The swan returned anonymously to her flock and continued her slow flight north.
Sister Boniface no more thought of herself as Irish than she thought of herself as a woman. Both were inconveniences of birth which she had struggled to overcome. God had not found her worthy to be born a man, but He had relented when He had created the strange circumstances whereby she had been delivered to the Abbey of Fontevrault as if she were a parcel, perhaps the only place on earth where a woman could rise to high position without dependence on a man. Sister Boniface’s ambition was no less than to become cellaress of Fontevrault, then its treasuress and then its abbess and then to take her place in heaven alongside the other souls who had been good and great on earth. Having known powerlessness as a child, Sister Boniface wanted power with a greed from which no penances could absolve her.
Patriotism and gender were for lay people. Sister Boniface was a would-be sexless citizen of Christendom, breathing its purified air with the million of other monks and nuns who knew no boundaries but God’s and who, whether they were Irish or Spanish, Angevin, Norman, Flemish or English, obeyed only God’s law and spoke God’s common tongue – Latin. It was true that her feminine state obtruded itself on her notice with disgusting, monthly regularity, but God might take that away as she bounded briskly up the spiritual ladder.
When the summons came she thought it was in order to put her onnext step up that ladder and make her Cellaress.
* * *
It came in silence from the hub of the abbey, along the Great Cloister, through the refectory, down long, light corridors to the kitchens, the only place in the convent where there was noise between Sext and None as the chaos created by the midday meal was eliminated. Even there the only sounds were sibilants; pans were scoured, tables scrubbed, tiles swept, slippered feet turned and scurried, platters were scraped and the scullion hissed when she scalded her finger on a turnspit insufficiently cooled down.
The summoner, Sister Jeanne, gave her message in the gestures which were the Fontevristes’ communication during The Silence. ‘From the Mother Superior, greetings. Would the Lady Kitcheness attend on her in her room,’ said Sister Jeanne’s hands.
Sister Boniface nodded. She would indeed – she’d been waiting to do so for a month. But even for that, even for the Mother Superior, she would not offend God by leaving the kitchen in a mess. She stayed at her post until the job was done as God would want it done. The meal had been unusually large and elaborate in honour of their guest that day, the papal legate; and although it had achieved the standard and quality which Sister Boniface and God required, the disorder in the kitchens caused by its preparation had been considerable.
She remained in the doorway, the bunch of keys at her belt as motionless as her folded hands under her scapula. As if she were the chantress and they were choir nuns, the kitchen staff glanced at her for direction as they went about their chores. Instead of a baton, Sister Boniface used her eyes. A blink popped a pot off the wrong hook onto the right one, another swept the ashes of the fireplaces in the north and west walls into neater piles, and yet another pointed out the discordant cabbage leaf lurking under the water vat.
At last harmony was achieved. God, who was order, beamed His approval through its shine. Sister Boniface’s hands emerged to shape a ‘Well done’ in the air. The kitchen staff shambled off to have forty winks before Vespers (being excused None) and Sister Boniface was released to pursue her destiny.
She did so at speed, asking God’s permission to allow her proper gliding gait to degenerate into a lope. He did. He was good about things like that. He spoke to her in the silent corridors through the whisper of her slippers on the tiles. ‘I promised you greatness, daughter. Hurry to receive it.’
‘I’ll sack the bailiff of Home Farm, Father,’ promised Sister Boniface to her God. ‘I’ll grow a better strain of barley and improve pig production. Your glory shall shine before all men.’
In its valley under the sun of Anjou in the centre of the civilised world, the Abbey of Fontevrault had grown in the warmth of God’s goodwill and men’s during the fifty or so years of its existence. It was the Queen of Abbeys, the home of Mary the Virgin to whom it was dedicated, spawning priories all over the known world so that altogether the Order of Fontevrault now numbered some five thousand souls. To be kitcheness of such an abbey carried great responsibility, but to be its Cellaress was to occupy one of the highest roles in female monasticism. For a month now, ever since the final stage of Cellaress Priscilla’s illness, Sister Boniface had shouldered her work as her deputy.
Although she was only eighteen years old she had discharged her many functions like a veteran, trading with merchants, ordering the immense amounts of food the convent consumed, overseeing the domestic staff and the management of the home farm where much of the convent’s produce was grown, planning menus, laying out money, laying in stores, attending the great fairs and markets, seeing to the repair of the kitchen and its utensils, fitting it all in with her duties as kitcheness and the relentless hours of worship. She had become thin and not minded it. What she minded was in not having the power that went with the post proper. As a mere deputy she couldn’t take seisin of Home Farm and reorganise it to be the efficient unit it should be, which meant sacking its indolent bailiff. She couldn’t institute the radical changes she had planned in her head to make Fontevrault’s – and her own – status even greater than it was. She couldn’t sit at the Cellaress’ place at table, nor receive the prestige due to that eminence. She didn’t have power.
‘Give me that, Father. Give me power and You’ll be amazed by what I shall do for You.’ Most of the Fontevrault nuns prayed to the Virgin Mother, their patron, when they were in need. But although Sister Boniface loved St Mary and consulted her on domestic matters, on important things she believed in going to the top. Wanting power, she recognised where it lay.
She entered the Great Cloister and checked her pace as she passed along the stripes of its holy shadows, ‘I was wondering,’ she prayed casually, ‘whether we shouldn’t buy a horse, just a little one, a trifle, to win the Saumur races in Your name.’ The ‘trifle’ she had her eye on was sixteen hands and had some form behind it. She waited outside the door of the Mother Superior’s room to hear God’s view on the subject; she wasn’t sure where He stood on her love of racing. Apparently he had none. The only sound came from a cuckoo in the abbey orchards.
Sister Boniface crossed herself, knocked on the door and went in.
To her surprise, the Mother Superior was still entertaining Cardinal Papato. She had expected that by now the papal legate would have returned to Chinon, where he was staying during his sojourn in Anjou. After she’d kissed his ring and the Mother Superior’s hand she was even more surprised to find that the cardinal, apparently, was going to conduct their interview. She wondered why the Pope’s emissary should have an interest in the appointment of an abbey cellaress, usually an internal business.
She relaxed as he prepared to confer the honour upon her: ‘Sister Boniface, you have been chosen for a task important to God and His Church…’
His next words diverged so sharply from the route she had expected them to take that, for a moment, he might have been lapsing into an unknown language. She didn’t understand. He repeated what he had said.
She wasn’t going to be cellaress of Fontevrault, but something greater and, to Sister Boniface, more terrifying. They were going to make her Abbess of Kildare in Ireland.
* * *
‘Where is Ireland, anyway?’ asked the fratress of Fontevrault that night after the kitcheness had delivered her news.
‘God knows,’ said Sister Boniface, miserably.
When they weren’t away on business, the officers of the Abbey of Fontevrault slept in a partitioned-off section of the dorter which demarcated their higher status from the other, run-of-the-mill princesses and noble ladies who were the non-commissioned body of the convent. The size of their beds was strictly in accordance with their ra
nk. The treasuress, for example, the most important woman in the abbey next to the abbess herself, had a bed that was enormous, which was lucky since the incumbent treasuress was gigantically fat. The shape she and her bed made in the moonlit room was frightening. The empty one reserved for whoever succeeded the late cellaress Priscilla was the next in size and the kitcheness, who had the smallest and hardest bed in the room, had looked forward to occupying it, but now she never would.
The importance of the women in this dorter gave them special dispensation. They were allowed, for instance, to miss night office sometimes – all except the Mistress of Novices who was obliged to lead her yawning young flock to that inconvenient interruption in the night’s repose – and occasionally, as now, to break the Grand Silence on matters which affected them.
‘I think,’ said the almoness, who was a Norman, ‘I think it’s somewhere off England. On the left hand side, I believe.’
‘Wherever it is,’ said the chantress, ‘it is a barbarous and backward nation. I suppose you, Boniface, are to be the spearhead of reform.’
‘And I wish the lot of you would go with her and let me sleep,’ interrupted the poor Mistress of Novices, waspishly. They ignored her.
‘Weren’t you born Irish, Boniface?’ asked the chantress. ‘Is that why they’ve chosen you?’
There was no reply.
‘Dear God,’ said the fratress, ‘Perhaps Boniface will be martyred.’
There was a frightened yet envious hush. Even though the world had grown so old, there were still sainthoods to be picked up and martyrdom was a sure way of doing it.
‘As a matter of fact,’ said the infirmaress, who possessed considerable learning, ‘Ireland was once renowned for its saints and scholars. Whatever’s happened to it now, it’s still producing the odd one. That Malachy whom Bernard of Clairvaux was so fond of, he was Irish. Bernard had himself buried beside him at the high altar of Clairvaux.’
‘I wonder who’ll be Cellaress now?’ asked the fratress and immediately caught everyone’s interest except that of the kitcheness, who had curled into the foetal position in the darkness and put her thumb in her mouth. Abandonment was her terror and now they were abandoning her, just as she had been abandoned as a child.
God had come to her aid then, with Mother Matilda. Wrapping her round in His love, He had promised never to leave her. He’d gone further; guaranteeing her power in and over her own life so that she could never be abandoned again. It was why she had become so brisk, some even said ‘bossy’. Efficiency was part of her bargain with the Lord. He had broken His promise. She had worked herself into a skeleton to make herself indispensable to this convent, worming her way into its very fabric in her need to be needed by it and by God. Now both had cast her off.
How could they send her back to that place which was associated with such horror that her memory still refused to recall the circumstances of it? Ireland was loss. It floated in her mind like some dismal Atlantis in a cold pagan sea, deserted by God’s light, off the map of Christianity, off-stage, off-shore, off-putting. Insecurity infected her so that twelve years of familiarity were obliterated and the structures around her, the women, the sounds of their voices, became as monstrous as they had been to the six-year-old, grief-stricken, hiccuping child she had once been.
There was a creak of stressed wood and a smell of body odour, an earth-moving disturbance, as the treasuress sat up in bed, clearing her throat for utterance. All the voices stopped at the sound which penetrated even Sister Boniface’s misery. This was the voice she had been waiting to hear ever since she’d told the nuns about Ireland. The treasuress had distressing physical characteristics, one of them being a tendency to fart whenever she bent down, which made her genuflections at mass a noisy procedure and caused the novices to go into hysterical giggles, but she possessed the shrewdest mind in the convent. Her words came deep and musical from her great chest. ‘I tell you what, Boniface. You’ll go far. Once an abbess always an abbess. Make a success of your abbey out in the sticks and you’ll be in line for taking this one over before you’re thirty.’
Jealousy that they could not help had prevented the other nuns voicing this fact which had been obvious to everyone but young Boniface herself; now their fairmindedness made them grunt their agreement and call out God’s blessing on her.
There was a virulent ‘God bless you’ from the Mistress of Novices’ bed. ‘And may your novices have a better example in keeping the Silence than these she-devils here.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ said everybody.
The thin body of the kitcheness gradually uncurled. A courage she did not know she possessed – she had little self-awareness – was suddenly enlarged by the challenge to her. Of course, that was it. God had not deserted her at all. He had promised her power, but He hadn’t said where. He was a tricky old God sometimes but He loved her for obeying His rules and she loved Him. His light would shine over Ireland, wherever it was, once she got there and instituted His rules in it. And she would, she would. They would not know in Ireland that she was Irish and they had cast her out. ‘I’ll give them abandonment,’ she promised.
And now she came to think of it she would have free rein over this Abbey of Kildare; she could make it grow good and prosper, order its nuns, arbitrate their fate, make them happy and obedient to God, punish their transgressions.
And what if she was martyred? She tried to imagine it. She saw herself, her arms protectingly outstretched in front of her abbey door, guarding it from the painted heathen hordes, as a spear went neatly – and painlessly (there was no point in overdoing it) – through her heart, and her soul streamed upwards in its new manifestation as St Mary Boniface to join St Stephen and St Peter and St Catherine and all the other canonised martyrs in the jewelled palaces and lush pastures – on which grazed unnumbered and excellent racehorses – in the highest heaven of eternity.
He had His plans for her, did God. She should not have doubted Him. When the bell rang for night office she would join the Mistress of Novices and go down and thank Him.
* * *
‘Remember you’re Irish,’ shouted Abbess Matilda of Fontevrault as they trotted along the road to Chinon with their escort the next day. The abbess’ normal speaking voice was a bellow, partly because she was getting deaf and partly because it signified her nobility. She never modified it whether she was talking to her nuns, addressing kings and queens and popes, or praying to the saints. The abbess’ blood was as blue as any royalty and certainly bluer than most of the saints’.
‘I’m not,’ said Sister Boniface. She was tired, but she had recovered her spirits which, as always, had been lifted even further by being on horseback.
‘Well you are. It’s only because you’re Irish that you’re to get the abbacy. The Pope was going to send someone else, not a Fontevriste at all, would you believe. But I told him. I said it would be better to have somebody who knew the native language.’
Sister Boniface snorted.
‘I didn’t exactly say you knew it now,’ went on the abbess, ‘I wouldn’t lie to the Holy Father. But you used to know it. When you first landed on our doorstep, snivelling little thing that you were, you jabbered away in your outlandish tongue like a heathen.’
The road began to run parallel to the Vienne, loveliest of rivers, and the onslaught of the abbess’ sentences startled a heron out of the reeds. It flew off across the river with slow, offended wingbeats. Sister Boniface shifted uneasily in her saddle. As sure as eggs were eggs the abbess’ next sentence would begin: ‘You were a funny little thing…’ To abbess Matilda Sister Boniface’s presence always evinced a reference to the time that Sister Boniface herself most hated to remember.
The old and the young nun rode through a countryside in which the wildlife was beginning its annual cycle to perdition in its usual springtime way. In the dust of the roadway puffed-out male sparrows fluttered on the backs of crouching consorts, the woodlands piped with courtship and tree buds cast off their blossom which sp
iralled down in the slight breeze and stuck to the veils of the two women. The superb mares on which they both rode as if born in the saddle lifted their tails to a stallion in a paddock who came galloping down to the fence to whinny at them. Old as she was, the abbess was part of the cycle, she had become head of Fontevrault only after the death of her husband – grandson to William the Conqueror – to whom she had borne children. It was the girl who would stay aloof from the meaning of the beautiful day by her vow of celibacy. And thanked God for it. It was such an inefficient, messy business.
‘You were a funny little thing,’ bawled the abbess, musingly. ‘Thin as a lathe; well, you still are. And not a penny piece as a dowry to God and us for taking you in.’
‘But you were brave,’ mouthed Sister Boniface.
‘But you were brave,’ said Mother Matilda, ‘and you knew about horseflesh.’
The sound of their hoofbeats dropped an octave as they crossed the Bridge of Nuns and then went up again as the horses regained the road and turned along it.
‘You insisted that you were descended from some Irish king or other, but Ireland is pickled with kings and, anyway, we couldn’t pronounce the name, so it didn’t mean much.’
It certainly had not. In those desolate months she had spent her nights crying and her days in verbal, and sometimes actual, fisticuffs with her well-born, snobbish sisters in Christ. Well, she had outdone them all. God had taken her into His hand. God and the abbess.
‘And I realised your potential when you showed me that horse had been bishopped,’ shouted the abbess, ‘I knew then you were destined by God for great things. And so you are.’ She stopped remembering, and turned to look at her nun with the shrewdness that had extended Fontevrault’s influence to all the countries of Christendom – except Ireland. ‘You must carry Fontevrault’s banner into Ireland before the other orders get there. This is important, Boniface.’
Daughter of Lir Page 2