The Abbess’s Prayers
1.
The Oratory is spare and simple, as churches go. The Master’s students built it with their own hands, under his direction. The only thing in it to look at was the altar and the massive wooden cross suspended from the rafters above it—until, after the Master’s death on April 21, 1142, the Abbess, consumed with grief, ordered that a tomb be built as close to the altar as propriety allowed. For more than a year the tomb lay empty, prominent, gleaming almost spectrally white in that so dimly illuminated space, a constant sign of the Master’s death—though who could forget it, given the Abbess’s perpetual sadness?—and a strangely eerie reminder that his bones lay elsewhere. The abbess and sisters face it whenever they perform the Offices, which is to say several times day and night. And since the Abbess’s authority is complete, no one dared question the fact of the magnificent, empty tomb.
On November 15, 1143, Peter the Venerable, the Abbot of Cluny, secretly delivered the Master’s remains to the Paraclete. The Abbess placed a candle four feet tall and the thickness of a peasant’s thigh at the foot of the tomb and ordered that it always be kept burning, and that it be replaced before its flame guttered. Heretofore a model of moderation in all aspects of the religious life, the Abbess mounted a nearly constant vigil, on her knees, at its head.
The sisters pray for the Master’s soul and say nothing to the Abbess about her sudden immersion in devotion. For who would dare to question the Abbess’s judgment? And who would take it on herself to articulate concern about another’s praying too much? Certainly no one in the Paraclete, certainly no one in the county of Troyes and Champagne, certainly no one in the kingdom of France, much less anyone in all of Christian Europe.
2.
Beneath her shift, between her breasts, rolled tightly into a thin cylinder, Sister Sebastienne carries her lover’s verses. Your naked hand will touch my naked page…You can safely lay it in your lap… Her lips sing the Nunc Dimittis of Compline in perfect outward obedience, while his words burn in carnal conflagration within her body and mind, sparking new words—her own words—in her tantalized, torrid thoughts. Hoc jacet in gremio dilecti schedula nostri, Ecce locata meis subjacet uberibus. It lay on her breast, yes, the record of their desire. And when she lies down to sleep, it will be with the naked pages placed under her left breast, so that the words on them may be close to her heart, scorching her body and soul, filling her dreams with the fire of his desiring. Her verses—for already she knows she will match him couplet for couplet, all eighty-nine—will tell of it, yes, of how his pages, lying pressed to her breast, set her womb on fire…
The others neither know nor suspect her passion. What could a correspondence in Latin signify to them? They have not read the Abbess’s correspondence with the Master. They assume that anything written in Latin must be either studious or holy. Latin, everyone knows, is the language of law, the language of erudition, the language of the Fathers. Salve regina, they sing. Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Banished children of Eve? It had always seemed so—until now. O dulcis Virgo Maria, they sing. And so to bed, though not, in her case, to sleep.
Matins comes cruelly soon, especially to those whose hours for sleep are spent caressing the naked words of a lover.
3.
Sister Sebastienne is awake when the bell summons them to Matins. The sisters’ footsteps are quiet, their voices mute as they file down the stairs and in through the choir. Only the creaking of the risers, the muted clicking of rosary beads, and the swish of their heavy wool habits nudge the shivery stillness of deep, dead night.
The sisters find the Abbess in the Oratory before them. As they chant, their voices crack and strain with middle-of-the-night dryness and disuse. The utter dark, except for the trembling pools of light cast by the candles, renders the stillness between moments of vocalization thick, obdurate, pressing. Night in the Oratory is unlike night anywhere else. Out of doors, night is dangerous, unbounded, endless. In the dormitory, night is a timeless field for unleashed imagination and the luxury of invisibility. And in the cloisters, under the stars, night is breath and wonder. But the Oratory belongs to God. The Oratory traps night and imposes a stifling silence as though encasing all that enters it within a thick, hard, dark crystal their voices futilely strain to shatter.
