IT SEEMS A capricious giant has passed through town, stamping one house into the dirt while leaving the next three standing, tossing a cart and both horses onto this roof here; over there, kicking a stone wall on top of a mother and her baby while the child toddling in front is untouched.
The house Agnes fled has crushed the father she disobeyed. Her neighbours whose homes were spared believe the quake came with purpose and achieved its aims. None of them say as much to her, the grieving and homeless daughter. They do not need to; the word all over town is that God has been merciful in sparing the just. Only a dozen dead and each a known sinner.
‘For what sin was that infant known?’ she rages to Randulf, who has left her side only to arrange her father’s burial and her accommodation in the convent of Altmünster and to return to his own quarters for sleep and prayer. He was known to be a great friend of the English Priest and is of course a trusted brother of Fulda. There is no reason for anyone to look upon his care of Agnes with suspicion. She herself would not without the recent memory of him rutting her in the mud.
‘We are all of us sinners,’ he soothes, chastely distant in the convent garden. ‘It is arrogance to claim to know God’s mind in taking some and leaving others.’
‘There are other punishments, besides.’ She gestures to the dorter she is to call home. She gestures to herself, owning nothing but the clothes she wears, scrubbed of river mud and sweat by scowling nuns while she, wearing a borrowed novice’s shift of the coarsest wool, wept for her father.
‘I have arranged a meeting with the Archbishop two days from now. He loved your father and will want to assure your future as best he can.’
‘I have no future.’ Again she flicks her hand towards that grim hall. ‘The most the Archbishop will do is convince the abbess to allow me to take orders. Make me an oblate rather than a charity case.’
‘Your father had many friends. Perhaps …’
She knows the suggestion he struggles with and will not help him.
‘There may be among them a man in need of a wife,’ he says at last.
‘If there was, he would have contracted with my father years ago. I am unmarriageable; it is a fact.’
His face reddens. ‘Were I free to … I have thought of it, Agnes. I have. You know of Brother Gottschalk?’
She nods. There was much talk of him at her father’s table some years ago. A child oblate of Fulda who, on reaching adulthood, took a case to the Archbishop of Mainz claiming it was illegal and immoral to force the vow on a child before he has the maturity to understand what it is he commits to. He won the fight, but his abbot appealed and the decision was overturned. Gottschalk was released from Fulda but not from monastic bond and lives now, presumably in misery, in Corbie.
‘So you know it has been tried,’ Randulf says. ‘And by a man with great familial wealth and powerful friends. If I were to … I would lose. I would be more constrained than ever. Watched over constantly, no longer free to move in the world. Agnes, I have thought it through, believe me. If there was any way I could marry—’
‘I am glad for it,’ she says. ‘I would dislike marriage very much. I’ve cooked and cleaned for my father enough to know taking care of a man is a thankless and endless drudge, and childbirth might as well be war for all those left dead and bloodied. As much as I dread the veil it is better than all that.’
He smiles, the first for days. ‘There is nothing of marriage you would like?’
‘I cannot think of a single thing,’ she says, and his face returns to desolation. As is right.
In the days following her father’s death Agnes refuses sustenance and sleep. All night she remains on her knees, praying for mercy. She sinned gravely and it is right she be punished. She does not pray, therefore, for a better life, only that she might stop desiring one. She asks God to take her rage and ambition, her selfish yearning for the life lost along with her father. She prays He will take away her wanting and leave only acceptance.
She prays and finds herself standing under a scorching sun, surrounded by pale stone walls. At her feet is a pile of bones she knows to be her own. There, her empty skull. There, her tiny heartless chest. Her sharp and childless hips. Her forever still limbs. Yellow dust swirls in the wind and blows clean through her unfeeling remains.
She wakes, and the urge to unlatch the door and flee into the night is stronger than any thirst or hunger she has known. From the quality of the dark she knows sleep has been brief. The first moments of sleeping are when the veil between worlds is thinnest. But demons and angels both may come at this time, and which of them brought her the vision she does not know.
In the garden the next morning she wants to tell Randulf of her dream, but he will not hear it.
‘Divination of dreams is forbidden for good reason, Agnes. Even where the devil is not intervening it is too easy for a layman to read signs where there are none and to bend the meaning of the vision to confirm his own will.’
She fails to see how she can bend a vision towards her will when she has none. But it is clear Randulf is not in a mood to converse. He has received a message calling him back to Fulda. He must leave the next morning and does not know when he might return.
‘The abbess will keep you until I can meet with the Archbishop to determine—’
‘Take me with you to Fulda.’
Her will has made itself known after all, surprising her as much as Randulf, who laughs, says, ‘Agnes!’ Laughs, says, ‘Agnes! What—Agnes!’
‘You said yourself I have the mind of a man. Let me use it.’
Any reasonable person would assume she has lost her wits through grief and self-mortification. Randulf, though, considers her with the seriousness he has always shown her ideas. ‘Your mind is quicker than any I’ve known. Your education has been eccentric and erratic, but no worse than that of others who come late in life to the abbey. Better than many.’
‘It has been done before,’ she reminds him, heart galloping to a lather. ‘Thecla, Marguerite, Eugenia and others beside. All of them sainted in the end for their deceptions.’
He is quiet awhile. She closes her eyes, listens to the joyous trills of birds overhead. Is it their first song since the quake or is she reawakening to the world only now?
‘It is not impossible,’ Randulf says, and she opens her eyes, lets him see the hope within them. ‘Your figure is straight enough. Your face and speech not overly womanly.’ He is looking her over in the way of a trader assessing a sow rather than a man about to push his lover into the mud. ‘The robe and cape make all of us formless and shadowed besides. Nevertheless, there is much risk. If you are detected you will be—’
‘All I want from this life is to be allowed to read and pray and to contemplate the things I have learnt. A future that does not allow for this is no future at all. I would rather risk the fiercest shame and even death than resign myself to a life that is less than it might be.’
Ah, there is the look she’d seen on the riverbank before the world shook apart. If she is not more careful in expressing her passions she will be thrown on her back again. Indeed, after checking the surrounds he seizes her by the shoulders, says her name so it sounds like a prayer.
‘Agnes, there is a happiness in my being I did not know possible. Days ago I was in despair at losing my greatest friend, yet here on the other side of disaster you have shown me the way to a miracle I did not have the imagination to pray for.’ He squeezes her shoulders hard enough to lift her from the ground, laughs and releases her so he can catch her face in his burning hands. ‘There is no risk I would not take to have you living by my side, both brother and wife.’
‘Wife?’
‘In all except law. In spirit and heart and flesh.’ His face now pink and joyful; so different to the grim, red mask she saw when he was upon her in the mud.
‘I thought I was clear, brother. I do not wish for a husband. Not in law or any other way.’
He steps back, regards her with an expression of great concern. ‘I have heard the first instance can be a trial for a maid. Now that the perforation has occurred, perhaps—’
‘I beg you to stop speaking of it.’
‘I cannot. Our union only confirmed for me that—’
‘I will offer myself as an anchoress if you do not stop.’
‘Agnes. You would go mad before the mortar dried.’
‘I will go mad if you will not stop talking to me of wife-ness or anything like it.’
A breath, eyes to the sky. ‘So I must accept you are not your father’s daughter in this respect, at least.’
The ground shakes. It is happening again. Perhaps this time she will be taken. She closes her eyes and waits. The moment passes and she still stands, still breathes. Randulf appears not to have noticed a thing.
‘I do not mean to speak ill of the dead,’ he says. ‘You must know your father’s weakness for flesh.’
She had not, though the moment Randulf says it she sees it is true. Tears slide from cheek to throat.
‘It is not the worst of sins, whatever they’—he waves at the buildings beyond—‘might tell you. Indeed, I’ve heard it said that even the great and pious Charles had urges so powerful he sometimes resorted to his unmarried daughters to salve them. At least your father—’
‘Stop!’ She heard this rumour at her father’s table. A man who rarely visited spoke in praise of the great king, offering the uncontrollable urges as proof of his virility. He wondered aloud how heavily God weighed such sins against the ultimate heft of uniting half the known world under Christ. Surely, the man had said, King Charles has done more to earn his place in heaven than any man since Peter, but daughter-wounding is a serious thing, and so perhaps he must spend a few years with rats gnawing at his nethers in purgatory first.
The man had barely finished this sentence when her father punched him on the nose and told him to leave and never return.
‘I have upset you,’ Randulf says. ‘I only wanted to—’
‘Stop,’ she repeats. ‘I do not wish to lay with you again. Even if you talk at me for a thousand days, I will not. If that means you will not take me with you to Fulda then so be it.’
He looks at her with eyes like a kicked dog’s. ‘I am taking you to Fulda because that is where you belong, Agnes. Your willingness or not to lay with me has no bearing.’
She exhales, nods. ‘Tell me what I must do to prepare.’
‘I will find clothes to disguise you as we travel,’ he says, the hurt sliding from his eyes and into his moving mouth. ‘Meet me in the north barn after Lauds tomorrow. We will be clear of the town before you are missed at Prime.’
The dun-coloured tunic he has procured is shorter and tighter than her own and seems designed to draw attention to the breasts. Randulf regards her like a puzzle for a moment, then takes up her discarded long tunic and tears several wide bands from it. On his own chest he shows how she might bind herself and then turns to preserve her modesty as she does so.
‘Better,’ Randulf says in a tone that means terrible. He hands her a hooded cape, large enough to cover her twice, and though it stinks of horse sweat and old ale, it will do well enough for the journey.
At Fulda, she will don the voluminous robe of the Benedictines, which will easily disguise her form. With the hood draped low over her forehead and billowing out past her cheeks she will blend into the ranks of identically swathed figures.
‘Your hair,’ Randulf says, moving behind her and tugging her braid. She hears the rasp of a knife, winces as the braid hits the dirt. He works gently at her nape, his touch sure. She could be the hundredth girl in a row to have her hair lopped short by this man. The thousandth.
‘Who cuts your hair, Randulf?’
‘Brother Gerhold. He will do yours, too, when you are admitted. Tonsure you.’
She is almost as close to Randulf as when he pierced her in the mud. She imagines this Brother Gerhold pressed against her back just so, his hands brushing and smoothing her face and neck.
‘Perhaps you could do it? I fear this other brother will know what I am.’
‘That man couldn’t tell an udder from a bullock sac if it was swinging in his face.’ He steps away, moves around her. ‘Fine job I have done,’ he says, sorry and sad as if he’s blackened her eye. ‘You are a stranger.’
She kicks at the braid on the ground, breaking it into strands. Kicks dirt and old straw over the lot of it. The roof of this barn barely deserves the name; next rain, the ground will turn to sludge and her hair a part of it. If the birds or crawling insects or wind have not already taken it all. She thinks of her dream: her bare and lonely bones. The way it made her want to run until she burst through the skin of the world.
‘We must start,’ Randulf says.
She follows him from the barn, across the field and down to the river, walks through the reeds where they rutted and, without a word, they reach the bridge before the light has fully broken. Randulf hesitates as though waiting for a door to swing open and welcome him across. Agnes strides past him, does not turn to check he has followed. She is a tarnished maid with no father, husband, property or wealth. She is strong bones holding thick, firm flesh; a mind and soul that caused a brilliant monk to fall in love. There is nothing behind her and the whole of God’s creation calling her from ahead.