The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  I was told all this as I was walked round the Abbey by Sister Mary Amor, who was kind to me in a brisk sort of way. I did not take it all in as I pattered after her. ‘Keep up, Agnes!’ as Hugh would say.

  On each side of the gatehouse and its entrance court, she showed me stores, hay barn and granary, built up against the boundary of the precinct, with small gates out on to Bimport. Near the wall separating the Abbey from Magdalen Lane, she pointed out the brewhouse. There are thatched tenements, freestanding as in a village, and a network of courts and yards for workshops, smithy, malthouse, laundry, bakehouse, stables, the offices of the Obedientiaries, the Steward’s house.

  ‘The Steward is the most important man in the Abbey, he is the Abbess’s right hand,’ said Sister Mary Amor.

  On the right of the gatehouse is the Treasury and what they call the Star Chamber, where cases concerning leases and tenancies are settled. The novices’ quarters are on this side too, and guest-houses for church and government officials. Pilgrims and vagrants are herded in a timber shed.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Mary Amor, ‘the novices’ dorter and parlour are in a shocking state of disrepair. Everyone, nun or novice, has to sleep nowadays in the main dorter. It was built in times long gone by, when there were more sisters than we have now, so there is plenty of room.’

  I had thought that this would be a world of women, but in and around the yards and courts there is continual noise and shouting from men making and mending, hammering and sawing, carting and unloading, and visitors on horseback clattering in through the gatehouse – and nuns flittering about trying to complete some chore before the bell rings yet again for the Holy Office.

  When later I had reason to penetrate this hurly-burly on some errand, I saw one or other of my sisters stopped in her tracks, transfixed by the sight of sweat-gleaming half-clad young workmen wielding pickaxe or hammer. I saw the young men glance up and grin, alive to the gaze of a woman.

  You must know that the life of the Abbey is shot through with dreams, fantasies and denial. And betrayal.

  Mary Amor led me away from the din of the gatehouse area, towards the quiet parts not penetrated by casual visitors.

  There are two churches within the Abbey. The first one you come to, with a pathway from a door on to the road, is for servants and people from the town. We walked on, through their graveyard, and then the nuns’ burial ground.

  ‘You and I will be laid to rest here when our time comes,’ said Mary Amor cheerfully, making the grave sound as cosy as a feather-bed.

  We went into the Abbey Church.

  On that summer morning the interior was flooded with brightness from the windows. I had of course seen glass, and glass painted with little scenes within the panes, in the church in Bruton, but never such dazzling expanses as this. Colour leapt out from the paintings all over the walls, from the vaulting, and from the gilded figures on the screen straddling the nave, with the Holy Rood, Christ on His Cross, hanging over all. The red blood pours from His side, His feet, His hands. His face is full of pain. I always found it hard to look for long upon the Holy Rood.

  The Abbey Church is transformed by another kind of magic after dark. When I first saw it by night, by candlelight, with the high shadowy roof pierced by glints of gold and scarlet and blue, I was dumbstruck.

  On that first day, following Mary Amor up the nave between fat columns, I saw how the floor we walked upon was tiled all over in squares decorated with flowers and animals and shields and emblems, all different. I came to love looking at those tiles. I stole one, when the End Time came.

  The air in the Abbey Church is heavy with whisperings and mutterings from the side aisles. That first day, I thought they were spirit voices. They are the voices of priests saying Mass for the souls of the dead, in the chantry chapels. That’s what chantry priests do, day after day, for ever. They say Masses and pray for the souls in Purgatory of those who can afford to endow a chapel and its priest, and so ensure a place in Heaven. The chantry priests have lodgings in neat one-storey tenements along the far edge of the nuns’ burial ground. Tedium apart, they do not have a difficult life.

  Beyond the screen, with the Holy Rood hanging above it, is the choir and the high altar. This is the holy part of the church, and where the singing of the Holy Office is done. Nuns were filing in as we stood there, taking their places in ranks opposite one another across the chancel. It was time for Sext. Mary Amor made to join them.

  ’Wait for me,’ she said.

  I dropped back and listened. One pure voice, like a dawn bird-call, then many, rising and falling, the individual voices blurred by echoes from the vaulting. I have heard the chanting of canons in Bruton – deep, warm, rhythmic. The chanting of women is different. There is sadness and longing in it.

  We left the church through the south transept, opening into a covered passage with stone benches down each side.

  ‘This is the slype,’ whispered Mary. ‘It is a pleasant place to sit and read, if you like reading.’

  ‘I do like reading.’

  ‘I never seem to find the time, myself.’

  Along the slype, out into the cloister. In the middle is a garden, with white and red roses and low grey-green bushes, some of which I recognised. There was a nun bent over these, working with a tool.

  We walked all round in the shade of the arcades. Mary Amor pointed out how this door led into the kitchens, that one into the refectory, down that stair are the cellars for beer and wine, and the place where you wash your hands before eating, these stairs led up to the nuns’ dormitory, the dorter; underneath it is the warming-room, through here is the Chapter House, there the Library, over there, look, look, on the other side of the cloister, that tall archway leads to the Abbess’s lodging.

  ‘King Cnut died here in the Abbey,’ said Sister Mary Amor. ‘He was a good Christian man in his own way, even though he was not so great as our own King Alfred.’

  ‘King Cnut came from another country and ruled England for nearly twenty years,’ I said, blessing Master John Leland in my heart.

  Mary Amor shot me a sharp look. People who enjoy giving information prefer you not to know anything.

  I became mightily confused as she showed me around, although I had already eaten in the refectory, seated at the very end of one of the long tables set against the walls. In the middle is a lectern for reading aloud during dinner and, at the far end, on a platform, the high table where the Abbess sits with guests or with the Obedientiaries. And I had already slept my first night in the dorter, a long chamber divided into many small ones with wooden partitions, each with its little window open to the winds. Even with the shutter pulled up, my cubicle is more airy than is comfortable. I have a bed, a little desk and a kneeler, a bench, and a shelf. It is a tight fit, but more space than I had for myself at home in Bruton.

  We have our own reredorter through an arch at the end of the chamber – a passage with closets along both sides, emptying into a drain below. I do not know where the drain discharges itself. I expect, down under the Park. Beside the hole in each closet is a slot in which stands a stick with a sponge on it. There is a basin at the end of the chamber in which to rinse the sponges. I am impressed by these arrangements.

  In spite of the warm outside air, the stone walls weep with damp. I do sometimes miss the smoky herb-tinged, dung-tinged fug of home. There is in fact too much space and air. Many of the buildings in the nuns’ part of the Abbey, so grand and venerable with their carvings and inscriptions, are dirty and dilapidated. So much for ‘rolling in money’. In our dorter, the wooden rafters are black with mould and tubs are set to catch the drips for when it rains.

  Outside, the mud and filth underfoot after rain – and the rats – are naturally no less troublesome than anywhere else I have been. But the clean parts, and the perpetual cleansing of those parts, are such as I have never seen before. Turds are cleared away almost daily from the stairs and passages. The kitchens and the cooking pots are scoured by sisters who are ca
pable of nothing else, and the refectory and dorter swept by women from the town. The nuns’ linen is bleached and starched in the Laundry to a perfection I did not know was possible.

  Mary Amor told me that this whiteness is achieved by steeping the linen in piss before boiling. She showed me a barrel outside the Laundry into which the chamber pots of the lay inhabitants of the Abbey are emptied, except in hard winters when the contents freeze solid. Everything in nature including urine, I suppose, has its uses.

  Except fleas. I cannot see what benefit fleas bring to anyone or anything. Yet knowing something of the strange ingredients which go into the concoctions of apothecaries, who knows whether a paste of fleas might not have some medical application. It would be hard however to harvest them to make the experiment, as they jump so.

  I said as much to Sister Mary Amor, thinking to make her laugh. But again she looked at me sharply.

  ‘You are whimsical, Agnes Peppin.’

  I said nothing. I am not whimsical, not in the least. It is just that one thought leads on to another.

  Beyond the cloister I was shown the Infirmary, perched near the edge of a ridge beyond which the ground falls away, down and down and down. The first time you see this view, you cannot prevent yourself from exclaiming aloud. On the steeply sloping land beneath us I saw copses, enclosures, beehives, fishponds, and green spaces, all enclosed within high walls. This is the Abbey Park. Right at the bottom, way down in the valley, is a village with its church and cottages.

  Sister Mary Amor and I stood at the fence on the edge and looked down on to the Park.

  ‘You see we live up on a cliff,’ said Mary Amor. ‘On a clear day, you can see Glastonbury Tor from here.’

  It was not a clear day. We were looking straight into a hazy sun. A string of horses hung about with bundles was labouring up through the Park, with a gaggle of young men urging them upward.

  ‘Everything has to be brought up from the bottom,’ said Mary Amor. ‘Even our water. We do have a well up here, but it does not give enough for the laundry, the kitchen, the brewing. So we draw it from the spring down on the road towards Sherborne, and it is carried up in barrels by packhorse. It’s a costly way to get water, but it does provide employment for people.

  Far away across the valley, forested land rises in curves like the backs of beasts.

  ‘We have the same difficulty with firewood,’ said Mary Amor. ‘That has to be carried all the way from Gillingham Forest, which is a Royal Forest. That is in the other direction. King Harold gave St Mary’s at Gillingham to our Abbey, and we have the right to take wood from the Forest. But this too requires heavy labour, and much to be paid out in wages. King Alfred was a great man but he was not practical, he did not think about the necessities of life when he founded our Abbey up on this high dry ridge.’

  It is indeed strange to be in a town through which no river runs. She had said ‘Gillingham’. I know the cart that brought me to Shaftesbury had passed through Gillingham. Somewhere far beyond the Royal Forest, and somewhat to the west, lies Bruton.

  ‘The Lord knows there is enough wood and to spare,’ said Mary Amor. ‘They say that the trees in the Forest are so dense that a squirrel could leap from branch to branch all the way from Shaftesbury to Gillingham without touching the ground.’

  I entered the Abbey as a postulant, but I did not remain one for long. There was no point in it, they told me. There were no other postulants, and I might as well join the novices in their instruction.

  The day I became a novice I met with the Chambress in my cubicle to be clothed. That is the expression. To be clothed. She carried over her outstretched left arm an array of garments in black and white, hanging down to the ground. She laid them out on my bed. I stood shivering barefoot in my shift while she took up my own things and bundled them on the floor. I said or rather looked a sad goodbye to my green hood. I had hidden the emerald dolphin on its chain under my mattress beforehand. They were not going to take that from me.

  Deceit was in me, from the beginning.

  Everything of mine would be kept, she said, until I was professed as a nun, in case I apostatised – that means running away – or in case, before the two years of my novitiate were up, I was found unworthy of the habit of a Benedictine.

  She cut off my hair. I sat on the stool and she chopped away, long pieces falling on the floor and wisps floating in the draught. I did not like this. In order not to feel what I felt, I became a block of wood. Badgers, when they are frightened, attack. Rabbits freeze. I am a rabbit. I know that. But I would like to be the best rabbit that can be.

  She passed me the new garments in order, making the sign of the cross over each, and helped me to put them on. First, a black underskirt. Then my tunic – a black woollen gown. Then the scapular, a long piece of black cloth with a head-hole, hanging down before and behind.

  ‘In olden times’, she said, ‘it served as an apron, but we have separate aprons now with a loop round the neck for when we do dirty work like gardening, or in the Infirmary.’

  She put an ordinary white cap over my head, covering my ears. Then the white wimple, like a head-cloth but fitting close under the chin, concealing my throat.

  ‘You have a long neck,’ she said, tugging at the edge of the wimple so that it covered the opening of my tunic.

  She spread out the white veil of a novice on her upturned hands, turned toward me, and placed it over my head. She came up close and pulled it forward so that it concealed my front hair and my forehead. I smelled her fishy breath.

  ‘Only bold girls bare their foreheads,’ she said.

  One difference between the habit of a novice and the habit of a professed nun, apart from their black veils, is that they tie an extra broad white band across their foreheads. I am spared that. She secured the veil to the wimple with pins and left a packet of pins with me, for as she said, they are easily dropped and lost.

  Then she put a broom in my hands, told me to sweep up my fallen hair, took up my own clothes, and bade me not to be late in choir today of all days.

  The Novice Mistress was waiting for me at the great door of the Abbey Church to escort me to my place among my sisters. As we walked up the nave every head, the black veils and the white, turned to look at me – stiffly. I learned, in a single hour of wearing my habit, about the constriction around my head. I could not turn my neck freely or very far, I could not toss my head or scratch my scalp, and it was already itching. From now on I was walking as nuns walk, looking straight ahead.

  The Novice Mistress’s name is Dame Monica Slater. She has small black eyes and almost no teeth, which makes it hard to understand what she says. She calls us her ‘little minchins’. We sit on benches in her office. She issues us each with a small book printed on paper, a Book of Hours, such as I saw in Bruton, which is called here a Primer. This is a costly item and we are to take care of it. It is to be our regular reading matter in our free time.

  The Primer consists of a calendar of the saints’ days and church festivals, short parts of the Gospels, the psalms, and prayers to God, to the Blessed Virgin, and to the saints. Dame Monica said we should each cultivate a special devotion to a particular saint, to whom we should pray, and who would protect us and intercede for us in Heaven.

  ‘The saints in Heaven can do great things for us sinners down below. You, Agnes Peppin, could do worse than make your devotion to St Agnes the Martyr. Martyrs go straight to Heaven without spending time in Purgatory.’

  She told me to read about St Agnes in the Lives of the Saints.

  I am named for St Agnes because I was born on her feast day. When I read about her I was disconcerted. She was martyred for her faith at the age of thirteen for refusing to allow her purity to be stained by marriage to the Governor’s son, insisting that Christ in Heaven was her only spouse and she could accept no mortal husband. She stood out against the anger of the Governor, against the offer of rich gifts, against imprisonment, and against being thrown into a house of sin, where an ange
l protected her virtue. Finally condemned to death, she laid her neck to the sword as happy as a bride on her wedding day.

  A terrible story, from every point of view.

  She is most unsuitable as a heavenly advocate for me. I read about other holy women and am attracted to Zita, who lived three hundred years ago in Italy and served the same family as a maidservant all her life. She finds lost keys for those who pray to her. That is really useful. From what I read about her, she is not officially a saint, though she is greatly venerated. She said: ‘A servant is not holy if she is not busy.’ I like her because she was a good Martha.

  St Agnes, the saintly child of thirteen, would hardly have time for me, whose purity is already stained. She was a true Bride of Christ. Not only virgin martyrs but every professed nun is a Bride of Christ. Just imagine those thousands of Brides over the centuries. Their teeth fall out or become worn to stumps, they lose their eyelashes and become bent and stiff and grow hairs on their chins, and then die, still and always Brides. On entering into Heaven, is each restored to youthfulness? Will St Agnes be perpetually thirteen? And what, please, is meant by Original Sin?

  When I raised these questions with the Novice Mistress she grew impatient. She explained to me yet again the doctrine of Original Sin. But was the sin Eve’s, or Adam’s? I am not even sure what Un-Original Sin is, beyond breaking the Ten Commandments. ‘Meditate on the nature of faith,’ said the Novice Mistress, ‘and pray for your own faith to be strengthened.’

  She told me that what she called my ‘scruples’ were unwholesome and self-concerned, and that I should keep my thoughts under control.

  ‘You will then be happy, my dear, in this school of God’s Service. St Benedict, our founder, did not wish our lives to be harsh or burdensome. We are not called upon to do perpetual penance, nor to apply self-punishment. We avoid scruples and manifestations of extreme zeal. We do not encourage the transports and trances of which you may be reading in the lives of some saints. Such things smack of self-vaunting.’