‘You may leave now.’
His workmen were clumping in and dumping their boxes on the Library floor. I stayed long enough to see them pulling volumes and rolls from their shelves and tipping them into the boxes. The poem I found on a loose sheet will be scuffed underfoot and lost and gone. When I go, and Dorothy, no one will know it ever existed. That is just one poem. How much that is precious, over centuries, is lost and gone?
*
Sisters disappear. The Prioress and the Infirmaress, transformed by bright coloured gowns and high gable hoods into Mistress Agatha Cracknell and Mistress Alice Doble, ladies of consequence, have gone off together in a coach and high fettle, full of talk. Two practical women with a pampered little dog, departing without repining from their sacred duties, from their companions, from their home, from the life of prayer. They plan to establish some commercial enterprise to do with cheeses from Cornwall. Master Tregonwell has given them some helpful contacts. The Fairheads too have all gone, picked up in clusters by brothers and fathers and admirers, carried away in wagons and coaches with all their ribbons and laces – some to marry and multiply, no doubt, some to decline into querulous dependent spinsterhood. But they will be all right. They will have enough to eat, and soft beds.
Sister Mary Amor has hanged herself.
I had thought, after our conversation in the slype, how selfish I was. She addressed my problems, and when she could say no more she had gone from me. I never either thanked her or thought to ask her enough about herself, and what she herself would do. I did not feel that it was my place to press her. I should have had a better understanding. Wishing to remedy my shortcomings, I asked her after dinner in the Refectory if I could come and see her in her office.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not today.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Not tomorrow.’
And then I said, as if I knew something that I absolutely did not know, could not possibly have known:
‘But how shall we manage without you?’
She did not reply.
‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘that is of course not your concern.’
‘No.’
When she did not appear in the Refectory the next day, and questions were asked – had Sister Mary Amor already left the Abbey, without bidding farewell to anyone? – I went to her office.
I saw her feet first, and then the rest of her, hanging from a rope attached to the central rafter. She was wearing her habit but had removed her wimple and veil. She had curling brown hair, I never knew. Her head fell crookedly from the rope. I am not going to write about her face. If you have seen, as so many in these days will have seen, a hanged woman or man, you will know. If you have not, you would rather not be told.
I closed the door and slumped down on the floor. I shuddered as if stricken by chill. The office was impeccable – files and ledgers aligned on shelves, the floor swept. Only a fallen stool. I rose, and saw that on the table was a packet with my name on it, and a white paper on which she had written in majuscule in black ink in her firm hand: ‘I CAN DO NO OTHER.’
She was a reasonable woman. Killing oneself may be one of the most rational acts possible. Though it is a mortal sin.
So I thought afterwards. At the time, I simply fled, down the precinct and through the cloister and straight to the Abbess’s house, and banged on the great door. Pushing past her maid, I ran through the house until I found the Abbess, puzzling over documents by the light of a candle.
I told her.
‘Who else knows?’
‘No one.’
‘Nor shall they. Father Bucket does not have the strength for this. I will call for Father Robert Parker. Go now, and return to me at daylight end.’
She rose, summoned the manservant, and gave him certain orders. There seemed now to be nothing at all now wrong with her mind.
*
The Steward and Gregory cut down Mary Amor from the rafter, wrapped her in a blanket, laid her on the ground, carried away the paper upon which she had written and the packet with my name upon it, and locked the door of her office. I watched them do it.
When I returned to the Abbess, Father Robert Parker was with her. On her table was the paper with Mary’s big black writing on it, and the package with my name on it.
I always thought of Robert Parker as young, almost a boy, or even – remembering Christmas – a boy-girl. This evening, he was a grown man and a priest. The Abbess had found two more stools from somewhere.
‘In the eyes of the Church,’ Robert was saying to the Abbess, ‘violence against the self is a crime. An atrocious crime, a mortal sin.’
‘What about the holy martyrs, who rushed upon their deaths for the love of Christ?’
‘That has been a subject for discussion and dispute. It is unresolved.’
‘It is nevertheless possible, is it not, that Sister Mary Amor died a martyr’s death?’
‘A martyr and a witness,’ I suggested. ‘She was perhaps bearing witness to a great wrong.’
Robert passed his hands over his eyes. There was wine tonight and Dame Elizabeth Zouche poured for each of us. Robert drained his cup immediately and she refilled it. There was a pause.
‘Our lives are not our own,’ he said. ‘We are God’s property.’
A fly fell in my wine.
Property. That heavy, worldly word.
‘A hard doctrine,’ said the Abbess. And then, as if changing the subject: ‘Well, we must think what to do.’
‘We cannot bury her in the nuns’ graveyard, nor in any consecrated ground,’ said Robert.
‘Then she shall be buried with every respect and solemnity in the orchard, late tonight, after Compline, when the sisters should be in bed. I shall instruct the Steward. The grave must be dug immediately. Will you speak with him now, and officiate at the burial, Father Robert? I shall not attend.’
‘Of course, Madam.’
Neither Robert nor I chose to remind her that there was no Compline, not any more. He rose to leave, and kissed the Abbess’s ring. When our eyes met I know that he was thinking of our time in the orchard with Dorothy. Perhaps Mary Amor’s grave would be in the spot where we had rested. I hoped so. The peace and happiness of that time might also, by God’s grace, become hers.
I also perceived that there was unfinished business between Robert Parker and myself, and that he knew it too.
After the door banged behind him, the Abbess took hold of the package with my name on it.
‘Open it.’
Inside, beneath a further wrapping, was a length of bronze-coloured silk, transparent, crusted with gold embroideries of flying birds, and with gold fringes at its ends. Beautiful. As I let it fall upon the Abbess’s lap a small paper floated out. The Abbess retrieved it and tried to read it, screwing up her eyes and then opening them as wide as they would go. She just could not, and passed it to me. I held it to the candle and read it out:
‘This is my only possession from another time and place and it will be yours now. I pray that you will find your right path.’
‘May I keep it?’ I asked the Abbess.
‘You may keep it.’
I went from her, leaving my wine-cup with the dead fly. Mary Amor’s piece of silk, and the tile with the lion painted on it, are treasures that I shall be taking with me when I leave.
I did not attend her burial in the orchard. I encountered Father Robert Parker at dawn the next day. He was pale, and looked unhappy.
‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘of saying a Mass for Mary Amor in the Abbey Church. But there are no vessels, no vestments, and the altar is cracked. Just the wind blowing through. Will you come and sit with me a while?’
We walked to his house, in the row of chantry priests’ houses on the far side of the graveyard. Dame Philippa and Dame Joanna were right, the destroyers had ignored them, at least so far. Robert’s room was as ordered and as simple as a nun’s – a stool, a desk, a mattress, a crucifix, garments hanging from nails, a little chest with his lute pr
opped against it. I sat on the stool, he paced up and down.
I asked, ‘What will you do?’
That was the question we all asked one another all the time.
‘I am still in love with God.’
He told me he would go to Salisbury, to call upon Bishop Shaxton. There might be a position for him in the cathedral, or in one of the nearby parishes. It was easier for men, he said. I knew that. They could become teachers in schools. Vicars and rectors would still and always be needed.
‘One only has to conform to the new dispensation, which has much in its favour. It is perhaps an opportunity’, Robert said. ‘The life of a chantry priest, in a house of women, is hardly illustrious, and of a tedium – God forgive me – that is quite unimaginable.’
‘I begin to hate this word “opportunity”,’ I told him.
‘You are mistaken. Change brings opportunity for every one, including you and me. Just for now, we are as free as birds.’
My Melancholy had said that birds were not free. Neither was I. I allowed myself to be led by him to the mattress, and he lifted my tunic, and I welcomed a man’s body into mine for the first time since I lay with Peter Mompesson in the woods so long ago. It was an act of tenderness, not passion, and no less true a connection for that. And he was clean and sweet. I thought of Dorothy, and perhaps he did too although we did not speak of her.
As I was preparing to leave, Robert said:
‘In God’s name, I had all but forgotten! I have a letter for you, a drover brought it to the gatehouse this morning and I promised I would deliver it into your hand.’
The letter was from my dear Jeanne Vile in Bruton, she had inscribed her name on the back of the cover. I snatched it from Robert and ran towards the slype. On my way down through the precinct I saw the Abbess’s bundled-up bed-curtains being thrown on to a fire. I felt nothing. When everything is being lost, each further, single loss loses the power to hurt. The slype was filthy with stone-dust and mud from the destroyers’ boots. I sat on the bench and ripped the cover paper apart and read what she had to tell me.
Jeanne’s letter, in the hand which is identical to mine because we had the same teachers, was guarded, as all letters now must be.
Hugh Backwell and John Harrold had gone from the Abbey, she knew not where. No one knew where Abbot Eley was either. The Abbey was empty, stripped of everything that had been in it – furnishings, plate, treasures, vestments, books, everything – but no one had yet come to demolish the buildings. The Abbey belonged to Master Maurice Berkeley now. He was much in evidence in the town, and it was said that he slept in the Abbot’s bedchamber. Richard Halford – this was the lean red-haired canon I had heard talking when my mother and I laid out the elf – was much in evidence as Master Berkeley’s chaplain. John White was in attendance upon Master Berkeley, and his people were measuring and surveying. Master Berkeley planned to bring the Abbey down and build a great house for himself from the ruins. His steward was already collecting the rents from the town. He had guards on the gatehouse, but there was that place on Dropping Lane near the fishponds where the wall was easily climbed. Boys from the town went in by night and reported what they saw.
And then, at the end:
‘P.M. is still in Brewham. His sister has died and his father too a year past and he has the farm now. Your father is not well, he has lost his strength.’
She said nothing about my mother and nothing about Peterkin. I read her last sentences, the only ones that mattered, over and over. I crushed the letter in my hands and then let it fall among the debris on the floor of the slype.
My sisters are leaving silently, in twos and threes and singly, clutching their bundles, their heads bowed. They do not bid one another farewell, or embrace. We all, I know, feel ashamed. We have somehow failed, and we are unwanted. We are trained to humility and submission. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I make my preparations. I go to the apple store and collect as many of last year’s apples as I can easily carry. On my way out I see Dame Monica Slater, the Novice Mistress, in company with Father Bucket. Mother Monica is clinging on to his arm, though Father Bucket is unsteady on his feet at the best of times. Both have sacks slung over their shoulders. Mother Monica is in tears. They have both been drinking.
‘We are expelled from Paradise!’ moans Mother Monica. ‘Cast out from the Garden of Eden.’
I want to say, do not be so foolish. Instead, I say:
‘Why not have an apple?’
Mother Monica wails louder, her mouth a toothless O, and the two of them totter out of the gate, turning towards the square, merging in the dusk with people and cart traffic until I see them no more. God only knows what will become of them. I go and knock on Robert Parker’s door.
*
We did not lie down together again. The desire that flickered between us was extinguished. It had served its kindly purpose. Robert took a silver knife from the pouch at his waist. He pared an apple for me and another for himself. He told me he had filched the knife when the Abbey silver was piled up in the Refectory, waiting to be packed into boxes by the destroyers. Because he was a priest, he was allowed in by the guards on the door.
That had been a bad day. We had all peered in to see the tapestries, cushions, velvets, vestments, altar-cloths, chalices, ciboria, censors, piles of linens and lace, stacks of pewter plates and silverware, goblets, ewers, glassware, copper pans, gold boxes, candlesticks … all jumbled together as if in some goblin market, waiting to be carried away in a train of covered wagons to London. Which way that was, and how long the journey would take, I did not know.
I told Robert about Dame Monica and what she had said.
‘If she thinks the Abbey was the ante-room to Paradise, she is mistaken,’ he said. ‘It was not intended to be, that was never the idea.’
I seemed to have lost the power of speech – the cat had got my tongue – and was too tired to enquire what he believed ‘the idea’ to have been.
‘Remember, Agnes,’ he said, ‘the really important things will always go on just as before. Beans will sprout. Children will be born. There will be butterflies.’
The next day his House was empty, the door hanging open. I was glad for the two old ladies, who would be moving in. I hope I will see Robert again one day.
‘There will be butterflies.’
I have often recalled that, at odd times and out of the blue. It is comforting because it is true.
*
I stand under the arch of the gatehouse. Dorothy is there, with Esther in a sling across her breast. She has come to say goodbye. She is wearing my green hood. Esther is now quite the most beautiful little baby girl I have ever seen, and I have seen a good many babies. I say this to Dorothy and she tells me that Sister Isobel had been to see her at the Winterbournes’ house. Esther was in her crib, and Isobel looked at her and said:
‘Eternal peace is lying in the hay.’
‘Were those her own words? Was she repeating something written down?’
Dorothy does not know.
‘Sister Isobel, I think, was speaking about the Christ Child.’
‘Obviously she was.’
‘Although Esther is a girl. It doesn’t really make any difference.’
‘So is Finbarr a girl. And so are you and so am I. Maybe.’
We laugh, both knowing what is meant but unable to pursue the thought, there is no time. We embrace, taking care not to wake Esther, and I give her Finbarr’s rope to hold.
Mother Onion is there too, sitting within the gatehouse on the stone bench, her sticks propped beside her. She is breathing with difficulty, or uncontrollably sighing, I know not which.
‘I have a thought,’ she says, ‘to go and spend some time in the orchard over the road. It is a fine soft day. God know there is no need for hurry. I am no longer myself. I am away with the fairies now like poor Sister Catherine.’
Dorothy sits beside her and takes her hand. Dorothy has become kind. Unlike me.
John Winterbourne, the one that does not speak, is there too, standing on one leg and then on the other, waiting for Dorothy to be ready to leave. It is strange saying goodbye to her and to Finbarr, even though it may not be for ever. Nothing is for ever. Is that still true? As I watch them depart, it’s as if I am departing from myself. From my old self.
*
Turning away, I hear the rumble of men’s voices in the chamber above the gatehouse. I recognise them. Master John Tregonwell and Sir Thomas Arundell.
I creep halfway up the curling stair, stopping where there is a landing and a slit window looking on to the roadway. The door to the upstairs chamber is open. They must be standing at the window, seeing what I see, watching the sisters leave.
‘They look ashamed,’ says Tregonwell. ‘Guilty.’
‘All those dried-up Brides of Christ.’
‘They are not all of them dried up. There are some tasty morsels among them.’
‘I had my way with one of them, a plump one, no country girl, she knew her way about. They aren’t allowed to marry, you know, even though they’ve been turned off.’
‘Who said anything about marrying?’ says Tregonwell.
I have heard him say that before.
‘I have been told,’ says Arundell, ‘by a Frenchman at court, how the Mohammedan lords keep quantities of women shut away for their use in enclosed houses. Just like nuns. Only not.’
I hear the clink of bottle against wine-cups.
‘A forebear of mine went on a crusade to Alexandria’ – Arundell is relaxed, half-tipsy – ‘and they broke open the harem and turned the women out on to the streets, fitted for nothing but whoredom. These Brides of Christ will become whores. Christ has not turned out to be so great a husband. He never was.’
‘Many of these women,’ said Tregonwell, ‘are too old or sick to make their living that way. Look at that one, with the two sticks, crossing the road. She can hardly walk.’
‘She will not last long. Have some more wine. Dame Elizabeth kept a good cellar.’
Clink, clink.
‘I am impatient,’ says Tregonwell, ‘for the demolition to end. I fear one will have to move fast to salvage the best before everything is burned or carried away. I plan to build a house in the town from the stones. I particularly desire the great lintels, to set over my doors and windows. I have my site already.’
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