Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain Read Free Book Online

of string and began to tie the young plants to the stakes Agnes had driven in. “Nonsense,” he said. “No protests.” Then he began to ask her when she first knew she had a vocation. Had she known right from the time Radegunda decided to leave court that she too was called to the religious life? How had she felt the call? When? He was handling the delicate bean tendrils roughly, twisting them so that she was afraid they might break and tying the string so tautly it was in danger of cutting through the stems.
    “Please,” she begged, “let me do it.” Taking the string from his hands.
    “Tell”, he went to sit down in a rose bower, “about the call.”
    Agnes released the plant he had twisted and ran her fingers along it, feeling the resilience of stem and root. “I don’t think I ever had a call,” she said carefully.
    “But you made a choice! You chose the religious life.”
    “Did I?”
    Fortunatus sighed.
    The nun turned to him. Green light from the bower fell on her face shadowing her dark Gallic eyes. They were wide and long and disconcerted the poet who was reminded that this woman was not yet thirty and had been loved while still a child by the dead Chlodecharius. Although she wore the same heavy unbleached habit of rough wool, her shape was quite different to that of Radegunda. Both of these rigorous women had been brushed by passion. The thought excited him.
    “The two of you went straight to Radegunda’s estate at Saix when you left the court?”
    “No. We went to the Bishop of Noyon. Radegunda wanted him to make her a deaconess. We needed to become part of the Church’s family. We needed its protection.” A smile. “And as you see we have had it since.” She laughed. Her voice was a young girl’s.
    And why not, thought Fortunatus. She had not lived. Under those unbleached layers of wool her body was like an apple kept in storage. Apples in the convent granary stayed fresh until the next season came around. Thinking of their pale pith, he found, with amusement, that his teeth were itching to bite one. He would ask her for a basket of them when he left. Gull-greedy, his liking for food was a joke between the two nuns and himself. They, whose Rule forbade them to eat meat themselves, enjoyed cooking it for him and the poem he had just sent Agnes in gratitude for her milk pudding was one of a series on his appetites and their skill. Trivial concerns for a poet but, as Symmachus had written—and if true then how much more so now—“What else is there for us but to exchange old courtesies?” Watching the nun who had returned to her work, Fortunatus remembered that here was a subject neither trivial nor recognized by Symmachus: the sacrifice of Christians who gave up this world for a better one. Agnes, her pale flesh hidden beneath her pale habit, was making that sacrifice with every moment of her life. Only Christian martyrs ranked higher than a dedicated virgin. He could—would write about that. She was storing up grace on which others could draw: a bank for the worldlings —himself included—who, spiritual grasshoppers flayed by their own passions, must come at the end of their singing summer to beg the careful ant for a little of the extra she had so generously been saving for them. Spiritual wealth was impossible to hoard; it was at the service of the community. Yes, he could make a worthy poem, perhaps several on the theme. Flesh was the poet’s clay and he would make use of paradox: he would describe purity in terms of Agnes’s union with her Mystic Spouse. He would describe the Judge of the world coming to her nuptial chamber and plunging into the immaculate purity of her bodily cavities. Fortunatus shuddered. He was a most verbal man. Words inflamed him as no reality unfiltered by them could do. His own flesh had begun to leap and heat. Better go.
    “Sister,” he called to the nun when he had put the garden wall safely between them, so that she could only see his head floating