“The workmen stuff themselves while we go hungry!” Sibillia, the youngest novice, said.
“The builders need more rations than we do because their labors are more arduous,” I told her. “Hewing stone and cutting wood are more toilsome than sewing and praying.”
“But it’s been raining and they’ve been doing nothing!” Guda spat. “They sit in their tents like great lazy lumps, and they drink and curse and leer at us.” She spoke with such vehemence, as though a stonecutter’s glance could set fire to her habit and kill her in the conflagration.
“My mother didn’t send me into holy orders so I could be ogled by some filthy carpenter,” the novice Margarethe cried.
“No doubt the magistra will now remind us that our Bridegroom was a carpenter,” Guda said in cold spite.
As I wrestled down my temper, their voices rose in a cacophony.
“Volmar, could you please speak to the builders?” I asked, pitching my voice above the pandemonium. “Please remind them that they are not to pester the sisters or cause any unpleasantness.”
“Of course,” he said. “I will speak to them directly after the meeting.”
Volmar looked as beaten down as I was.
“Magistra, you promised you would convince Cuno to release our dowries,” Adelheid said. Quiet, thoughtful Adelheid who usually took my side. She, too, was looking gaunt. “You said you would write to the archbishop.”
“Indeed I have.” Pain shot through my temples. “I have written to Archbishop Heinrich and to Cuno, but I lack the power to force their hands. We must pray that God will guide Cuno to do what is right.”
“We’re losing what little support we have,” Guda said, her eyes glittering and sly, as though she were a lean, hungry she-wolf leading her pack to circle me. “Margarethe and Sibillia’s parents have elected to withdraw their donations.”
I shook my head at Guda and wondered how she had come to be privy to this when the parents must speak directly to me, the magistra, concerning their donations to Rupertsberg.
“They have richly endowed Disibodenberg,” Guda went on, “only to have you move their girls to this muddy hilltop where we live like wretches.”
“Sister Guda,” I began, but she cut me off.
The she-wolf went straight for my throat.
“How much longer must we suffer for your folly? If your pride, magistra, prevents you from returning to Disibodenberg, perhaps we might join the sisters at Schönau Abbey.”
Everything in Guda’s stance told me that she was prepared to leave, taking the novices with her, in a rebellion as radical as my own when I had led our community away from Cuno. Guda was threatening us with schism.
I wanted to shriek in her face, remind her that I was the one who had saved her from Jutta’s ghastly punishments those many years ago. Instead, I pressed my hands together and looked at all my daughters, from the tearful novices to sullen Hiltrud and Verena to bewildered Adelheid. Even Richardis appeared perturbed. Although she did not speak against me, she did not defend me from the others’ outrage. Had Richardis done so, Guda would have undoubtedly accused her of being my favorite. Guda would have reminded everyone present that my special regard for Richardis broke the Rule of Saint Benedict. Richardis kept her silence, her eyes on the muddy ground.
“May I remind Sister Guda and everyone that you have sworn an oath of stability to this community.” My heart was as heavy as the sandstone blocks the masons cut to build the dormitory that would remain empty if Guda had her way. “But those who undermine our holy sisterhood with ill will are free to go.”
With my crook, I pointed to the path snaking down the steep slope.
“Those who are unhappy may go where you will and leave the rest of us in peace to build our new home on this sacred hill of Rupertsberg.”
Guda sagged. In calling her bluff, I had stolen away her power. How easy it was to tear things down, how difficult to build something up from the ground. Guda could grumble, but could she lead? Would the novices dare to follow her into some uncertain future?
The nuns looked from one to the other. It appeared they had nothing more to say.
“Is there any more business?” I asked, preparing to adjourn the meeting.
Volmar stepped forward, his eyes rimmed red. From the folds of his habit, he drew out a scroll. “Magistra, dearest Mother of Rupertsberg, Cuno has ordered me to return to Disibodenberg. He says he requires my services as secretary and scribe.”
His words, spoken with such regret, knocked the breath from my lungs. This was Cuno’s final insult. He would let us come this far, watch us flounder and go hungry without our dowries, and then deliver his death blow. Without Volmar, our provost, there could be no new abbey. Without a priest, there would be no Mass, no sacraments.
I didn’t dare look at Guda for fear of seeing the vindication in her eyes. I, Hildegard, had failed, and now we would be forced to return to Disibodenberg.
“Hildegard, my dear sisters, I’m so sorry. This is not of my choosing,” Volmar said. The good man wept.
“When do you leave?” I asked. My mind raced as I thought how I might unravel this snare Cuno had woven.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Forgive me.”
“I shall go with you,” I said.
Turning to my sisters, I spoke in such a loud voice that the builders turned their heads.
“Tomorrow I shall return to Disibodenberg to ask Cuno to release our dowries and restore Volmar as our provost. I will go to Mainz on my knees if I have to and speak to the archbishop. But the building of Rupertsberg shall go on.”
At last I faced Guda and prayed that she could love and trust me once again.
“Daughters, I give you my word that I won’t return empty-handed.”
Volmar and I made ready to ride at dawn on borrowed horses. Decency demanded that I travel with a female companion, but this time Richardis refused.
“Forgive me,” she said. “But think how the others see us.”
My heart dropped like a stone. By the others, she meant Guda.
“It saddens me,” I said, “that one with a spirit as noble as yours should be swayed by such pettiness.”
“Hildegard, don’t you understand? There’s already enough enmity between the sisters. I don’t think we can endure any more. At least I can’t. If they goad me one more time for being your favorite . . .”
“Then it is I who must beg your forgiveness,” I said, beside myself to see how she had suffered.
Only when her eyes met mine did I notice how glassy they were. I touched her brow, which burned in fever.
“Cara, you’re ill! Why did you not say anything?”
In a panic, I took her to our makeshift infirmary where I brewed infusions and laid damp cloths on her forehead. She had always been so robust, this young woman who had nursed me through illness and paralysis. But our hardship had ground her down to nearly nothing. With purple smudges beneath her eyes and every spark of color drained from her cheeks, the girl looked as hard done to as the beggars at our gate.
“I’ll call off the journey,” I swore. “I can’t leave you like this.”
Weak though she was, her hand pressed mine. “You must go. For all of us. You must see this through, Hildegard.”
When I asked Hiltrud to accompany me, my niece seemed too shocked to say no. At daybreak the following morning, I watched her exchange wide-eyed glances with Verena as we set off down the muddy track.
Once I had been frightened to perch atop a horse, but now I sat deep in the saddle and squeezed my legs to urge the bay mare forward in a ground-covering trot. I had been riding more and more on my trips back and forth to Bingen to order supplies from the tradesmen.
“You must prepare yourself,” Volmar told me, riding at my side. “Disibodenberg has gone into decline since we left. Brother Otto has died, bless his eternal soul, and the new physician is a poor substitute. Cuno’s failing is that he appoints men not according to their ability but because of their loyalty t
o him.”
“What about Egon and his goiter?” I asked. Surely Cuno thought it reflected poorly on him to have a disfigured prior as his second-in-command.
“Egon has given up his office,” Volmar said. “I understand the new prior is named Helengerus.”
As we hastened toward the place I had wanted to leave behind forever, I plotted what I would say to Cuno. Never in my life had I been so grimly determined.
We reached Disibodenberg at dusk, just before they locked the gates. When we trotted into the courtyard, our horses’ hooves clattering on the paving stones, a mob encircled us. Such foul looks they threw me, as though I were a bird of gloom. How their eyes raked us over, as though they rejoiced to see how scrawny and sorry we had become, these men who were fat off my daughters’ dowries. They looked hostile enough to drive us out to sleep in the forest like outlaws. The whites of my niece’s eyes shone in dread, her mouth frozen in a silent cry. Little wonder that Richardis had refused this mission.
“Brothers!” Volmar shouted in his attempt to pacify them. “I have come at Cuno’s behest. Hildegard and Hiltrud are my guests. Kindly let us pass.”
Cuno emerged from the throng. “Volmar, I expected you to arrive alone.” He didn’t even deign to glance in my direction.
“Abbot,” I said, towering above him on my horse. “I will speak to you now, if you please. Unless you are afraid of a poor weak figure of a woman.”
Cuno stalked off, leaving us to follow in his wake. After twelve hours in the saddle, I staggered like a cripple, using my magistra’s staff as a cane, which seemed to provide the brothers with untold amusement. Cuno would have his revenge by letting me appear as foolish as possible, a woman misled by her sinful pride, her humiliation laid bare.
As I limped through cloisters and corridors, my empty stomach howling for sustenance, the walls of Disibodenberg reared up, a prison once more. The very air seemed noxious, as though the monks, angry and bitter as never before, exhaled poisonous smoke.
In his private parlor, my abbot sat as though enthroned, with a cup of wine in hand and his most trusted men clustered around him like courtiers. Instead of inviting Volmar, Hiltrud, and I to sit, he let us kneel before him on the cold stone floor, as though we were penitents. Filthy from our long ride, the smell of horses rose off our garments, causing the men to wrinkle their noses.
“Hildegard said she would never darken our threshold again,” Cuno told his men. “Yet here she is.”
“I have come at God’s admonition,” I said, “to ask you, once again, to release our dowries.”
“God’s admonition?” Cuno appeared bemused. “I fear there is nothing godly in your impudence. Those monies rightfully belong to this house. A pity you acted so rashly, causing your nuns to starve on account of your ignorance.”
His words evoked a picture of Richardis in her sickbed. An icy terror gripped me that I would ride home to find her dead. For her very sake, I forced away those thoughts and locked eyes with Cuno before staring at each monk in turn. Rising to my feet, I spoke, my words slow and deliberate.
“My lord abbot, my brothers in Christ, hear the words of the true vision I have received.”
From my lips emerged not my own voice but another, as terrible as thunder. An unearthly power filled me as I spoke in prophecy as God’s sibyl.
“The Serene Light says: Cuno, you should act as a loving father to my daughters and cast off your greed. Their dowries have nothing to do with you. But if it is your will to persevere in the gnashing of your teeth, then woe betide you.”
My entire body shook, possessed of a might far greater than my own. When I slammed my staff on the tile floor, everyone jumped. Cuno spilled wine on his robes.
“If any among you say ‘We intend to diminish their holdings,’ then I Who Am says you are the worst despoiler. If you attempt to steal from my daughters their Brother Volmar, the shepherd who applies their spiritual medicine, then again I say that you are like the sons of Belial. God’s justice shall destroy you.”
Their faces as white as the moon, the brothers looked from one to the other. Once more that foul smell, worse than our stink of sweat and horses, filled the room. No one could deny that this abbey had become a stagnant place, full of woe, since my sisters and I left. Who was to say that this was not God’s wrath at work?
Cuno himself looked jaundiced, his teeth blackening in decay. He slumped in his chair, an aging man of failing health. But a man who would die fighting before he gave in to me. He opened his mouth, as though to denounce me, then seemed to think better of it, looking instead to the young man beside him, who eyed me gingerly, as though I were a viper that required careful handling.
“Sister Hildegard, reverend magistra,” the young man said. This could only be Helengerus, the new prior. “We shall meditate on your words. You must be hungry and weary from your journey. Please let us offer you food and drink.”
In the guesthouse, I watched my niece devour six bowls of thin Lenten pottage before that haunted grip of hunger vanished from her face. My heart sank to think that even this poor fare was probably the best she’d had in half a year.
The following morning brought no progress, only Helengerus wringing his hands to tell me that Cuno had yet to make a decision regarding our dowries. Immediately I asked for our horses to be saddled, for there was no point in lingering.
Then one of the young brothers I remembered from the scriptorium appeared. His eyes were oozing white pus.
“Hildegard, dear lady, have pity,” he said.
So I accompanied the boy to the infirmary, where I instructed the surly new infirmarer on how to prepare a compress of pounded field mint tied in a cloth.
“This will draw out the discharge. Make a fresh compress three times a day until his eyes are clear and free of infection.”
“This has become a house of pain,” the boy whispered. “I think my eyes have clouded because it’s so miserable to see.”
In the courtyard, I crowed in delight to see Volmar waiting with our horses.
“My friend! You’re coming with us?”
“I told Cuno I believe the truth of your prophecy,” he said, helping me into the saddle, “and I dared not go against God’s will. If Cuno insists on my return, he’ll have to appeal to the archbishop. Besides, do you think I would let you two ride alone?”
“You can’t bear it here anymore,” Hiltrud said, her voice overflowing with her fondness for him. “Nobody can. If they could, they’d all leave.”
How much more spirit the girl had with food in her belly and distance from Guda and her carping.
“Will we ride home now?” she asked me.
I warmed to hear her call Rupertsberg her home.
“Not empty-handed,” I told her.
The next days were a blur of hard riding and hunger.
“This is where I was born,” I told my companions, pointing to the castle on the hill skirted by vineyards, nestled in the fields and forests where I had once run wild with Rorich. My heart raced to see Bermersheim again after forty-two years of exile. How I wished Richardis could have been here, how I longed to share this homecoming with her, to offer her my girlhood memories in a jeweled casket. In the mirror of her understanding, my pain and loss might be transformed into something precious.
No doubt Bermersheim was humble compared to her family’s palace in Stade, but how abundant this land was. My eyes devoured the rich sweep of newly sown fields, the budding green grapevines, the orchards about to burst into blossom. The pastures were bursting with new lambs and calves, the woodland with game and swine.
Hugo, the only one of my three brothers not to enter the Church, was heir to this place, and he was very old, a widower with no living children. Hope beat inside me that this, my family birthright, might be Rupertsberg’s deliverance.
The servants, unfamiliar faces all, greeted me as if I had returned from the dead. That seemed not so far off the mark as, after the day’s hard ride, I limped to the solar where my br
other received me. During my childhood, he had been away in the Holy Lands, only returning after I had become an anchorite. Though we were born of the same womb, this was the first time we stood face-to-face.
As we exchanged our formal greetings, I thought to myself how ancient he looked, like one of the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Twenty years my senior, Hugo was old enough to be my father and I was already half a century old. His sparse hair was as white as hoarfrost, his face and hands marked by scars he had reaped in the First Crusade. But his gaze was shrewd and his mind dagger sharp.
“Hildegard, welcome,” he said. “I thought you might come. Rorich writes that you’re in trouble.”
“Yes,” I said, for what point was there in denying the truth? “My daughters go hungry because my abbot won’t loosen his grip on our dowries. See how thin Hiltrud, our niece, has grown.” I put my arm around the girl who gaped at her uncle as though he were a relic from the time of the Romans. He was probably the oldest man she had ever seen.
“So you’ve come to implore me to leave this estate to you.” He regarded me wryly, for I was the supplicant and he the judge. “For the glory of God, no doubt. You’ll tell me to think of my immortal soul and hint that my donation will ease my passage into the heavenly kingdom.”
“Brother, clearly you are far too astute to be swayed by such talk,” I said. “I know we have nephews in plenty who are clamoring for your lands. Perhaps you’re well-weary of hearing the arguments over who most deserves Bermersheim.”
“You’re certainly no less ambitious than any of our nephews.” The aged knight probed my eyes as if recognizing the fellow warrior in me, his sister. “God should have made you a man. You’d have been a boon on the battlefield. But I fear your ruthless striving ill suits a nun.”
Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen Page 23