THE CHILD IS named Agnes after the saint who was once a girl who became a young woman who was burnt at the stake and stabbed in the throat for refusing the men who wished to lay on her. The child asked once if it might have been better for this woman to have lain under the men and then gotten up afterwards and still been alive. Her father did smile but said she mustn’t say such things. The saints’ lives were provided as holy instruction and so by definition there was no better way to live.
‘And die,’ Agnes said.
‘Sometimes, yes.’
But Agnes knows they always die, the saints. And hardly ever without great pain.
She does not know it is odd for a girl to read until one of her father’s guests, a Benedictine from Fulda Abbey, spots her bent over a book by the fire and roars as though he’s spied a deer hunting a man.
No benefit and much harm derives from women reading, he tells her father, who responds that this man’s own order is known to educate girls.
‘Girls destined for the cloister, and even then I would have them learn their prayers and hymns by heart rather than risk corruption in this way.’
‘The great Charles himself insisted on his daughters’ educations.’
‘Ah, yes,’ the Benedictine says, ‘those paragons of virtue.’
Her father purples and Agnes thinks he will wallop the monk. Instead he calls for more ale and turns the discussion to the successive bountiful harvests they’ve been blessed with up at the abbey.
She herself does not speak to the monk, does not look at him directly. She is eight years old and must not cry, but she was frightened of the man even before he seized her book and began to shout. Of all the men who pass through this house, only the Benedictines terrify her like this. Their hooded black robes are thicker and longer than any garment need be. They are designed to conceal, but what? Their voices, too, are low and secretive, except when they are—like this one—agitated, in which case they bellow as though expecting God Himself to heed them.
If she could bring herself to speak to the Benedictine, she would tell him that she has learnt more about sinners and their deeds and the evil that stalks the earth from staying silent beneath this table than could be contained in all the books of the great library of Fulda combined.
It is not from a book she has learnt, for example, that the fine and famous church in Frankfurt was built over the remains of a pagan child, daughter of a warrior lord. Alongside the tiny bones lay golden idols and burnt animal offerings to false gods. She knows, too, of the infant still marked by birth but already dead left outside the walls of Altmünster Abbey. Not in any book, that tale. The men at table agreed the babe could only have come from one of the nuns inside. It was well known they were a loose-living cohort there. One man proposed a delegation to examine every seal in the place to determine which had been broken. Another said that if reputation be a guide they would find most every door within had been opened—and well used at that. If reputation is a guide, a third man added, our delegation will be welcomed as a reward.
Her father silenced the ribaldry by telling of a case some years ago in which the abbess had her charges march around the convent walls singing Psalms, their arms outstretched in the shape of the cross. If one of them were guilty she would surely fall, but none did and the sight of the suffering and piety of these fine women of God inspired a local maid to at last confess to having borne and left the child.
‘I would therefore advise,’ her father finished, ‘all those who seek to blame the holy sisters of the abbey to look first to their own cowardly and dishonest womenfolk.’
Something else Agnes learnt that night without reading a thing: men can beat half the life out of each other and then embrace as tender and loving brothers before the blood on the rushes has dried.
Only yesterday, and without touching a book, she learnt that at the northern edge of this very town, good people were having their rest disturbed by an invisible being hurling rocks at their walls. The men at table disagreed about whether the being were a revenant or demon, but most agreed a priest should be called to test it.
Her father, though, told of a village he visited where the local priest had tried to exorcise a spirit and had only made it bolder. Now it had voice and would drift about spreading rumours, creating discord and hatred among the villagers. Better that those affected here stay safely indoors at night and pray when they heard the rocks coming. Whatever the thing was, it would become bored at its lack of effect and soon head elsewhere for mischief.
The men yielded to his view as they most usually did, but Agnes saw the clenched fists on thighs, the agitated boots, that her father didn’t. She knows from watching well (she wishes she could tell the Benedictine) that men might say one thing with their mouths while their bodies said another thing altogether.
While the Benedictine and her father continue to talk of harvests, Agnes flees through the back door, past the cook and serving girl sweating over their pots, and secretes herself in the furthest corner of the kitchen garden. It will soon be dark; the monk will go to his prayers and other men will come, and there will be ale and stew and scraps of secrets.
A fennel shoot between her teeth and freshly turned soil between her toes, she pokes at the cabbage patch looking for worms and beetles. But all the crawling, flying things have gathered by the hole in the fence to the yard next door. Agnes picks her way across, careful not to noticeably tread on the leeks or chard lest she get noticeably smacked by the cook.
A kitten, stretched as though seeking the sun on its soft pale belly. A perfect darling thing except for the gash in its side, about which the insects are making such a fuss. Agnes shoos away the flying things, though they hover just beyond her hand, ready to rejoin the crawlers the moment she lets down her guard.
She knows kittens die. Most of them drowned before their eyes are fully opened to a world with no use for them. The odd one kept to replace an old mouser that has lost its hunger. She has always known this fact.
To know is not to understand. She strokes the pale belly and it is not soft as it should be, nor warm. It is as cold and hard as the fence. As dead as. Not a kitten at all.
Dead means you are not what you were. It means you are not.
Does her father know this? He must, yet how does he go on?
Each day she returns to the thing that was a kitten and sees it become less itself. Become more a smell. More a feast for other creatures. More a borderless patch of fur and guts sinking into the yard. The very ground on which she sleeps, walks, eats is filled with messes like that. They used to do the same as her, every one of them, and now they rot piece by piece, their flesh sliding into soil.
Among them is her nimbed mother, who she never met but whose name is sacred. How—she asks the Lord as she lies awake in something worse than terror—how will my mother know me in heaven with her eyes turned to water in her skull? Her skull perhaps, by that time, water too. My mother, soon my father. I! All of us turned to muck and then nothing at all.
The meat on the table is no different to that decaying underfoot, no different to the substance of her. She cannot touch it, repulsed by the thought of making more of her flesh by ingesting that of others. Her father orders her to eat what is served. She refuses. He rages. It has no effect. The imaginings of the darkest hours are far worse than anything his soft human hands can do.
Her father forbids her from reading, banishes her to bed before the guests arrive.
After a week of this, she eats a tranche of mutton. ‘The child is a born monk,’ the English Priest crows. ‘Deprives herself of every comfort so long as she can still study her tracts.’
Soon after, flooding rain rips trees and crops from the earth and joins half the houses and all inside them with the rushing Rhine. For days the drowned, human and animal both, bob on rivers newly made of the streets. When at last the rains slow enough for the living to venture out and collect the dead, they find coffins wrenched from the churchyard, split open on tree roots and stones and roofs, and so, among the recent dead sodden with water and filth, are corpses in every state of decomposition.
Death, so recently revealed as the most unfathomable horror, has become an ordinary foulness.