‘Well?’
‘There, Comarba, dear. I knew there was something. And didn’t I forget? You give me a nice penance now, and, sure as God, I’ll have it cut tomorrow.’
‘You’ll have it cut now,’ said her abbess, grimly. ‘Sister Clotilde, the knife.’
Cruimtheris’ red young head was exposed to the chapter and Sister Clotilde began shearing locks off at ear-level with what Abbess Boniface thought was unnecessary reluctance. The silence intensified the rasp of the knife, but nobody moved or spoke. Boniface always tensed herself for their revolt at times like this, but none ever came, though she was, after all, dealing with women who all claimed to be descended from kings, and Cruimtheris actually was a princess of Meath. She was grateful to them for their Christian compliance with her changes of their tradition – what few she was able to implement. There was never any hostility; when they opposed her, they merely ignored her commands. On the whole, she thought, they had been remarkably generous in accepting a foreigner as their head, especially Sister Gormlaith, the senior nun, who had uncomplainingly carried so much of the work while she and Sister Clotilde were finding their feet, and was equally prepared to relinquish her position to Clotilde without rancour.
She was beginning to be fond of her Irish nuns, but she did not allow herself to show that fondness and it did not stop her doing her duty.
‘And now,’ said the abbess, when the cropping was over, ‘Sister Cruimtheris will beg her bread in the refectory for a week in order that she may reflect on the sin of vanity.’
The trouble was, she thought, that, although they conversed together in Latin, she and her nuns spoke different languages. To them it wasn’t vanity to have their hair long. It was merely the custom of St Brigid. ‘Female hair is a net of the devil,’ she told her flock, ‘God likes it as short as possible.’ But, again, she made little sense to them. There was surprisingly little sexuality in their make up. She had expected from what she had been told about the Irish before she got here that she would be combating raging promiscuity, but among her nuns at least, there was none. They had opted for the celibate life of their own free will and their passion was for God and His saints. They talked to male visitors on amazingly equal terms, but with little flirtation. As for intercourse between them and them monks, it was precluded by a physical and spiritual wall, not to mention a strong, anti-female asceticism among the brothers.
Sister Cruimtheris’ hair lay curved on the stones like red weed abandoned by a tide. The abbess allowed the silence to continue – she had another lesson to ram home – until it was broken by a metallic birdcry from the fields outside. She took her opportunity: ‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t you know it, Comarba?’ asked Sister Acall. ‘It’s not heard until the hay is scythed. It’s a corncrake.’
‘I am aware that it is a corncrake,’ said the abbess, ‘the point I am making is that today it is a corncrake and tomorrow, which is the Sabbath, it will still be a corncrake. But only this morning Sister Eithne informed me that any birdsong I hear on Sundays is not birdsong at all, but the rejoicing of souls from hell having a holiday.’ Sister Eithne covered her mouth with both hands.
‘This abbey must be rid of heathenish superstition,’ continued its abbess. ‘When God sends souls to hell, He damns them for all eternity. He does not give them a day off. Is that clear?’
It seemed that it was. Abbess Boniface blessed her congregation and dismissed it. ‘Officers will stay behind.’
When the great carved door closed behind the main body of the nuns, the abbess self-consciously relaxed, though not too much. ‘Always be dignified, but never a tyrant,’ Abbess Matilda had advised her.
She faced the women remaining, all of them older than she was. ‘I wish to consult you on the matter of Lady Dervorgilla’s expected baby. As you know, she has claimed sanctuary here, which puts us in a quandary. Sister Aine, perhaps it would be a good moment to serve some wine.’
Among Eleanor of Aquitaine’s lavish parting gifts to her had been a tun of superb red wine which Boniface had been bestowing on her officers on special occasions – usually when she wanted her own way. ‘Cosset them,’ Abbess Matilda had said, ‘make them feel part of a team.’
The team grunted appreciatively into the beakers Sister Aine passed among them. ‘Isn’t this great?’ said Gormlaith, ‘Them Norman grapes must be kissed by God, by God.’
The abbess sighed. The grapes were actually from Bordeaux, but her nuns laboured under the belief that anything not Irish was Norman. She had given up trying to disabuse them. ‘Well?’ she demanded, ‘The O’Conor besieging us at this minute is becoming impatient.’
‘Comarba dear,’ said Gormlaith, ‘There’s not a lot of “well” about it. The damned woman’s here, still as pregnant as MacCarthy’s old cow, and we can’t violate sanctuary and chuck her out, not even though she is an O’Melaghlin.’
‘And what’s wrong with the O’Melaghlins?’ asked Sister Maire, who was one herself. Since Gormlaith seemed disposed to tell her, the abbess said quickly: ‘I should like to hear Sister Aine’s view.’ She had quickly learned to nip tribal disputes in the bud; besides, she was beginning to have a great regard for Aine, who was tall, thin, and reflected to some purpose.
‘Gormlaith’s right, Comarba,’ said Aine, ‘We can’t violate sanctuary, for sure, even if she goes on claiming it after the baby’s born.’
‘The minute that baby’s born, O’Conor says he’ll come in and get her, sanctuary or not,’ the abbess told her. ‘He is a godless man, but there’s nothing we can do against violence. Besides, I intend to see that she goes back to her husband then, willing or not. I am not sheltering an adulteress here forever. The question is, does the baby go with her?’
‘Oh no, Comarba,’ Sister Acall cried out. Her carbuncled face flamed with infection and pity. ‘If you send her back to O’Rourke with her baby, he’ll kill it. He will.’
‘Kill a baby? Nonsense. Don’t be so emotional, Acall.’
‘I’m afraid he will,’ said Aine, and the other nuns nodded their heads.
‘O’Rourke’s a pig of a man, so he is,’ said Gormlaith. ‘He’d kill a baby as soon as look at it. Quicker, as it’s Dermot’s.’
‘He beats her,’ said Sister Acall, ‘Ochone, the poor mavourneen,’ she relapsed into a moist Irish lament.
‘It’s true,’ said Gormlaith, ‘I despise the woman, but I’d have left the swine myself.’
‘I see,’ said Boniface, ‘Thank you for your guidance. I know now how to deal with the matter. You may return to your duties.’ She blessed them. Sister Acall was still sobbing.
As they went out, Gormlaith said ‘Isn’t it a pity about those poor souls in hell now. Mustn’t they need a holiday.’
* * *
In rare leisure moments between her duties, Abbess Boniface had taken to walking the ramparts of her abbey. She did so now, with Sister Clotilde, taking deep breaths of fresh air. It was always like coming up on deck. The sprawl of the abbey buildings and the town below them resembled a flotilla of Noah’s Arks which had been stranded on an Irish Ararat, washed around by the heaving waves of grassland which stretched to the horizon.
Clotilde, who had a forgiving nature, had become friendly again after her rejection as a room-mate. Together they rested their arms on the wall and enjoyed the view. Boniface was trying to sort out the confusion in her mind that her encounters with the Irish always engendered. It had seemed so straightforward back at Fontevrault; she had to venture into a barbarous country and bring it civilisation, a vast undertaking but comprehensible. Now that she was here she was bewildered by the fact that elements of barbarism as she understood it existed side by side with great learning, horror with beauty, customs that shocked her mingling with others that contrasted well with conditions back home.
‘Is it an uncivilised country?’ she found herself asking, ‘or is it just different?’
Clotilde interrupted her musing. ‘This is a wonderful land for game, at
least,’ she said, ‘There’s something under those trees over there, but I can’t make out whether it’s deer or boar.’
Her abbess didn’t bother to look. ‘I’ll tell you what it isn’t,’ she said, gloomily. ‘If it’s native to this blasted place, it’s not what it seems.’
Clotilde grinned, partly in sympathy – Boniface was being sorely tried – but partly because cheerfulness insisted on breaking in. She hadn’t wanted to come to Ireland. Indeed, when the Mother Superior of Fontevrault told her that Boniface had chosen her to be her companion on this venture to the end of the world, she had been both frightened and angry. ‘Why didn’t you ask me first if I wanted to go?’ she had demanded of Boniface, ‘It isn’t as if we’ve ever been particularly friendly.’
Boniface had stared at her. ‘What’s friendship got to do with it? I’m going to need someone who’ll tell me the truth, and you are the most honest person I know,’ – an answer that had sent Clotilde back to the Mother Superior to say that she would go after all.
And now that she was here she was enchanted – still frightened, but enchanted. ‘And so are you, young Boniface,’ she thought, ‘for all that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.’
Boniface, too, was thinking that she would be more careful with her entreaties to God in future. He had answered her prayer for power with almost more than she could cope with; in fact she wasn’t coping with it. Like everything else in this weird country, it was eluding her. Back home at Fontevrault this had seemed an important, but provincial, appointment; yet here, in the middle of it, everything was on a scale undreamed of by those who had wanted her to lick it into shape.
As Comarba she commanded a diocese as large as Leinster itself, with an influence which stretched far beyond. Strictly speaking the Abbot of Kildare was its bishop – she had been shocked to find that an abbot could also be a bishop – but Flynn’s progresses weren’t interrupted at every step by petitioners begging to have their wrongs righted – hers were. It wasn’t Flynn who was consulted by kings, queens and princes – she was. Every time she rode out it was to find her route lined with crippled, afflicted men, women and children who had travelled long distances in the conviction that a glimpse of her countenance would cure their every ill.
Her power over this shambling, beautiful abbey was absolute, yet its manipulation escaped her.
‘Are they laughing at me, Clotty?’
Touched by the use of her old nickname, Clotilde said: ‘The sisters? I don’t know.’ She was here to give her honest opinion and she honestly didn’t know. She supposed they were not worse and not better than the nuns back home, they must share the same goodnesses, the same neuroses, the same hopes of heaven, yet they didn’t correspond to the women she had known. The context in which they existed was too different. It was like trying to recognise familiar landmarks in a fog. ‘I can’t grasp them yet,’ she said, ‘I suppose it’ll take time.’
‘I can’t grasp anything,’ said Abbess Boniface. The people, the whole country, had an avoiding quality. They were like their own weather which, when it was obviously going to be a sunny day, and you’d made up your mind to it, would rain out of sheer perversity. And then, just as you’d accepted: ‘This is a rainy day,’ the cloud would slip away and land you back in sun.
Laziness, she had decided quickly, was the besetting sin of these Irish Celts. Now she was beginning to think it wasn’t laziness so much as a dislike of routine, a love of leisure. Work didn’t get done – you could see it not getting done – and yet the place functioned. The wild horses roamed the grassland apparently at will, yet the quality of their pasture showed that it was grazed exactly right, neither too much nor too little, which argued management.
The cattle down in the watermeadows shone with a fat health which seemed to be achieved independently of their herdsman, lying on his back with a straw in his mouth. Further away there were hills which the people here called mountains, and they never stayed where they were put, sometimes advancing as a purple menace, at other times fading away in an innocent blue. Everything seemed one thing and proved another. Deception was in the air she breathed, and she was at a loss to analyse why it smelled so different from other air.
She concentrated all her frustration at this shape-changing on the arch-deceiver, Dermot of Leinster, who had seemed the essence of sophisticated Christianity, who had tricked her. ‘I’ll give him charm,’ she promised herself.
‘The people seem to like you, mind,’ interrupted Sister Clotilde, who had been considering the matter, ‘they call you Ann-something. It sounds complimentary.’
‘It isn’t. “Anbobracht”. It means no-fat-person. They think I’m a living skeleton.’
‘You should eat more. Gormlaith says she can see the stars twinkling through you. Why don’t you tell them you’re beginning to understand what they say?’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Boniface, irritably, ‘We’ve been over that. My position here depends on my neutrality. That’s why they welcomed me in. Besides, it’s useful to hear what they’re saying without them knowing I understand it.’
But she knew that was not the only reason. Ireland had abandoned the child she once was and she could not surrender herself to it because of that abandonment. Perhaps one day, when her power over its souls was complete…
‘Crafty,’ said Clotilde. ‘As your truth-teller I have to inform you that you’re becoming crafty. Incidentally, there’s something I must show you.’
‘Is it important? I have to see Dervorgilla.’
‘It’s frightening.’
It was still a hit-and-miss adventure to find their way through the abbey and they still enjoyed it. A couple of paces could take them from their own twelfth century into the fifth, or seventh, from the cavernous, painted, modern church into the now rarely-used chapel which was thin and steep-roofed and built of a peculiarly Irish many-coloured stone and attributed to the founding saint herself.
‘Perhaps St Brigid was like that,’ Clotilde said, ‘Tweedy, and sort of fun.’ Their feet passed over tiles, each one of them a work of art, to stone, to brick to beaten earth, out of shadowed archways into speckled, trellised walks, into gardens, down terraces, steps, past colonnades so carved with nightmarish animals and fiends that they hurried along them into cloisters where the perfection of shape calmed them again.
Everything led to the centre in which burned the sacred fire and where the round tower stood.
On their way to wherever it was Clotilde was taking her, they passed St Brigid’s oak, another of Boniface’s headaches, though it was also a considerable source of revenue since a mere twig or acorn from its venerable branches was considered to contain some of St Brigid’s holy properties and fetched a good price from pilgrims and visitors. Nobody dare cut it with a knife or axe but St Brigid’s Custom allowed people to break off pieces with their hands, which led to contention between the abbey, which regarded the oak as its monopoly, and the townspeople of Kildare who, being allowed to wander in and out of the grounds at will, kept stealing bits to sell on their own account.
Two small and very dirty boys were sitting underneath it today, whistling with innocence. Angrily, Boniface made shooing gestures at them. They got up to bow with the courtesy of princes before moving off, but as they did so she heard one tell another in Irish: ‘Let’s be waiting till she’s gone and then fill our pockets.’
When she’d first arrived the language of the common people had been a miasma of sound, but lately more and more of their words came through clear and comprehensible, as if her ears were unblocking. Sometimes, as now, she could understand whole sentences.
She called in Latin to a passing nun. ‘Would you come here, Sister Brigh, and tell these urchins that if they come back when I’ve gone, let alone fill their pockets, I shall have them whipped.’
As the message was retailed, the abbess saw with some satisfaction that her stock had gone up in at least two young Irish minds.
‘Where are we going?’ she
demanded of Clotilde as they passed over the hill and down towards the wall which divided the nuns’ convent from the monks’. They were in an area she did not know, a maze of stone passages that led to cells like large beehives which were now used for storage.
‘Here.’
It was a courtyard, very old, and with moss and valerian sprouting between its cobbles. The ivy overhanging its walls muffled sound and made the place oppressive on the ears.
‘What?’
‘Here,’ Sister Clotilde lifted some ivy on an inner wall and stood back.
‘Well… oh my God.’
It jumped out at her, shrieking. She’d fallen back before she could comprehend that it hadn’t moved or sounded at all, that it was violence in stone, an ossified attack on the mind. The mouth was open as if it was braying, showing a rampant tongue. But it wasn’t the face you looked at. The squat body was crouched and its hands were between its legs, fingering open a swollen labia, as if it would drag everything outside itself into the gaping hole of the exposed vagina.
Boniface retched. ‘Oh God, what is it?’
Clotilde let the ivy fall back. ‘I’ve asked. Discreetly. Of the sisters, only Aine will even admit its existence. She thinks it might be Eve.’
‘Eve? Eve was a woman.’
‘Well, it’s undeniably female.’
‘But Eve’s in the Bible.’ Whatever her faults, Eve was part of the Christian tradition, a fitter-in; she’d got used to Eve. But this carving on the wall belonged to no recognisable world except hell. ‘It’s a demon.’
‘Sister Aine says the townspeople call it St Brigid. Boniface, I’m afraid women come here to… well, touch it. So they can conceive, apparently.’
‘Not any more they won’t. I’ll have it smashed. How can they think it’s St Brigid?’ St Brigid might be an interfering and often inconvenient saint, but she was in heaven with God, clean and beautiful. ‘If no one else will do it, I’ll wield the hammer myself.’ But she didn’t even want to come back here. To obliterate the thing would give it recognition. She felt polluted, that it would be lodged in her mind forever like a pustule, like Eleanor of Aquitaine’s garden.
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