by Tracey Warr
‘Almodis,’ he says softly, his arm about my waist.
‘You look surprised,’ I say. ‘Were you expecting someone else? Did you mean only to flirt and not to act?’
He is shaking his head, smiling at my questions. ‘No. No.’ And then after staring at me for some time: ‘We might lay with épreuve,’ he says meaning that we could lay chastely with a sword between us, its cold metal touching our hot flesh.
‘We might,’ I say, unlacing the ties of his shirt.
I wake before him at first light and look at the tufts of his blond hair and his brown eyelashes against the brown and pink blush of his face on the pillow beside me. I sit on the edge of the bed and put my shift on quickly, scooping up my jewels with one hand, wanting to get back to my room before anyone else in the household awakens.
‘Almodis?’
‘I must go quickly.’
He raises himself on one elbow, ‘Sweet Almodis. You are like your birthland in the Limousin: strong as granite, secret as the bosky woods, modest as the mountains.’ I smile politely to him and start to stand but he holds me back. ‘Tell me, if I had asked you to marry me all those years ago in Toulouse, would you have said yes?’
‘No,’ I say, watching the smile extinguished in his eyes. ‘I was betrothed on my father’s oath. Our lives are not for our desiring.’ I neglect to mention how I had desired Hugh of Lusignan at that time, my chimera.
‘And now?’
I do not reply.
‘We can find a way, Almodis, if you wish it.’
‘I don’t have time for conversation, Ramon, I must go.’
I move swiftly to the door and hear him jump out of bed behind me. He comes around me, holding his shirt comically to his groin, and opens the door gallantly for me.
‘Another time, then?’ he says.
Later that morning I go down to the dock with Berenger to see Ramon off on his journey to Rome. He leans close to kiss me goodbye on both cheeks. ‘My love,’ he says in my ear. He has given me a thick gold ring that I am wearing on my little finger, but only for today. Inside it is engraved with the words: ‘I am wholly yours’. When I turn back for a last sight of him I see that his hand is still cupped, in the same position, as when I left his embrace, cupped to the shape of my hip, to the shape of my absence. I smile at that and turn away. A boy. He is a sweet boy still, and I am glad that I have stolen one beautiful night for myself.
I pace my room, horrified. There is no doubt. I am with child. Pons has not lain with me for over two years. I could birth the child in secret and send it away. Or I must expose it in the forest as poor mothers do, so that it dies of cold or is eaten by animals. I pull my lips in tightly and begin to weep silently to myself. If I send word to Ramon what good would that do? He is betrothed and he will wed Blanca. He must now. He told me in Narbonne that he had betrothed himself to Blanca in despair at my rejection at the Troubadour Court but then found that he could not forget me, could not marry her. He has found excuses each year to put the marriage off: a military expedition last year, a pilgrimage to Rome this year. ‘I will keep finding excuses, Almodis,’ he said, ‘until you marry me.’ What nonsense he speaks. What did he expect? That I would leave my husband and marry him? We would be disowned by everyone, our people, our families, everyone. My sons would be shamed. My sister, my poor sister: she would not be able to show her face anywhere. People would spit on her, mistaking her for me, the Count of Barcelona’s whore, a woman of unbridled lust. No one would recognise a marriage between us. He would lose all the respect he has earned so hard over the last years. He is ridiculous. He still thinks like a boy! Because he wants something he thinks he can have it, he can have me with none of this weight of the world mattering. Now if I tell Ramon of this child what would he do? He will not own a bastard got on the wife of another lord. I am undone. Ramon could not risk war between Barcelona and Toulouse for my sake.
I sit hugging myself and weeping for a long time. In my head I chant Dia’s litany of contraceptive herbs: birthwort, Queen Anne’s lace, lupine, pepper, myrrh, licorice, pennyroyal, rue, parsley, cypress. Unfortunately I used none of them. Dia is outside the door calling to me. ‘Leave me be now,’ I call back and her footsteps retreat down the passage. Perhaps I will miscarry in my misery. Perhaps Dia can help me miscarry. Must I pay so hard for one small pleasure?
I stamp my foot. I have only to look at a man and I am pregnant! I am so tired of carrying children: the pains in my ankles and back, the swellings and unswellings, the difficulty of sleeping in the late stages, and now I must sleep with Pons to conceal my infidelity and stop him from making me a nun. I dash my pink glass to the ground at that horrible thought and cry some more, realising that it is the glass Ramon gave me for my wedding to Hugh. How I have loved the way it fitted into my hand. I cry for it as if it were a dear friend, ruined and shattered on the cold ground.
‘My Lady?’ Bernadette comes in looking anxiously from me to the pink shards.
‘It’s nothing. An accident. Clear it up.’ I wipe my face and shake my head. ‘It’s nothing.’
I try to write a letter to Ramon to tell him of my predicament and ask him for his help. I begin with a quotation from Dhuoda: If sky and meadows were unfurled through the air like a scroll of parchment and if all the gulfs of the sea were transformed, tinged like inks of many colours I could walk across this floating parchment like a bridge, crossing the inky sea to you … Ridiculous. Love is ridiculous and not real. I scrunch up the blotched sheet of paper and throw it in the fire.
29
Moissac 1052
Pons and I have travelled by boat up the Tarn to the abbey at Moissac where we will sign a charter to join the abbey to Cluny. It was my idea and greatly welcomed in letters to me by Abbot Durand. We are shown into the abbot’s office. Durand de Bredon is very tall, taller even than me and thin, so that he gives an overall impression of longness. His face is long, his nose is long, his fingers, held out to us in blessing, are very long. He is a fanatic, talking to us of a return to the rigours of the early church, of the need for self-deprivation.
‘You will be interested to know that we are preparing for the beatification of a saint here, my Lady,’ he says, ‘a sister of great faith.’
‘Oh?’
‘Sister Dolores. She lived in utter solitude for nigh on twenty years, not touching a living soul, not speaking except to whisper her visions to us, wonderful visions of the angels and seraphims.’
I try to look impressed but recoil at his description. I do not believe that God wishes such self-deprivations. God made us and the world that we live in. It and we, I think, cannot be all as bad as some preach.
‘Come and see her cell,’ he says. ‘It is quite extraordinary.’
I am not at all interested to see a nun’s cell but politely I must feign my fascination. Pons, on the other hand, is intrigued. ‘Imaginethat,’ he says to me pointedly, ‘not touching a living soul for years.’
When I step over the threshold into the church time seems to slow and stop, partly because of the weight of history here, but also because of the sheer volume of still air. The columns, buttresses and vaults rise up around me like a great stone forest. Demons cavort in its stained glass windows, an orchestra of angels play their instruments in the ceiling above the choir. Inside the church are forty carvings of green men and outside, hideous gargoyles funnel rainwater away from the walls.
The abbot leads us on to the cloisters where birds are singing in the green square. Monks pace the quadrangle underneath the intricate stone latticework of the fan-vaulted ceilings, or are seated at the stone carols contemplating the enclosed garden through a colonnade of arched windows. The order is mostly silent so the church is the sounding space where voices can burst out. The abbot brings us to a place mid-way down one side of the quad and turning his back on the grass and sunshine, faces the wall, declaring with relish, ‘Here it is!’
I am confused. There is no nun’s cell here. I see two rectangular openings in the
wall, one above the other.
‘This one here,’ he says, ‘placing his hand at the top opening, ‘was at eye-level, so that she could see out, and then this one,’ he gestures at the larger opening below, ‘was for her prayer books and letters.’ It takes me a moment to understand him.
‘She was walled up here?’ I say slowly. ‘Inside this wall.’
‘Yes. Astonishing isn’t it? She was a true saint.’
I feel sick and turn away from the wall. Unspeakable.
‘Would you like to try it my Lady? The access is from the side here …’
‘No. I would not.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Pons says. ‘She would love to try it.’ He takes my arm tightly, bruising it. ‘Try it,’ he hisses at me.
‘No need to be afraid.’ The abbot is humorous. ‘We won’t leave you in there, will we count?’
‘Oh certainly not. How would I cope without my wife?’ There is an opening and Pons thrusts me into it so that I am tightly encased front and back by stone.
‘You have to sidle sideways, countess, to get to it. Yes that’s right, down that way, until you reach the stone that she perched on. That’s it.’
The narrow stone passage opens out into a room that is only slightly wider. In the middle is a stone bench long enough to stretch out on and suspended on the far wall, a large, dark crucifix. A chamber pot and a water jug are the only objects in this sliver of a room. If I sit on the bench with my back to Pons and Durand, facing towards the church, I can see through a squint hole where I have a view of the altar. She would have been able to hear mass and the music of the choir. If I swing my legs over and face out to the cloisters I have a narrow framed rectangular view. The lintel I had stepped over would have been bricked up when Sister Dolores occupied this living grave, mortifying her flesh, in hope of paradise. A small hatch beneath the crucifix would have allowed her servant to take her pot and pass through her water and food. Sister Dolores would have stayed here with not even room to pace on either side of the bench for twenty years. I am doing my best not to imagine it.
My hands are at the opening now and my eyes at the eyehole. I try to slow my breathing. I am overwhelmingly hot. ‘Of course Sister Dolores was smaller than you,’ the abbot rattles on.
I imagine the long, long years. I imagine spiders weaving strands of my hair into their webs.
Pons is standing in the line of my vision, enjoying himself hugely. ‘Suits you,’ he says nastily. He thrusts his hand into the lower hole poking about my lap. ‘Is this how she was fed?’
I bat his hand away. There is barely room to bend my arm and raise it to my mouth. Her muscles must have wasted, her bones must have ached. She would see the monks coming and going on their way to mass. She would see a butterfly or dragonfly skid across the green quad. She would see snow fall and leaves fall, year in, year out. The horror of it. Only a loss of her mind could have sustained her, only a feverish dwelling in visions. I scuttle sideways back out.
‘Mind your dress, my dear.’
I lean my back against the wall, outside, taking deep breaths. I ignore Pons’ grins and stare at the abbot. He stares back at me, stony, long. I say, ‘And does God wish this, Father?’
‘Sister Dolores will be beatified in a matter of weeks,’ he says in a tone that disapproves of my challenge. ‘Female flesh, in particular, requires mortification, driven as it is by godless female itches,’ he says, his eyes on my heaving breasts which are already starting to fill out with milk for Ramon’s child in my womb.
‘You are quite pale, dear,’ says Pons, clearly pleased.
I walk quickly down the cloister needing to escape the sight and thought of the anchorite cell. I am disgusted. In the guest chamber Bernadette rushes to find a bowl for me but she’s too late and I have to vomit into one of Abbot Durand’s ornate vases decorating the room. I order Bernadette not to clean it.
30
Lammas 1052
I have returned to Toulouse, and Pons to Saint Gilles. My sister, Lucia, has come to stay with me. The muggy, hot weather has broken and I lie in bed listening to the sound of summer rain beating down hard on the cobbles and roofs. It is not light yet. The sound must have woken me. I relish the warmth of my bed, of my body, and the fact that I need not get up just yet.
‘My Lady!’ Bernadette is through the door with her words. Something is wrong. I sit up, pulling my shift up my shoulders, blinking against the candlelight that she has brought in with her.
‘What is it? Is it Raingarde? One of the children?’ But not Raingarde. I would have felt her long before anyone came to give me news of her. Is it my mother?
‘It’s Alienor, Lady!’
I struggle for a moment trying to place Alienor in my household. I am still half asleep. ‘Alienor?’ I repeat.
‘She’s outside and begs urgent audience with you.’
‘In the middle of the night?’ Is Pons dead? Hope rises in me. ‘Quickly, show her in and bring us some water.’
‘Big with child she is,’ Bernadette, says her eyes round. ‘And wet through with the rain. Shall I light the fire? She’s in an awful state.’
‘Yes, light the fire.’
The commotion has woken Dia and she comes in just behind Alienor and helps her take off her wet cloak and hood, but the clothes underneath are soaking wet too.
‘Get Alienor some clothes from my chest, Dia. You mustn’t stay in those,’ I tell her.
Bernadette helps her to strip. As the mound of her belly is exposed she is looking at me mutely, her eyes wide and afraid and I begin to fear too. When she is clothed in my gown and has stopped shaking with cold I say, ‘Sit here on the bed, Alienor and put this blanket around you too. What has possessed you to ride here in the middle of the night in this terrible storm?’ I settle the blanket around her.
‘He’s thrown me out,’ she says, ‘and you can see why. He said he would run me through the town naked if I didn’t do what I was told. Said he didn’t want to know nothing of my bastard. My bastard,’ she says indignant. ‘Well it’s his, isn’t it my Lady?’
‘Yes,’ I soothe her, drying her hair. ‘Never mind him, Alienor. You are safe now. You have served me well and I will take good care of you and your child.’
‘That’s just it,’ she says. ‘You won’t. Not if his plans and plots all go to schedule. I thought me and the babe would be done for if I didn’t get word to you in time.’
‘What plans do you mean?’
‘I heard him talking with Piers.’ I glance up at Bernadette at that and she looks anxious.
‘He’s meaning to put you away, Lady. Lock you up. You wouldn’t be able to help any of us then.’
I sit back against my pillows. ‘Tell me what you heard.’ ‘I thought he loved me just a little,’ Alienor sniffs. ‘I thought he might like a babe of mine to dandle on his knees and give him a job as a cook when he’s old enough.’
I wait as patiently as I can for her to tell her story.
‘He was going to ship me off to the nuns in the morning. “I’ve got you a good place as convent servant at Saint Gilles,” he says to me. Me! With nuns! I don’t think so. Had to leave in the middle of the night, didn’t I?’ She looks around the room at Dia and Bernadette, gesturing dramatically.
‘Half those nuns are former prostitutes, anyway,’ mutters Bernadette.
Warming to her story, Alienor continues, ‘I picked up these letters that were waiting for Piers in case they help.’ She reaches for her saddlebag and gives me two letters with Pons’ seal. ‘I don’t know what they say. They might not be the right ones. He says to Piers, the bit I heard, my Lady, the sleeping draught will make it easy till you can get the countess to the boat.’
I swallow hard at that and look at Dia and Bernadette huddled close together in the dark room lit only with one candle and the young fire. This is very bad. The fire is still struggling with the frigid night air and our breath comes white before our faces.
‘Then he says,’ continues Alienor, ‘“keep he
r bound and gagged on the boat, Piers. It will be the only way.”’
Dia and Bernadette exclaim at this and I feel cold to my bones.
‘“Durand will meet you at …” But I couldn’t hear that part clearly. Maybe it says something in the letters. It was something beginning with M. Piers was shuffling papers and I couldn’t hear it.’
‘Did you hear anything else?’
‘No, that’s it. But he’s said to me many times in the last months, “I’m going to put her in a nunnery. That’s where she belongs with her books. Time for a new wife.”’
‘You have done well,’ I tell her quietly, calmly. ‘Bring me the letter knife, Bernadette.’ I slice open one of the letters.
‘From the Count of Toulouse to Eli, Captain of The Tarn Trader,’ I read out.
‘I’ve seen that boat at the pier,’ says Dia. ‘It plies salt and the like up and down the Tarn.’
‘My servant, Piers, delivers to you the cargo I spoke about with you. I charge you, as we discussed, to ship it to Moissac, with all haste and deliver it to Durand de Bredon.’
I pause and Bernadette is exclaiming, ‘Moissac! He means to incarcerate you with those stone demons!’; and Dia is saying at the same time, ‘Durand de Bredon, Almodis! They mean to do worse than make you a nun’; and I am thinking, ‘Ship the cargo’. I take a deep breath.
‘What time is it, Bernadette?’
‘The sun’s not showing yet,’ she says, peering out of the window. ‘Must be an hour yet or more before sunrise.’
‘Wake the groom and saddle our horses. We will ride to my sister in Carcassonne. Alienor, you will come with us. You will be safe there and Raingarde will give you a position in her household. Wake the girls, Bernadette: Lucia, Melisende, Adalmoda, and also Hughie. We must all go and before first light when Piers will discover his letters missing and Alienor fled, and he will be hard on her heels then.’ Bernadette stumbles out into the dark of the corridor. ‘You have done so well, Alienor.’ I press her hands warmly and she is smiling brightly at me, with tears on her cheeks. I wipe her face with a corner of my bedsheet.