No wonder Father Egbert chided; it was a wonder he didn’t excommunicate. God masculine and feminine?
Adelia, who considered herself a modern thinker, was confounded by a perception of an Almighty who, in every religion she knew of, had created weak and sinful woman for man’s pleasure, human ovens in which to bake his seed. A devout Jew thanked God daily that he had not been born female. Yet this little nun was plucking the beard from God’s chin and providing Him not only with the breasts but also with the mind of a female.
It was a philosophy of most profound rebellion. But now that Adelia came to consider her, Mother Edyve was a rebel, or she would not have been prepared to flout the Church by giving space in her graveyard to the body of a king’s whore. Only independence of mind could at the same time be extending charitable thought to a queen who had brought nothing but turbulence into the abbey with her.
“Yes,” the birdlike voice went on, “we grieve for the lopsidedness of the world as the Almighty Feminine must grieve for it. Yet God’s time is not our time, we are told; an age is but a blink of an eye to one who is Alpha and Omega.”
“Ye-es.” Frowning, Adelia moved nearer and sat sideways on the chancel steps, hugging her knees, staring at the still figure in the stall.
“I have been thinking that in Eleanor we are witnessing a blink,” it said.
“Eh?”
“Yes, for the first time to my knowledge, we have a queen who has raised her voice for the dignity of women.”
“Eh?”
“Listen,” the abbess said.
The trouvère in the cloister had finished composing his song. Now he was singing it, the lovely tenor of his voice flowing into the gray chapel like honey. “Las! einssi ay de ma mort exemplaire, mais la doleur qu’il me convendra traire, douce seroit, se un tel espoir avoie…”
If the singer was dying of love, he’d chosen to set his pain to a melody as pretty as springtime. Despite herself, Adelia smiled; the combination ought to win him his lady, all right.
“…Dame, et se ja mes cuers riens entreprent, don’t mes corps ait honneur n’avancement, De vous venracom loneins que vos soie…”
So if his heart ever undertook anything that would bring him honor, it would come from the beloved, however far away she was.
The music that attended Eleanor wherever she went had, to Adelia’s indiscriminatory ear, been another of her affectations, the incipient background of a woman with every frailty ascribed to the feminine nature: vain, jealous, flighty, one who, in order to assert herself, had chosen to go to war to challenge a man greater than she was.
Yet the abbess was attending to it as if to holy script.
Attending to it with her, Adelia reconsidered. She’d dismissed the elaborate, sighing poetry of the male courtiers, their interest in dress, their perfumed curls, because she judged them by the standard of rough masculinity set by a rough male world. Was regard for gentleness and beauty decadent? Rowley, she thought, with a tearing rush of fondness, would say that it was-he loathed femininity in men; he equated his messenger’s liking for scent with the worst excesses of the Emperor Caligula.
Eleanor’s version, though, could hardly be decadence, because it was new. Adelia sat up. By God, it was new. The abbess was right; deliberately or not, the queen was carrying into the uncultured farmyard of her domains an image of women demanding respect, people to be considered and cherished for their personal value rather than as marketable goods. It demanded that men deserve women.
For a moment back there in the queen’s apartment, Eleanor had held Wolvercote up to her courtiers, not as a powerful male gaining what was his but as a brute beast dragging its prey into the forest to be gnawed.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said, almost reluctantly.
“…vous que j’aim tres loyaument…Ne sans amours, emprendre nel saroie.”
“But it’s a pretense, it’s artificial,” Adelia protested. “Love, honor, respect. When are they ever extended to everyday women? I doubt if that boy actually practices what he’s singing. It’s…it’s a pleasant hypocrisy.”
“Oh, I have a high regard for hypocrisy,” the little nun said. “It pays lip service to an ideal which must, therefore, exist. It recognizes that there is a Good. In its own way, it is a token of civilization. You don’t find hypocrisy among the beasts of the field. Nor in Lord Wolvercote.”
“What good does the Good do if it is not adhered to?”
“That is what I have been wondering,” Mother Edyve said calmly. “And I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the early Christians wondered it, too, and perhaps that Eleanor, in her fashion, has made a start by setting a brick in a foundation on which, with God’s help, our daughters’ daughters can begin to build a new and better Jerusalem.”
“Not in time for Emma,” Adelia said.
“No.”
Perhaps, Adelia thought drearily, it was only a very old woman who could look hopefully on a single brick laid in a wasteland.
They sat a while longer, listening. The singer had changed his tune and his theme. “I would hold thee naked in my arms at eve, that we might be in ecstasy, my head against thy breast…”
“That, too, is love of a sort, nevertheless,” Mother Edyve said, “and perhaps all one to our Great Parent, who made our bodies as they are.”
Adelia smiled at her, thinking of being in bed with Rowley. “I have been convinced that it is.”
“So have I, which speaks well for the men we have loved.” There was a reflective sigh. “But don’t tell Father Egbert.”
The abbess got up with difficulty and tested her legs.
Warmed, Adelia went to help her settle her cloak. “Mother,” she said on impulse, “I am afraid for Dame Dakers’s safety.”
A heavily veined little hand flapped her away; Mother Edyve had become impatient to go. “You are a busy soul, child, and I am grateful for it, but you may leave Dakers’s safety to me.”
As she hobbled out, she said something else, but the words were indistinct, something like, “After all, I have the keys to the lockup.”
By the end of that day, Adelia had changed. Perhaps it was anger at Emma Bloat’s rape. Perhaps it was anger at the attempt on Dakers’s life. Perhaps it was the courage inspired by Mother Edyve.
Whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t cower in the guesthouse anymore while murderers and abductors went unchecked.
In essence, the killer of Rosamund and Bertha had made a contract with her: Leave me alone and your child is safe.
A shameful contract. Nevertheless, she would have abided by it, taking it as a given that he would not kill again.
But he’d tossed a burning rag through an aperture as if the living woman inside was rubbish.
I can’t allow that, she told him.
She was afraid, very afraid indeed; her baby would have to be protected as no child ever had been, but she, Adelia, could not live, her daughter could not live, at the cost of other people’s deaths.
“Where you going?” Gyltha called after her.
“I’m going to ask questions.”
She found Jacques in the cloister, being taught how to play the viol by one of the troubadours. The courtiers were colonizing the place. And the nuns, she thought, are now too intimidated by everything that has happened to stop them.
She dragged the unwilling messenger away toward the almonry and sat him and herself down on a mounting block.