Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  *

  [A.D. 574]

  Once, however, when Ingunda was four and another civil war had sent the forces of King Chilperic’s son, Theudebert, to gut areas around and even inside the city of Poiters, she judged it humane to permit convent serfs to come for refuge within the cloister. Among them was Ingunda’s foster-family.

  While trestle tables were being set up to feed the refugees, Fridovigia caught Agnes’s elbow, drew her forcefully towards a gaggle of children and, picking up one blackberry-eyed, dirty-faced little girl, whispered:

  “Look at her. Isn’t she a beauty? The spitting image of …” Fridovigia’s gaps and pauses could be more intrusive than speech. She gave this one its due, then: “I make sure she gets her share. She’s well fed, as you see. She knows me, don’t you pet? Don’t you know old Fridovigia?” Wagging her ecstatic old head and dodging mirthfully back and forth behind Agnes’s. The little girl laughed and Agnes felt a fossil hollow contract somewhere inside her.

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly and with what might be fear. “She’s pretty.”

  She walked off, her head swimming. She couldn’t cope with whatever she was feeling and didn’t want to know more about it. Later, when she was giving bread and pottage to the families, she found herself watching the woman who was Ingunda’s foster-mother. She was ordinary enough: a serf and the wife of a serf, strong-bodied, older-looking than she probably was. She seemed to have several other children as well as Ingunda and the little girl seemed comfortable with her. That was as much as Agnes could tell. She did not dare watch too long. Did the woman guess whose child she was raising? Fridovigia had sworn to be discreet but would have hinted at the girl’s noble blood. Her own contacts with the convent were obvious and public. Even a peasant woman could make the connection.

  Agnes walked away. Fridovigia, however, was not going to let her off. She came after her, panting more than she used to. She had some respiratory sickness which got worse in the winter and her eyes were runny and red. She might not, it occurred to Agnes, live long. Who then would keep up the frail link between Agnes and Ingunda? Or was it as well to let it snap?

  “Well?” Fridovigia’s breath knotted in excitement. “Well?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve seen her!” The words escaped in strained, painful little spurts. “Doesn’t that change anything for you? You’ve seen how she lives—or you can guess. I could tell you, I …” Fridovigia was having to learn to save her breath. Ironically, it had been an old threat of hers. Now she paused for a few puffs, her glance pinning Agnes the while to where she stood. “A child”, she resumed painfully, “of a senatorial family—on your side. Even on the other, she … Well … good enough stock I suppose. They’ve put her to work now,” she said. “Watching geese. You can’t blame them. It’s what they do with their own. But she’s not like their children. She’s sensitive. She …” Fridovigia’s breath caught in her chest and she had to stop.

  Agnes closed her eyes. “St. Caesar”, she recited, “has said ‘As holy vessels cannot serve for human uses or be taken back once given to the Church, so no nun may be involved in obligations towards her relatives …’” She said it the way she might have thrown a small stick at a charging animal: hopelessly and because it was all she had. As she had expected, it failed to arrest Fridovigia.

  “Listen!” The old woman’s breath rasped in her throat but the impediment only magnified and gave more moment to her speech, “… to me,” she coughed and caught Agnes fiercely by the arm. “That child is defenceless. She’s weak and she’s yours. She didn’t ask to be born. Your friend, St. Caesar, didn’t ask for her to be either, did he? So forget about him and do your best for the girl.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Make a nun of her!” Fridovigia creaked like a bellows, the breath oozing weakly away. “Take her in. It’s not much of a life, God knows, but maybe it’s the best there is nowadays. Your mother and grandmother had a better life, but what’s the use remembering the past? Make a nun of her. No,” she put a hand up to stop interruptions, “I know it’s too soon. She’s better where she is for now. But in a few years, take her. You have girls in the convent who are only seven.”

  “But …”

  “No ‘but’. I may be dead by then. I’ll die easier knowing she’ll come to you. You know that woman she lives with? Her ‘mother’ as she calls her? Do you know that woman can’t eat meat? Hiltga her name is. When I started taking it to her from the convent kitchen, I couldn’t make out why she never ate any but gave it all to the children. ‘Have some yourself, woman,’ I used to say. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from,’ I’d tell her. ‘The nuns don’t eat it unless they’re ill and have a dispensation. It’s their Rule,’ I said. I was explaining to her, you see. It’s hard for people like that to understand why anyone would give up what they never had. ‘They have it’, I told her then, ‘for the sick and the poor. So you’re poor, aren’t you? And you may as well profit. Eat some yourself, Hiltga! It’ll do you good!’ Well, one day she got so fed up with my trying to force the meat on her that she opened her mouth and said, ‘Look at my teeth!’ So I looked sure enough and, do you know, they were all ground down like an old cow’s, like some underfed old cow’s that would have been chewing coarse roots for years. All flattened and crooked and worn down to the gums from eating woody roots and the bark off trees during the famines they’ve had here. Well,” Fridovigia paused but her upheld hand showed she was not to be interrupted, “after that,” she went on after a moment, “I said to myself: Let Ingunda be a nun. Anything’s better than this! Anything. They’re not bad people, God help them, but …”

  “All right,” Agnes cut her short. “I promise. When Ingunda is seven or eight she can come here.”

  *

  At this time the Bridegroom made another visit to Radegunda and told her she must sacrifice her dearest wish. She must allow the sanctuary which she had so painstakingly built up for herself and her sisters to be violated. Peace, he reminded her, is not of this world. Radegunda was not surprised. She knew that human wishes, even the best, were likely to be opposed to divine ones, that earthly happiness was currency for buying its counterpart in the other world and that sooner or later the sacrifice least to be foreseen was likely to be demanded. Indeed, the warning reassured her. She had had doubts about the celestial origin of her vision. Its human effects were so real. In memory, the faces of Clotair and Fortunatus kept alternating with that of the Bridegroom, whose actual features she found impossible to recall. They had been luminous and elusive and, as time passed, her certitude that she had seen them at all became weaker. She was ashamed to doubt and equally ashamed at the thought that she might be misled by a self-aggrandizing fancy. In the circumstances, the demand for a sacrifice could only be a relief—the devil did not ask for sacrifices. She begged the Bridegroom to forgive her doubts, wiped his feet with her hair and promised to do whatever he wanted. This time he stood with his back to the light and, as she was excited and had tears in her eyes, she got an even less clear view of him than before.

  “You may imagine”, he told her, “that if I have given you such proofs of my love, it is because I have a mission for you. You may be asked to do things which may seem strange or shocking: to violate your own cloister and undo your own work. Do it in obedience to me.”

  “How shall I know when and what to do?” she asked submissively.

  “You will know when the time comes,” she was told.

  *

  [A.D. 580]

  A bad year for Gaul. Pilgrims who paused in Poitiers brought news of floods, an earthquake in Bordeaux, fires and summer hail in several areas and, most terrifyingly, the plague. Fridovigia caught it when it first started in August and suffered badly from pains in the kidneys, a heaviness in the head, pustules, fever and vomiting. She directed her own treatment, had cupping vessels applied to her legs and shoulders and sent Ingunda, who was now a novice in the convent, to the fields for herbs which were then br
ewed and decocted according to Fridovigia’s own recipes. They seemed to bring her relief for a while but just as she seemed to be on the mend, she worsened and died. Ingunda and Agnes cried and, for the first time since the girl had come to the convent, found themselves alone together at the old woman’s bedside. Keeping vigil.

  Agnes stole glances at the girl, who must by now be ten years old. She was pale, a contained little person with freckles under her eyes which would have come from working out of doors. She was crying. For Fridovigia. The child caught and acknowledged Agnes’s look.

  “Mother!”

  Agnes started.

  “Mother Agnes, you loved her too, didn’t you?” Nodding at the dead woman.

  “Yes,” said Agnes. “She was my nurse.”

  “She was the person closest to me.”

  “I see.”

  The two were silent for a long while. But vigils were processes dangerous with memory and too tiring not to be interrupted with some talk. Agnes, to seem natural, questioned the little girl. Cautiously. Keeping on the subject of the dead woman.

  “I had hoped”, the girl whispered, “that maybe, one day, she might tell me—who my parents were. Now…”

  “You think she knew?”

  “Oh yes. She knew.” The girl had a blunt resentful look. “She was mean about it though. Wouldn’t say a thing.”

  “Maybe she couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  Agnes foundered. “What good would it do”, she said feebly, “if they were dead?”

  The child looked impatient.

  “Or maybe”, she ventured, “couldn’t acknowledge you?”

  “I’d know,” the girl said, “I’d know more about myself. Whether I was wanted and that. What the trouble was—there has to be some trouble. I’d like to know what kind. Fridovigia”, she added, “said I had ‘good blood’.”

  “That means nothing in a convent.” Agnes reminded her. “This is your family now. You have two hundred sisters. We are all equal here.” That, she realized, was absurdly untrue: theory, not practice. Ingunda was probably made to feel her irregular origin by better-born nuns—and who would not consider herself better born than a girl brought up by serfs? “You’ll miss Fridovigia, won’t you?” she said, realizing that the old woman must have been a protectress in many ways. While despising convent hierarchy, she had known how to deal with it and made full use of her special relations with its abbess. Ingunda must be feeling very bereft. “You’ll miss her,” she acknowledged. “Won’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m alone now.”

  “Don’t you visit your—family?”

  The girl shrugged just perceptibly. “Yes.”

  Those ties too were loosening. What would a family of serfs have to say to a nun? Rashly, Agnes said, “We were both fond of her,” nodding at the dead woman. “If you’re lonely you must come and talk to me about her. Come tomorrow afternoon. You can help me work in the sacristy. It’s work she used to do sometimes.”

  “All right.”

  The next day, however, Agnes was unable to keep her appointment with Ingunda. She was half glad. She needed time to contain a rush of feeling which had come on her while Fridovigia’s body was being carried to its burial place outside the cloister. Agnes had stood at the convent wall watching a hasty little group bundle the bier on its way. No mourners. The nuns could not leave the cloister and fear of infection had kept any friends Fridovigia might have had among the tenants from showing their respects. The bier was piled with strong-smelling herbs but, from the way the bearers craned from it, Agnes could tell that the decomposing body had begun to stink. It was a vulnerable moment and the one in which the dead woman came nearest to winning her old war against Radegunda—maybe she did win it. Certainly, a ghostly version of the nurse’s voice had begun debating with Agnes’s inner thoughts: a wily one which granted that Agnes’s first duty was to avoid the scandal which could only destroy herself, the convent and Ingunda too. Allowing that much, argued the voice, leeway could and must be found for the feeling Agnes had managed to suppress as long as Fridovigia was there to do her mothering for her. Now, said the pleader, it must be given an outlet. Occasions could be contrived, words found to channel towards Ingunda a tenderness capable of consoling her without betraying itself. How? Well, why not take over the novice-mistress’s duties? At least some of them. This would allow Agnes to devote time and attention to her daughter without appearing to single her out. That was the pitfall to be avoided. Ingunda was lonely, her affections turbulent. She could not be expected to be prudent. Agnes must be prudent for two.

  The last of Fridovigia’s little funeral procession had disappeared. Agnes left the look-out place and went into the chapel. Her head was light. Instead of praying, she found herself dreaming up and discarding moves which were either too awkward, extreme or likely to alarm the child. There must be no suddenness, just a growth of intimacy such as might happen between any teacher and pupil. The planning was pleasant. Agnes indulged herself and found that the old obstacles had turned into assets. Without the ten years of restraint and being a stranger to her child, how could she have felt this keen anticipation? If her daughter had been everyday fare to her she would not put such value on the girl’s response. If she had known her as a baby she would not be confronted by a whole person whom she must learn to win. This surely was a challenge worth meeting, a love of a different order to the milky reflex linking mothers to the parasite just detached from their own organism? She remembered wondering, almost eleven years ago, about how soon a foetus was ensouled—that was when Fridovigia was suggesting a visit to the Syrian doctors. She had never found out the official doctrine of the Church but had reached her own conclusions: ensoulment surely took place over years. An infant was only potentially of a higher order than a cat or dog. Fridovigia had sensed this since she had been ready to help Agnes abort yet solicitous of the child once it survived and began to grow. Childhood was the time Fridovigia liked best. She was a wet-nurse by vocation, had been Agnes’s and would have been Ingunda’s if she could. Even in her old age, she had provided a warm chrysalis of affection for the girl and had prolonged her own life, thriftily stretching it just long enough to see Ingunda through childhood. Now Agnes and the girl must struggle to know each other as adults. Agnes wondered, dreamed, mourned, though not painfully, for Fridovigia and noticed that her old scruples and shame had gone. Perhaps ten years’ dutiful attention to the convent needs had absolved her? Civil law allowed for such workings off of guilt for injuries done. Why shouldn’t God’s?

  She left the chapel in a mood of exhilaration. She was eager to get to grips with this new challenge, but was impeded.

  A nun had come to look for her. There were visitors at the convent gate. Important ones who would not be put off.

  It was still early. The garden foliage was white with dew and the sun had not finished burning the haze from the tops of the vines below the convent walls. Who could have come with such imperious needs outside convent visiting hours? Someone, it appeared, from the royal palace at Soissons. An emissary from Queen Fredegunda herself. Poitiers had been under the rule of this queen and her husband—who was also under her rule—since its former king, Sigibert, had been murdered five years before. Popular opinion credited Fredegunda with that murder but then half the murders ir the kingdom were laid at her door.

  “Who is it?” Agnes asked the portress when she reached the gate. “Did they give a name?”

  “Bishop Bertram of Bordeaux.”

  “No less!”

  This bishop, whose already shady reputation had not been improved by recent rumours of a scandalous intimacy with Queen Fredegunda, was not in his own diocese and Agnes under no obligation to receive him. However, she handed her key to the portress who opened the door.

  A bull-like man with heavy jowls, not much neck and dressed more like a soldier than a bishop was outside on horseback backed up by a train of armed and mounted men. A girl, also mounted, was beside him but her head was be
nt and Agnes could not see her face. The bull-faced man inclined his torso a little, identified himself as Bishop Bertram, and began to speak.

  “My lord,” Agnes cut short his compliments. “I should be grateful if you would state your embassy briefly. Our Rule permits us only the most necessary dealings with the world outside.”

  “Admirable, Mother!” The bishop raised an eyebrow then bent his head. The two gestures seemed to annul one another. “How I envy you!” He paused, then, injecting a careful dose of insolence into his tone, said, “My mission, as it happens, is holy and delicate. If you would allow me to unfold it to you in some place more discreet…?” Another pause. “It concerns”, he decided to admit, “a vocation.” Nodding at the girl beside him who did not look up. “I can say no more here.”

  “All right,” said Agnes. “I shall see your Grace in the reception room then. With the postulant. Nobody else.”

  The bishop bowed. Agnes withdrew. She went for a moment to the chapel to prepare herself for what was coming. Bishop Bertram would not have made the journey from Soissons simply to escort a nun. Agnes wished she could have consulted Radegunda but Radegunda was in retreat. The only other person familiar with courts and politics was Fortunatus. How thoroughly she was cured of him! She had not thought of him once during the vigil or funeral. Now his name came to mind in a worldly connection—appropriately, for he was a worldly man. He had become a priest four years ago: a late, tepid vocation. But he did know about court intrigues. He would be able to help her. She left the chapel and gave orders that a peasant was to be sent to the poet’s quarters with an urgent request that he come to the convent. Then she went to the parlour. The prioress was waiting at the door and followed her in: Justina. She was the niece of the Bishop of Tours, not the one who had come to the ceremony for the True-Cross relic but his successor, Gregory. Justina was the most likely of all the nuns to be able to give useful advice. Besides, the presence of another nun was required at all visits. Bishop Bertram did not waste time.