure fire.

  Wilda sits stunned as the snow thickens outside. She prays. She whips herself. And then she takes up her plume. She tries to describe the beauty of the Virgin. At first, her words get stuck, stunned as flies in a spill of honey. But then she begins with a simple sentence, in tiny, meticulous script.

  Whenne the virgin descended I smelde apples and oceane winde.

  At Prime Service the Abbess keeps coughing—fierce convulsions that shake her whole body. She flees the chapel with her two prioress flunkies, eyes streaming. The Abbot pauses, and then he returns to his theme of Hell as a solid block of ice, the Devil frozen at its core. Satan is a six-headed beast with thirty-six sets of bat wings on his back. The Evil One must perpetually flap these wings to keep the ninth circle of Hell freezing cold.

  Wilda frowns, trying to grasp the paradox of Hell as ice, wondering how this same Devil, frozen at the center of Hell, can also slip through her window at night, burning with lust, every pore on his body steaming. But it’s morning, and the Abbot is sober. When he returns for vespers, his imagination inflamed with wine, he will speak of carnal commerce between women and Satan. But this morning his theme is ice.

  Today is the first day of April, and a crust of snow covers the dead grass.

  The chickens aren’t laying. The cows give scant milk.

  The meat cellar boasts nothing but hard sausage, ox tails, and salted pigs’ feet.

  The beets are blighted, the cabbages soft with rot.

  But Wilda smiles, for she knows that Christ will return this blessed month, descending from Heaven with a great whoosh of balmy air. She has described the glory in her secret book: trees flowering and fruiting simultaneously, lambs frolicking on beds of fresh mint, the ground decked with lilies as Christ walks across the greening Earth to fetch his virgin bride.

  On Sunday, in the kitchen, Aoife puts two bits of turnip into her mouth, mimicking the Abbess’s crooked teeth. Crossing her eyes, Aoife walks with the Abbess’s arrogant shuffle, head held high and sneering. Wilda doubles over, clutches her gut. She staggers and sputters as laughter rocks through her. Her eyes leak. She wheezes and brays. At last, the mirth subsides. Wilda leans against the cutting table, dizzy, relishing the warmth from the fire. A stew, dark with the last of the dried mushrooms, bubbles in the cauldron. Aoife, still sniggering, places her hand on Wilda’s arm. Wilda feels a delicious heat burning through her sleeve. Aoife’s smile sparkles with mischief, and the young nun smells of sweat and cinnamon.

  Wilda’s body floats as she looks into Aoife’s honey-colored eyes, pupils shrinking, irises etched with green. Aoife murmurs something in her mother tongue. But then she speaks English.

  “Man is a rational, moral animal, capable of laughter.”

  Aoife removes her hand and turns back to her bucket of turnips.

  The Abbess is dead by Tuesday. Her body, dressed in a scarlet cowl, rests on a bier in the chapel. The Abbot, fearing plague, sends a small, nervous prior to conduct the service. The chapel echoes with the coughs of sickly nuns. The prior covers his mouth with a ruby rag. He hurries through the absolution, flinging holy water with a brisk flick of his fingers, and departs. Three farmers haul the body away.

  That night, a hailstorm batters the stone convent, sending down stones the size of eggs, keeping the nuns awake with constant patter. Sisters whisper that the world has fallen ill, that God will purge the sin with ice. No one arrives from the monastery to conduct the morning service, and nuns pray silently in the candlelit chapel.

  Contemplating the body of Christ, Wilda kneels before her little book, waiting for words to come. She sees him, torn from the cross, limp in the Virgi
n’s arms. He is pale, skinny as an adolescent boy. His side wound, parted like a coy mouth, reveals glistening, pomegranate flesh. Other than the flowing tresses and silky beard, Christ is hairless, with smooth skin and nipples the color of plums. He has a woman’s lips, a woman’s soft, yearning eyes. Wilda imagines him waking up in his tomb, cadaverous flesh glowing like a firefly in the cryptic darkness. His groin is covered with loose gauze. His hair hangs halfway down his back, shining like a copper cape when he emerges into the sunlight.

  The world is frozen in sinne, Wilda writes, frozen until the Lammbbe descendes to walk among floweres and bees. He wille strewe his marriage bed with lilies. Hallelujah!

  Fifteen nuns have been taken by the plague, their bodies carted off by farmers. Not even a prior will set foot in the convent, but the nuns shuffle through their routine, sit coughing and praying in the silent chapel, their hearts choked with black bile. They pine for spring. But the heavens keep dumping grain after grain of nasty frost onto the stone fortress. In mid-April, the clouds thicken, and a freak blizzard descends like a great beast from the sky, vanquishing the world with snow.

  Prioress Ethelburh orders the nuns to stay in their rooms praying, to leave only for the lavatory. Kitchen workers will still prepare food but the nuns will no longer gather in the refectory for fellowship. Victuals will be taken from door to door to stave off the contagion.

  In the kitchen Aoife is bleary-eyed, and Wilda worries that the plague has struck her. But then the poor girl is weeping over her pot of dried peas.

  “What is it, Sister?” Wilda moves toward her.

  “Nothing,” says Aoife, “just the sadness of winter and death.”

  But then Aoife pulls up her cowl sleeve, shows Wilda her thin arm—pale and finely shaped, mottled with pink blisters.

  Wilda jumps back, fearing contagion.

  “Only burns,” Aoife whispers, “from Prioress Ethelburh’s hellish candle.”

  Wilda allows her knuckles to stray across Aoife’s soft cheek.

  “I was out walking in the garden,” says Aoife, “watching the moon shine on the snow, and she …”

  Sister Lufe bustles in with a rank wheel of sheep’s cheese, and the two girls jump apart. Aoife dumps melted snow into her pot of dried peas (the well is frozen). Wilda hacks at a black cured beef tongue (the last of it). Outside, the sun glares down on the endless white blight of snow. The trees are rimed with frost, the woodpile obscured, the garden paths obliterated.

  Wilda kneels on cold stone, stomach grumbling. For supper she had three spoons of watery cabbage soup and a mug of barley beer. The crude brew still sings in her bloodstream as she takes up pen and parchment.

  The Lammbbe will come again, she writes, murmuring the word Lammbbe, reveling in its deep, buzzing hum. She closes her eyes, pictures Jesus hot and carnified, walking through snow. Frost melts upon contact with his burning flesh. Walking accrosse the barren earthe, she writes, the Lammbbe wille leeve a hotte traile of lillies. When he steps into the convent orchard, the cherry trees burst into bloom. Thirty-sixe virgines stand in white arraye, pearles withoute spotte. The nuns stand in order of age upon the lawn, ranging from thirteen-year-old Sister Ilsa to sixty-eight-year-old Elgaruth. Jesus pauses before twenty-three-year-old Wilda. He smiles with infinite wisdom. He touches her cheek with his hand, peers into her eyes to look upon her naked soul. Wilda feels the heat from his spirit. At first she can’t look at his face. But then she looks up from the grass and sees him: eyes like molten gold, lips parted to show a hint of pearly teeth, a tongue as pink as a peony.

  “My bride,” he says.

  And cherubim scream withe joye, squirminge naked in the frothe of heavene.

  The shrieks grow louder—so loud that Wilda looks up from her book. She’s back in the convent, hunkered on the cold floor. She gets up, walks down the hallway, turns left by the lavatory. The screaming is coming from the sad room where nuns are punished, but Wilda has never heard a ruckus in the middle of the night. She peeks in, sees Aoife seated, skirts pulled up, hair wild, eyes huge and streaming. Prioress Ethelburh twists the young nun’s arms behind her back. Prioress Willa burns Aoife’s creamy left thigh with red-hot pincers. This time, Aoife does not scream. She bites her lip. She looks up, sees Wilda standing in the doorway. Their eyes meet. A secret current flows between them. Ethelburh turns toward Wilda, her mouth wrenched with wrath, but then a violent cough rocks through her. She shakes, sputters, drops to the floor. And Aoife leaps from the chair like a wild rabbit. In a flash she is halfway down the hall.

  “Surely mockers are with me,” says Prioress Willa, casting her clammy fish eye upon Wilda, “and my eye gazes on their provocation.”

  The next morning, Ethelburh is dead, her body dragged beyond the courtyard by hulking Sister Githa, a poor half-wit fearless of contagion. Twelve bodies lie frozen near the edge of the wood, to be buried when the ground thaws.

  Aoife is singing in her mother tongue, the words incomprehensible to Wilda, pure and abstract as birdsong, floating amid the steam of the kitchen. Poor old Lufe is dead. Hedda and Lark have passed. Only Hazel, the girl who carries bowls from door to door, loiters in the larder, bolder now that Lufe is gone, inspecting the dwindling bags of flour.

  “Prioress Willa has taken to her bed,” whispers Aoife.

  “God bless her soul,” says Wilda, crossing herself.

  Aoife chops the last of the onions. Wilda picks worms from the flour. And the soup smells strange: boiled flesh of a stringy old hen.

  “Sister,” says Aoife, her mouth dipping close to Wilda’s ear, “I have heard that the Abbess kept food in her chamber. Pickled things and sweetmeats. A shame to let it go to waste, with our sisters half starved and weak.”

  Snow falls outside the kitchen door, which is propped open with a log to let the smoke drift out. The light in the courtyard is a strange dusky pink, even though it is afternoon. Wilda thinks of Jesus, multiplying fishes and loaves. She sees the bread materializing, hot and swollen with yeast. She pictures the fish—teeming, shimmering, and salty in wooden pails.

  “Sister,” says Wilda, “you speak the truth.”

  The Abbess lived in the turret over the library, and the two nuns tiptoe up winding stairs. The door is locked. Aoife smirks and fishes a key from her pocket. Aoife opens the door and steps into the room first. Wilda stumbles after her, bumps into Aoife’s softness, stands breathing in the darkness, smelling mold and rot and stale perfume—myrrh, incense, vanilla. Aoife pushes dusty drapes aside, discovering windowpanes in a diamond pattern, alternating ruby and clear. The nuns marvel at the furnishings: the spindly settee upholstered in brocade, the ebony wardrobe with pheasants carved into its doors, several gilded trunks, and the grandest bed they have ever seen: big as a barge, the coverlet festooned in crimson ruffles, the canopy draped in wine velvet. Wilda wonders how the crooked little Abbess climbed into this enormity each night, and then she spots a ladder of polished wood leaning against the bed.

  Aoife opens a trunk, pulls out forbidden things: a lute, a fur-lined cape, a crystal vial of perfume, and a bottle of belladonna. They find a clockwork mouse that creeps when you wind it up (a mechanism that Aoife, oddly, seems to understand). The girls giggle as the mouse moves across the floor. Aoife strokes the ermine cape as though it is a sleeping beast. Wilda leans against the settee, but does not allow herself to sit. The second trunk is chock-full of dainty food: small clay jars of pickled things, dried fruit in linen sacks, hard sausages in cheesecloth, venison jerky, nuts, honey, wine.

  Aoife opens a pot of pickled herring, sniffs, eats a mouthful, chews, and then offers the fish to Wilda. They taste fresh, briny, tinged with lemon. Something awakens in Wilda, a tiny sea monster in her stomach, so weak and shriveled that she hardly knew it existed. She feels it stretching strange tentacles, opening its fanged mouth to unleash a wild groan. Wilda is starving. She gnaws at a twisted strand of
venison, tasting forests in the salty meat, the deer shot by a nobleman’s arrow, strips roasted over open flame. When Aoife opens a pot of strawberry preserves, she moans as sweetness fills the room—a kind of sorcery, the essence of a sun-warmed berry field trapped in a tiny crock. Aoife eats with her fingers, tears in the creases of her eyes. And then she offers the jar to Wilda. Wilda pauses, feels the monster slithering in her gut, dips a finger, and tastes the rich, seedy jelly.

  “Hallelujah!” she whispers, smacking her lips. She eats more strawberries. Offers the pot to Aoife. But Aoife has discovered a stash of sugared almonds. Wilda tries them: butter roasted with cinnamon and cloves, a hint of salt, some other spice, unfamiliar, bewitching. The nuns sit down on the soft settee and spread their feast on a carved trunk. They eat smoked fish, dried apricots, pickled carrots, and red currant jam. Suddenly very thirsty, they have no choice but to uncork a bottle of wine, passing it between them. After shaving off teal mold with a small gilded knife, they consume a chunk of hard cheese. And then they discover, wrapped in lilac gauze, a dozen pink marzipan rabbits.

  The monster in Wilda’s stomach lets out a bellow. She can picture it, lolling in a hot stew of food, the scales on its swollen belly glistening. She pops a candy into her mouth, closes her eyes, tastes manna, angel food, milk of paradise. The young nuns drink more wine. And now Aoife is up on her feet. She opens the Abbess’s wardrobe, rifles through gowns and cloaks. She pulls out a winter frock, thick velvet, the luminous color of moss, sable fur around the neck and cuffs. Wilda looks away as Aoife undresses.

  “How do I look?” Aoife asks, still buttoning up the bodice, contorting like an acrobat as though she has pulled on fine frocks a hundred times before.