IN THE SPRING and summer months Randulf is often absent. She watches for new boxes of manuscripts to appear in the library, strains to hear the murmurings of Hatto and Ermo as they determine what is to be copied and how and for whom. Yearns for a mention of the brother responsible for the acquisitions, for word of his whereabouts and wellbeing, though such word never finds her ears.
Then each time her longing has been worn small and sharp as her nib, she will turn onto the night stairs or step into the library or cloister and there he is, eyes as bright with pleasure and promise as at her father’s table.
Still there is little chance for them to speak. There is a nod and sometimes a small smile when he sees her across the dorter or in Chapter. Several times he has signed to her in the refectory: Is all well with you, brother? and she has replied, It is. And with you? and he has nodded and returned to his pottage. There have been short exchanges of news while passing in the yard here and there: her reporting on her work; him listing the cities he has travelled to lately, the texts he has purchased. Every time she wants to say: May we not speak as we used to? May we not be friends now we are brothers? She wants to say, Brother, I wait for you as the thirsty fields for rain.
Early autumn, her fifth year at Fulda, after one of these long, yearning absences, she sees him in the refectory. His face and hands, revealed in the act of eating, are as pale as at the end of winter. This time she finds in herself determination in place of helpless thirst. She will speak with him and at length, and she will do so without secrecy or shame. After all, Brother John, respected scribe, trained by Hatto and one of the few workers Ermo addresses by name and stops to observe for long moments on his way through the scriptorium, has every reason to consult Brother Randulf, the man responsible for procuring the abbey’s most valuable manuscripts. Indeed, it is absurd they have not conversed regularly all this time.
The bell rings, all wipe their hands, replace their cowls, file silently from the refectory. She walks directly to him, murmurs (as is appropriate) but does not whisper: ‘Brother Randulf, I seek your guidance on the texts recently brought from Monte Cassino. The script is unusual. Might Abbot Hrabanus spare you for a short spell?’
If he is surprised nobody would know. He nods, approaches the abbot. Returns and tells her they may walk together to the scriptorium.
‘Are you well, brother?’ she asks when they are clear of other ears.
‘Very well, brother.’
‘Only that your complexion speaks of travel in a covered carriage. You must be more important than I knew.’
He does not smile. ‘I create more wealth for the abbey with every journey. A covered carriage is the least they can do to thank me.’
‘Is it not for God that you collect these works?’
‘I thought a man as observant and clever as you would have noticed by now that God does not, in fact, live in Fulda.’
‘I was only being light with you,’ she says, but it is as if he has not heard.
She risks a longer look, sees dark shadows beneath his eyes, lines carved more deeply than she remembers around his mouth.
‘You must be very weary from the journey. Perhaps after you have rested …’
‘It is not the journey that wearies me. It is this.’ He flicks his hand at the cloister, the church. At the scriptorium. At her. ‘Let us get on with it. Explaining the extremely simple Longobarda script to the cleverest scribe in Fulda will no doubt take considerable time.’
He strides ahead up the stairs and, for the first time in years, she feels an imposter.
She thinks her way out of the dread. There is no rule against friendship, but particular attachments are discouraged. To prefer one brother over the community risks discord. Attachment to earthly relationships prevents true communion with God. That Randulf repels her friendship means she is truly part of the body of Fulda. His refusal to indulge in intimacy is a great compliment and a gift.
She requests permission to work through Terce, Sext, Nones so as to make full use of the low, brief winter light. When the scriptorium is finally too dark, she works in the cloister where there are, at least, wall lamps. When the cloister becomes too cold she retreats to the dorter to work with her blanket wrapped as a shroud, until she is commanded, with the others, to put out her candle and sleep.
Increasingly she finds that in the space between reading a line and replicating it on parchment her mind leaps in to question and argue. Copying Pelagius she realises too late she has allowed her pen to transcribe her thoughts alongside the proper words. A summary of Augustine’s original position; a short treatise on why Pelagius misunderstood now interrupts the original text. They are so busy that checking pages before binding is rushed and sometimes not undertaken at all for work by a senior scribe. Still, if someone were to notice her interference, her assumption of scholarship or correction … She imagines the denouncement in Chapter. Step forward, Brother John. Kneel and lift your robe.
She takes to mouthing each letter to herself as she makes its strokes, as the barely literate scribes of lesser houses are said to do. This prevents her ideas leaking onto the parchment but not from clogging up her mind. Her hand copies with perfection while the rest of her itches to expand on her earlier notes; to explain that Augustine was wrong about predestination though not in the ways Pelagius thought. So hard she strains to keep hand uninfluenced by mind that she forms S six times over before noticing. She must scrape the parchment clean before someone sees, thinks her amanuensis to a serpent.
It happens again and again; the accidental commentary on a text she is copying followed by carelessness as she struggles to restrain herself. She loses her place while chanting, glides past the lavabo into the refectory and is called back by Brother Dominicus, who watches her wash as though she were a child caught playing with his own shit. Next Chapter she is ill with fear, but Dominicus remains silent and she—for the tenth, twentieth, hundredth time this winter—promises God she will take more care with His work.
But what if this is the work He wants from her? What if in stifling her thoughts she is denying His call?
She asks Ermo for parchment for her own writing; he sends her to the old parchmenter to beg offcuts. The scraps are thick and uneven, more brown than yellow, edges over-tanned and curled. No matter; their smallness means she can keep one always at the ready beside the texts on her desk. Her thoughts flow smoothly from mind to parchment. At night she orders the scraps, making small piles which trace one argument through to its end, others formulating questions raised, texts to chase down, ideas needing more time. Every thought she releases makes room for a better and more complete one; the messier her pallet becomes with scraps of calfskin, the clearer her mind, the more expansive her thoughts.
God has made me to excel at this work, she thinks. There is not another person on this earth who sees things as I do.
If she were to say this out loud she would be whipped and worse. Insolent and prideful, just as Hatto accused. In herself, she knows it is of God. The intelligence and the awareness of it. There is no greater praise for the Lord than to recognise the wonder of His creation, after all. Her mind—sharper, nimbler, larger than any in this place with more than its share of sharp, nimble, large minds—was made by Him and it would be a sin not to use it as best she can.
No, pride is not her sin. Increasingly, though, anger is. But still on His behalf! That the men who purport to be His most loyal would deny the fullest expression of His creation. That the men who claim to protect His kingdom on earth work to make it smaller and less wondrous. That the true object of their protection is their own sense of power, their prideful conviction in the superiority of their maleness.
For years she has bound and rebound her breasts without emotion. A necessary, uninteresting task like pissing or trimming her nails. Now, as her thoughts break free of the copyists rows, she seethes at the blasphemy of it. Stuffing and strapping and restraining the body given her by the same God who made the mind that the abbey so values.
We are told here, she thinks and thinks and thinks, that bodies are sinful and should be obscured and ignored as much as possible. Yet I, the cleverest and most hard-working of servants, am forced to remember my body in a way I never did when its femaleness was a harmless fact.
In the latrines, while a brother groaningly shits out his lunch on the other side of the wall, she refastens the linen strips around her flattened, rash-splotched breasts and is flooded with a rage so hot and intense she fears it will turn her insides to ash. God release me from this all-consuming anger, she prays.
The ways God speaks to us are manifold, Abbot Hrabanus says, and here is a fine example. God calms the raging fire in her but does not, as He surely could, extinguish it. He makes of it a single smouldering coal for her to carry in her heart; a reminder that the only one who matters knows who she is and feels no offence or horror, only hot, live love.