Hardened Brides of the Lord

8 September 1330, Nativity of Mary

The collective berserk occasioned by the visit of the chanting Benedictines at the Assumption has ebbed at long last, and no one is now shrieking in the cloisters. Much has happened since I last wrote. Sister Heloise has been stripped, shamed, and dispatched by ox to her home in Languedoc, and three volumes of Gregorian chants have been confiscated from the cells of Sisters Hildegard, Brigitte, and Jeanne.

But there was little weeping in the pews this morning: only mewling from homesick postulants and the usual crying fit from Sister Ermelina. After the craze that gripped us in August—the swooning, the toppled haystacks, the bodily awakenings, and the unnatural hot weather that made us forget stockings and wimples—this is a reprieve. Before August we had known no such upheaval at the abbey in many years, perhaps since we received the illuminated manuscript with that dazzling portrait of Saint Anthony. When I searched our library, I could not locate the volume, but I recall that as he knelt to comfort a lamb, his Franciscan robes were hitched to midcalf, his tonsured curls gleamed like a crown of chestnuts, and he had surprisingly thick hair upon his toes.

I have written three letters to Brother Roland since he departed, and burned them all before the ink dried, for I could not get the sentiments right. I wished to tell him how our debates about the nature of the Trinity made me feel—as if I were wearing a hair shirt on my lower half and had boarded a boat, as if I had drunk sour milk and would be sick but pleasantly so—but I could not do so in a way that transcended the fleshly and temporal world, and I think he would be horrified by such an accounting of the female body.

Still, I thank the Lord for this small stretch of quiet, for soon we will bleed again, and all will be in uproar.

9 September 1330, Feast of Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, who trained a fox to carry his papers; the fox later ate them

A man came to the abbey gates today after Lauds with a bag of kittens. He was stout as a barrel and had hair thick upon his pate, so Sister Clotsinda admitted him, although he reeked of ale and could keep little hold on his burlap sack. She brought him to the abbess, as is customary in matters of coin and beast, but when our Mother only gaped at him and placed her hand into her mouth, Clotsinda ferried him to me. I am the sacrist here, entrusted with the tending of our records and books and vestments and vessels and the upkeep of our buildings and grounds. I am librarian and gardener and polisher of brass chalices and dispenser of monthly rags and puzzler of sums and, lately, slayer of rats. This week alone I have killed six—with a broom, with a candlestick, with a trap contrived from wire and cheese, with a well-placed foot.

I was offended that this man—shuffling from foot to foot upon the library threshold, peering with superstition at our shelves of books—thought us unequal to the task of killing rats, as if we are cosseted ladies who leap upon chairs and not hardened brides of the Lord.

But too many slices of brown bread have arrived on my plate half-eaten. So I considered the man’s proposition. Two copper pieces per kitten—he held one up for my inspection, a squiggling ginger tom no bigger than a rat itself—or two gold for the entire sack, which wriggled and clutched in his hands, like bad meat in the belly. Stars of claws jabbed through the burlap, and tiny voices yowled for milk. If I didn’t purchase ’em, the man said with a toothless grin, he’d drown ’em.

He knew well the weakness of women, then, how our innards heave and our eyes dew at miniature versions of things we are used to seeing big: kittens, ponies, rag poppets and their clothing. Even though I am a servant of the Lord and have no comforts and will not produce babes, I am weak in this way. When I was a girl in Normandy, there was a cat I fancied a pet, a fierce ginger with a ragged ear that would bring me slaughtered songbirds and once, from our lord’s field, a green-headed pheasant with feathers I had so wanted for my cap. For that crime—and to teach me not to coddle things and name and love them—my father chased that cat off with a broom and hid the bird’s feathers away in our tick mattress.

Philip, I had called that cat, after a cheesemonger in the village whom I thought handsome—much handsomer than the cobbler—but I had not thought of him in many years. Not until this man brought a satchel of beasts into my library and pressed me to buy them.

“You won’t find a better deal in all of Brittany,” he said and hitched at the bag as I’ve seen men hitch at their loins.

I knew from our annals that the abbey once engaged a man who played a charming tune on the pipe to lure all the rats from our crannies and walls. But in light of the frenzy mere chanting had incited in my sisters this summer, I judged it too risky to engage a man with an instrument. Surely cats would be safer?

While I pondered, the man scanned our shelves. Slack-jawed, he pulled out a volume: a deadly dull book, furred in mold, on the invention of the heavy plow and how men say it transformed the world. No one who could read spines would have chosen it.

“Can you read all this here?” he said, poking a thumb at the book as one would prod a flank of meat to see if it were cooked.

“Yes, and write it in a remarkably fine hand.” Although, I added in my head, I am hopeless at the whorls and saints and great dragon-tailed S’s and F’s a manuscript requires, and all my martyrs to the flame look like parsnips. I blame the scars on my hands, how they stiffen and pang in damp weather.

“That’s some strange magic,” he said, shaking his head, as dolefully as a flagellant. “Women reading.”

I felt a prickle in my throat at that—pride before a man. Such things can get a woman, even a virgin, thrown into a well. I swallowed it and smiled at him as if my head were full of sawdust. “I mostly look at the pictures,” I said.

I tried to simper but my ears boiled. My mother used to say it was the Devil working in me that hid the pitchfork so the neighbor would rage and accuse my father of theft, that overturned pails of goats’ milk so my brother would not eat.

It may have been the Devil in me, but he gave me the genius of a man.

“Can I see them all, please, to see that they have not fleas and worms?” I said to the cat-wrangler. “We have fleas enough here without them coming in on the backs of cats.”

“What difference does an extra flea or two make then?” he said.

“What colors are your cats?” I continued. “Are they ginger or are they mottled as cows? Are they girls or are they boys?”

“What does it matter, if they catch rats?” Spittle swung from his lip.

“It matters to a woman.”

“Well, look upon them,” he said and inverted the bag. A tangle of kittens fell onto the library table—a matting of fur, ginger and gray, tadpole tails and jogging legs. They wriggled and cried and scrambled onto the shelves and across books.

When he realized what he had done, the man tried to catch his cats, but everything had gone topsy-turvy, and they had scurried into the bowels of the nunnery and up habits, and he could do nothing but toddle after them, clutching at tails as uselessly as a man attempting to catch fish with his hands.

10 September 1330, Feast of Saint Pulcheria, empress of the Eastern Roman Empire, who permitted no man to enter her palace

We are inundated with cats. They have upset pots of porridge in the kitchen and snatched chicken legs from dinner plates. They have caused uproar in the schoolroom, where Sister Agnes was trying to teach the newest postulants, orphans from the village, the mysteries of the rosary and how to take one’s seasonal bath. They have set their claws into an eleventh-century volume about transubstantiation, toppled candles in the chapel, and set fire to a seventh-century altar cloth that was very ugly anyway, and, I suspect from the smell, pissed in the nave.

But against their charms the girls are as defenseless as a band of monks on an island in the icy North Sea. They are pats of butter in June. They do nothing now but fuss cats. Ermelina totes the runt around in her habit like a suckling and feeds him from a handkerchief dipped into milk. The orphan-postulants sketch portraits of kittens in baths of sun and kittens with ribbons, and swap them among themselves. Their hands are scored by claws, and their habits are dusted with fur—they have to whisk it from each other before services.

We ought to have dispatched four crates of handkerchiefs, stitched daintily with loaves, fishes, and droplets of Christ’s Blood, to Lille yesterday. I tried to rally the novices to stitching in the solarium this afternoon, but they wriggled and chattered and produced kittens from pockets and would not be still. They speak to these beasts as they would the babes they thought to have before they were given over to the Lord: “My darling, my sweetmeat, my pimpernel, my dove.” Ermelina dissolves into tears when her gray tabby will not be held through midday prayers and scratches her nose in their tussle. Brigitte, who claims to be the bastard of a duke and thus to have a lady’s fragile composition, sniffles and sneezes but will not stop stroking cats.

Rats scuttle in the walls and scamper, brazen as whores, in the rectory, for the cats are too mollycoddled and wee to chase them. But no one is now bothered by rats and their fleas. When I tumble into my hard bed, a ginger tom curls at my feet like a gently snoring snail, and I dream for once not of Brother Roland and our stirring ecclesiastical exchanges but of cats. Tabbies playing pipe organs, and ginger toms on the painted ceilings of faraway Italian chapels, and black-and-white cats nuzzling faces through loaves, and still more cats romping through God’s heavens.

12 September 1330, Feast of Saint Guy of Anderlecht, invoked against mad dogs

Tumult and outrage at Lauds this morning. In place of every amen, a cat’s meow, plaintive as a babe or a flute. We crouched to look under pews and hiked up our habits but for once could find among us no cats. We resumed the Psalms, but still the meowing continued, and with greater urgency, like a cat who wishes to be fed morsels from your plate or is seized with a whim to pass through a door.

We did not realize until the final Lord’s Prayer that the meowing was Jeanne, alone in the last pew. She seemed as startled to discover so herself and clapped her hand upon her mouth. Under our eyes she went as red as rouge and stammered an apology—and then another for breaking the silence we’re supposed to keep in prayer—but the meowing was like a hiccup she could not still. She meowed while we filed from the chapel, and she meowed in the solarium while we made another effort at stitching and meowed again at afternoon prayers, and finally we sent her to bed with a hair shirt and without supper.

“I cannot help it, I can’t!” she wailed as Clotsinda pushed her to her cell. Woman and beast gathered to watch them scuffle: Jeanne’s hair fell in its heavy braid from her wimple, and there whipped, and her fingernails flew, etching blood on Clotsinda’s cheek. Clotsinda prized the girl from her habit and tossed her, like a sack of meal, to her pallet and locked the door. Jeanne scratched at it and wept and yowled, and we had to go into the cloisters to find quiet to confer.

There, in the half-light, Clotsinda’s fingers fretted at her rosary beads. “Should we tell Mother Superior?”

I shook my head. “She doesn’t have strength for trivialities with the girls.” Although she certainly had time for a black kitten newly christened Boniface, which followed her like a shadow.

“Should we alert the archbishop?” Clotsinda’s fingers, gnarled and thick as ginger root, would not still. It was all I could do not to swat at her hands.

“Certainly not. They’d dispatch an inquisitor and probably an exorcist here by dawn.”

Clotsinda paled. “Is Jeanne—” She bugged her eyes and twisted her face, and I was reminded of why she had ended up here. Daughter of a wealthy Alsatian lord, with a dowry of many acres and dazzling jewels and fine cheeses, but so hound-ugly no man could be enticed.

“No,” I said, “and do not suggest that to a soul.” I would not have girls feigning demonic possession to weasel out of prayers and mopping. “Jeanne is simply spirited.” It was why she was here. I’d read her records: how she’d sung the songs of troubadours in Mass and had danced the ronde too ecstatically and how folk in her Picardian village had been unsettled.

I am certain I made the correct decision. A meowing girl is just the sort of thing to send the diocese into paroxysms, like a girl who refuses to eat or one who finds a cabbage with the face of Jesus or one who refuses to marry a cobbler and instead sets fire to his roof. If hearsay of Jeanne’s fits spreads beyond the abbey—I shudder to think of the commotion it would cause, the stream of men in crimson robes it would bring down upon our heads, from Rennes, from Paris, from Rome.

And they would come not with gleaming scalps and chants that stick like burrs to your ears. No, these would have vexing theological questions and crucifixes wielded like sabers and, under their silk cassocks and incense, the reek of sweat. They would trample upon our hospitality and eat our best meats and herd us to confessionals. They would sleep in our beds while we slept on the floor with the rushes they dirtied and the rats.

So it had been ten years thence, when there was a craze here for forgoing meals and growing thin. The cardinals and inquisitors who visited were suspicious. We were not Angela of Foligno; we were not drinking pus from the wounds of beggars or mortifying our flesh with whips, although they waited around and drank through our wine cellar to see if we would. It was the most miserable year I could remember, and in the end we were all inspired to eat mightily and grow plump just so they would leave.

It would be worse now, with us in our decadence. They might come for Jeanne and her mewling, but what they would discover would be far more damning: the prattle in the cloisters, the raspberries grown on ground that should yield cabbage, the bottle of blackberry wine we have been using as Our Lord’s Blood instead of a dry red, our custom of standing in rows and plaiting each other’s hair in elaborate and fanciful ways. All the freedoms we have become accustomed to since Mother Superior went imbecile, pleasures which I often bemoan but have myself enjoyed. The archbishop might even shutter the abbey and scatter us to the winds, to the homes of widowed lords with many children to teach to sing and stitch, to miserable nunneries on far islands and in damp valleys that no bands of chanting monks ever visited.

13 September 1330, Feast of Saint John Chrysostom, who stood up for two years and thus ruined his digestion

Jeanne’s affliction has spread like pox. Today at Lauds more meowing— and not from the cats, which we lured from the chapel with dishes of freshly slaughtered rabbit, and not from Jeanne, who was still shut in her cell with a bowl of cream and instruction to pray for the return of her wits. It came from the pews, from the gray bunching of sisters in their habits. Three times we had to halt the Psalms and start again, and at first none would claim responsibility for the noise. It so exercised Clotsinda that she wrenched my hand. “What if this is the Pentecost?” she hissed.

I threatened to withhold breakfast, and that wrung a confession from the pews. First from Ermelina, weeping as usual. Then from Brigitte, flushed and beautiful as a cherub. I interrogated them in the cloisters. Ermelina toted along her gray kitten—“Louis,” she introduced—but Brigitte protested, and I had to drag her there by the scruff of her scapular.

“Did Jeanne put you up to this?” I asked.

“Did the Holy Spirit?” Clotsinda asked.

No and maybe; how would that feel? Was it like a sneezing fit, like the urge to vomit? That’s how this was, they said. Like an impulse to dance when you hear a stirring plainsong; like, Brigitte whispered, when you lie abed alone and think of the Benedictines, an inclination to touch yourself even though you know it will make you blind. As a bastard, she would think such a thing.

I dismissed them, but Brigitte hung back and smiled, smug as the Virgin.

“Ermelina’s baby was called Louis,” she said. “She sketched me a portrait of him once. Monstrous thing. Misshapen, freakish, with a tail. Her husband drowned him in a lake, before he could be baptized even, and sent Ermelina here, and well—”

I think I should drown these cats that have so infected my sisters, bag them in the sack they came in and throw them into our well. But I’m not sure the magic they have worked could be undone. Even stalwart, ugly Clotsinda has been taken: she wept so hard about Ermelina and her freak-child she began to hiccup, and then the hiccups turned urgent and wistful, and she began to scratch beneath her habit and at her groin, and I had to banish her from my sight.

I sat to stitching. It’s supposed to clear my mind; it’s the only thing that will make me blind. But cats chased the ends of my thread and sat upon my lap. Twice I had to unpick an embroidered crucifix; three times I needled myself in the palm—I could feel the sting even through the tough skin of my scars. Finally I threw the linen onto the grate and watched as it caught fire: first in whiskers and then in a boisterous conflagration—Nebuchadnezzar would not have wanted more. As I watched the flames romp, I puzzled on the meowing. Surely I could solve this riddle with books?

Not volumes authored by men with curious ideas about the afflictions of women and cattle: If she bleeds too heavily with the moon, sit her upon a clump of wild rocket. If she’s melancholy about a marriage arranged by her father, beat her with a paddle. I ignored their shelves and walked to the dankest corner of the library, where the abbey’s own records are kept.

Today we are not, so to speak, the type of abbey to which a king would send a seventh daughter, but years ago this little nunnery in Brittany was a place to behold. Running like a siege engine; Mother Superior lucid and in her prime; lettered nuns recording all that transpired—those were the annals I sought. They would be dull reading to layfolk, all comings and goings and scourings and stitchings and infestations and piddling coughs that escalate and congest the lungs and kill two out of three, but in our decadent age I find them soothing. I could lose myself entirely in their “fifteen skeins of wool sent to Brest” and “Sister Mary IX took violent sick after drinking three bowls of cream and died in the night.”

I dragged the volume for 1314, the year before I arrived, from the shelf. It was fattened with damp and gnawed by rats. The months moved under my fingers like beads on a rosary. There were no cats. I licked my thumb to turn the vellum faster. 1313 next, 1312. To think then I was under my father’s roof, dreaming of cheese and feathered caps.

Dusk fell; my candle guttered. The ginger tom found me and fell asleep on a thick codex. I trudged through the ’90s and rubbed at my smarting eyes. But finally! Here, on a page with illuminations of rats playing lutes and giving haircuts: in 1292 a clowder of cats engaged for the removal of vermin. An account followed, with felines named Rothair, Judas, and Paws. “They feasted upon lamb and gamboled in the nave.” Then I turned the page, and it was naught but a dried puddle of ink, an entire pot by the looks of it, obscuring the text. I looked at the tom; my habit smelled sourly of the milk he had spilled upon it at breakfast, the pitcher upset by the paddle of his paw.

Mother Superior would recall 1292, although extracting memories from her would be like getting blood from the eyes of a statue. It pains me still to see her thus. When I was freshly arrived here, a scrap of a thing and ignorant of all Latin, she was an inspiration to me. She would bustle through the corridors with the urgency of a saint and fast the most determinedly and pray the most fervently and sing the loudest in Mass. She taught me my letters and herself tended to the burns upon my hands so that I might one day stitch handkerchiefs and copy the theological works, Augustine’s and Abelard’s.

That was until 1326; I had recorded the events of that year with shame. How she festooned her chambers with holly outside of the Christmas season. How she talked endlessly of when she was a girl in Burgundy and had lain once under an apple tree with a knight for three-quarters of an hour. “Divine, divine,” she’d said, among other carnal accounts I blush to recall. (His leather jerkin! The handkerchief jaunty at his throat! The candlestick betwixt his legs and how it frisked and jumped!). Now she has forgotten everything: even the vigorous Sir Geoffrey, even the Lord’s Prayer.

Nocturns

My mother told me a story, a pagan tale she said was older than the Bible itself. Once, there was a crone who never married and shunned the world, living in a small cottage on the edge of a remote village. She enjoyed the company of no living thing so much as cats, and they flocked to her and she fed them raw chicken from her hands and called them each by name. And because she was very old, one deep winter she died, and no one but the cats knew. When folk from the village found her in the spring from the stench of her thawing body, they discovered the cats had eaten her toes and face.

14 September 1330, The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

I slept fitfully, dreaming of the crone, her head without a face, her nibbled feet; the cats that swarmed her body, white chins bloody—I could smell the copper tang. When I woke, I reached to find my own toes and found instead the ginger tom. Even in the dark, my hands knew him: the sleekness of his fur, the throb of his purr. But there were feathers too, and a slickness of blood, and when I lit a candle, I could see it: a pheasant, a glorious green-ringed cock, with beautiful plumage on his tail. His neck was broken like a flower stalk, and his blood leaked across my quilt and splotched my tom’s white chest. “Philip,” I said and stroked the cat’s long back.

I did not go to Lauds but instead stayed in my nightgown, plucked and dressed the bird, roasted him on the fire in my grate, and ate him, feeding Philip shreds. With grease-bright hands, I tucked one of the tail feathers into my hair and looked at my reflection in the water basin. My face there was faint, and older than I remembered it, but my hair still tawny and thick. I am thirty, older than my mother ever was.

I went to Sext and stood, not in my front pew but among the girls, the knotting of them in their gray habits. Jeanne, too, and Mother Superior, swaying like the clapper in a bell. When Brigitte stood to read from Psalms, she produced nothing but meows, a chorus my sisters echoed. Clotsinda, with golden hair on her lip and six fingers on her hands; Ermelina, her face tear streaked but transcendent as that of a statue weeping blood; Brigitte, more beautiful than any Pietà; Jeanne, who is boisterous but perhaps because she is just fourteen.

When I was fourteen, I had wanted to marry the cheesemonger, but it was not to be: he was too poor and anyway had been eaten by a wolf. 1314 was a year of misfortune: my mother died, bleeding my father’s dead third son from her belly; I started to bleed too, in that regular and not immediately fatal way women do; and my father’s toes pushed holes in his shoes. He could not tend to the pigs or walk the frosted fields with his toes bare, so he struck a deal with the cobbler, who was twenty-five and pustuled: me for a pair of calfskin boots. At Mass the cobbler smirked at me with his three teeth and breath like the grave, and as I prayed—for my mother, for Philip devoured and his Neufchâtel turned to mold, for time to run backward and blood to flow into bodies—an idea caught in my head. Maybe it was the Devil working in me, to make me hang back after Mass, to steal a candle from the altar, to set fire to the thatch of the cobbler’s roof so he would not have a home for a wife. I burned my hands on the kindled thatch, but I didn’t feel it that day, nor the thrashing of my father’s whip. I knew only exaltation as I danced in the glow of flames.

I never knew such rapture again, not in prayer, not in reading, not with a figment of Brother Roland in my bed. But now—now! While I stand with my sisters, my throat is full of a delight I cannot utter. I fumble in my head for Psalms and responsories that would say it—how it is to stand among them, ugly Clotsinda, riotous Jeanne, bastard Brigitte, Ermelina who might have fornicated with the Devil, and our Mother who did with Sir Geoffrey. Sisters: they know the language and they teach me, and it is the gabble of cats that no man can understand.

I clasp their hands and they welcome me. Mother kisses my forehead, not as in the Eucharist but as my own mother did. My mouth unhooks and I meow with them. It is like striking a firesteel over dry grass. I am consumed with the glory of it, a virgin beneath an apple tree, a martyr tied to the stake.

I know not when

The ecstasy! The communion!

This must be how the Pentecost felt. This must be how fornication feels.

Jeanne frolics in the cloisters, pale as a taper, and Ermelina suckles the tabby to her teat. Brigitte sleeps in a square of sun, her hair lustrous and hot; Clotsinda strokes it and scratches at her own hindquarters. I catch four rats and eat them raw, their bones crunching, their blood staining my wimple and, after I claw that white linen off, my neck. I sleep until my eyes burn and my limbs are heavy. I lie beneath a tree with my tom; his paws knead my stomach and breasts. I meow: in praise, in abandon. At closed doors; at plump and aging pigeons; at dust when it spins in the nave; at my sisters as they scuffle and play; at nothing, frequently in the night.

Later

The catmonger returns. We smell him before we see him: skin in wool and toes in boots, his fat, his ripeness. He has another sack of kittens. They yowl for us as babes for milk, and we clamor back to them. We cluster at the gates, in all colors, black and tawny and red, on our heads and between our legs—the man wets his mouth to see it. “Are these the notions you get from books?”

How men love the sight of women in ecstasy—martyrs and nuns, how we bare our chests to Christ to give him our hearts, how during the Lenten fast we grow lean as boys. How Saint Agatha’s breasts looked upon the dish when the Romans cut them from her chest. Brother Roland said he liked when I was enraged, that as we disputed the Trinity my cheeks ruddied and my hair tumbled from my coif.

Our hair now is scraggly as if from mating, our bellies exposed as if for him. He is unafraid as we beckon him in.

Read more from Issue 17.1.