Fantastic Metropolis

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.

For some unfathomable reason, it happens often during Matins that Sister Sebastienne recalls how she, now a bride of Christ, was bartered by her parents to God in exchange for her brother’s recovery from the fever that threatened his life. We will give you our daughter Sebastienne, God, if you spare our firstborn son, they solemnly vowed before a priest and the entire household. It is a female’s lot to be bartered, she knows, but she has always found it especially disregardful of her that her parents exchanged her for her brother’s life rather than for a parcel of land. (Actually, they endowed her with a parcel of land to administer to the benefit of the convent.) Everyone said, when she took the veil, that being given to God was an honor greater than marriage. (Sebastienne, of course, knew that they did not really believe it.) Herself, she feels as though she had been designated a human sacrifice, offered to an exacting, extorting God determined to have his pound of flesh in one form or another.

This particular middle-of-the night, standing in the icy presence of the God who demands recognition at those times most mortals give over to sleep, as Sister Sebastienne feels God in the dark corners and thick silences that persist whenever their voices cease, the secret in her heart gives her the special strength and vitality of the young wife kept locked up by her ancient, cold-tempered husband, enjoying as much the thought that she is flouting his dismal constraints as the pleasure of the adultery itself.

4.

In the morning, after Mass, as they go about their daily tasks, a whisper flies from sister to sister that the Abbess has again spent the night in the Oratory.

As she does several times every day but the Sabbath, Sister Sebastienne goes to her place in the scriptorium. It is fortunate, she thinks, that the Abbess will again be missing the lesson. Though Sister Sebastienne’s years number a mere twenty-two, she is exhausted from a night of seductive sensuality, a night spent reveling in certain words and the sensations they conjured up. In the damp chill of early December, her cheeks, her breasts, her most moist and private places burn unslaked. Passion for an absent lover is an exhaustingly fiery affair.

Earlier that morning, after Chapter and before Terce, Sister Sebastienne, not fearing immolation, replaced the satires of Juvenal she had been studying with the Heroides. Ovid, of course, must be her mentor in grasping her correspondent’s many allusions and witticisms strategically placed like kindling to set the entire edifice burning, as well as her muse in matching him couplet for couplet. Two particular lines of Ovid popped into her head before she even laid hands on the book. Love came to me more deeply for being late—I am burning within; I am burning, and my breast has a hidden wound. Yes, yes, it must be to Phaedra’s elegy to Hippolytus that she turn first. I burn in silence with a knowing love. She has no choice but to keep silent about her burning. She has joined those sisters with secrets never to be bared outside the confessional.

For the first time since the Abbot of Cluny’s visit, the Abbess enters the scriptorium. She surprises and delights them all by going to her desk exactly as she always used to do. The Prioress—who occupies the Abbess’s desk when the latter is absent—rises and bows with the formality that the sheer grace and authority of the Abbess’s person inspires in all who come into her presence. Indeed, all the sisters rise from their benches and stools and bow to acknowledge the Abbess’s arrival, their mouths and manners appropriately grave, but their eyes joyful to see the Abbess now visibly about her duties, looking more radiant and serene than they have ever seen her, veritably brightening the thin wintry gloom that passes for daylight, as though she had not been going nearly sleepless for the last three weeks.

The Abbess gestures Sister Sebastienne to join her. The sister obeys, aware that all eyes are on her, confirming that she is still the Abbess’s favorite. “The Heroides? ” the Abbess says, making room on her bench for the sister, “Did you get through the Juvenal so quickly, then? ”

Blood rushes to the sister’s neck and face. “I thought I would put him aside for a while,” she said softly. “He’s so harsh. By your leave, I’ll return to him when I’ve done with these.”

A flash of gaiety, a hint of playfulness warms the Abbess’s face. “Frustrated love being less harsh? ”

The sister can’t find the words to answer. She’s only glad that the Abbess hasn’t rebuked her with a query as to whether her choice may not have something to do with Ovid’s being so much easier to read than Juvenal.

“His elegiac couplets are moving and beautiful, all the same,” the Abbess says. “So, let us begin with Penelope. Read the whole of it aloud first, and then give me a translation.”

The recitation makes such demands on her concentration that Sister Sebastienne forgets everything but the lesson, even her lover’s couplets. The Abbess corrects her only after she has finished the entire translation, then calls her attention to the text’s interesting figures, until the bell rings calling them to Sext.

The Abbess and the sisters rise and walk in a slow, silent file to the Oratory to perform the Office. As they chant, Sister Sebastienne realizes she is ravenously hungry. The office for Sext is short, but seems interminable. Finally they go to the refectory for the midday meal of lentils, leeks, coarse brown bread, and one of the Master’s drier, denser sermons. Afterwards, Sister Sebastienne returns to the scriptorium, knowing that the Abbess, who has other duties, will return only after Nones, to work with a group of novices and boarders struggling to learn Latin grammar. The sister is happy, confident that it will be an afternoon of clandestine, personal pleasure. Laudri’s eighty-nine verses—and not Ovid—will be her text. Laudri may be no Master Abélard, and she may be no Lady Héloïse, but the pair of them are close enough, she thinks, to play the moon to their betters’ sun.

5.

An hour before Lauds Sister Philippa cries out in her sleep, waking everyone in the dormitory, including herself.

In the Abbess’s absence, the Prioress lights a candle to investigate.

“Oh! ” Sister Philippa gasps, her worn, knobby hand fluttering at her breast. “I had such a dream, such a dream that I’m sure I’m meant to tell it! ”

Many of the younger sisters would rather go back to sleep, but they dutifully sit up to listen.

“In the dream,” Sister Philippa says, her thin, reedy voice trembling and quavery, “we were at Vespers, singing the Magnificat. As we finished, and were turning to file out, I caught sight of a cloud of light hanging above the Master’s tomb. Startled, and feeling an urgent need to make everyone else see it, too, I said loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Sisters, sisters, do you see the cloud of light hovering above the Master’s tomb? ’ And lo, even as I spoke, the cloud resolved into perfect clarity the image of a robe’s sleeve rising up, out of the tomb, and of a hand rising up from the sleeve falling away from it, thrusting high a shining silver crucifix. I knew all of you saw what I saw, for up and down the line there were gasps and whispers, and many of us fell to our knees in startled, holy awe. And lo, a form sat up, out of the tomb, then stood in the air above it. And lo, sisters, I recognized, without doubt, our Master himself, wearing that stern aspect that we who came with the Abbess to the Paraclete saw when he first visited us here, more severe in its expectations and austerity than has ever been seen even in the Abbot of Cîteaux himself. And the figure opened his mouth and a terrible howling and wailing proceeded from it, causing a great wind to spring up in the Oratory, sweeping and seizing our habits, even scouring the walls and and ceiling, such that all the candles in the Oratory were extinguished. ‘Hear me,’ the figure thundered at us. ‘Sisters, hear me! ’ Those who were still standing fell to their knees and bent low their necks. ‘It is written,’ the figure said. ‘It is written that women must keep silent! It is written that the devil prowls about, ravening like a hungry lion, seeking to devour us. Guard yourselves strictly, you handmaids of Christ, that the uncleanness in your hearts does not invite devils into holy places. Cleanse your hearts and pray without ceasing! I exhort you, I implore you, I command you, sisters! God watches! God knows all! And God will not be mocked! ’ And so saying, the figure became again a cloud of light, which, as a blinding whirlwind, rose high in the air above the altar, where it was sucked into the cross itself. As there was great confusion in my mind, I remained on my knees, too stunned to take in the wondrous sign that had been granted us. But suddenly I came to myself, and realized that all of you, my sisters, had risen to your feet and were moving past me, out of the Oratory. I knew that we must not do this, that it would be disobedient for us not to stay there and pray. So I cried out to the Abbess, who stood to one side, as she sometimes does, watching us as we file out, ‘My lady, this must not be! The sign is clear: we must pray without ceasing! ’ And the Abbess looked at me, and raised her fingers to her lips, indicating to me that by speaking out I had disobeyed the rule. It was then that I awoke.”

Sister Philippa looks dazedly around her. “Sisters,” she says, “you all saw! You all saw the sign we were given! ”

Sister Agnes, the granddaughter of a duke, laughs. “Sister Philippa,” she says, “I can assure you that I did not see the sign.”

“Nor I,” Sister Anne, the daughter of a viscomte says.

“Nor I,” says Sister Eleanor, like Sister Philippa—and Sister Sebastienne, too- the daughter of a mere knight.

“But you did, Sister Agnes, and you too, Sisters Anne and Eleanor,” says Sister Philippa, all anxious protest and stubborn insistence. “You did see the sign! In the dream it was-”

“Silence! ” the Prioress says sharply. “It is forbidden to talk idly at any time of the day or night. If there is to be discussion of this matter, it will take place in Chapter, as the Abbess directs.”

The Prioress snuffs the candle, and dark and silence return to the dormitory. Sister Sebastienne thinks of the tomb and shivers. Night in the dormitory has been disturbed, as though the heavy, stifling, icy dark of the Oratory has crept up the stairs and penetrated the dormitory. In her thoughts there is only the tomb and the awful, dread-filled sense of God’s cold demands on his brides. The sister feels strangely like crying, though no tears fill her eyes much less touch her cheeks. Sister Philippa’s a silly old hag, she tells herself. But it is not the dream or Sister Philippa’s high, quavery voice that she is really thinking about, but the tomb, the tomb now holding the Master’s bones.

6.

That morning, as they are performing the office of Prime, Sister Agathe is taken by a fit of hiccoughs that mars the perfection of the psalm. She leaves the Oratory, but the damage has been done.

Later, as Sister Agathe chastises herself for her sin, Sister Philippa is heard to say that the devil found his way in, even into the holiest of places, the very house of God, through their lack of attention to the sign given them. “Nonsense,” the infirmarian says briskly. “Sister Agathe simply ate the morning gruel too quickly. She should have known better.”

7.

In Chapter, the Abbess neither questions Sister Philippa about her dream nor introduces the subject for discussion. She asks the Prioress, who has a strong, steady voice, to read yet another of the Master’s sermons, which everyone knows the Abbess esteems highly.

Afterwards, when dismissing the sisters, she gestures slightly to Sister Sebastienne. When the novices and other sisters have gone, the Abbess says, “The Porteress tells me you’ve received another letter from Brother Laudri.”

Sister Sebastienne’s heart pounds; she flushes. Has all been lost? She pales—and acknowledges to the Abbess that she has indeed done so.

“I do not ask to see it,” the Abbess says. Her fine, high forehead remains smooth, her voice light and even. “I’m sure that if you perceive a reason for my reading it, you will tell me.”

Sister Sebastienne bows her head. Her breath expels all at once, and she realizes she’s been holding it.

“And yet I would ask you, Sister, to have a care for what you are about,” the Abbess says. “I mark the signs of too little sleep on your face. Words scribed in ink have more potency—as do things of the mind generally—than any of us cares to believe. This is the reason we strive to keep speech in our community to a minimum. I am not your spiritual advisor. Truly, I do not wish to know what is in your—or any other sister’s heart. My concern is only for the perfect performance of the offices, which is our first duty, and for the modesty and decorum of all the inmates in the houses under my care.” The Abbess looks down at her hands, so shapely and graceful, so coolly marmoreal against the thick black wool of her habit, folded quietly in her lap. Briefly, her knuckles blanch. “The Heroides is heady wine for a young woman without experience of the world. May God keep you safe, child.” The Abbess rises. “Go to your desk now, Sister. Business affairs claim me, requiring that I miss our lesson today.”

Sister Sebastienne fairly flies to the scriptorium. Her heart is bursting with adoration for the Abbess. She has loved her almost since first seeing her. Shortly after Sister Sebastienne’s parents brought her to the Paraclete to hand her over to God, the Abbess spoke privately with her. “You are not the only inmate here who comes at the will of others, rather than through vocation. While it would be best for you if you did acquire a vocation, it is not my concern to force you to the appearance of one. Once a woman has taken the veil, she can never be permitted to leave the cloister, because it would be considered an affront to the honor of God. With men, it is otherwise. The estimable Abbot of Cîteaux, for instance, accepts vast numbers of professions from the young men he inspires, most of whom a year or two later tire of the life and choose to leave. God’s honor, in such cases, is not impugned, for brothers are not called the Brides of Christ, and are not required to be kept strictly enclosed. But then women are seldom allowed to speak even the frailest word about their own disposal. What I say to you now, Sebastienne, is that you must accept your fate, which is to spend the rest of your life within these walls, and learn to live within our rules, with decorum and discretion. The best outcome would be your acquiring a true profession; the second-best would be your developing a passion for any of the kind of work we do here—a passion for study, for scribing and illuminating, for healing, for music, needlework, or gardening. You will otherwise find your life utterly tedious and your spirit intolerably vexed.”

These words subtly alleviated her sense of grievance at having been thrown to God as a hostage for her brother’s life. Later, after she had discovered an aptitude and delight in learning, and well after she had mastered Latin grammar, the Abbess allowed her to read the voluminous correspondence between herself and the Master, who had been both lover and husband to her. Though the bulk of the correspondence concerned the rule of the community, the first few letters were personal—exceedingly personal, and more impassioned than any romance Sebastienne had ever read or heard. Of course the Abbess and the Master were famous personages; even before her novitiate, while still out in the world, she had heard something of their story. She knew that the Master, Pierre du Pallet, the firstborn son of a Breton noble—known to all the world as Abélard—was a famous scholar and brilliant teacher who had taken his pupil, the Lady Héloïse, who was almost equally famous for her erudition, as a lover. When she bore the Master a child, her uncle demanded they be married. They acceded to this demand, but kept their marriage secret. When the Master dressed the Lady Héloïse in a novice’s habit and sent her to live at Argenteuil, the convent in which she had been raised, where he often visited her and flagrantly took his pleasure of her in even the most sacred places of the convent, Fulbert, the Lady Héloïse’s uncle, furious that the marriage was not openly declared, had the Master castrated. Immediately after his castration, the Master forced the veil on the Lady Héloïse (because, Sebastienne has always believed, he did not trust her to remain chaste), and himself took holy orders, and later become an abbot. The Master thought his wife forever immured at Argenteuil, and of no further concern to him. But after a few years, the Abbé Suger evicted Argenteuil’s nuns from their convent; for weeks, the Lady Héloïse, who had been Prioress there, led a band of them about, begging food and shelter wherever they went, churning up a torrent of talk at the scandal. Concerned for his own honor, the Master offered the Paraclete as a home for the wandering nuns. The sisters who followed the Abbess to the Paraclete so honor and obey her as their wise, caring superior that they have created an atmosphere of reverence for her, causing each new sister and novice to adopt their attitudes. This is the reason, Sebastienne thinks, that the Abbess has never resorted to the rod for correction. Most sisters correct themselves, for a word of quiet reproof from the Abbess is enough to crush any of them.

Sister Sebastienne knows the Abbess allowed her to read the correspondence so that she would understand that the Abbess herself took the veil under protest, being handed over to God not by her parents, but more treacherously and hurtfully by her lover and husband, whom the Abbess always declared was God enough for her. With what new eyes the sister beheld the Abbess after reading the letters! Her theological acumen, evident in the later letters, of course impressed her. But when (as she often does) she ponders the torment and agony the Abbess suffered—might even still be suffering—the sister finds herself repeatedly amazed at the Abbess’s appearance of serenity, goodness—even purity. Though she has known a love that was not only carnal but frequently blasphemous, though her body once gave birth to a child, she radiates so powerful a purity and grace it seems at extraordinary odds with her past declarations that she would rather risk damnation with the Master than seek heaven without him.

Sister Sebastienne enters the scriptorium and goes to her desk. A thought strikes her, an observation that somehow previously escaped her notice. After the Master’s death, the Abbess’s face took on the deep, anguished sadness of grief (that nevertheless remained entirely private). When, just a few weeks ago, the venerable Abbot of Cluny brought them the remains of the Master, the community breathed a collective—though unacknowledged—sigh of relief, tacitly reasoning that the Abbess must have known all along that the costly but plain white marble tomb would one day be filled. The bones were respectfully interred; a special mass was celebrated. The Abbot departed, and the Abbess began to spend her nights in the Oratory—kneeling always at the head of the tomb. Praying, presumably. Praying for the Master’s soul, as they all did at frequent intervals. But, Sister Sebastienne realizes, the Abbess has been marvelously altered since the Abbot’s visit. For a year and a half the Abbess was grave and sad, always in the lowest of spirits. She spent long hours in her cell, often through the night. Her face frequently bore the marks of weeping, her eyes the ravages of insomnia. But now—of a sudden—all is changed. The Abbess moves with a light, youthful step. Her voice has something new in it, something Sister Sebastienne never heard before. She glows with happiness, beyond her own usual unique radiance.

The sister opens Ovid to Phyllis, which she must prepare for her next lesson. She will work hard; she will prove to the Abbess that the games she plays with Brother Laudri inflict no torment on her spirit. She plays with fire, certainly, but easily, happily, chastely.

8.

Sister Sebastienne spends as much time studying her lover’s carmen—seeking to flush out his every allusion, pun and witticism—as she does studying Ovid. She notes down the phrases that have been floating in her thoughts, tantalizing little snippets of pleasure, scribing one couplet here, another there, without yet knowing the shape her own carmen will ultimately take. Custom and law guard our love, A chaste life justifies our games. This she writes after the Abbess’s talk with her, needing to be clear that for all its wild excitement, for all it makes her body burn, it is a game, of words and thoughts, exciting but erudite, flirtatious but without scandalous consequences.

It is really all just playing with the Heroides, she imagines saying to the Abbess. Playing so gleefully. So hungrily. One mind to another, speaking one body to another. Chastely.

It is not even anything she need mention at confession (which will soon be upon them, since they always communicate at the feast of Christ’s nativity).

So many heroines in Ovid, all longing and wanting and desiring—and in every case fruitlessly, if articulately. Laudri could not have found better inspiration for seducing her into the playful poetics of love.

9.

Daily the sisters perform the Offices, repeating each gesture and movement and vocalization perfectly again and again and again as God’s handmaids must. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline—always the same, always perfect, an anthem here, an antiphon there, each psalm in this way, the doxology in that, all of God’s brides moving in unison—rising to their feet at this time, falling to their knees at that, bowing their heads, making the sign of the cross, chanting, chanting, chanting modestly, correctly, adoringly, giving praise, giving thanks, giving reverence to their lord. Brides (though not all of them virgins) cloistered, suspended in time, waiting to be taken by their Bridegroom. Filing into the Oratory, then out, the black robes and the white, silent, orderly, perfect.

Increasingly often now when the sisters file into the Oratory to perform the Offices they find the Abbess there before them. The Master, it is true, has always been at the top of their list, and his name has now been entered into the Paraclete’s necrology, as one of the souls they will constantly be praying for. And who should know better than the Abbess how much the Master needs their prayers! Their correspondence, Sister Sebastienne recalls each time she sees the Abbess rising from her place at the head of the tomb, their correspondence alluded often to the blasphemous character of their lovemaking and to the special pleasure they took in its blasphemy. From the moment the Master installed the Lady Héloïse and her sisters at the Paraclete, his chief concern had been that they pray for him. And is that not the hope of all the relatives of the sisters, and their reason for endowing them with gifts and rents and tithes and mills and harvest bounties? The sisters pray even for Fulbert, the uncle of the Abbess, the man who ordered the Master’s castration. And did not the Abbot of Cluny beg their prayers, and was that not the reason he brought the Master’s body? Because of all things, the sisters excel in praying? It is the reason they must take care always to perform the Offices perfectly. The perfect performance of the Offices makes their prayers more pleasing to God. By the time a novice makes her profession, this at least she understands. Of all things, they must know their raison d’être in the world.

The Abbess’s prayers, Sister Sebastienne thinks, must be superior to those of the other sisters. The Abbot of Cluny addresses her as “Your Sanctity.” In fact, before his visit, the Abbot wrote in a letter to the Abbess, If only our Cluny possessed you, or you were confined in the delightful prison of Marcigny, our daughter house, with the other handmaids of Christ who are there awaiting their freedom in heaven! But is the Abbess’s new radiance and ease in manner solely due to gratification in shortening the Master’s time spent in Purgatory? Sister Sebastienne has read the correspondence. She knows the Abbess is much more than greets the eye of the Abbot of Cluny. The Abbess’s apparent elation mystifies her.

10.

They go to bed so early in the winter. Halfway to Matins, Sister Sebastienne composes—in her head—certain she will remember it in the morning: Love that has been wakened knows no night. Her stomach is burning with gas; she can’t stop belching. At the evening meal they ate braised cabbage and onions with their coarse brown bread. Worse, Sister Sebastienne is exhausted in both body and mind from too many nights of scanting sleep, her eyes red and sore, her limbs cramped and aching. She must get her carmen written, for her body cannot take much more—of going without sleep, of constantly juggling Latin phrases in her mind, trying to get them to scan as they must.

To be sure, it is not just her stomach that burns! What she would like to make clear in her reply to her lover is that she burns as only women do—not with the dry heat Aristotle says is the normal healthy state of man, but with the passion of a woman—the steaming, liquid molten heat of shifting magma and flowing lava, lava that can be shaped into poetry not with the arid perfection of a monk playing games, but in the purest sculpting of a passion that erupts as a fluid and then cools into gleaming, smooth hard rock.

Sister Sebastienne listens to her sisters’ slow, even breaths. Sister Adele snores in her usual rhythm of explosive, toneless puffs. Their digestion of cabbage and onions has created its own winter fragrance, binding them in sharing, wordless, intimacy.

Sister Sebastienne reflects on the purpose that fires her brain: it is a matter, she intuits, of exalting the flesh, of putting its passion into words, which are themselves chaste, and making it soar. Solomon, reputed to be one of the wisest men ever to live, though not a woman, surely understood that. The thought makes Sister Sebastienne smile, and sends her drifting warmly, quietly off to sleep.

11.

The days grow very, very short, and what little light they afford is thin and gray with constant rain. And it is the dark of the moon, and everyone who is neither aged nor ill has the flowers. Every one of them is unusually cranky and irritable. The cramps in their bellies and the aches in their backs and heads impel them in a nearly constant stream to the Infirmarian. They are all so cranky, in fact, that when two lay sisters have to be rebuked for their exchange of sharp words over the washing of so many rags, no one is shocked by the raucous openness of their conflict.

The Abbess gives Sister Sebastienne a lesson. The sister reminds her that they last read Phyllis and says she therefore will read Briseis. “No, not Briseis,” the Abbess says sharply. Sister Sebastienne catches her breath in amazement. The Abbess is almost never cross. And Briseis is next. “Discedens oscula nulla dedi,” the Abbess quotes in a tone of voice too grating to be recognizable as hers. Sister Sebastienne recalls that when as a girl the Abbess studied with the Master, he required her to recite every text she studied from memory. “It is an inferior dialogue,” the Abbess says. “Unworthy of Ovid, in my judgment. We won’t waste our time on it.”

Unworthy of Ovid! It would be improper for Sister Sebastienne to question the Abbess. But never has the Abbess said such a thing about any text in the house’s possession. “Phaedra, then? ” Sister Sebastienne asks.

“Quam nisi tu dederis,” the Abbess says, gesturing the sister to continue.

Phaedra is the sister’s favorite text, the text that will lie burning beneath the words of her carmen to Laudri. Yes, yes: What modesty forbade me to say, love has commanded me to write.

12.

They celebrate the special Mass after Terce on Christmas, all of them not only seeing God as they do every morning at mass, but eating Him, too. They celebrate the feast of St. Stephen on the day following, then finally, finally, they celebrate Epiphany, feasting on meat as they rarely do and growing giddy and merry drinking wine. The novices and boarders perform a mystery play. Most of the house’s inmates dance in a chain around the periphery of the refectory. The sound of frank laughter, lilting voices, clapping hands fills the room.

But they don’t neglect to perform the Offices—perfectly, as they must.

They go to bed as usual after Compline. Sister Adele puffs more violently than usual, fueled by meat and wine—making other sisters wakeful and needing the privy. Sister Sebastienne tries to ignore the fullness of her bladder, hoping to wait—as she usually does in winter—to void it after Matins. Her head is reeling; her pulse is racing. Since her thoughts are too jumbled to make poetry, sleep is what she most desires. But as the others gradually drop off—and more of them begin to snore than just Sister Adele, for instance Sister Stephanie, at a pitch and rhythm completely dissonant with Sister Adele’s more modest production—her mind remains stubbornly stimulated and the physical discomfort becomes impossible to ignore. Sister Sebastienne has no choice but to leave her warm bed and face the clammy cold and descend the rickety stairs to the privy.

She rushes through the cloister, which, in the thick, winter fog is impenetrably dark. The only trace of light is the faint glow that strikes the Oratory’s few panes of stained glass from whatever candles may be lit within. The seat of the privy feels even colder on the bare skin of her buttocks than the open air of the cloisters on her face; but of course it is not so cold yet to make resort to a chamber pot necessary (chamber pots being a luxury restricted to the ill in all but the bitterest of seasons). Sometimes when returning from the privy, Sister Sebastienne pauses in the cloisters to look up at the stars. Not so this night, so overcast, so chilly, so moist. And yet something, some sound, perhaps, makes her stop. For several seconds she stands motionless, holding her breath. Then yes, a noise comes to her borne on the dense, damp air. Cries, perhaps, or whispers, or maybe even murmuring…

Sister Sebastienne thinks of the Abbess, often praying long into the night, on her knees in the Oratory.

What she hears does not sound like praying.

Sister Sebastienne hesitates until a great cry, something between a sigh and a scream, penetrates the fog. The sister must know, she must know, she must know if it is the Abbess…grieving secretly.

Seeming so radiant and happy, when all along she is mourning in secret…

Sister Sebastienne creeps soundlessly and precisely through the choir. No passage is as familiar to her as this one, though without a sister going before her and another following it feels larger and alien. When she reaches the nave, she stands silently in the darkness that makes her invisible. She stares, but does not understand what she sees. A man, naked, is standing near a brazier of glowing coals, set only a foot or so from the tall, thick candle that is always kept burning at the foot of the Master’s tomb.

Sister Sebastienne hears the Abbess say, “As I wrote to you years ago, nothing is less under our control than the heart.” Sister Sebastienne looks around for the Abbess, and then realizes that that lady is lying—also naked!—on her back, on the tomb itself, her skin nearly as colorless as the marble, only tinged here and there with a rosy flush. A memory comes to the sister of a passage in the Master’s letters to the Abbess, a passage both vivid and icy, telling the Abbess that on her death she must be sewn naked into her shroud, as a superior’s special example of humility to her flock.

“The power of our love is plain,” the Abbess says. “That you rise from the dead, with your manhood intact, itself always rising to greet me, to claim me, to take me, is proof enough! This miracle of the flesh is your gift to me. And yet you never cease trying to deny it! That you should come to me like this, so perfectly—as it is written, And the dead shall be raised—incorruptible! And the maimed made whole!”

As she speaks, the Abbess rolls gracefully off the tomb to her feet—her breasts, the sister sees, full and firm as one never imagines of a nun’s—then moves swiftly to kneel before the man, twining her arms around his waist, pressing her head against his round, hairy belly, stroking him boldly, passionately, possessively.

“This is blasphemy, blasphemy,” the man says angrily. “All the worse that I myself taught you to blaspheme. This madness must end! You keep my soul from purgatory and would drag me to hell with you! All your talk of miracles mocks God! ”

Sister Sebastienne is astounded. This is the Master? But she saw him once, briefly, when she was a novice. He was emaciated, gray, ill—nothing like this full-fleshed, vital man! She wonders, irrelevantly, whether he had been sewn naked into his shroud, having once been an abbot himself.

The Abbess’s voice is soft but exultant. “You are my God! You made yourself my God. I worshiped you! I still worship you, and will always do. And so I do not mock God—not my God. Though maybe yours—which is nothing to me.”

The Master’s voice grows hoarse. “It is said, truly, that there is nothing so monstrous as a woman’s lust! What you do, what you are, is monstrous. Renounce this, I command you! And release me from your monstrous will! ”

The Abbess rocks back on her heels and looks up into his face. Sister Sebastienne, heart pounding, glimpses the Master’s member, engorged, ruby-eyed, trembling. A wave of heat flows over her. She feels as though she is suffocating.

“Mon coeur, mon coeur,” the Abbess says. Her voice, sweet and low, is a tender murmuring, relentless and wholly without gentleness. She laughs softly and strokes the Master’s member. “When you renounce this,” she says, “when you renounce this miracle of the flesh.”

The Master groans and sinks to his knees. He takes the Abbess’s face between his hands. “If you love me, obey me,” he says, his hoarse voice breaking with emotion.

The Abbess places many and many kisses on his face. The moist, sucking sound of them thrills the sister. The Abbess sighs. “Though I’m no Briseis, I’ve always obeyed you even when I knew it was wrong. When I first gave myself to you, all the times I blasphemed with you, when I married you, when I took the veil, when I kept silent about what you from the beginning called my ‘old complaint’—always I obeyed you, to keep your love. I told you, and you knew it, that I would do anything to keep your love, give up anything, even the hope of salvation. And now you would have me obey you, to fling that love away? ” The Abbess embraces the Master and rains even more kisses on his neck and eyes, his cheeks and lips. “Give up a love that has triumphed over the grave? Never, and never, and never! You are physically as you were the day you walked into my uncle’s house. Our bodies are of an age now, my dearest. When I weary of love as you did, ask me then, my darling. Now love me again, I command you, before the bell is rung for Matins.”

In the Oratory’s nighttime silence that the sister has always thought of as God’s, in the shimmering pool of light cast by the great, thick candle, the Abbess’s fingers, tongue and lips draw great gasps and cries from the Master. It is the Master who obeys the Abbess, not the Abbess him, speaking words the sister knows only from the fabliaux she heard as a child in her father’s Hall, overpowering the Abbess with embraces fiercer and wilder than any act of love the sister has dared to imagine, until at long last the Abbess, crying out, impales herself on his member.

Sister Sebastienne creeps soundlessly back to the dormitory. Her teeth are chattering, her knees trembling, but her private places are thrilled and moist, burning with an intensity she had not known possible. What she saw cannot be, she is certain. It must be that the meat and wine have given her this lewd, wanton vision, sending her imagination to places it has never before visited. So vivid, yes, so real, but surely impossible…

13.

Carefully, lovingly, Sister Sebastienne copies out the first couplet of her carmen onto the smooth, clean vellum a lay sister prepared for her. Perlegi vestram studiosa indagine cartam, Et tetigi nuda carmina vestra manu—“I read your letter with embracing zeal, And with your hand I have touched your naked songs.” It is a joy to write out her verses, a joy to see them written on the vellum—giving her almost as great a pleasure as she took composing them.

Sister Sebastienne glances over at the Abbess, seated at her desk, the sunlight pouring down on her head like the radiance enveloping a saint in a painting. She writes, “At last, weary, I tried to get to sleep, but love that has been wakened knows no night…” Hearing her own words in the privacy of her mind makes Sister Sebastienne’s palms tingle as though filled with the shapeliness of her soft, naked breasts. Love that has been wakened…

How much the Abbess has taught her! She may be a handmaid and hostage of God, but she knows now, in her heart, that not only are the delights of a life of study prodigious, but that the power of love surpasses that of the grave—and that of the Master himself.

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“The Abbess’s Prayers” was originally published in Dying for It, ed. Gardner Dozois (HarperPrism, 1997).