Dame Agatha put her finger to her lips.
‘Keep your voice down, Agnes Peppin.’
Later she walked round the cloister with me. We were living through difficult times, she said.
‘The Abbess has enough to worry her without inflicting upon her the opinions of a petulant novice. And this not a subject to be brought up in Chapter. The Infirmaress is doing her best, with more sick sisters than usual. Our older nuns seemed to be falling ill from nothing more than anxiety. If fever or the flux broke out in the Infirmary and spread through the Abbey there would be many deaths. We can only pray.’
If the helpers from the town were turned away, she said, it was unlikely that more would come forward, or that any who did would be of better quality. With increased traffic in the town from visiting officials and their retinues there was more and livelier work to be had in the taverns.
‘What is more, Sister Agnes, the running of the Infirmary is not your affair. I would remind you of your duty of humility and your vow of obedience.’
Those Cannington nuns were winter cows. At home in Bruton, when the dark days come, the cattle are brought in from the meadows and woods and tethered in byres within the houses, or in barns on the backways. We bring our own cow, Blossom, into a stall in the room where we sleep.
The cows feed on hay and leaves which before the end of winter are sparse and sour. Their ribs and hipbones protrude from the loose and scabby skin. Some slump down and do not stand up again. The ones who die have to be dragged out with ropes and disposed of.
When the spring comes, the survivors are driven out to smell the air and taste new grass. Some have to be half-carried. Then they are reborn. They gambol, insofar as cattle can, and within a couple of weeks’ grazing they are plump and well.
The Cannington winter cows looked as if they could never gambol. But they did settle down – and became quite demanding, as if we owed them something instead of the other way around. There were complaints about them in Chapter.
We all called them the Melancholies. They were not sick in their bodies, but something had gone wrong for them, and we tended to avoid them as if they carried some infection – except one, who fascinated me. I would come across her sitting alone in the slype, sometimes with her hands over her face, sometimes staring ahead. There was something familiar about her pale thin face. I think that she looked like my mother.
I wanted to know her. When she saw me coming along she sat up straight and picked up the Primer on the bench beside her and pretended to read. I know that when I passed, she sank back into inertia. One day I took a piece of sewing – stitching up torn lace on the hem of a surplice for old Father Bucket – and sat on the bench directly opposite her, and looked at her over my work. She kept her eyes on her book but did not turn a page. I tried to imagine what it was like to be her. I thought about the time when I was waiting for my child to be born, when my life closed down. And of the time after they took him away. And again of my mother, who did – nothing. No meaning for her in anything, no colour, no pleasure.
‘Are you missing Cannington?’ I asked my Melancholy.
‘No. There was nothing there.’
‘Are you unhappy here? Would you rather be somewhere else?’
‘It makes no difference to me where I am.’
She got up and walked away.
When I told my Abbess about her, she was neither surprised or alarmed. This is what happens to some nuns, she told me. ‘They fall into darkness. They lose touch with life, with God.’
‘They lose their holy faith?’
‘Perhaps not. Many in the religious life find their faith paling from time to time. If they are well-rooted, it hardly matters. The routine of the Rule carries them forward. The community contains and constrains us all. And apart from that, of course, private prayer …’
I have seen the Abbess kneeling in private prayer with her head high and her eyes open before the statue of the Blessed Virgin in the Abbey Church. Her face at such times shows no ecstasy, only stillness and hardness.
I could ask the Abbess about most things. Observing the amount of business she had on hand, and the enormous sums of money which came in and went out, I did wonder aloud to her about our vow of poverty. But we own nothing for ourselves, she said, looking at me sharply.
‘We administer our wealth for the glory of God, and for the well-being of the people in our charge. A religious house that does not prosper is not fulfilling its obligations and responsibilities and cannot survive, especially in these disturbed times. We are exceptional of course, we are an ancient and Royal foundation.’
How many dozens of times have I heard her say that?
But there were some questions that arose in my mind that I could not ask. God is all-merciful and all-powerful. Why then do the chantry priests spend so many hours of their days and nights praying for the relief of the souls in Purgatory? He could admit them into Heaven whenever He willed. And why did He need our continuous praise? But the Holy Office was the point of our lives. Without that, what were we here for?
‘It was easier for the sisters to find meaning in their lives in the olden days,’ said the Abbess, ‘when they made their own clothes, and cooked their own food, and worked in the fields and workshops and with the animals. It made for health and it gave variety. It is the lack of variety that drives some sisters into foolishness and misbehaviour, and others into petty bickering, and some into accidie. Manual labour used to be considered to be a means of salvation. No longer, not for a long time.’
She stretched out a hand and picked up her cup of wine, and took a morsel of the white wheat bread that only she and her important visitors ever tasted.
So in the olden days all nuns were Martha, as well as Mary. I begin to think that Martha and Mary are the same person. Spin the coin.
The Abbess had said ‘accidie’. Never having heard the word, I thought she said ‘accident’. I have learned from reading that it means spiritual sloth, apathy, a deadness of feeling. It was that from which the Melancholies suffered. They could not enjoy breaks in routine even when they occurred, as in the parlour after Compline – after which we should go straight to bed and observe the Grand Silence until after Prime the next morning.
But sometimes we sat up late and gossiped. It was an irresistible temptation, but the result was that it was painful to be woken when the bell rang rung for Matins and Lauds in the small hours. Occasionally one or two of the Fairheads missed Matins altogether. I was often among those who, half-asleep, fumbling with tapes and pins, and late, stumbled down the curling night-stair from the dorter into the Abbey Church. I have seen nuns sleepwalking down the night-stair and dozing all through the Office.
The three Melancholies, though they seemed loath to go to their beds, took no part in the parlour conversations, but looked from one face to another, as if they did not understand the words, and they were mute in choir. I myself am sometimes overwhelmed in choir by the sweetness of our chanting curling up out of the silence and dimness like the song of blackbirds. I like it when one voice flies up above the line of chant, making a harmony, or weaves in and out of the melody, making patterns. Such chanting really does bring peace to the soul. It is entirely unlike the jaunty modern airs which Father Robert Parker plays on his lute, or the eerie laments, starting and stopping, slipping between the notes, that Mother Onion sings in her own language.
Sometimes, though, I become disconnected. When we have choir practice, clustered around the great choir book, I imagine the black squares of the notes arranged up and down on the four lines of the stave to be rooks on a fence, perching or alighting or flying away. And none of us articulates the words of the psalms and prayers and canticles in choir properly because we have little idea what most of the Latin means, or even where one word begins and another ends, and it sometimes becomes just a slurry of sound. Then the Prioress, who is also the Choir Mistress, raps with her ivory baton on the ledge of her stall and makes us begin all over again.
So
I did not always maintain my holy pride in taking part in the Work of God, and have sometimes felt it is an empty form. That was my kind of accidie. It was not grave. Routine is the root of our Rule. Love and duty are not what you feel. Love and duty are what you do. I do believe to this day that it was enough that we did it, and that God heard it.
I restrain myself from dwelling on such questions. ‘Scruples,’ as the Novice Mistress would say.
Some of the Fairheads send messages to each other during the Holy Office, keeping the line of the plainsong intact:
‘Shall we go out to the town later?’
‘Yes, there is a handsome new ostler at the inn as I hear.’
They do it so cleverly, it makes us laugh behind our hands.
The Melancholies’ lips move in choir, but no sounds come. They never smile or laugh, though when my own particular Melancholy chances to speak I see that she still has teeth. I suppose she is about thirty.
We happened, she and I, both to be in the cloister at dusk, waiting for the bell to ring for Compline, watching starlings wheeling above us in complicated skeins and circles. She was facing away from me, but I knew it was my Melancholy. Although the habit makes all of us the same, I recognise my sisters even from the back or at a distance from the shape and tilt of their heads under the veil, from the slant of their shoulders, from their height and girth and gait. Some few of them limp, or wave their hands about because they are half-witted.
There are two ancient nuns who are by no means half-witted, and who are recognisable from a great distance if only because they are always together. They were professed nuns already when Dame Elizabeth Zouche came to the Abbey as a novice. They knew the previous Abbess, and the one before. Our King was only a child of five when their second abbess was elected. They love to tell you that.
They are Dame Philippa and Dame Joanna, the ladies who embroidered the Abbess’s bed-curtains. They do not do needlework any more because their sight is weak, and Dame Joanna has a tremble in her hands. They are inseparable. Because of their great age they are excused the night Offices. Neither would be able to get down the winding night-stair from the dorter without tumbling. They both walk with a stick – Dame Philippa because she is large and her swollen legs cannot carry the weight, and Dame Joanna because her back is bent and she is in pain from her joints. Dame Joanna’s mouth has caved in for lack of teeth, and her nose and chin nearly come together. Dame Philippa has a face as flat as a full moon.
They totter round and round the cloister as if yoked, the high bulky one and the low crooked one, reminiscing about the old days. Sometimes they stop and look at one another in delight and laugh their cracked laughs. They share their stories with anyone who will listen. They came into the Abbey as young girls and had dear friends, all gone now, buried in the Abbey graveyard, God rest their souls. They speak the names of their lost friends, and recall their foibles. Their first Abbess found the records and accounts, and the vestments and the altar cloths, all in a terrible state of muddle and neglect when she was elected. The two of them had helped her sort everything out. Before their time, the Infirmary nuns used to bring men in, and drink with them, lolling on the patients’ beds. The old ladies cackle at the very thought.
They have a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin and spend long minutes standing side by side every day before her statue in the Abbey Church, in veneration. They have their holy faith, they have each other, they have their memories, they have spent all their lives in the Abbey and the Abbey is the whole world. They are the incarnation of the Rule of Stability. I have never known such joyous women.
There is no Vow of Stability in the outside world, and in Bruton people come and go. There are new families, squatting in an abandoned hovel, arriving during the night from God knows where. Young men – and sometimes young women – just disappear. They go to look for work on the coast, or down Exeter way, or have found a position in some gentleman’s house. And yet there are men and women in Bruton who in all their lives only know the town, and the fields and forest where they graze their beasts, and maybe they have been to Batcombe or have relatives in Wincanton. My father is one such, and his father before him.
Rich people are different. Gentry who live in great houses visit other great houses many miles away, in other counties. Those who have fingerings in the great world know London. No one whom I knew in Bruton had been to London. When the Abbess asked Master Tregonwell what first drew him to London, he replied:
‘The arrow of ambition.’
In Bruton, many a man’s arrow of ambition falls no further than on a more favourable strip of the Borough Field. He may never speak in all his life with anyone whom he has not known since childhood. Rich men meet new people. To live among strangers – an impossible thought for my parents – holds no threat. The greatest men have business in countries over the sea, beyond London. I have never seen the sea and cannot imagine it.
My father’s ideas, such as they are, are his own. I think he is more perfectly himself than is any aping courtier. I begin to think that the intensity of experience is the same for all, whatever one’s range, and that few people lead more fulfilled lives than Dame Philippa and Dame Joanna.
My mind wanders easily because I live in my imaginings and silences. Thinking about the two old ladies, I forgot my Melancholy for an eternal moment.
Ravished anew by the starlings, I said to her – because she was the only one there, and the thought came:
‘The birds of the air are free as no human beings are.’
‘No,’ she said, without turning towards me. That would have taken too much effort on her part. ‘The starlings are not free. They must do what they always do, what they always have done since the Creation. They cannot help it. They have no decisions to make. They are of one mind, they share one mind. A bird with ideas of its own does not survive.’
I told her something that John Harrold had told me – that there are insects like big foreign grasshoppers which are born solitary and are all marked and coloured differently until they come together in a swarm. Then they change and all become of one and the same colour and pattern. I asked my Melancholy whether she thought that was some kind of enchantment, like with the starlings. She said:
‘It is the alchemy of propinquity. Like the way that many of us bleed at the same time every month.’
When our monthly bleeding occurs we go to a bin in the Laundry and take a handful of rags. The bloodied rags are thrown in another bin to be washed. The first time, I was there alone and picked over the rags seeking the least noxious, for they are boiled up and used again and again. Then my bleedings became irregular, and had I not known that it was impossible I would have feared I was with child again. But after a few months I was never alone at the bin. We scavenge for rags together because many of us bleed in unison. What my Melancholy said was true. I am a starling, I am a foreign grasshopper, I am a woman in a community, I am a nun. If I have ideas of my own, I might not survive.
4
UNTHINKABLE
Master John Tregonwell is a pest. He lacks the urbane attraction of Sir Thomas Arundell. He is a squat creature, bundled up in mantles and furs whatever the weather, as if he were always cold. He has the run of the Abbey, and access to all documents, by virtue of his new position as the Abbess’s rent-collector. He is constantly coming into my office and standing behind my stool, leaning over me as he affects to check what I am doing.
One day he put out a hand, grabbed my chin and jerked my head round towards him, his eyes bulging:
‘Sweet Agnes Peppin …’
I told the Abbess.
‘Is that all?’ she asked.
‘It is disagreeable, Madam. What should I do?’
The Abbess sighed and turned her head from me.
‘When something goes wrong between a man and a woman, it is always the woman’s fault.’
‘Even when it is not?’
‘Women are the daughters of Eve. We share in her shame. Offer it up. Pray to Our
Lady for special grace. And keep out of Master Tregonwell’s way.’
How can I?
*
Dame Elizabeth Zouche had believed that her compliance to Master John Tregonwell, and her special relationship with Sir Thomas Arundell, would solve any future problems.
In private, with me, propped on her pillows she wondered whether she should adopt a different strategy and challenge the constant demands, as would a man – even though the Abbots, monks and canons were all being put under similar pressures and did not seem any more able to withstand them than did the convents.
‘As the Abbess of Shaftesbury I have the statutory right to sit in Parliament. Did you know that? No Abbess has ever availed herself of that privilege. I have considered it. I could challenge the government’s policies. I am not bashful. But it is not expected. My lords would not hear a woman’s voice. They would just hear a twittering and wish it to cease. My words would not reach them, even though my understanding might outstrip theirs. You see how it is with Tregonwell and Arundell.’
I did see. She told me about Elizabeth Barton, a nun of our own Benedictine Order who had spiritual influence in the days of Cardinal Wolsey and was received by the King. When she condemned the King’s attempts to annul his marriage to his first Queen and his annexation – as she saw it – of the English Church from the Pope, the King of course turned against her. She did not give up. So she was accused of sexual irregularities and of being insane.
‘Elizabeth Barton made prophecies and saw visions. That was the only way she could get attention and make her woman’s voice heard. She prophesied that the King would die if he cast off his first queen.’
‘Madam, he did not die.’
‘Indeed he did not. He flourishes like the green bay tree. Maybe Elizabeth Barton was in truth a little mad. But she had courage.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She was arrested and condemned without trial. She is the only woman whose head has ever been boiled and stuck up on a spike on London Bridge. This was not so long ago. It was the year before you came to the Abbey.’
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