by Lauren Groff
She understood then that it didn’t matter that the landscape inside her looked so different from that of her sisters, that they had been taught to crave their own subjection and she had not, that they believed things that she thought silently were foolish, unworthy of the dignity of woman. They were filled with goodness as a cup is filled with wine. Marie was not and could never be. Of course Marie did have a greatness in her, but greatness was not the same as goodness.
And she saw at that moment how she could use this greatness for her sisters; she could give up the burn of singular love inside her and turn to a larger love, she could build around the other women an abbey of the spirit to protect them from cold and wet, from superiors waiting to gobble them up, she would build an invisible abbey made out of her own self, a larger church of her own soul, an edifice of self in which her sisters would grow as babes grow in the dark thrumming heat of the womb.
As she entered the chapel with the single lamp lit and saw in the shadows and the darkness of the habits only the faces of the nuns gleaming, singing, she saw them as tender bare babes floating in the amniotic dark.
And now that she is old and dying in the close herbed air of the infirmary, she thinks of how strange it is that it is not the long good comfortable times of happiness returning so close to the end, but rather the times of briefest ecstasy, and of darkness, of struggle and passion and hunger and misery.
She smiles at the version of herself at that time of pain, so young that she believed she could die of love. Foolish creature, old Marie would say to that child. Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.
9.
Marie sickens deeper.
One night she sees the hounds of hell circling in the darkness over the grounds outside.
She sits up, desperate to warn her daughters.
A sweet voice tells her to hush and gentle hands lay her back down. They take off her headcloths. She knows the warmth of these hands, the smell of herbs. Nest. Oh lovely, nervy one.
When she was young, she had the thickest and most beautiful hair, someone says in sorrow. Now look. White as ice. She knows that voice, she struggles to find the name, she cannot. But the face comes to her; dimpled in golden straw, or hair like straw. Lips like a heart beating. Young.
Why can she not see? All has become pale in her eyes. She wants to tell them, she knows not yet what. It is urgent. She must. She sees her great wings still spread over the abbey in protection.
She hears the baying in the distance. Yes, yes: the hounds of hell, more and even more coming.
Now she can hear them, hear the weight of their paws running over the ground, so swift. Digging holes in her abbey’s lands. Killing the sheep. Howling, calling their hellish sisters forth. She longs to tell her daughters to listen, to go out with their crosses and their prayers, drive the hounds away.
For the daughters of this great place have made one of the seven towers of holiness keeping evil from the world.
For their goodness and their piety is what has kept the grace of the Holy Virgin upon the earth.
For their prayers are as buttresses to the heavens.
Someone is saying now that the poor abbess has been ill longer than she has admitted. She has been gasping in her pain and pressing her hand to the space between her breasts for years. Feel now. There is a rock in there.
Ah well, the abbess would not have told them of the pain. She wouldn’t want to worry her daughters. That is how her own mother went and her grandmother before her also, it is the family curse, alas. Marie was very young when her grandmother went but she watched her mother sicken. She is gray in the face, as they were then. It will be soon now.
Someone’s breath is rasping loud against this paleness.
The pain is eating Marie alive.
Mouth that cannot speak, eyes that cannot see, hands that cannot feel, feet that cannot walk, nor can she make a sound from the throat. It is coming, it is coming.
The end times: seas rise, seas fall, the monsters come roaring from the seas, the water burns, the trees sweat blood, the earthquakes topple buildings, the hills turn to ash, all people flee, the bones of the dead rise, the stars fall from heaven, the heavens and the earth burn, the earth releases the good dead to the heavens to their judgment, yes judgment is coming.
A doe burning white in the steam of the cold water, a mother, a queen, her crown her rack of antlers.
Daughters, prepare, make ready for the end of time.
Breath so painful to take in.
She cannot protect her daughters any longer, she will soon thank the Virgin for her gifts, she will pray in intercession for them, she will soon lie beside her own mother, letting the warmth of her flesh warm this cold body, touching her curly dark hair in love.
Last rites.
Everything possible with everything given has been done.
She sees a woman in a box.
No, she is the woman in a box. She is slithering away from the swords coming in from all angles, contorting her body in the darkness so that she will not be stabbed by the new swords coming so relentless, so sharp, and each sword is cold upon her body where it presses but not a one does cut the skin to blood.
Yes. It was like this, her life.
Sing the canticles.
My vineyard, which is mine, is before me.
Marie longs for it, longs for it, her whole body reaches for it, the gold, the heavenly music, the release. To see god, who is not split in three, but singular. God, sole, female. She has had an eternity of community, it has been enough.
Make haste, my beloved.
So be it, she thinks. And it is.
* * *
—
The funeral is solemn and the feast is large; the mortuary roll will return so thick with their sewn-on tituli of praise for Abbess Marie that it becomes quite clear that no other woman of the realm could be remembered with such veneration. Marie was majestic; great, still, in death, and her renown struck fear in the hearts of even those who had never known her.
There are few alive who remember the poverty of the abbey before Marie took it up, only Goda, as well as Ruth and Swan-neck, who had been novices with her. The three old nuns at the funeral feast tell stories: Fourteen nuns dead of the plague in one week, Goda protecting the last milch cow with her own body from the four starved nuns come with kitchen knives to kill and eat the beast, the meals of sad roast turnips, the child oblates dying of hunger. And Marie huge and gaunt as a crane, rattling forth from the forest on her destrier on that first day she arrived, such an unlikely savior that, in the abbey, watching from behind the shutters, the sickly hungry nuns wept with dashed hopes at watching her near.
But the novices, thinking now of the summer gardens overgrown with vegetation and the honeybees darting through the flowers and the grapevines under their singing sculptures and the pigs and sheep and goats and chickens and cows and the apple trees heavy with fruit, give little smiles, knowing these nuns to be holy and truthful yet not quite believing their tales.
They bury Marie’s body under the stones of the chapel’s main altar, place of gravest honor. There has been talk of sainthood. Already, the villeinesses come in the night to pray near her and there are rumors of the healing of a wen, a broken wrist, an abscessed tooth.
Eight nights running after her election to abbess, Tilde is disturbed in her dreams and awakens feeling as though her heart is beating to escape her chest; and on the ninth night, when she wakes in the same panic, she rises and goes to the chapel to pray.
She leaves her taper on the altar and kneels in the chancel, but she is uneasy there, and her thoughts fly from her head. She finds herself looking at the paintings on the wall as they dance in the small light: the apocalypse, the judgment, Mary Magdalene with her long hair loosed to her waist and her long plain horsey face. A great intensity of gold flooding
down upon the face of the Virgin in the Annunciation. The Revelation, the two-headed whore of Babylon on her dragon.
And then she feels a small chill wind upon her neck as though a breath blown upon her from close by. Someone or something is in the nave behind her. She swallows and sees her hands shaking before her and says a prayer while slowly standing up. She reaches for her candle, but as she touches the holder, the flame is extinguished. The smoke in the darkness spools over her hands.
And she steels herself and turns to look, and sees a distant simmering of light in the place directly above where Marie has been buried under the stones. She knows without doubt that what she is seeing is the old abbess’s ghost, though later she will ask herself if it may have in fact been the moonlight shining off the glossy leaves of the oak outside and through the window, perhaps quivering its reflected light in the air.
There had been a great ambition in Abbess Marie, an impatience, often a barely held rage, but never any evil; Abbess Tilde worked beside her for over two decades, she knows this well. And with this thought, she feels the fear seep out of her skin. Inside her mind she becomes calm.
She bends her feet toward the disturbance, and as she goes it seems to seethe and re-form itself ever farther from her step. And she lets it lead her to the outside, the darkness of trees moving in the chill wind, over the path, through the cloy of rotten windfall apples, and back to the abbess’s house.
By the leading shimmer she is brought through the darkness to the desk heaped with her unending work. And in the moonlight she sees what the eye skipped past in the day; that the shelves are thick with the bound parchments of the abbey’s workings over the centuries, and that so many of the pages have been filled with the hand of Marie.
But when she broaches the door, time peels from the abbess and in the dark a vision comes before her and she sees Marie as she had once seen her, only months before Marie was elected abbess, shortly after Tilde had become a novice and had taken her place as a copyist in the scriptorium, never daring to even hope that the queen would elevate her to prioress. Marie’s face had settled into its handsome austerity by then; she had been standing in the orange sideways morning light, smiling at the door where Tilde had come in quailing and so young, with a question of Latin that the other nuns could not solve. When Tilde had knocked, Abbess Marie had been holding in her hand the abbey’s seal matrix, and she placed it deliberately upon a small leather-bound book. She said Tilde, and her name in the abbess’s mouth gave Tilde a thrill. The abbess answered her question with no hesitation, but a fond smile.
And then the memory fades and Abbess Tilde strikes her taper alight and rummages among the books until she finds the little one that the seal had rested upon in that too-bright memory.
She reads without stopping for Matins and Lauds and Prime, and when she finishes, she rubs her temples. It is a bleak gray dawn, the Ides of November, and in the window the light shines weakly upon the frozen ground. She kneels in the fireplace and starts her own fire, for she has locked the door against disturbance and will not let the servants in. She stares at the fire to give herself time to think.
She had known Abbess Marie to be a brilliant strategist, a thorough and clever manager of the abbey’s affairs, a savvy politician with spies and allies everywhere, a friend of the great and the small, and a good and sensible woman within her own faith. She had seen her untangle a butterfly from a spiderweb, to be so moved by the glory in a sunset that she fell to her knees. True, there had been rumors of witchcraft; but such rumors are irrepressible when it comes to powerful women. Still, Tilde had always believed that the visions Marie had been given by the Virgin were not true visions, but rather ideas that she worked up into vision form to sell her building projects to her sisters. Tilde did not truly believe her abbess to have been an actual mystic. Mystics are ethereal creatures, and Marie was the opposite of ethereal. She was massive, fleshly, ruled by her hungers.
Also, there is something that disconcerts Tilde about the visions; something about them that feels less like the word of god ringing with authority in the Bible; something more human; something that, perhaps, if she’s being truthful, feels like things that have not been given, but wholly created.
Yet it must mean something that the abbess’s ghost had wanted to speak to her.
She thinks hard and in despair, and can come to no satisfactory action.
She rereads and finds herself again and again astonished to her quick, for had such visions as these seeped into the world during her lifetime, Abbess Marie would have been burned a heretic at the stake and all the sisters in the abbey would have been scattered and the richness that the abbey had built over the years lost to the hungry superiors ever circling above, eyeing the wealth of this place for themselves.
In Marie’s visions, Eve and the Virgin Mary share a kiss; god is a colossal dove hen laying the eggs of the world; Marie herself is protector well above the power of any woman born to woman. Singly, each vision does not seem so very heretical, but together it is imagery so far from the common that it takes Tilde’s breath away. She has the urge to cover her own eyes.
Putting the book into the world would be impossible; she knows this already. It would be easily discovered who had written it, and the punishment of the remaining sisters would be immediate and harsh. Already Abbess Tilde thinks it is prudent to stop saying Mass and hearing confessions herself, to give back that right without fighting to retain it, for she too is uncomfortable with the idea of women holding such authority in their too-small too-weak hands. Simply keeping Marie’s mystic book at the abbey feels dangerous to her.
And she thinks she would simply slide the little bound volume back behind other volumes, to stay hidden until she grows the wisdom to handle it, but now she hears Subprioress Goda’s heavy step in the hall, her hand trying the handle, and in a thoughtless panic Tilde takes the little book and throws it in the fire, and watches Marie’s careful handwriting crumple like the legs of spiders as the fire eats the parchment in swift blue flame.
Tilde is not blessed with mystical sight, she cannot see how much is lost in the burning: the traces of a predecessor, the visions that might have shown a different path for the next millennium. The strong stock for a new graft gone. How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life.
The abbey crumbling, the earth warming, the clouds abandoning this place, and the newts and birds vanishing, and in the new dryness of the hot world, the traces of the old dead abbey’s buildings are thrown up in seared brown lines upon the grasses of the strange changed place absent of holy women, the lines of the labyrinth buried under the roads and houses of later, even more ravenous people.
No, the new abbess, so good, so obedient, so deeply pious, only feels a terrible sort of dark and tarry joy spreading inside her, and she begins to shake with the feeling, for she has never before known the profound pleasures of destruction.
It is this pleasure she feels in destruction that she would later reflect on, deeply troubled; it feels elemental, human, it must have been this that was first hissed by the serpent into Eve’s ear.
By the time Goda enters, all traces of Marie’s visions are gone.
Goda bellows that the abbess must not lock herself away from her sisters, it is not allowed, even for an abbess. She bellows because she is very old and has gone mostly deaf.
Tilde says that she will ask for penance in confession. She feels her face is red-hot.
Goda glares at her, then crosses to her desk and sits with a wheeze. She sighs. She folds her hands. She sighs, very solemnly, the pigs.
Tilde looks at her. The pigs?
Goda says that it is with great sadness that she must tell the abbess that three of the new gilts were born with the kinky back and that they will be culled this morning.
Tilde looks at the good subprioress and wills herse
lf to tolerant love. She says that she is thankful that Goda is so very excellent at overseeing the health of the abbey’s beasts.
Goda looks at her suspiciously to make sure the younger woman isn’t laughing at her, but at last nods, her mouth set nearly in a smile. She says she has been subprioress for longer than the abbess has been alive. Fifty-six years subprioress. And she has seen the cattle grow from a single sick heifer to a healthy three dozen. Hundreds of chickens where there were four. Swine and goats beyond measure. She is not a proud woman, but she has done a passable job. Better than passable, maybe, even if nobody has ever thanked her for her hard work. Now, she says in a much lower voice, what is that smell? Stinking. Is the abbess unwell? Colewort disagrees with Goda’s guts also.
Abbess Tilde says she just now burnt a thing, but not to worry, it is nothing.
And she tells no lie, for she has looked into the fire and seen the whole book burned and even if it once had been something now it has become nothing, not a book anymore but ember and ash. She is free from having to decide what to do with the strange visions of her predecessor. With the burning, all the visions of Marie are as though they had never existed.
Smoke to smoke, she thinks, and feels a pang for failing her old friend, gone ghost.
Such fires, so small in themselves, will heat the world imperceptibly until after centuries it will be too hot to bear humanity.
In the schoolroom, the novices are chanting the imperfect passive indicative, third conjugation: capiebar, capiebaris, capiebatur, capiebamur, capiebamini, capiebantur; and the novice Lucy with the freckles pinches the novice Gwenllian with the great cow’s eyes and both girls smile into their hands.