‘I have a riddle for you, lad. What’s the difference between a nunnery and a bawdy-house?’
He gave me the answer, rocked with laughter and punched me on the shoulder.
‘Pass it on! By Our Lady, living in a house of women is not all beer and skittles, my lad. It’s the smell. The female reek. It’s like living in a basket of toadstools or’ – a couple of Fairheads skittered by – ‘a bowl of figs.’
He lumbered off to find a livelier audience and more ale.
That final night would normally have been the least rampageous, the tensions and desires diminishing into quietude. But there were disturbances. Weasel and Dick, with Finbarr at their heels, came to me in distress, wearing little skirts and red paper crowns, their faces and hands smudged with wood smoke. They had no trouble recognising me.
‘Father Pomfret,’ Dick said. ‘Father Pomfret.’
‘Dick does not have the words to tell you,’ said Weasel.
Weasel could not find did the words to tell me either. We sat down on the ground all three, with Finbarr, in the nuns’ burial ground, the quietest place I could find, and I teased it out of them. Father Pomfret, in his normal clerical clothing, but drunk, had sought them out where they were playing and told them to come to his chamber. He wanted, he said, to train them to serve the Mass at the altar. When they entered his chamber, Father Pomfret was naked. He smiled and told them what he wanted them to do for him, or to him, and that they were to take their clothes off as well.
‘So what did you do?’
‘We just laughed. We could not help it. Father Pomfret naked! Only think of it, Sister Agnes.’
Father Pomfret became angry. He tried to catch hold of them but he was too drunk and they were too nimble and ran away out of the door and came to find me.
‘We do not want to have to go and see Father Pomfret.’
‘You do not have to go and see Father Pomfret again. I think he will not ask you. It was just tonight. Do not think about it any more.’
It was a lesson for them, I thought, in what the real world was like, and perhaps salutary. They had not been harmed and they had learned something.
*
The twelve days of Christmas turn the world upside down. The excesses may seem risky, but they are fun and serve as a release. We tolerate one another’s peculiarities better afterwards. Like a blood-letting.
But this year there was no joy in the naughtiness and rule-breaking. I think transgression is transgression only when it is an temporary escape from a willed submission to grace and order. Otherwise it becomes something quite other. There was dread, maybe despair, in the rampages this year. The world turned upside down in a bad way.
A few days afterwards Master Tregonwell sent a message asking me to wait upon him in his office beside the gatehouse. I imagined there was some detail of Abbey business on which he wished me to inform him. I had Finbarr with me because the little boys were being taught their letters that morning by Sister Catherine Hunt. She can barely read and write herself but no matter. She loves the boys.
Master Tregonwell locked the door of his office and pocketed the key. He lost no time on civilities.
‘It is all over, little Sister Agnes. You understand that, don’t you? When your Abbess signs my Deed of Surrender, you will be cast adrift.’
‘The Abbess will never sign.’
‘She will. She must.’
‘No.’
He picked me up as if I were a child and laid me out across his knees in his chair. Taken by surprise, I froze. He pulled up my tunic and my shift and gazed upon my private parts. He held me down with his left hand while he explored me with his right hand, and began to talk in a husky, hurried voice, as if he had long been planning what he was going to say.
‘I will thread red ribbons through this bush of yours, and wind Spanish lace round your belly, I will stuff your hole with apricots and eat them out of you. I have a sensitive nose, my dear. You will rub yourself with rosemary and lavender, for me. You will be my sweetheart.’
‘I will not marry you. I am a nun, I am the Bride of Christ.’
‘You are not a full nun, you are a minchin. Christ has a sufficiency of Brides. And excuse me, who said anything about marrying?’
I have always disliked this man. I struggled to sit upright. I found my tongue.
‘What do you suppose that there is about you, John Tregonwell, which would incline me or any woman to go with you as your concubine?’
He was taken aback, a spoilt child. I was taken aback too, by what I had said. Then he grinned his scheming grin.
‘You do not understand. I shall soon be rich. Very rich.’
There was no arguing with that.
His heaving lust was disagreeable and his breath smelled of meat but his hand was skilled. The body is witless and mine was melting, even as my mind did not for one instant stop working.
What good outcome might there be, for me? Four years at the most, Anne Cathcart had said. Then what? Spoiled, ruined, older, I would be abandoned.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I will give you a fine dwelling, and a horse to ride. You shall have fruits, and wine, and silken gowns. Did I mention already that I shall be rich? And you shall have flowers to put between your little titties.’
Oh poor, sad idiot. But still …
‘And books, will you buy me all the books I want?’
‘Why books? What books? What would a pretty creature like you want with books?’
‘Then again no.’
‘You are stupid, my dear. You have been this way before, I can tell. I am not a fool. You are not a maid. You are a slut. What better chance do you have?’
Finbarr had all this while been sitting upright beside us in her heraldic pose, front paws together, head held high, watching. She suddenly moved, sinking her teeth into his sleeve and ripping the fabric. Master Tregonwell kicked out at her, catching her in the chest. This hitherto silent dog stood on her four feet and barked. Her bark became a hound’s howl, her head and throat raised towards the roof. Her floppy ears rose up like wings. They must have muscles in them, I never knew. For an instant I was more interested in that than in anything.
Master Tregonwell tipped me off his lap, roaring. I scrambled to my feet and got hold of Finbarr’s rope.
‘Get rid of that filthy dog!’
He was bellowing above Finbarr’s howls. If there had not been much shouting going on outside, the pair of them would have been heard all over the Abbey.
‘No.’
He stood up and brushed himself down, adjusting the tapes of his hose, shaking out his wrecked velvet sleeve.
‘I give you until noon tomorrow. Send me a message. If we can agree, you ride away with me after the signing, whenever that is. Without the dog. If not …’
He unlocked the door and bowed in an exaggerated manner. I fled with Finbarr.
In February a man turned up at the gatehouse, a man of the roads, grizzled and bearded, seeking shelter. He was taken in, given bean soup and a place to sleep. He had travelled on foot from the north of England over many weeks, he said. He had seen terrible things. It was a miracle of God when he came to Shaftesbury and he found the Abbey still standing. The Abbess’s maid, overhearing, pricked up her ears and told the Abbess who ordered the man to be brought to her. She asked me to take notes.
He stood before Dame Elizabeth in her parlour in his muddied clothes, his cap in his hands. She, sitting upright in her great carved chair, asked him what he had seen. He found it hard to speak.
All the way that he came, he managed to say, he had found abbeys deserted and half-demolished.
‘Small ones?’ she asked.
‘No, Madam. The great ones. Fountains Abbey has gone. Jervaulx Abbey has gone. Many more. Dozens. Scores. I cannot tell how many. I heard tales of monks and priests beheaded, hanged, burned. Of nuns turned out and cast adrift.’
Never taking her eyes off him, she bade him say more.
As he came south, he
said, where the weather was less cruel, the abbey churches already had young nettles springing up between broken floor tiles, under naves open to the sky. He saw holes of badgers and foxes in what had been cloisters. In one place he shared his bread with women squatting in the ruins. They were nuns with nowhere to go, and half-crazed. They prayed each night that in the morning everything would be as it was before. When they woke among the fallen stones, they knew that they had not prayed hard enough. They would try again. He saw people with barrows picking over fallen stones and broken carvings and taking them away.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘you must understand. Our land is strewn with ruins.’
He began to sob and could not stop.
The Abbess motioned to me to give the man a coin from her purse. She blessed him and let him go. She told me to go too. The day was darkening but she waved me away when I went to light her candle. I left her in the dusk in her great chair. The next morning I saw that she too had been weeping. That made me frightened for the first time, and I remained frightened.
I am not sure how much our sisters knew. Most of them received letters. Travellers, pilgrims, vagrants, carters, market-men brought garbled news to anyone who went out into the town and stayed to hear it.
‘Our land is strewn with ruins,’ the weeping man had said. I could not forget it.
After his visit the Abbess held a meeting with the senior nuns and the Obedientiaries, to which I was not privy. I believe she took them fully into her confidence. I believe they agreed that the community must not be disturbed.
The routine of our lives went on unbroken. The complaints from my sisters in Chapter were as they always were. Too many bones in the fish. The beer was weaker than normal, was it not? Was there something wrong with our hops? Since it was so cold, might we not have extra bed-coverings? Those two boys with the dog were a nuisance, they did no work, why were they here? Anne Cathcart complained that the spoons were not scoured properly. She did not care to eat from a dirty spoon. Upon which the Cellaress suggested that Sister Anne might care to clean the spoons herself.
Dame Elizabeth Zouche dealt with everything in her dry manner, and deflected further hostilities between Anne and the Cellaress by commending the general concern to uphold the high standards of the refectory. It would be a good idea to have the refectory freshly whitewashed when the spring came. She would speak to the Steward. As for the two boys, the Prioress had been thinking of apprenticing them to the blacksmith, and would set this in train immediately. That would keep them out of mischief.
I had a worry more immediate than anything from the outside world. Something was amiss with Dorothy Clausey. She looked sickly, and in the Library she sat picking at the skin of her face with a fingernail, on and on at the same spot until she drew blood, upon which she gave a sigh, wiped away the blood with the palm of her hand, and returned to her book. Sometimes she picked at the little scabs and made them bleed again. It seemed to make her feel calmer. I did not understand it and did not like to speak to her about it. We all have to find ways to endure what we cannot endure.
It entered my head, I know not why, that she might be carrying a child, though she did not show. Anne Cathcart, whom I consulted, cast her sharp eyes upon Dorothy and said she certainly was.
‘There is a look. She has the look.’
Before Christmas Dorothy disappeared. She did not come to those last festivities, she did not come to the Library, she did not come to the Refectory. That need not mean she was not eating. As a Corrodian, she could order food from the kitchen in her apartment.
I had not seen her for weeks when on a dark winter afternoon in late February I glimpsed her leaving the Abbey Church. She had probably been making her confession to Father Pomfret, it was his day for it. I ran after her and called her name. She looked towards me. I asked her if all was well.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’
‘You can’t what?’
She turned and walked fast away from me in the direction of the house where she lodged.
I worried during the night, sleeping not at all between Matins and Prime. The next afternoon when the light was fading I gathered my courage and knocked at the door of her apartment.
She must have been sitting in the dark doing nothing – except, maybe, praying? She was always thin, but she was skeletal. When she lit her candle, I saw that her face was white, with dark circles under her eyes, and more of those little scabs on her cheeks and brow. I made to embrace her, but she was as unresponsive as a stick.
‘Dear Dorothy, is there an infant? You have a child?’
She pointed to a low door at the back of her room.
‘Is he asleep?’
‘She. I don’t know.’
‘May I go and see her?’
I made for the little door, Dorothy following me. It opened into a chamber as small as a closet, icy cold. I waited for her on the threshold, where she stopped.
‘I left the window shutter open,’ she said. ‘I thought she would be too hot.’
I went back for the candle and tiptoed into the chamber. I saw a cradle, but there was no baby in it. There was a bundle on a bench under the window. I looked at Dorothy.
‘I thought the high sides of the cradle might frighten her. Like being in a prison.’
‘When did you last feed her and change her?’
‘I cannot remember.’
‘Pick her up. Bring her through into the other room.’
‘I cannot.’
I went to the bench and picked up the bundle.
‘She’s soaking wet, she’s freezing. Why in God’s name did you not –’
‘I could not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The longer I left her, the more I could not. I kept thinking that she might be … and I just couldn’t go in there in case she … and then it was getting dark. Please do not be angry with me, Agnes. I could not bear it. I was thinking all the time about her all alone and cold, and not knowing.’
I carried the wet bundle back into the other room and Dorothy followed. I set the bundle on my knee and unwrapped it.
The infant’s eyes were closed. Her hands and feet were cold. Her lips were creased. She had no colour. She looked like a very old person, and as if dried out. I wrapped her up again in the damp shawl.
‘Hold her, warm her,’ I said. ‘Just wait. I’m coming straight back.’
I ran to the kitchens where they were preparing the Refectory dinner. Avoiding the Cellaress, who was counting out dried herrings, I begged from the servants a ewer of warm water, and a corked bottle of boiled water, and snatched up the very smallest spoon I saw – a sliver of pewter, a salt-spoon. It was an emergency, I said. I hurried back with the spoon in my pocket and the bottle floating in the big bowl, water slopping all over the cobbles.
I suppose this took ten minutes. Dorothy had not moved, and was still holding the child.
She had in the room a basket of linens and towelling and pieces of fine woollen. I took the child on my knee, removed the shawl and the wet interior wrappings, and wrapped a piece of the woollen stuff around her. I tried to make her take the boiled water from the spoon, but she would not open her mouth.
‘Let me do it,’ said Dorothy. ‘You don’t know her. You don’t know how.’
I transferred the child from my lap to hers. She held her in the crook of her left arm and teased and pushed the spoon between the dried-out lips. The infant twisted her head away – the first movement she had made – put out the tip of her tongue, felt the water, and began to suck at the spoon. Dorothy rocked her a little.
I took a deep breath. In a few minutes I said, ‘I think we should bathe her in the warm water now. She is chilled. Will you do it?’
Dorothy shook her head.
‘I cannot.’
I laid the naked infant in the bowl, my left arm under her head and shoulders, and splashed warm water over her. After a short while she flailed with her arms and kicked with her legs. I was ready to la
ugh with relief. We dried her together, on Dorothy’s knees, and wrapped her in clean cloths. She began to cry.
‘Why is she crying?’ said Dorothy, stiffening.
‘I think she is hungry. Water is not food. Do you have milk?’
She pulled up her tunic and showed me her shift, damp and stained at the top and a bit smelly. She had milk all right, and she fed the child, who sucked with her grey-blue eyes locked on to her mother’s.
Dorothy began to talk. She was more herself.
‘An infant is either all right or not all right, there is not much of a middle way.’
‘That is so,’ I said.
She began to sing to her child:
‘“Greensleeves is my delight, Greensleeves is all my joy, Greensleeves is my heart of gold …” My father used to sing that when I was young. I can’t remember. Just his voice, and his big ring with a ruby. He let me play with it.’
The Cardinal’s ring. I would have liked to hear her to say more, but thought it better not to press her.
‘Tell me what went wrong. Why do you leave the little one alone, why do you not attend to her?’
‘It is something that happened. To me and to her.’
‘What if I had not come? What would you have done, all night?’
‘Nothing. She was not in pain. She was closing down. She did get cold, and she was hungry, and I did hear her crying, before.’
‘How could you not go to her?’
‘She was not remembering being warm or the milk or me or anything, not what we mean by remembering. She’s always now. She does not know about hoping that I will come. She does not know she is cold or what cold is. She just is it.’
‘What is the “it” that she is?’
‘Terror, that is a word I could use. But that is not right because she does not know that word or what it means, and she does not remember not-terror. She does not have a before and an after, or not that she can get hold of. I can’t explain.’
The Butcher's Daughter Page 12