Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  Radegunda waited for him to finish. She gripped the baluster of the marriage bed.

  “My Lord,” she said, “I shall lay out my brother’s body with my own hands.”

  Clotair nodded without looking at her. As she wished. Whatever she thought fit.

  “Then, my Lord, I crave your permission to leave this court. After the funeral I want to go to Medardus, the Bishop of Noyon, and beg him to consecrate me as a deaconess. I am unfit for matrimony. It will be better if I consecrate my life to God and leave your majesty to take a fitter wife. We have been married fourteen years. God has not blessed our union with children. It would be impious to fly against heaven’s clear dictate. Chlodecharius was my child as well as my brother. Now he is dead I beg your majesty’s permission to give my life to God.”

  The henchmen’s silence thickened. It was congested, palpable. Like gruel in their throats, like ice before their eyeballs. They wrapped themselves in it, insulated their nerves and waited. Some must have been remembering other occasions when Clotair’s will was thwarted or his pride assailed. Savage acts … There were many to choose from. Expecting another, they were braced, for Clotair’s rage could whirl off-target, bolt like a freshly branded beast and flatten whatever lay along its unpredictable passage.

  Clotair frowned. Head bent, he squinted at the daylight glittering on the gold balusters of his bed and on the tufty flames of its fox-fur cover. His own beard and hair flared with the same red, foxy vigour. His spirit too was foxy, like that of all his race, known for their nerve and perfidy in the tremulous chronicles of their time. A shudder threw his body into a rampant posture.

  “So, Radegunda!” he roared. “You want to leave me. Is that it?”

  “For God, my Lord!”

  “For God! For God!” The tawny head was thrown back. “Well! What do you say to that?” he challenged his men. “Ha? What kind of a king do you think reigns up there,” with an upward jerk and flounce of his mane, “what sort must he be if he’s not afraid to steal the wife of a king as great as me?”

  No answer. This was a tricky one. The henchmen’s eyes stayed lowered. Only Radegunda stared straight at Clotair awaiting his reply. For a moment they locked glances. Clotair broke the lock. Shaking his spine like a wet dog, he said irritably, “Go then, woman! Go lay out your brother and go to God when you choose. Go! Go!”

  He turned and walked out of the bedroom.

  Chapter Three

  [A.D. 568]

  Hilarious and worn, Fortunatus was back from another trip. He had stayed in villas porous with inner courtyards where peacocks and turtle-doves were kept for table and display. He had lived high, suffered discomfort on the roads back and returned with a baggage of fresh anecdote. He had seen a merchant from the East with a coat made from phoenix-breasts joined so cunningly as to show no join.

  “Like the seamless robe of Christ,” he told Agnes, for it was time to sound a pious note after betraying what was perhaps too frank a delight in the crass richness of villa life. “Moreover the phoenix, since it rises after death, signifies Christ. The peacock too …”

  Its colours moved in the prism of his eye.

  “We shall seem dull to you now.”

  “Oh, if you only knew how glad I am to be back!”

  They told each other this in a number of ways, drawing on formulae from Ambrose, Cicero, Jerome and anyone else who came to mind; it was polite to do this and prolonged conversations which might otherwise have died. They had, they assured each other, been parted in body but not in spirit. Honourable love, fragrant as honey, bound them so to each other and to Radegunda and to God that neither of them was ever alone. Yet they rejoiced to see each other again with the body’s eye. Each to the other was as a spring to a thirsty man. In all sisterliness. And brother-lines. And caritas. And so forth. Agnes broke into all this with a practical suggestion:

  “You must be exhausted! And starving! I shall send over a meal from the convent kitchen.”

  She did. A very good one: beef braised with leeks and coriander, fleabane, parsley, basil, chervil, fennel and vinegar and served with a sauce made from honey and must. With this came several kinds of vegetable, gravy and, finally, a milk pudding swimming in heavy cream.

  Fortunatus ate with enthusiasm and afterwards, since he was simmering still with the excitement of his journey but had no one to talk to as visiting hours at the convent were now over, decided to write her a thank-you poem. He had already begun tapping out the meters before he had finished the meal. Strong trochees. One meter-beating finger dived into the dessert and found it finger-furrowed already. Agnes must have shaped the concoction with her own hands. Fortunatus licked his creamy digit with an odd shudder of happiness.

  POEM TO THE HOLY ABBESS AGNES TO THANK HER FOR A MILK PUDDING

  Moulded in cream I found your fingers’ trace

  Where, skimming it, they’d left their track.

  Say, who could sculpt with such exquisite grace?

  Was it from Daedalus you learned the knack?

  Rare love whose image skimmed my way

  Though the fair form itself had gone!

  Sadly, this melting imprint will not stay,

  My share in you blurs and grows wan.

  [A.D. 586]

  A recluse does not easily forget her animal nature. I am sure I am more aware of my body than any whore of Babylon or meretrix. I am all body. More than a lizard toasting its long belly in the sun, more than a woman in labour or the libidinous Queen Fredegunda, I live in my flesh, think flesh, am flesh. My flesh cannot be ignored; it smells as the queen’s is unlikely to do since she can take baths and walk away from her excrement. My feet slip in mine. My shoes are caked with it. My skin itches all over. My mind too is like an itchy place. My thoughts are scratching nails. Over and over old itches they scrape and scratch. Where would I get new matter for them? I have long ceased to pray. My life, my smelly, itching, mindless life must be my prayer. I offer my filth so that I may be cleansed. I offer the lives I never lived. I offer the baseness of the life I do live. I offer its narrowness, the shrivelling of my mind and my efforts to keep it from shrivelling. I offer my awareness and my forgetfulness, my mistakes and my shame. I have to compensate. I am a child of sin. I am illicit flesh.

  Scream! I shall! Scream! Not yet. Yes. I must. Now. I need this relief if I am to keep sane and I must stay sane if I am to pay again and again, day after day. Scream: that licence I must allow myself or I shall go mad as my mind itches, itches, scratches over the old itch, bleeds, scratches, itches …

  I have screamed. The nuns hear. “The woman in the wall is screaming again,” they say. They are used to it. Their recluse is no saint.

  *

  [A.D. 568]

  Agnes’s memories were less precise than Radegunda’s.

  Fortunatus questioned her inquisitively. Coming to the kitchen-garden when it was her turn to do the garden chores, he interrupted her as she was staking bean-vines.

  “Let me help. Then we can talk.”

  “I should do it myself,” said Agnes scrupulously. “The Rule says we should let no one wait on us.”

  “The Rule means servants,” said Fortunatus, “not charitable friends.” He picked up a ball of string and began to tie the young plants to the stakes Agnes had driven in. “Nonsense,” he said. “No protests.” Then he began to ask her when she first knew she had a vocation. Had she known right from the time Radegunda decided to leave court that she too was called to the religious life? How had she felt the call? When? He was handling the delicate bean tendrils roughly, twisting them so that she was afraid they might break and tying the string so tautly it was in danger of cutting through the stems.

  “Please,” she begged, “let me do it.” Taking the string from his hands.

  “Tell”, he went to sit down in a rose bower, “about the call.”

  Agnes released the plant he had twisted and ran her fingers along it, feeling the resilience of stem and root. “I don’t think I ever had a call
,” she said carefully.

  “But you made a choice! You chose the religious life.”

  “Did I?”

  Fortunatus sighed.

  The nun turned to him. Green light from the bower fell on her face shadowing her dark Gallic eyes. They were wide and long and disconcerted the poet who was reminded that this woman was not yet thirty and had been loved while still a child by the dead Chlodecharius. Although she wore the same heavy unbleached habit of rough wool, her shape was quite different to that of Radegunda. Both of these rigorous women had been brushed by passion. The thought excited him.

  “The two of you went straight to Radegunda’s estate at Saix when you left the court?”

  “No. We went to the Bishop of Noyon. Radegunda wanted him to make her a deaconess. We needed to become part of the Church’s family. We needed its protection.” A smile. “And as you see we have had it since.” She laughed. Her voice was a young girl’s.

  And why not, thought Fortunatus. She had not lived. Under those unbleached layers of wool her body was like an apple kept in storage. Apples in the convent granary stayed fresh until the next season came around. Thinking of their pale pith, he found, with amusement, that his teeth were itching to bite one. He would ask her for a basket of them when he left. Gull-greedy, his liking for food was a joke between the two nuns and himself. They, whose Rule forbade them to eat meat themselves, enjoyed cooking it for him and the poem he had just sent Agnes in gratitude for her milk pudding was one of a series on his appetites and their skill. Trivial concerns for a poet but, as Symmachus had written—and if true then how much more so now—“What else is there for us but to exchange old courtesies?” Watching the nun who had returned to her work, Fortunatus remembered that here was a subject neither trivial nor recognized by Symmachus: the sacrifice of Christians who gave up this world for a better one. Agnes, her pale flesh hidden beneath her pale habit, was making that sacrifice with every moment of her life. Only Christian martyrs ranked higher than a dedicated virgin. He could—would write about that. She was storing up grace on which others could draw: a bank for the worldlings—himself included—who, spiritual grasshoppers flayed by their own passions, must come at the end of their singing summer to beg the careful ant for a little of the extra she had so generously been saving for them. Spiritual wealth was impossible to hoard; it was at the service of the community. Yes, he could make a worthy poem, perhaps several on the theme. Flesh was the poet’s clay and he would make use of paradox: he would describe purity in terms of Agnes’s union with her Mystic Spouse. He would describe the Judge of the world coming to her nuptial chamber and plunging into the immaculate purity of her bodily cavities. Fortunatus shuddered. He was a most verbal man. Words inflamed him as no reality unfiltered by them could do. His own flesh had begun to leap and heat. Better go.

  “Sister,” he called to the nun when he had put the garden wall safely between them, so that she could only see his head floating disembodied above its mossy coping, “pray for me.”

  She smiled with an openness which astounded him until he recalled that she, after all, knew nothing of his lust. She was separated from him now not only by the wall but by wreaths of vegetable fibre which criss-crossed between his eye and her creamy, sunlit habit, weaving her into the garden foliage, withdrawing her from his private speculation as a nymph or dryad might be withdrawn and dissolved into the pagan forests which spawned them. Aroused a second time by this memory of old verse about which he, like so many Christian poets, felt ambiguous—it represented civilization and pagan immorality—Fortunatus had the flashing certitude that he would never feel the same again about this woman.

  “My homage and greetings to Mother Radegunda,” he called.

  “I’ll tell her.”

  As he left, she was still smiling, still standing among the greenery, looking appealing, vulnerable, dangerously soft.

  *

  [A.D 552]

  “Soft! that child is soft all through!” complained Agnes’s wet-nurse. “I worry about her,” she told the other women in the work-rooms of the women’s quarters. “She’s my responsibility. Who else will look after her? The queen?” She made a sign to ward off the evil eye. “Look at her crying now!” she nodded at Agnes, “crying her eyes out for that boy who, when all’s said and done, was only a German. Let the Germans kill each other I say!” The nurse lowered her voice. “And the Franks too,” she whispered. “Let their blood manure the earth of Gaul. It’s thirsty for it. Not for our tears. It’s had too many of them! Come along now, Agnes.” The woman walked over to where the little girl was sitting in the winter sunlight which fell like coins through the pitted marble window-panes. “Keep those eyes fresh for live young men. Let’s go and have a bath in the stream since there are no heated baths in this place. We’d better go while the sun’s high or we’ll be chilled to the bone.”

  Agnes said she wanted to stay in the palace.

  “Palace!” said the nurse with contempt. In the old days the slaves on Agnes’s father’s estate were better lodged, she could tell her that. All show here and no comfort! “What could you expect”, again she lowered her voice, “of Franks?” Constantly moving from one ramshackle “palace” to the next! Why couldn’t they stay put in one properly appointed villa? But no: they were like wild oxen! They ate the harvest on one royal estate then moved on to the next. Nomads! “Where’s the German queen?” she wanted to know.

  “Washing his body. Preparing it,” said Agnes. She was playing with a piece of string, making knots and nets with her fingers and would not look up.

  “People are whispering about her!” the nurse said. “She won’t be in favour long. It’s dangerous to be friendly with her now. Mark my words!”

  Agnes plucked loops off the fingers of her left hand with those of her right, twisted, then plucked them back, making a kind of hammock. “She’s leaving,” she said, “She is going away to be a deaconess. She wants me to come with her.”

  “What’s that?” The nurse grasped the child to her, anxiously putting a hand over her mouth. “Speak quietly. Your voice is … So she’s running away then? It’s worse than I thought?”

  Agnes continued weaving and reweaving her cat’s cradle. It was a protection. A kind of screen against the alarm her nurse was so eager to pass on to her.

  “Revenge”, the nurse was saying in a misty whisper, “is a meal that’s as tasty cold as hot. Tastier cold sometimes. And no man, especially a king, likes to be rejected. Clotair’s arm is long. He can bide his time. You remember that, Agnes. When lightning strikes a tree the cattle that shelter under it get killed. Keep away from the queen. She’s whetting a knife for her own throat. She’s contemptuous of happiness,” said the nurse, “and you, my pretty, are made for it!”

  “That’s what Chlodecharius said.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he knew more than I gave him credit for.”

  Agnes began to cry.

  “No more of that now!”

  The nurse was angry. Crying, she reminded, never mended broken pots. What was needed now was to get Agnes married. She had no kin to protect her. The sooner she found some the better. Mummolus, the king’s major domus, a Gallo-Roman distantly connected with Agnes’s dead father, would help. Once married, Agnes would be all right. Meanwhile she must wear her amber necklace because amber had magic properties and … Agnes stopped listening. Yes, that would probably all happen. She would be married. She supposed. But her mind could not latch on to the idea. It remained dangerously empty and while it did in came the very image she had wanted to keep out: the pale, taut face of Chlodecharius. Very earnest, talking in nervous spurts, not laughing ever but touching her as cautiously as he had the dragon-fly he had caught one day as it hung, foolishly poised above a pond.

  “Like a courtier,” he had said. “It sees the dazzle, not the danger. I should talk! I should have left Clotair’s court long ago!”

  “Would you leave your sister?”

&
nbsp; “If she won’t come with me.”

  “She is married to the king.”

  “Do you know how many wives he’s thrown out? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I keep telling her. Sooner or later she’ll fall out of favour and then …” Chlodecharius stroked Agnes’s hand.

  “I wonder what will become of you, little Agnes? Will you marry one of Clotair’s leudes? Some great strapping Frank with hair bursting out of his nose like a prawn’s feelers?”

  “No I won’t,” Agnes laughed and shivered.

  “Ah, but my sister said ‘no’ too. Only when she ran away, Clotair came after her and got her back. It only made him madder for her. What does my sister teach you, Agnes?”

  “Prayers. Latin.”

  “She’s trying to turn you into a copy of herself. But you’re not like her. She torments herself. Do you know why? Because she can’t live as she wants to so she chooses to live worse. That way the choice at least is hers. It’s pride. She’s proud as the devil.”

  “What am I like?”

  “Nothing yet. You’re still at the tadpole stage. You might become a frog—or a butterfly. If you’re nicely treated and petted and looked after then you’ll be a very lovely butterfly. I wish I could take you with me to Constantinople and see it happen.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “No.”

  But on other days he had said he could and would and had described the city as full of gold and spices and strange, domed, majestic palaces. While he spoke he held her hand and Agnes had the feeling he was saying a long, slow goodbye. She was not sure she really liked being with Chlodecharius who was so gloomy and a little dull. She might have had more fun with someone jollier but then, there was no jollier person around. Besides, she was really a little young for courting so it was flattering to be kissed and told in his sad, renunciatory way, that she, unlike himself, was made for happiness. He sounded sure. “You’re like water,” he told her, “you’ll flow where the stream-bed carries you. Radegunda and I are stubborn. Weapons jangled at our birth. Our stock is bloody. Did you know that her name means ‘Council in Combat’? Clotair’s means ‘Famed in Battle’. Well-matched, you see.”