Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen Read online

  From between these two women, a third appeared, an utter stranger, and so beautiful. Crowned like the others, her long black hair swept to her waist. Her silk gown was as red as the Virgin’s beating heart, and her smile gleamed in tenderness as she stretched out her arms. Hildegard, seek me. My name is Caritas, Divine Love.

  Before me this trinity of women blazed, the sacred shimmering through them. My fever was broken by the vision of these three divine maidens dancing around a flowing fountain of pure grace. Three women who formed the face of God.

  We formed a pact, my girls and I, the three of us united against Jutta’s tyranny. When our magistra railed at them, they clung to me. The resignation on Jutta’s face almost made me pity her, for Trutwib’s prophecy was unfolding before her dimming eyes. Despite her every effort, Jutta had not succeeded in crushing me under her heel—Adelheid and Guda’s presence only made her slipping grasp of authority more evident. When she ordered me to cut the girls’ hair, I only pretended, the blades slicing empty air. Into Jutta’s cupped palms, I offered my own severed locks and let the children’s hair grow. Jutta had no need to cut her own hair, for her fasting had left her as bald as Methuselah.

  Our magistra turned a bitter face to me, her traitor. She who believed herself an eternal maiden, still the girl of fourteen with pearls of rain glinting in her auburn hair, was growing into a feeble crone before her time, her bones as brittle as glass. What seemed to pain her most was how Adelheid and Guda took to calling me “Mother,” the title they should have reserved for her.

  Adelheid soon mastered her letters and sums. Her appetite for knowledge seemed as ravenous as my own as she pounced on the books Volmar brought us. When she turned fourteen, the two of us were poring over the newly copied manuscript of Constantine the African’s Book of Medicine, full of the secrets of the Arabs, the most advanced physicians. We studied the mysteries of the four bodily humors and the way that blood coursed through the human body in a delta of pulsing streams.

  More adept with her needle than the stylus, Guda could sew and embroider with astonishing delicacy. As her skills waxed, her altar cloths and banners became so exquisite that our abbot gifted them to cathedral canons in Worms, Mainz, and Trier. Most of all, Guda loved to sing. By the time her first bloods came, her voice had grown so sweeping and magnificent that she outshone our magistra. Since Guda’s voice was a pure instrument of God, it would have been a sacrilege not to let it develop to its fullest beauty. So I composed canticles for her. Her voice turned my compositions into shimmering revelations.

  Years passed. My visions blazed, the visitations that made the girls withdraw to a corner while Jutta simmered in envy that the Bridegroom should appear to me and not her, his face as gentle and soothing as Volmar’s when he came bearing the books that were my consolation for all I had renounced. As I sought to mother the oblates, my own youth ebbed. A girl no longer, I was a woman growing ever older, ignored and unseen, a bush left to blossom down a dank ravine with no one to even notice that the flowering had ever occurred.

  Adilhum died, and then the brothers elected Cuno as our new abbot. His rule was more austere than Adilhum’s, more in keeping with the Benedictine ideal. Not for him the feasts of stuffed pheasant and wild swan to woo wealthy patrons. Cuno’s fasts could rival Jutta’s.

  After rising to the rank of abbot, he summoned me to compose music for the entire monastery. This was Volmar’s doing—my friend had praised my talents to highest heaven. Although Cuno had never particularly liked me, he went along with Volmar’s suggestion, perhaps in hope that my songs might coax his beloved Jutta to sing again, she who had remained silent for so long, as though her vocal cords had dried to dust.

  As my young sisters and I joined our voices in the Holy Office, singing the songs I had composed, I gazed through the screen to see Cuno’s face soften in adoration, as though he had somehow convinced himself that Guda’s voice, so soaring and angelic, was Jutta’s.

  Caritas habundat in omnia, we sang.

  Divine love abounds in all things,

  From the depths to the heights,

  Above the highest stars.

  I could lose myself in ecstasy, our voices weaving in a circle of prayer, rising like incense to touch heaven, so far away from this abyss.

  My girls grew into women, ordained nuns to whom the world outside our prison was a lost dream. The margravine visited every summer. Meanwhile, her husband died, leaving her with three sons and her only daughter to survive infancy.

  Rorich traveled to Disibodenberg when he could, but an awkwardness had come between us ever since that night those many years ago when he had offered to help me escape only to have me turn away. As the years passed, he had become increasingly important in the archbishop’s court, climbing the rungs of influence that might even lead, God willing, to his own election as bishop one day. If I had, indeed, thrown myself at his mercy that night, would Rorich have risen to these heights, I wondered, or would the infamy of our deed have dragged him down? I tried to be happy for him, to treasure what few moments were left for us to share.

  In the year 1136, I was thirty-eight. Jutta was forty-four and had no teeth left in her gums. Ora et labora, prayer and work, ruled our days in a rhythm as fixed as the seasons. Volmar brought us herbs of the forest and field that Adelheid, now thirty-two, helped me grind and mix to prepare ointments and tinctures for the monastery infirmary. Adelheid and I devoured our texts of science and learning, while Guda, now twenty-six, embroidered and sang with a voice that made the monks fall rapt inside its beauty.

  Our magistra had abandoned every employment apart from praying and fasting. More grimly determined than ever, Jutta made a spectacle of her pain to admonish the rest of us for the pleasures we took in our work and studies, our circle of friendship. We were blinded by our vanity and mortal pride, she chided. Did we not understand that this earthly life was intended to be nothing more than a vale of tears? We would do better, she warned, to mortify our bodies so that our souls might earn their passage to paradise. When Jutta slept, it was not in her bed but on her knees on splintered planks.

  I thought our life would drag on like this for eternity, the three of us bumbling around our sainted magistra while we struggled to live the most useful lives we could in the confines of that cage. But even stasis cannot last forever.

  That November a package arrived through our hatch. It seemed a plain enough gift, wrapped in rough sacking, perhaps an offering from some grateful pilgrim whose prayers had been answered. Guda pounced on the bundle, her face glowing in delight at this diversion from our dreary routine. She tore open the sacking to find a deerskin pouch.

  “It’s for you, magistra,” she called to Jutta, who swayed on her knees. “From the court of Sponheim.”

  The pouch bore Jutta’s family’s coat of arms.

  “Don’t disturb her,” I whispered.

  Her eyes squeezed shut, Jutta seemed determined to ignore us. It was as though we, her chosen companions, were flies—minor nuisances that distracted her from her holy duties.

  The mere sight of the arms of Sponheim made the old panic beat in my throat. Jutta’s mother, the countess, had died four winters ago. The only one who could have sent this was Meginhard. Though he had taken a wife, God had cursed his seed and left him without an heir. Banished from our abbey, Meginhard hadn’t sent his sister as much as a letter in more than two decades. My eyes filled at the memory of fifteen-year-old Jutta bashing her head against the stone wall and screaming that she was polluted. Did he think to torment her again after twenty-nine years?

  “What could it be?” Adelheid asked, grabbing the pouch before I could stop her. Though wise as far as book learning was concerned, she was possessed of a curiosity as fatal as Eve’s.

  “No,” I said.

  Too late. Adelheid untied the pouch’s string, spilling its contents, which hit our table with an awful clang. While Guda and I looked on, frozen and speechless, Adelheid bent to examine the triple rows of interlocking b
rass links more than a yard long. Exclaiming at how cleverly it was made, she grasped the thing, then shrieked. On each link was a sharp, inward-pointing barb, designed to pierce the skin.

  “Hildegard, what is it?” Adelheid lifted her bleeding hand to her mouth.

  “A penitent’s chain.” My heart was like lead.

  Twenty-nine years ago, Meginhard von Sponheim had smiled at me through the screen, his serpent eyes glittering, venom dripping from his every word. I’m her brother, after all. Her only living sibling. There’s a chain that binds us.

  “Get rid of it,” I hissed. Wrapping my hand in the sacking it had come in, I was about to stuff the damned thing back into its pouch and fling it back through the hatch. I’d beg Volmar to pitch it into the Nahe.

  But Jutta stood before us, her dimmed eyes open wide, as though she had just awoken from a twenty-nine-year sleep.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What has arrived from the court of Sponheim?”

  My lips trembled. My tongue turned to wood. Reaching out, she took the chain from me. I thought that once its teeth bit into her skin, she would scream and drop the thing like the poisonous snake it was. I braced myself for her tears, her terror, but she remained utterly still, not flinching or making a noise until she finally spoke.

  “Sisters, go to the courtyard and take your exercise. Leave me.”

  Later, after the three of us had stepped in from the November chill with wind-chapped faces, I scoured the anchorage. But I found no trace of the chain or the pouch and sacking it had come in.

  “Maybe she got rid of the thing,” Adelheid murmured, as though in hope that such a torturous device was too much for even Jutta to suffer.

  But the knowing pierced me like the barbs on that cold chain. While we were in the courtyard, Jutta had stripped to the skin and wrapped that evil thing round and round her wasted body before concealing it under her hair shirt. I thought of Satan coiling his serpentine body around the Tree of Life, despoiling it, turning its nourishing fruit to poison. Meginhard had meted his final humiliation upon Jutta. Her debasement was now complete.

  What a grip her brother held her in. After three decades within the impregnable fortress of the anchorage, Jutta still wasn’t free of him. From that day on, she remained as still as the grave, as though she had taken a vow of silence. She didn’t scold us, even when Adelheid and Guda chattered and laughed during the hours of enforced stillness. She just knelt on her splintered boards, leaving us to tiptoe around her while her lips moved in an inaudible stream of prayer, her eyes frozen on the invisible.

  Each morning after Prime, Abbot Cuno appeared at our screen, his fifty-year-old face alight with a young man’s love. Whispering behind their hands, my sisters called him Jutta’s suitor. But Jutta turned her back on him, as though her sins and inner turmoil had strayed even beyond his powers of absolution.

  In that sepulchral gloom, my sisters and I endured our days as best we could. Guda would not stop talking about the margravine’s upcoming visit—their godmother had promised to make a rare winter journey and visit us at Christmas. She was bringing along her youngest child and only daughter, a girl of thirteen, to meet Guda and Adelheid for the first time.

  Adelheid diverted herself by tearing through one book after another, eager to cram every scrap of knowledge into her brain. In bleak November she was particularly fond of reading herbals and bestiaries, then sharing the illuminations of plants and animals with Guda, who embroidered pomegranate and cedar, lily and dove, lion and hind on silk vestments and altar cloths.

  The hunger on my sisters’ faces ran me through like a blade. How they needed to see real trees, real birds and beasts, real meadows full of wildflowers again, or they might go mad. How could anyone go on living like this, year after year, decade after decade, without cracking apart, as Jutta was cracking before our eyes?

  The three of us were unwilling witnesses as Jutta broke, piece by piece. It was as though she had taken upon herself our despair and failings until this burden crushed her.

  In the past, she’d had plenty of spells of weakness and illness that I had nursed her through. But she’d never been as bad as this. Not only did she refuse to eat, she also refused to sip water, even though we begged her down on our knees. She wouldn’t budge from her planks, even to make use of the chamber pot. Our magistra’s skin went as dry as old bark and came off in scaly flakes. She was disintegrating, dust to dust.

  Adelheid lost her patience and tried to shove a spoonful of broth between Jutta’s lips, but Jutta remained as rigid as a marble effigy while the liquid dribbled down her chin to stain her hair shirt.

  “Leave her be,” I said, for I knew from sad experience that we’d have to wait until Jutta grew so weak that she toppled over. Only then would I be able to gather her in my arms and carry her to her bed. When her frailty overpowered her, she would weep in my embrace and finally allow me to spoon turtle soup into her mouth.

  I prayed she would give in and let us help her. But Jutta hovered for days in a realm between life and death, without even closing her eyes to sleep.

  “It’s impossible,” I told Volmar. “How can she do this? She defies every human need.”

  Volmar’s hair was beginning to thin around his tonsure, yet his eyes were as gentle as those I’d first learned to love and trust thirty years ago. My heart still swelled with my undeclared love for him, though the fiery heat of my youthful passion had mellowed into a warm glow. Through my many sorrows, Volmar had been there for me, his compassion the shining lamp that lit my way. In the secular world, we might have married. We might have had a son or daughter almost as old as Guda.

  “Cuno’s right,” he said. “Jutta’s truly a saint. She has transcended this earthly existence while still living here among us.”

  Just as I went on quietly loving him, he continued to adore his Jutta. Let him believe in his holy anchorite. Who was I to spoil his illusion?

  Since Jutta rejected our proffered cups of water and broth, since the blankets we wrapped around her just slithered off her bony frame, we could only gather around and pray while she knelt there, her whole being shuttered to us. Meanwhile, Abbot Cuno led the monks in a vigil for our holy woman. The still center of this storm, Jutta remained on her knees, propped up by an unearthly might, for seventeen days and nights.

  On the first of December, I awakened for Matins to find that our magistra had finally collapsed. Her breathing was shallow. Tears trickled from her eyes. She huddled on her side, curling into herself like a child in the womb.

  Flat on her bed, Jutta stared with spectral eyes, her skeletal hands lifted in prayer.

  “Behold,” she said in a reedy old woman’s voice, as though she had aged one hundred years since emerging from her seventeen-day trance. “My bridegroom has come to end my travails. He shall take me home at last.”

  A needle of ice stabbed at my heart. Of course, it was not Christ she spoke of. How fervently my magistra had wooed Death, her true mystic husband, these thirty years. How languorously she had drawn out their courtship, leading him on, then holding him off, delaying their coupling until this rapturous moment on the brink of consummation. We, her handmaidens, circled round Jutta, born to be a countess, then ruined by her brother and locked away. Haughty as ever, she commanded us to lay her on a mat of coarsest goat hair strewn with ashes, for she would suffer till her last breath.

  How she craved pain, how it thrilled her, weeping tears of blood. Our Savior died for the sins of the world—that was the true meaning of passion. Jutta mortified her flesh for her own self-indulgence. How she basked in this attention, how she played the saint, she who had never really grown up, she who was never anything more than a vain and broken young girl. Turning her face away from the bowl of broth I offered, she would take no food but the viaticum of communion bread and wine offered to the dying.

  Coyly, she took my hand, her bony grip already death-cold.

  “Please,” she said, assaulting me with her ghastly breath, “when m
y soul departs, don’t let them uncover my body.”

  I lowered my head without giving my word, for I knew Jutta had only said this to beg the opposite. She longed to be exposed, longed for everyone to witness how she had tortured herself with her brother’s chain.

  “Have them bury me in a place where I might be trodden upon by each passerby.”

  Not knowing how long Jutta could draw this out, I sent the others to bed while I held vigil. The most traitorous prayer welled up inside me: God, let her die so that we might live.

  What an awful wretch I was. I had spent thirty years locked away with this woman, my mentor, my sister, my magistra, my spiritual mother, only to look on with a heart of granite when her chest juddered and sank, the last air bursting from her lips with bubbles of spittle. Her eyes rolled back. It wasn’t until the stink of her emptied bowels filled the room that panic seized me.

  In a frenzy, I awakened the others. Together we raised the alarm, Guda and I banging on the church screen while Adelheid beat on the revolving hatch. Before long, the monks came running. I sank to my knees, my heart beating hard enough to bruise as the hammers and picks pummeled the bricked-up doorway.

  “And the walls of Jericho came tumbling down,” I whispered to Guda, who knelt to take my hands. “When the moment of freedom comes,” I told her, cupping her cheek with my palm, “we must act and not hesitate. Step over the threshold before they can stop you.”

  At last there was a path through the rubble, gray dawn shining through that aperture. Like a grieving widower, Cuno stumbled in to claim his beloved’s corpse.