SHE HAS NEVER known tiredness like that of her first months at the abbey. Her narrow pallet is one of dozens in a dorter so vast that the furthest are not visible from the doorway. Every pallet occupied by a monk who is also a man and therefore prone to all the snores, farts, sleep talk and night moans as any other. High windows run the length on both sides, letting in sweet air but also vicious cold and so the shutters are often closed and, sometimes, brothers stuff cloth into the gaps in a feeble attempt to block out the chill. All night a lamp burns and the circator makes regular checks to ensure no man removes so much as a cord from his clothing or rises before the bells. Her robes itch and the bindings press deep into her flesh, but terror of discovery is stronger than discomfort and so she lies still as a fallen log.
Miserable though it is in bed, she wishes for more time there. To lie with eyes closed if not actually to sleep. The Divine Office more demanding, more disrespecting of rest than a newborn infant. Bells rouse them at the darkest hour for Nocturnes, and they must traipse down the night stairs to kneel on the packed earth floor, the smell of unwashed men pulled from never-clean beds and irritating flicker of candles the only things stopping her from sinking back into sleep. Afterwards only the barest couple of hours to rest before being roused to sing Lauds. Then every few hours the bells calling her back to the cold, stinking church for Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones. Every day at least one additional mass and sometimes two. Several days a week they sing Psalms for the deceased. Always, Vespers as the sun goes down and, finally, in the full darkness of night, Compline.
Between Prime and Terce they gather in the chapter house and listen as a brother reads from the Rule. Morning after morning, chapter after chapter, starting over again when done and onwards like this forever more. Day after day after day after day they are reminded that they must be content with the meanest and worst of everything, call themselves the lowest of the low, take no independent action. It is a revelation that these men struggle and need constant correcting in order to live as women must.
After the reading of the Rule, there are announcements about the business of the place and then it is time for the brothers to hear each other confess and seek penance (as though sitting on bare stone for the hour is not punishment enough). Certain among the brothers are eager to confess the most minor sins and beg the harshest punishments. The abbot is most generous in his willingness to let those who long to scourge their flesh or kneel on nettles do so frequently.
After confessions come accusations. It is good for your brother’s soul to speak of his sins if he cannot or will not. Perhaps. More often it is done to assuage a petty vendetta or out of simple dislike. Even when the error reported is severe, such as when a brother assisting the cellarer is accused of having taken for himself provisions meant for the destitute, there is a visible pleasure in certain of the assembled company when the guilty man is hauled onto the tiles to have his bared buttocks whipped until he faints.
She takes careful note of those whose faces flush at the bloodied welts and pained gasping. Flush in the way of one not enraged but engorged. She fears these men as anyone would fear a beast who hunts out of lust rather than hunger, but no more than she fears the brethren who report on others out of genuine concern for their souls. She fears every man in the place save the one who brought her. Any of the others might, out of holy intent or wicked, report her for an infraction, and the moment her robes are lifted to the whip her life will be done.
She wards off the terror with scrupulous obedience. If Benedict himself were watching from above he would call her an exemplar of all he intended. She is ever aware, though, that the true threat is her body. The robe and cowl cloak her in anonymous maleness, but multiple times a day, in the dim and fetid privacy of the latrine, she checks and rechecks the firmness of her bindings.
In the voices of her brothers she hears every variation of depth, but still she worries her own will betray her. She works on it during the endless singing; learning the way her chest and throat feel when she matches, as one is supposed to in chant, the tones of the men around her.
Most of all she dreads the monthly blood, keeps her pockets filled with moss and leaves, an extra strip of linen. But when it comes it is barely noticeable—lightened, perhaps, by the lack of meat and excess of labour. Or perhaps God has eased her curse. Perhaps it is His way of showing He approves.
She had thought the long periods of enforced silence would be difficult, but as she gets to know her brothers through gesture and action, through confession and accusation, she sees there are few she would wish to speak with if she could. She had thought the restriction on laughter would be difficult, too, but nobody jokes, and although there is much absurdity it is the kind that makes one want to write a treatise rather than laugh out loud.
Mealtime, for instance. Once a day in the cold months, twice on the longer, warmer days, they gather in the refectory. A senior brother is assigned reader and his voice drones (always, whoever it is, he drones) while the men eat silently and conduct what at first seem complex, important conversations using their hands. Time and experience prove that most of this gesturing and whirling, finger shaping and air poking is to say pass the bread and the broth is salty and listen to how he drones, and she longs to make the hand shapes she learnt in Mainz market: the ones the merchants and wives used to tell customers what they thought of their offer without wasting a breath.
Randulf is always there but so is everyone else. There is no privacy, no tolerance for particular friendships. She sees him every day, sleeps in the same hall every night, yet they rarely speak. Day by day, the flesh memory of him grinding her into the mud recedes and her craving for his company, for the long, winding conversations they once shared as they walked bareheaded around Mainz, rises.
When they are not praying or confessing or attempting to sleep they are working. Manual labour for two hours a day in one of the gardens or crop fields or with the horses, sheep or chickens. Most days it is bone-achingly cold, and as a city-bred novice her task is always either digging or shovelling.
At least outside the stench of men is diffused, the cloying incense and tallow stink almost forgotten. It is a blessing indeed to be allowed for two short hours to breathe instead cow dung and soil and pine, sweet wood smoke drifting from the kitchens, malty hops from the brewhouse.
Outside, too, her ears are spared the constant swish of cloister whispers, the drone—Lord forgive me—of Latin chants sung by rote rather than intention. Outside, it is spade meeting dirt, axe striking wood, pump handle squealing, water hitting stone, and every now and then a scrap of laughter drifts across the grounds and renews her hope that there is, in this place, at least one soul not exhausted into joylessness.
The rest of the work day is spent on tasks assigned to each brother according to his talents. It must be a hard thing, indeed, to be deemed naturally attuned to cleaning latrines and shovelling horse shit. There is no risk of this for her, a brother who can read several languages and write in two, in a community of which more than half are effectively illiterate. Still, she is not allowed to take up her assigned work until she has completed her noviciate, and so for this first year at Fulda she, like the other novices, is rotated through tasks under each of the obedientiaries and sub-obedientiaries: the cellarer, the kitchener, the granatarius, the guest master, the refecteror, the gardener, the camerarius, the sacrist, the matricularius and, most dreaded for the foul work as well as the foul temper of the man himself, the infirmarian.
Working alongside boys from the most famous noble families in Francia she is ever aware that—even with her particular skills, of which the abbey is in great need—it is only the special relationship Randulf enjoys with Abbot Hrabanus Maurus that allows her, a penniless orphan with no official education or connections, a place here.
Barely in his forties, with thick, wavy hair as black as befits a man named for a raven, Hrabanus is famous throughout Christendom as a leader and scholar. A child of Mainz, like her, he studied at the feet of Alcuin and was several times in the presence of Charles the Great. It is said he has travelled to every known country on earth and is fluent in every living language and some that are no longer spoken. He is expert in astrology, botany and theology as well as canon law. He was once Randulf’s schoolmaster and has long been his mentor, and in hearing the abbot speak she often recognises not only the ideas but the precise way of phrasing them. She experiences the heavy thud of disappointment on realising that the man who dazzled her with his mind might have been merely stating things told him by another.
She wonders if the abbot himself is doing the same, if every man in the whole tall tower of brilliant men is taking from the one above and restating with the confidence of an originator. She wonders how a person might tell the difference between something that is true and something that has merely been repeated so often and for so long that it is carved into men’s thinking like a desire path through the forest.
It is a hard, lonely, exhausting life, and if she could think of a place to run to where she would not be destitute or veiled, she would go at once. In the spare few breaths a day in which she can pray her own mind she asks God for a sign; He sends nothing but more bells to interrupt her sleep, more chants to practise, more dirt to shovel, more droning old men to listen to.
Nine months of this before she finds herself drifting to sleep with the thought that the mass of bodies in the dormitory is a single softly heaving animal whose presence soothes without demand. She wakes easily for Lauds, floats to chapel as if carried by the same gentle creature that blessed her sleep. Singing the office, she notices hers is no longer one voice straining to meet the others but a drop of water in a mighty sea. She is nothing and immense all at once.
In the hot, bright morning, chopping wood for the stores, she feels a new lightness in the axe, as though the arms of her brothers are joined in the effort. There is a sweetness to the scent of split beech as though the sacrificed tree is sanctifying her work. A cooling breeze kisses her face and she feels God in it. She is exactly where she should be and He, as always, is there too.
After twelve months, on the Feast of Perpetua and Felicity, she is brought before the whole community and the Rule is read to her in full, as it had been after two months and again after six. As on those occasions she is told, This is the law under which you are choosing to serve. If you can keep it, come in. If not, you may leave. This is the last time the offer will be made. If the young brother agrees to live by the Rule today, he is no longer free to shake its yoke from his neck.
She does not have a word for this feeling. Knowing she is an imposter, false and wicked, that a person so skilled at deception could never hear God’s truth. Knowing equally that it is God who has placed her here.
Tremors in her hand as she signs her false name to a document promising stability, fidelity and obedience. She is not afraid, in this moment, of the hundreds of robed men crowded into the chapel, every one of whom (for Randulf is away on a procurement mission) would happily bury her in the latrine pit if they knew her true form. It is God alone she fears as she signs the parchment then places it on the altar, as she says, Receive me, Lord, as you have promised, and I shall live. She waits for the reliquary to combust, for the vaulted roof to crumble, for her eyes to turn inwards and her mouth fill with blood. The brothers of Fulda repeat her verse three times, add, Glory be to the Father, and so she continues the ritual, prostrating herself at the feet of the abbot and the obedientiaries and then the community as a whole, asking for their prayers.
The ground remains solid stone and the lamps do not so much as flicker and at the end she stands and Abbot Hrabanus places the monastic scapula over her head and not a single voice, let alone all of God’s creation, rises up in protest.