‘There is a world elsewhere. There are new places to go, new thoughts to think.’
‘I know all that, but I do not want any of it. I shall make my arrangements. But you, Agnes – it is different for you, what will you do?’
I told her how I was torn between possibilities, none of them promising. I could try and remain within the Order, and seek another House abroad, as the Abbess had suggested to us in Chapter. Or I could go back to my parents in Bruton and be a help to them in their old age. Then, my heart in my mouth, I confessed to her about Peterkin. Because my third possibility was to seek out Peter Mompesson and fulfil the vows I made to him (and he to me) before we parted for the last time. Peterkin would not know me. But I am his mother still. Then I stopped speaking, because I was fighting back tears.
Mary did not say anything for a while. Then she asked:
‘Does the life of a nun suit you? Would you be content?’
‘I believe so. I like the complication of it. The complexity.’
‘Most people on the outside believe it to be constricting and limited.’
‘Such people perhaps do not understand the way of life. I have come to think that constriction and freedom both come from within.’
‘Then you have learned the most important lesson of all.’
‘And if I were professed as a nun in another country, I could learn new words, another language, and that would be an adventure.’
‘I am beginning to see you, in years to come, as a lively Abbess ruling over a French convent.’
She laughed a little.
‘Have you spent time with Sister Isobel?’
Sister Isobel – that nonentity, as Anne would say? Sister Isobel is small and plain. She keeps apart. She sits always very still and straight-backed. I have never in all my time here spoken with her. I shook my head.
‘I an sorry for that. Of all our sisters, she is the one who best knows why we are here. She walks with God. Her life is within, with Him. She exists in a state of grace. To talk to Sister Isobel even for a few minutes is to open a shutter into sunlight. She says nothing profound but everything becomes simple and true – and accepted, inevitable, even glorious. I am so sorry that you do not know her.’
Sister Mary Amor fell silent. She was somewhere far away. She came back to me.
‘And how would it be if you went back to your parents?’
This was difficult. I told her it was perhaps the most dutiful course of action. The life at home was familiar, I could slip back into it as if I had never been away. I told her that I loved my father dearly.
‘But I would need more,’ I said. ‘I would need to read and to study, somehow. Otherwise I would go out of my mind.’
I did not say to her that I have relatives in Tisbury who do not know me. A grandmother, if she still lives. I could seek her out, but she might not receive me. I did not say, I could show my grandmother my emerald dolphin. Perhaps in my innermost heart I already did not believe that it was a real possibility.
‘And if you were to seek out your son, and his father?’
‘That is the unknowable thing, like walking out from home with no idea of where you are going.’
Silence again.
She gave me no advice. She said:
‘You tell me that you have three choices. We say that accidents happen in threes. There are three degrees of light – Lux, Lumen and Illumination. Everything comes in threes. That is why the mystery of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Ghost – has such potency. Everywhere, even here in the Abbey, there are three kinds of people – the powerful ones, and the unfortunates, and the self-sacrificing helpers. Christ is the son of Almighty God, and at the same time He is the Suffering Servant, the victim – have you read the Book of Isaiah? – and He is also our help in time of trouble. We too are all three, in turn and often at the same time – a punishing Jehovah, a victim, and a helper. This is not comfortable. The Holy Trinity is the redemptive resolution of a natural dissonance. Look into your own heart.’
I found this triangulation theory too far-fetched. Mary Amor was more eccentric than I realised. But maybe there was something in it. I asked her, ‘Is Martha in the Bible a victim, or a helper, or a punisher?’
‘She is all three. When a helper, a Martha, begins to see herself as a victim, she becomes as angry and as punishing as Jehovah. The she feels guilt and shame and the wheel turns again.’
‘And her sister Mary?’
‘Ah … That is an interesting question. Perhaps she is that within us which stands outside the daily round, intent upon wholeness and holiness. Martha and Mary struggle for survival within one soul.’
‘I too have thought that. And – sin? What about sin?’
‘If men and women were not sinners, there would be no need for redemption. We would be innocent as the animals are, as Adam and Eve were before they ate the apple. If we were without sin then the mercy and forgiveness and love of God, and Christ’s death upon the Cross, would have no meaning. There would be no need for us to pray to God and to worship Him.’
Sister Mary Amor rose. She turned to me and I saw her face, ravaged.
‘Either one is capable of change, or one is not. I am not like Sister Isobel, but I committed myself to the life of a nun in Shaftesbury Abbey long ago with the certitude that I would lie when I die in the graveyard beside my sisters who have gone before. My path was plain before me. I have no longer any choice. But you … God bless and help you, Agnes Peppin.’
She made the sign of the cross with her thumb on my forehead.
I was left in the blackness and the cold. I saw in my mind’s eye the track out of Bruton which leads towards Wincanton, though I never got so far. Over the hill, it splits three ways. I walked that track with my father once towards daylight end, and when we came to the splitting, he said:
‘Home now. We don’t want to lose ourselves in the dark.’
Poor Father Louis Pomfret broke down in an unpleasant manner. I do believe that he was possessed by the Devil. But there was a desperate honesty in him. If it were not absurd, let alone heretical, I could believe that God and the Devil too were opposite sides of the same coin, like Martha and Mary. He began to spill out the secrets of the confessional, which are beyond anything private and sacred. He was drunk, as he was drunk all day and every day now.
He stood purple-faced outside the Abbey Church, where everyone passed – and where everyone stopped, to hear him shouting out his foul betrayals like an itinerant friar preaching damnation to attract a crowd. Father Pomfret did attract a crowd, not only of us nuns but of workmen, tradesmen, servants, apprentice boys and even Tregonwell’s clerks and the destroyers. I was in that crowd. Most of what he was shouting was gobbledygook, half of it in Latin, with obscenities thrown in, and meaningless. Every now and then he paused, drew breath, and uttered a single sentence:
‘The Cardinal’s daughter is a whore!’
Off he went again into his rigmarole and then:
‘Your Lady Abbess is a bastard!’
He had to be stopped.
‘Robert Parker is a fornicator and a sodomite! Eleanor Wilmer is a deluded nincompoop who fingers Christ in her filthy dreams!’
Mother Onion, beside me, put her hands over her ears.
‘Sweet Jesus, this fellow gives my arse a pain.’
Father Pomfret, a weighty man and out of his senses, could have knocked any woman to the ground with a single swipe. We sisters should have overcome him in unison like small birds mobbing a predator. I wish we had. But we were not of one mind and the men in the crowd just could not get enough of the show and were not going to make a move.
I saw Sister Mary Amor running off towards the Steward’s house, just as Father Pomfret, after more mumbo-jumbo, was starting in again, out of control.
‘The Cathcart bitch is a thief, she stole a diamond. Eleanor Wilmer, I haven’t finished with her yet, is an infanti–’
Up strode the Steward. He grasped Father Pomfret by the shoulders
, looked him in the eyes, spoke to him in the way that a stableman speaks to a frightened horse, and led him away stumbling and needing support. I have never had any personal dealings with this Steward apart from our encounter round the bonfire at Christmastime. He was for all his crudity a sound man.
We drifted away to wherever we should have been and did not speak of what had occurred. There had always, in the Abbey, been matters which were not spoken of. Now there was less and less of which we could safely speak at all.
In the morning the Melancholies had disappeared.
Sister Onora told us that the previous night she saw three nuns high in the air flying across the face of the moon. The night had been clouded. There was no moon to see. But Sister Onora sees what others cannot see. I am a little afraid, however, that when we all have to leave the Abbey, the outside world will not understand this about Sister Onora, and that she will be condemned as a witch. I am worried for her because she lacks common sense.
The last time that Sir Thomas Arundell visited the Abbess in her house he asked her where she would go.
‘I would like to retain Place Farm in Tisbury.’
‘Unfortunately you are not permitted to retain anything that belongs to the Abbey, that is to say, that did belong to the Abbey, and now belongs to the King. Tisbury will be sold.’
The desolation in Dame Elizabeth’s face was pitiful. She turned her head away, unable to look at him.
‘But perhaps,’ said Sir Thomas, leaning forward, ‘we can come to an arrangement.’
She motioned to me to put down my writing things. This was not a conversation that would be recorded.
He told her that he himself was negotiating to buy the manor of Tisbury from the Crown. He did not tell her what we afterwards learned, that he was also negotiating to buy the Abbey site. He had a courtier’s tact. He said he was prepared to lease Place Farm to Dame Elizabeth for her lifetime at the market rate. She could easily afford this out of her pension. In return, he would expect recompense after her death for the loss of amenity to himself.
‘And since you will live long and well, the time of waiting for me will not be short.’
She said, ‘I will make a Will. I will make you my heir.’
He bowed in acquiescence.
‘You will make your Will, and your man of law and mine will also draw up an agreement.’
She bowed her head.
‘And the Seal, Madam? You have not yet handed over the Seal. The Crown requires it.’
The Abbess motioned to me to leave the chamber. The handing over the Seal of the Abbey was so terrible for her and so final that she could not endure to have it witnessed. I cannot bear to think of her shame and her pain.
Late that night, when I was getting ready for bed, a maid came from the Abbess requiring me to go to her in her house. I was exhausted and so was she.
‘Where will you go, Agnes Peppin? I need to know.’
‘Home, Madam,’ I said, ‘probably home to Bruton, just at first. After that, I know not.’
What Dame Elizabeth had to say astonished me.
‘I am entrusting to you the holy relics of St Edward. I removed them myself from the casket inside the ossuary. The ossuary, which has great monetary value, is to be taken tomorrow by the Commissioners. The lead casket is heavy and no one will suspect that it is empty. The holy relics must not fall into impious hands. When you leave, you will take them with you. You will tell nobody.’
‘But what will I do with them, Madam?’
‘I will send word to you as to where you will bring them when all has quietened down.’
She went to her cupboard and took out a black silk bundle. She placed it on the table and unwrapped it in the light of the candles.
I saw a pile of bleached bones, one large one and half a dozen splinters. The Abbess crossed herself and I did the same. Neither of us spoke. The Abbess wrapped the bones up again in the silk. She double-wrapped the holy relics in a piece of cloth, and put the whole in a canvas bag.
‘I also want to tell you that I have loved you, Agnes, my martyr. More than you know.’ She touched my cheek and took my hand. Her hand trembled and her touch was not maternal. There was carnality in it. The ashes of carnality. I wanted to unlace my fingers from hers. The moment seemed to go on for ever. I almost stopped breathing. But I loved her too, I still do. It hurts me now that I did not tell her so. It was a sin of omission.
‘Send to me, where you are,’ she said. ‘Send to Tisbury, to Place Farm, even if I am not there the people will know where to find me. I will send to you, as I will to all our sisters, when I can, and we may be together again if only for a short while.’
‘Where is Tisbury?’
‘It is not far from here. Over the border into Wiltshire.’
‘I have family in Tisbury whom I have never seen. My grandmother’s name is Hibberd. I believe she paid you a visit to arrange my coming to this place.’
I longed for her to say that she remembered the visit well, that my grandmother was a fine woman and her own kin, and I should surely attempt to seek her out. She said nothing of the sort.
‘You may be right.’ She passed her hand over her face. ‘I do believe someone did come to see me about you. I cannot remember. So much has befallen us since then that there is much that I forget. My mind is not so sharp as it was. Tisbury is full of Hibberds.’
She let my hand go and stood up. I too stood up.
‘I will be requiring your services again, but I will not be speaking with you in this way again.’
She embraced me, holding me close to her bulky body, and made the sign of the Cross on my forehead. She pushed the canvas bag into my arms and turned away.
Then she called me back:
‘The cloister is a disgrace. There are weeds growing up between the flagstones. Kindly, Sister Agnes, clean it up.’
‘Yes, Madam.’
She sounded unhinged. Her mind has become weak. Why would we be weeding the cloister now? And why me? Perhaps it was to remind me of my duty of humility. I was shaking as I walked through the cloister and crept up the stairs to the dorter in the dark. Her demeanour unnerved me.
But there is worse. I am a butcher’s daughter. I know bones. Those bones I was carrying away, the holy relics of St Edward the Martyr, were not human bones. I knew at a glance what animal they came from. I will not name that animal. I will not betray the thousands of pilgrims who travelled long miles to pray on their knees to the holy relics of a saint, and who paid money, and who went away strengthened and sometimes cured of their ills.
In the morning, between one ill-attended Holy Office and the next, I procured a blunt knife and a basket and, on my knees, began to scrape away the grass and weeds growing between the paving-stones of the cloister, which was destined to be in a state of perfection for an eternal moment only hours before it was destroyed. There was a great growth of parsley in one corner of the garth. Last year the parsley had not germinated well. This past summer the conditions had been right and in spite of the cold the stems were still strong, topped by clusters of dark green leaflets. I broke off some and chewed it as I worked, thinking how this parsley would self-seed, so that next year there would be even more. No one would come to cut it for the Abbess’s mushroom dish, because she would not be here, nor would any of us. Only ruins where once had been the whole fine world we made.
Finbarr was playing around me, nosing at the gaps between the flagstones where weeds and grass had been, scenting worms. I had been at it for an hour when Master Tregonwell appeared. He walked heavily round and round the cloister, stepping past me as I worked, and then sat down near me on a ledge beneath the arcade. I could feel his eyes on my backside.
‘Are you interested in architecture?’ he asked me.
‘I could be,’ I said. I sat up.
‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘I am much struck by the notion, the idea, of a cloister. It is a form known only in monastic Houses. It permits access from a covered way into separate cham
bers.’
Of course it does. I did not know what was so special about that. He was going to tell me, anyway.
‘In great houses, one is compelled to pass through one chamber after another to reach where one desires to be. Have you ever been in such a house, Agnes Peppin?’
‘No, sir, except that it is surely normal to pass from one chamber into another, even if there are only two. What else should one do?’
‘The passing from one chamber to another through high doorways, in great houses, is a matter of glory and ostentation – a great vista. They call it en enfilade. That is French.’
‘I thought it was French. I know what French sounds like.’
‘Of course you do. The enfilade of rooms is inconvenient, especially at night, when people are sleeping all over the place, or not exactly sleeping, which is even worse, ha ha. My idea is to build a great house with a long covered way, a passage, within the building itself, so that one could walk along and enter only the chamber where one wished to be.’
‘How would one know into which chamber each door opened?’
I went back to my weeding.
He lumbered off, shouting at me:
‘That is how I am going to build my great house! It is revolutionary! They all will copy me! You are stupid not to see it. In the coming time there will be a building and a rebuilding such as England has never seen. And why do you not rid yourself of that filthy dog?’
Finbarr was still with me, or so I thought. But she had distanced herself when Tregonwell was talking to me.
Because I did not know where to stow away safely the relics of St Edward, and was unwilling to let them out of my sight, I had brought them with me in their canvas bag and wedged the bag a niche in the cloister wall. I chanced to look up at the very moment when Finbarr placed her front paws up on the shelf of the niche, sniffed, and grabbed the canvas bag between her teeth.
‘Finbarr!’ I yelled. ‘No! Drop that! Drop it! Drop it!’
She pranced off, the bag in her mouth, and was away out of the cloister before I had even got to my feet.
I chased that dog past the Infirmary and had nearly caught up with her – because she dropped the bag, and took a moment to retrieve it – when she reached the fence on the edge of the ridge, and was under it, with the bag, racing down the slope of the Abbey Park and disappearing into a copse. I saw her wagging tail on the far side, then she was gone.
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