The rebel nun, p.5
The Rebel Nun, page 5
Seven
What I regretted most was not listening to my mother.
Rosalda was her name, and like Radegund, she was a war-booty child whom King Clothar had brought to Paris from Thuringia as a slave and given to his daughter-in-law upon her marriage to Charibert. But with her red hair, bright blue eyes, and freckles, my mother looked like an adolescent, and Charibert’s wife, Ingoberga, was threatened by her unique, foreign beauty. Immediately, my mother was exiled to the king’s villa outside Paris. With youthful energy, Rosalda tended the villa’s gardens, and when Ingoberga sent her children to the villa to get them out of her hair, Rosalda watched over them. Charibert first noticed my mother as she was kneeling, weeding a low patch of herbs in the villa garden as he passed through one day. That evening, she was summoned to his side.
Ingoberga was in Paris while Charibert entertained Rosalda in his bed for the next fourteen nights. My mother had learned Latin alongside their children, and she impressed him with her fine mastery of its complex inflections. When Charibert’s wife returned, Rosalda went back to the small house at the periphery of the villa grounds and gave birth to me nine months later. Summoned by my mother, my grandmother crossed the Rhine to live with us.
Even as he married more wives and had more children, Charibert looked for me when he returned to the villa from Paris, from whence he ruled his quarter of Gaul. He frequently called my mother to join him at night. Although Rosalda gladly warmed his sheets when his other wives were pregnant, nursing, or away, she refused to marry him.
“I will not be the fourth on the list,” she told me when I was old enough to understand the difference between marriage and concubinage. “I would rather be who I am—a Thuringian slave and a whore—than stand on the lowest rung of a tall ladder of wives.”
I remember that vow, if not its precise words. Like most of the memories of my preconvent years, I fear losing it to time. Months go by between flashes of the time I spent with her and my grandmother in the garden and in the kitchen. Only when I returned to the convent garden each spring and began its annual renewal did I dwell on those memories long enough to recover more than mere glimpses. Now these scenes seem to hover just out of reach.
My life in that garden with my mother and grandmother, however, was cut short. A year after the poet Fortunatus arrived at the villa, where he found a haven from political enemies in Rome, my father fell ill and died. Immediately, his wives began jockeying for position, seeking the best political appointments for their sons, and Fortunatus feared for my life. No one wanted me around to produce a possible contending heir.
“Clotild cannot stay here.” Fortunatus had come to our hut to talk to my mother. He called me in from the garden to hear his warning. “She will be murdered within a fortnight if she does. Charibert’s widows will see to it.”
“As long as she does not claim any inheritance, what danger does she pose to them?” Rosalda argued. “We have asked for nothing but this modest hovel and work in the gardens.” We had only two three-legged stools in our one-room hut, and I stood behind my mother as they talked.
“It is too risky.” Fortunatus continued to press. “Charibert’s wife Ingoberga is treacherous and not above murder. Clotild will be far safer at the Holy Cross. Her grandfather’s wife Radegund will watch over her. And if Clotild chooses not to stay after her novitiate, she can leave.”
My mother said nothing. Her eyes swelled with tears. Other than my grandmother, I was the only family she had. Finally, she let out a long sigh. “She will decide for herself,” she said. She turned to me and pulled me into her arms. “You will never know the warmth of a man’s arms around you at night, the beauty of a babe at your breast, the joy of your child’s laughter. The cloister is death, the end of your dreams. Think of that before you decide.”
I hated to sadden her, but for me, it was an easy choice. As much as I loved my mother and grandmother, as much as I knew I would miss our garden and our warm, tight but snug cottage, my heart leapt at the thought of getting far away from my male cousins and half brothers, who constantly taunted me with such words as, “Bastardis! Bastardis! Your mother is a whore. Her mother is a whore. You shall be a whore,” while my half sisters, Bertha and Berthageld, stood by and tittered.
This abuse was the dark secret of my childhood, which I hid from my mother as I did not want her to see me as weak. She always held her head high and her eyes level when surrounded by my father’s wives, even as they sneered at her to her face.
As I got older, the boys became more aggressive, groping at my budding breasts and grabbing at my crotch. Bertha and Berthageld’s mothers had drawn them into the villa’s parlors to learn to sew, to mewl, and to modestly tilt their heads and drop their eyes in the presence of their male cousins, to whom they would soon be betrothed.
As a bastardis, I was not allowed in the salons and parlors; I was not expected to secure a marriage that would bring wealth or honor to the family, only one that would get me safely out of the way. But neither did I belong among the children of the farmers and tenants of my father’s kingdom. I had no assurances that I could stay at the villa once my mother died, and I was of no use to the Merovingians, except as a slave, the daughter of a slave.
On the night before I was to leave with Fortunatus, I joined my mother and grandmother in a ceremony under the full moon, calling down the moon goddess, Máni. Sweet incense filled the small space between our hut and the garden, and our candles flickered in the night breeze. We chanted the rhymes I had known by heart from infancy, my child’s voice adding but a whisper to my mother’s hearty song and my grandmother’s scratchy one. My mother poured three cups of wine and handed me one without diluting it.
“Where is the water?” I asked.
“Tonight, you will have trouble sleeping,” she said. She was wise and could see into my heart. “You will need the wine, not the water.”
We sat in the moon’s glow, and I sipped my sour wine while my mother and grandmother filled their glasses several times. I studied the spidery shadows the willows threw on the ground. Already homesick for the garden, I worried that someday I would forget the place. I listened to the murmur of their Germanic chatter—not the words, just the sound of it—and tried to memorize its cadence.
I drifted off to sleep on the ground, and the last sound I heard was of my mother weeping.
The next morning, Mother sobbed and threw her arms around Fortunatus as he loaded my small trunk onto the wagon. “Please, do not take her from me. She is all I have left of Charibert. She is all I have in this world.”
I remember feeling little that morning except for nausea from the wine, an eagerness to start our adventure, and joy at escaping the torture of my cousins. I rebuffed my grandmother’s hugs and kisses and gently pushed my mother away. As the wagon rolled up the lane toward the old Roman highway to Tours and Poitiers, I did not look back.
My heart softened toward my mother over the next few years, as I took up gardening for the convent, which brought back memories of our life together at the villa. The warmth of my new sisters compensated for my loss of her. Under Radegund’s special tutelage, I learned diplomacy and patience, which burnished my reputation inside the cloister’s walls as a fair and thoughtful sister, worthy of being a future abbess. And before I had even completed my novitiate, I had set my sights on that future.
Now, sleeping alone in the cold, drafty corridor, away from my whispering sisters, I regretted having left my mother so eagerly. I longed, painfully, for the garden of my youth. I pulled myself into a ball on my side to conserve my body heat, and for the first time in ten years, I wished I had not left with Fortunatus. I saw my mother only one more time, when she made the trip to see me in the monastery, and I knew the worms had entered her brain. I think she was aware of it too, and she had come to visit me before it was too late. Now, I was forgetting her face. I remembered the moon’s sharp shadows in the garden but I failed to conjure up her image.
Seven days into my nighttime solitude, the Christmas vigil began directly on the heels of Vespers. Starting at three hours past sunset, we gathered in the chapel for six readings from the Prophet Isaiah before midnight’s Nocturnes, and six readings from the Gospels after Nocturnes. At the Hour of Terce, our liturgy included twelve readings of Psalms. And then the glorious feast could begin.
I had spent the entire day before helping to prepare the Christmas meal, including venison and boar donated by hunters from the noble family of one of the sisters, none of which I would be allowed to eat. At the smell of the roasting meat, saliva gushed in my mouth and swamped my throat, puddling with nausea in my empty stomach. Perhaps to make my misery sharper, Lebover sent Justina to tell me I could attend the feast, but I could not eat. Nearly dizzy with hunger, I decided that smelling the repast was better than nothing, and I joined my sisters as they filed into the dining room at midday.
Surrounded by my favorites—Desmona, Greta, Covina, and my cousin Basina—I joined in the blessing of the food and the prayers of thanks for its abundance. Looking up after the amen, I fought dizziness. The huge plates of food weighed down the far end of the table, fragrant and steaming in the cold dining room. A large goose was surrounded by bright globes of beets and glowing onions. Chunks of moist pork lay on a bed of sliced cabbages, sprinkled with shavings of carrot.
I wondered if I could experience hunger as a good sensation if I put my mind to it. Perhaps I would feel the rapture of the presence of Christ on this day of his birth if I could turn that suffering into pleasure.
But the smell of browned goose skin and salty pork was torture and it defeated me. I was not strong. I bowed my head and prayed. I diverted my eyes as the abbess and prioress began passing the heaping plates around the tables. As I accepted the first platter from Desmona and passed it along, I noticed she had not taken any of the luscious goose. Still under orders not to speak, I could only raise my eyebrows to ask the question.
“I am not eating until you are,” Desmona said quietly, not meeting my eyes.
I shook my head. It was wrong for me to be punished for misdeeds I had not committed. It was even worse if Desmona was punished for them as well. Desmona nodded her head toward the rest of the table. I looked around and realized that none of the other nuns were taking food either. Plate after plate passed us by, and no one took a morsel.
The heaping dishes circled unmolested and returned to the head of the table. Justina watched, her face turning red with anger. By resisting temptation to feast on that rare and succulent meat, the nuns not only showed how strong they were, they showed how willing they were to stand by me.
Justina looked ready to kill, but Lebover simply lowered her eyes. Sadness, not anger, was written on her face. Had she realized her attack on me had failed? Had she understood how it jeopardized any chance she still may have had to make friends or win love and support from my sisters? Again, I had a fleeting feeling of pity for her.
I glanced around the table and saw no other face soften with Lebover’s obvious regret. As the abbess rose from the table and slowly, laboriously clawed her way out of the room, leaning heavily on her canes, a murmur rose, and soon, nearly a cheer. Furious, Justina stood and ran after Lebover.
My sisters wasted no time. They eagerly passed the plates around again, starting each one at my place.
It was the beginning of our rebellion.
Eight
My sisters’ show of solidarity with me at the Christmas feast weakened Lebover’s resolve and strengthened mine. As we gathered in the nave for Vespers on Christmas night, the abbess limped up to me and said, “In the spirit of the love of the season and the gift of Jesus Christ, I have decided you can move your cot back into the dormitory and resume eating our meals.” Her tone was cold, stiff, and labored.
I did not answer but stared straight ahead with exaggerated piety. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her staring at my face, but I refused to acknowledge her.
Lebover’s change of heart was too little too late. By then, the consensus in the monastery was that she was a monster—perhaps even worse than Maroveus. Adding to the abbess’s vulnerability, the bishop had either tired of his role overseeing the quotidian details of the monastery or was sufficiently distracted by serious matters elsewhere. Or, perhaps he simply abhorred the cold streets of Poitiers in the dead of winter. Whatever the cause, he came less often after Christmas, and the first two months of the year went by without a single sighting of his pudgy face. The parish priest, a diffident and unassuming man of God, came with little fanfare to officiate over the services for the Epiphany and the Presentation of the Lord to the Temple.
The particularly cold winter did not improve Lebover’s status amongst us. The dearth of wood she requisitioned for the monastery barely kept the water from freezing in the pitchers on the dining tables, and we shoved our cots closer together, hanging sheets from the ceilings to block the icy draft in the cavernous dormitory.
Meanwhile, Lebover continued to add layers of fat, even as her gout worsened. She shuffled through the convent, stabbing her cane into the ground ahead of her feet and leaning her heavy frame against it. A complete pass through the sacristy, the kitchen, the infirmary, the cellar, and the dormitory absorbed a couple of hours, and her daily rounds declined to one and then none. By the time Lent arrived, we saw her only at the Hours, and other than the cellarer, the sacrist, the infirmarian, and Justina, no one had reported a word from her for more than a month.
Colder, but free of the dispiriting presence of Lebover and Maroveus, our convent regained some of its earlier cheer and camaraderie. Regular gifts of grain begged from royal relatives boosted the supply of bread at meals, and until the fasting before Easter began, many of the other nuns had regained the weight they had lost in the days leading up to Christmas. After my long fast, however, I was still the thinnest I had been since I reached puberty.
One afternoon, as we sat silently over our embroidery, the elderly portress Bertie walked into the sewing room and motioned for me to follow her. The great poet Fortunatus had arrived at the door of the monastery and asked for me. My heart leapt in my chest, and I jumped up, dropping the scarf I was mending, and ran ahead of her to the reception room. Fortunately, he had shown up at a time when Lebover had secluded herself in her chamber with her decidedly male-looking guest. I was not inclined to interrupt her, but careful to follow the Regula, I asked Bertie to sit in with us.
“What a blessed pleasure to see you, old friend!” I greeted the poet with more emotion than I had expected to show. “What news do you bring us from the world of our fathers?”
Fortunatus had come to show me the progress he was making on Radegund’s hagiography, the long paean to her life that he had been writing since her death. He looked on as I read his latest installment, which described a monastery unlike the one we now suffered. I had started to wonder if my memory of Radegund’s reign had been clouded with nostalgia, but in Fortunatus’s words, I saw that it was not.
The poem made me shake with anger and self-pity. I had not planned to complain to Fortunatus, but once I read his verse, my grievances poured out. “Oh, dear friend of Radegund! Our beloved cloister is draped in such sorrows now, you would not recognize it. We are starved, frozen, and belittled by Lebover and the bishop, Maroveus. This is no longer Radegund’s blessed monastery. It has decayed into darkness and despair.” I told him about the items taken from the sacristy. I told him about the food rations and the cold.
When I finished, he studied my face for a long minute. “Is it possible that you are simply jealous of her position?”
I wondered if he found my stories outrageous, perhaps even incredible. I had thought, as a friend, he would listen and sympathize rather than doubt me. “I admit that I wanted to follow Agnes as abbess,” I said. “And, yes, I perhaps am a little jealous, but—”
“Do you want to live with such envy?” he interrupted.
The question stung. I stood and paced across the room to shed the anger flooding my body. After a couple of turns, I stopped before him, my arms folded across my chest. “Do you think I would choose to be envious? No one wants to live with envy,” I said. “It is not something one aspires to. It makes one miserable to compare oneself with others more fortunate, not more sanguine.”
Fortunatus swatted at my logic. It was a dismissive gesture, something I would have expected from Maroveus, not from a man who had regarded Radegund as his intellectual equal, and who had never brushed me aside. What had changed? Was he not here for my critique of his work?
“I believe you should worry less about your conditions and more about your soul,” he said. “Perhaps you should think less and pray more.”
I shook my head and dropped back down on the bench. Was even this champion of the Holy Cross now adopting the church’s new attitude toward women?
“What would you say if I suggested you think less and pray more?” I asked.
“But I’m a m— . . . poet.” He was about to say “man” but caught himself just in time. If he had said “man,” he could claim no credit for his good fortune as a famous and revered member of Merovingian society. After all, no one chose to be born a man. But becoming a poet was a matter of choice, and it required work and study.
I let his assertion fall without comment, and we sat in silence for a few minutes. “The worst of it,” I said finally, returning to the subject of our cloister, “is I’m afraid that several of the nuns may decide to leave.”
“And go where?”
“They do not know,” I said. “But that is how desperate it is here. Winter persists in the air and in our hearts, and it is unlikely to get better soon. Maroveus has sunk his teeth into us now, and he is enjoying his new power over us. But his true aim is possession of our relic.”
