(August 1374–June 1374)
Day by day, season after season, Dame Lilias, walking in the cloisters, looked at the spire, and her mind experienced the same train of thoughts. There was the spire, and here was she: the same day had ceremonialised them both into the fabric of Oby, and a long, a too-long novitiate had preceded that day. The spire had tried to get away. It had broken itself in the gale and fallen and killed Dame Susanna in its fall. But it had been rebuilt, and here it was, so much a part of Oby that now it was not even grudged at. No one remembered what a nuisance it had been, and with the death of the old prioress went the last thought of the time when it was still only a project and the dearest preoccupation of a mind. For that matter, the old prioress had lost interest in it long before she died. But she, Dame Lilias, had never tried to escape her destiny, and no gale had thrust such an idea upon her. She had been a novice, and now she was a nun; and in all her life she had known nothing more impassioned than what came to her from a narrow highly-specialised sensuality. She had an extreme sensibility to sweet smells and the warmth that nurses them, and to certain aspects of light, as when it lies trembling in a bowl of water. Underlying this, as the grim root underlies the flower, she had a less-explored sensibility to what was harsh, foul, and noisome. It was this latent sensibility that Dame Beatrix had discerned and exploited, ignoring everyone else’s Lilias to elicit the five-year-old child who had trotted, attentive and forgotten, through a castle where the Black Death had usurped any other ownership. It was sickness and not the sick, death and not the dying, which drew Dame Lilias towards the infirmary: as the sick must have perceived, for when the post of infirmaress was given to Dame Alice there was a general outcry of relief.
Appointed instead to be cellaress, Dame Lilias sometimes asked herself why this veer in the wind should be so chilling. She had not lent more than half an ear and half a heart to Dame Beatrix’s persuasions; and as appointments go, cellaress was the less disagreeable post, it is better to smell stale fish than sores. But from the hour that snapped off her rather indefinite intention she was overcome by a sense of coldness and stagnation. Little by little the sensuality which had quilted her wore thin and fell away. No one could have guessed it. She was still fastidious about her food, she dodged physical discomfort as dexterously as ever, and now that she had command of the spice cupboard she castled herself in sweet scents, was never without a couple of cloves or a bayleaf in her pocket, and rubbed powdered cinnamon into her veil. But scents must be nursed by warmth, and she was cold: cold to pleasure, cold to her own coldness even. When she lounged in, late as always, for the night office, yawning and shrugging her shoulders, no one could have guessed that she came – not from sleeping, but from a frigid and boring wakefulness.
Among her companions her languor was diagnosed as pride. She was too proud to speak, they said; and if one asked her a direct question she was too lazy to give back more than a bare Yes or No. It became a current pastime to address remarks to Dame Lilias – the sillier the better; when she replied, one exclaimed at the wit of her answer or thanked her for replying so graciously. Dame Adela put a great deal of energy into this sport, but she was not so skilful as Dame Lovisa. It was Dame Lovisa who hit on the device of consulting Dame Lilias on matters of beauty and the toilet, magnanimously exposing her own ugliness for the pleasure of the community by asking Dame Lilias how often she should wash her face, how best she could improve her complexion, what she must do to grow long eyelashes; or thrusting her ill-odoured face under Dame Lilias’s nose she would enquire if her sores were not wonderfully mended by the rose-water.
If the sores had not been vizored by so much hatred and derision this particular sport might have mended Dame Lilias. The sensibility to what was foul and noisome had made a better resistance than the sensibility to light conversing with clear water or strawberry leaves trodden by the sun, and reacted to this young, pitiable, and intelligent little monster. Looking down on the sores and the pimples and the weak glaring eyes Dame Lilias felt as though she had turned from a painted landscape to a window giving on the whole real world, the world of our first parents as they walked away from Eden gate under trees whose fruits were unmystically wholesome or deadly, a world where serpents were sufficient in being mortal serpents, no more, no less. But an artificiality of malice and the routine amusement of the other nuns interposed between her and what she might have got from her tormentor, and presently she was insensible even to Dame Lovisa.
It was God’s will, she supposed. God’s will had taken away Dame Cecily’s eyesight, God’s will had taken away her sensuality, and with it the sins of the flesh which nourish the life of the spirit. She could feel neither pleasure nor disgust, neither rebellion nor contrition. For a while she tried if austerities and mortification would revive her. Nothing revived her: austerities and mortification fell on her like ashes on the dead.
At length, and almost inadvertently (for she did not doubt that her wretchedness would be quite as boring to others as it had become to herself) Dame Lilias in confession spoke of her state of mind. To her astonishment Sir Ralph roused up and seemed interested. It was accidie, he said; a malady of the soul that in its final intensification of wanhope is one of the seven deadly sins.
‘Accidie,’ she repeated. ‘Dame Susanna spoke of it when she taught us our sins.’
‘Dame Susanna!’ he exclaimed. ‘A lot she knew about it.’
The convention of the confessional seemed to have broken down, here was Sir Ralph talking to her as if she were a person. Recovering his manners he went on to say that accidie was not so very rare, though unusual among women; and with patience and God’s help, curable. She rose from her knees with an impression of having pleased. It was momentary: as though, travelling through an endless cavern, a ray of sunlight had for an instant touched her cheek. A moment later the laconic voice of her intelligence was assuring her that since the majority of mankind will be found among the damned the addition of herself to that number could not be remarkable, and that if Sir Ralph were interested it could only be because wanhope was rather more of a rarity than sloth or anger. But to Sir Ralph it appeared as though his last prayer were about to be granted. In addition to the pleasures of the senses he enjoyed with Magdalen Figg and the pleasures of sensibility he enjoyed with himself, he was, it seemed, in a way to enjoy the pleasure of conversing with a spiritually-minded nun. She had touched his heart. The words, so inadequate and true, in which she had described her wasting misery were like a descant on his own revival. Her dreariness was the antipodes of his delight Everything he had, she lacked; and the antithesis drew him to her because it completed his self-realisation.
His first fear was that she might recover too quickly, and become as dull a penitent as the rest. Time went on, she made no step towards recovery. She was too wretched for eloquence. His sincere attention drew from her little more than a glum: ‘It is no better. I can feel no hope.’ But the few bare words seemed to him to have a classic grace. And so he continued to reason with her and admonish her, genuinely concerned for her state and at the same time snuffing up her odours of clove and saffron, the sweet scents that breathed from this barren fig tree.
As for what went on in the convent it was really no affair of his. But one day Magdalen Figg said to him that the nuns would murder Dame Lilias among them, and he plucked up his resolution and went to the prioress, telling her that Dame Lilias was in a state of perilous melancholy and should be handled with consideration. Immediately it sprang into her mind how abominable it was that Mary can always catch a man’s ear while Martha grunts unheeded.
‘Dame Lilias has always been singular. It is just what I should have expected of her – to choose this moment to doubt of her salvation while all the rest of us are worrying night and day how to pay off the convent’s debts.’
He had happened to approach her on the day after she had received Hugh de Stapledon’s repudiation of the loan. He could not know this, but he realised that he had chosen a bad hour. It struck him that the prioress was growing vulgar and uncongenial. If she would not listen to him about Dame Lilias he would not listen to her about debts. He ignored her hints about a little loan from a friend, some old friend who could be trusted, and she grew angrier than ever and more confirmed in her prejudice against the nun.
Christmas passed, the days grew lighter, colder, barer. It seemed to him that Dame Lilias and he were wading through some classical Styx, a cold corner of Hell that Christ had never harrowed and where the writ of christianity did not extend. When he said: ‘Why do you not pray to Saint Leonard? He releases prisoners,’ he thought how falsely the words rang and how her silence made mincemeat of them. For months she had been incapable of prayer, he might as sensibly have told a lame man to put on red shoes, and see what that would do for him. That same evening she knocked on his door.
‘Saint Leonard has heard me. He has shown me the way out.’
Even now she was not eloquent. Her narrative was broken by long pauses during which she seemed to be falling asleep, but it was plain and coherent. She had done as he had bid, escaping from the afternoon recreation to go and pray before the statue of the saint. She had done her best, but no sense of devotion had come to her. Instead, she had been submerged by resentment against her companions, remembering all the pricks and gibes they had given her, until the last convention of charity was torn away from her mind. She had felt, she said, all of a sudden such a force of loathing that it was as though a headsman’s axe had fallen on the nape of her neck, and she had tumbled face forward on the ground. Then she was aware of Dame Dorothy standing behind her and saying: ‘What a pity to disturb such devotion! But the rest of us are such dull grovelling creatures that we have to live by the Rule; and it is time for me to light the candles.’
‘And while she was still speaking,’ she concluded, ‘I heard another voice. And it said: ‘Now see the reason of all this hating. Go, and become an anchoress.’
‘An anchoress!’ she repeated. ‘Saint Leonard bade me become an anchoress.’
‘You did not see the saint?’
‘No, for I was lying on the ground when he spoke. But I felt him. It was he who struck me that blow. See if there is not a bruise.’ The bruise was not large, but there was no doubt of it. Saint Leonard must have a small fist and a strong arm. Saint Leonard, or Dame Dorothy. It looked like woman’s work, to him.
‘And when you felt this blow . . . ’
‘I was free, suddenly free. It broke a chain.’
Even if the blow came from Dame Dorothy, one might say that Dame Dorothy must be accounted instrumental, a signet snatched up in a hurry while the wax was in perfection, as one seals with a groat or a dagger-hilt.
‘There is a bruise, certainly. But do not speak of it.’
She gave an adjusting shrug of her shoulders, and winced at the real pain of the real bruise. Her veil fell, her spices flowed forth. He would miss her. But she must go to her anchoret cell, and he must help her departure.
After she had quitted him he remembered the dried plums in his cupboard, and began to munch them, grateful to be eating. He had always dreaded something like this, now it had happened. Dame Lilias had heard a voice from heaven, and the voice she had heard was now reverberating in him, and assuring him with the greatest distinctness that it takes a sacrament to make a priest. Learning, custom, the habit of years, all that is of no avail, tinting water does not make wine: here he was, reacting to Dame Lilias with as much simplicity as a ploughman. Dame Lilias had heard a voice from heaven and so little a priest was he that he thought none the worse of her, and even took her at her word. The bruise, he supposed, was Dame Dorothy’s handiwork. She was a dull unnoticeable creature, in all the years he had known her she had been a nonentity. But every nonentity must have a moment when it flashes into something positive, the immortal soul is not housed in flesh for nothing, and very probably Dame Dorothy’s soul had had its moment of necessity in striking that blow from behind. The blow was necessary if Dame Lilias was to be freed. Everything is planned by divine intelligence: a cipher is begotten and born and lives for thirty years in religion in order to deliver a blow on the neck; and after that, naturally, it lives on, according to the law of its kind. Whether or no Dame Dorothy’s soul must suffer the penalty of nursing malice and giving way to anger was a fascinating speculation, but one to be deferred. Her part was played, a ‘Here beginneth’ to the voice of Saint Leonard, a supernatural voice released by the natural instrumentality of her blow, like the waters which sprang from the rock when Moses struck it. Now see the reason of all this hating. Go, and become an anchoress.
All in the imperative as usual. A model of conciseness, as well struck as Dame Dorothy’s blow. But it is not enough for heaven to speak, the supernatural for its completion must be adequately accepted otherwise the work is not worked-out. Dame Lilias had matched her moment. She had heard and believed. As for himself, he really could do no less.
He had eaten two more plums before he recalled his own part in the affair, his advice to Dame Lilias that she should pray to Saint Leonard, patron of prisoners. He too had been instrumental, a figure balancing Dame Dorothy’s. Everything is planned by divine intelligence.
But now came the formalities; and his heart sank as he contemplated the morass of tact and negotiations through which he must move. Dame Lilias could not become an anchoress with the bishop’s permission. Her application must be made through the prioress, which meant that the voice of Saint Leonard would reach the bishop at third-hand. In theory his own voice, as the professional witness, should out-shout that of the prioress, but it was questionable whether this would be so in fact. Above all, the voice of Dame Lilias must be pitched very low.
As a first step he commanded her to say nothing about it. Then he set about the prioress, who pointed out that no letters could be sent from Oby till the floods went down, and added that it would be best if for the present Saint Leonard’s speech remained a matter of confidence. ‘For I am sure you don’t want to have everyone chattering about it, and plaguing you for advice on how to hear voices. No doubt many of them would enjoy a word or two with a saint.’
‘It is her own wish that nothing should be said of it,’ he replied artfully.
‘I am glad she is so sensible.’
Sir Ralph was glad that the prioress was so sensible. He had not expected her to take the news so indulgently.
It had been an exceptionally wet season. The watery skies were mirrored in acres of water, flocks of water-fowl cried and swooped across the floods, and in the hamlet people were laying bets as to what course the Waxle Stream would be found in when the floods withdrew. Pigs, poultry, and cattle, men, women, and children, all the livestock of Oby was gathered on the rise of ground. Lowings and gruntings, cock-crowing, shouting and chattering, the thump of the flails and the hymns of the nuns, all resounded together as in some jovial ark; for this winter there happened to be plenty of victual, so the prevailing mood was cheerful and rather childish.
Feeling that Dame Lilias might be the better with something to divert her mind after all she had been through, he lent her his copy of the Georgics. It was a cheap copy, the scribe had used his worst ink and saved space and time by employing all the recognised contractions and some others of his own invention; though Dame Lilias was a fair scholar he wondered how much she would be able to make out. He thought, too, that a book so appreciatively devoted to the active life would make odd reading for a woman who proposed to spend the rest of her days in a cell fastened, like a moth’s coffin, to the side of some church. Yet her cell would have its window-slit, and she would see, as in the compass of a pentameter, oxen at plough, a tomcat courting its female, the cloud retreating behind the rainbow. Meanwhile her mind was at rest. Her outer life too had become easier, so Magdalen reported, for the prioress had called off the tormentors.
The prioress had done so for a sound reason. She had not forgotten the affair of the old prioress and Dame Johanna, and she knew that only a thick universal plaster of good manners could save her from expressing a most impolitic annoyance. An anchoress, even more strictly than a nun, forswears worldly goods; but would Bishop Giles allow them to lose Dame Lilias and retain her dowry? He had behaved scurvily over the de Scottow legacy, ten to one he would behave as scurvily now, and rule that the revenues of those water-meadows and saltings should be diverted to some almshouse or some altar. First the failure of the loan, now the loss of a considerable revenue . . . Fury shook the prioress as she saw her work jeopardised by this nonsense of Saint Leonard and a discontented nun. But if the situation were to be retrieved she must not show her fury. She must seem to believe, and she must seem to approve. Even in her letter to the bishop she must somehow combine disparagement of Dame Lilias with piety towards the saint and indifference to a possible reduction of income.
She made many drafts of the letter. Fortunately the floods gave her a breathing-space; and when they went down William Holly could not spare a man to carry letters. Regretting this to Sir Ralph she added that Etchingdon bursar would shortly come to collect the interest on the Methley tithe, and that the letters could be entrusted to him. He came, stayed a night, and went away. Only after he had gone was it discovered that in the turmoil of trying to persuade him to take part of the interest in kind the prioress had forgotten to give him the packet. But a week later when Brother Baltazar called for a meal she gave him the packet herself.
‘The bishop?’ said Brother Baltazar. ‘But he has gone. He has been appointed to the see of Auch, a great advancement, and they say that Pope Gregory will soon make a cardinal of him.’
‘What a loss to us!’ she exclaimed. ‘Has the new bishop been chosen?’
‘Not that I know of. But many wish that it may be Sir Walter Dunford, the archdeacon. He is a poor man’s son, and a very holy clerk, and much loved by the poor.’
It was a friar’s answer. Friars ramble everywhere and are as slippery as coins rubbed smooth by all the hands that have transmitted them. She had no doubt that Brother Baltazar knew something of Walter Dunford which it pleased him to keep from her; and since it pleased him to withhold it, that something must be something which it would advantage her to know. At the same moment the companion friar, a great hulking youth with lips like sausages, cried out in a strong west-country accent: ‘Oh, he’s a lovely clerk! He will make a lovely bishop.’
So Walter Dunford was the man.
But even friars may be misinformed, and Oby continued to speculate until the eve of Palm Sunday. The nuns were out gathering willow-palm. It was a sudden hot day, as hot as summer; bees were lolling from one golden tuft to another, and followed the cut boughs into the chapel. Light-headed from the conjunction of lenten abstinence and this luxurious weather the nuns were frisking about and pretending to beat each other with the willow boughs when a messenger rode up amongst them. Where was the prioress? There was the prioress, trying to put a bee down Dame Philippa’s neck. But she came up with her usual sturdy dignity to receive the letter. The new bishop was Walter Dunford, who greeted his beloved daughters and begged for their prayers.
In a fine springtime there is always a lot of coming and going; before long more was learned about the new bishop. Yes, it was true, he was a man of low birth: his father had been a candle-maker, his mother a midwife, and between them with great piety they had reared up a long family. The father’s connections (he supplied candles to the great Abbey of Holy Cross in Middlesex as well as to the house of Our Lady at Barking) helped him in getting an education for his children, and he placed many of them either in religion or near by it. By the time Walter, the youngest son, entered the priesthood the Dunfords in their small way were a dynastic family. Yet he had much to contend with, for he was sickly, diffident, and unprepossessing: up to his fortieth year no one would have thought him the stuff of a bishop. Then came the Black Death, and cut a swathe for him. In that time when so many priests died and others hid themselves in routine, the sickly diffident Walter Dunford became known as a man almost angelical in energy. He ministered, he comforted, he organised. Respectable witnesses averred that he had been present, at one and the same time, beside a death-bed and at the altar. Some had felt healing flow from his fingers with the holy oil, others had seen him, whilst running to catch the confession of a dying outlaw, caught up by his zeal as if on wings, and wafted across the empty market-place like a bird. In the year 1351 many people were saying that Walter Dunford was a saint. Five years later twice that number were saying he was a man with a future. He became eminent enough to have slanderers, the retinue of eminence. He had the evil eye, it was said; he was leprous, he was crazy, he was a plotter, he was a sorcerer. Beyond doubt he was undersized, pious to eccentricity, ludicrously thrifty. His reputation spluttered, and hung fire. It did not seem likely that he would ever win more than a local fame. He was made an archdeacon, with every expectation that he would die of the office, but he did not die. All of a sudden, as startlingly as a grounded heron displays its wing-span, he was in every mouth as a man who should by every right be a bishop. There is only one statesmanly answer to this sort of challenge, and in 1374 he was given a mitre.
The reports that came to Oby by pedlars and palmers, people who carry rumours as naturally as they carry fleas, told a rousing tale of Bishop Dunford’s austerity and industry. He drank only water and slept on a mat He journeyed incessantly, dismounting to kneel at every wayside cross. He listened to the poor talking among themselves, he plucked young girls out of brothels, he visited leper-houses and poor parish priests. He asked rich ladies how much they paid an ell for velvet and how many ells it took to make a mantle. He had not changed his shirt since his ordination. He had an open sore on his left side but no one was allowed to look at it. His sister cooked all his food for him, for he feared to be poisoned.
Roger Salhouse, Dame Cecily’s lawyer cousin, staying the night on his way to Bury Saint Edmunds, confirmed much of this, and added that Walter Dunford was a hard and shrewd man of business, and that so far no one had found a handle to him; but that he would probably wear himself out in a year or two. Meanwhile, he was extremely popular, with the wealthy praising him even louder than the poor, and thronging to hear his sermons against luxury and vanity.
Such a bishop, thought Dame Lilias, who kneels before the Christs of the wayside, would understand my wish to become an anchoress; and such an industrious functionary will not fail to read that request. Her patience took heart. Patience is an easier merit under Taurus when cold does not drive one to the chattering fireside. Dame Cecily liked to hear the birds singing, and during recreation she and Dame Lilias sat in the orchard, the sighted nun winding silk off the blind nun’s hands. Dame Cecily listened to the birds and Dame Lilias thought of her cell and wondered to which quarter its window would face. She still kept her word not to speak of her calling.
Such a bishop, thought Sir Ralph, will blow like an east wind through Oby. What with our debts and our dinners we shall certainly feel the admonitory end of his crozier. But such a bishop, rating austerity so high, will be more inclined to favour Dame Lilias, if only as a slap in the face to the remainder of the establishment.
The prioress also thought about the new bishop; and among weightier considerations she recalled her letter to Bishop Giles about Dame Lilias’s vocation. The former bishop would have read it sympathetically, but this one might not be so responsive to her disparagement of the kind of nun who hears voices, especially if he believed himself to have been whisked over a market-place. But there had stood Brother Baltazar, eyeing the packet in her hand and ready to tell the world that the prioress of Oby wrote letters to a Bishop Giles which a Bishop Walter might not read, and so she had let him carry it off. How silly of her! – any woman with her wits about her would have said it contained a recipe for a febrifuge. But when Bishop Walter’s answer came it was pretty much as though Bishop Giles, that prudent man, had written it. For a nun to quit her convent and become an anchoress, he wrote, demanded so clear a vocation and such special gifts of the spirit that he could not consider the application without further evidence and a personal interview. He would go into it when he visited the house of Our Lady and Saint Leonard, which he proposed to do, God willing, before the feast of Saint Michael and all Angels.