Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (22 page)

The girl’s face was flushed and expectant. The look she gave me, filled with such affection, left me weak. The dear, dear girl, so beautiful and spirited. So full of life, like a silver birch still growing, its branches stretching toward the sun, its leaves brushing heaven. Something fierce beat inside my heart. For one blinding moment, I couldn’t imagine my life without this girl and that terrified me.

“You must think long and hard about your vocation,” I told her. “This is no easy path. Besides, I fear you would disappoint your mother very much. Return with her to Stade, Richardis. You’re her only daughter. If she loses you, it might break her heart.”

“You think me unworthy of the calling? Have I displeased you?” Richardis went pale.

“Listen to me, child,” I said, fighting the tremor in my voice. “If God has truly called you, none may stand in your way. It’s your choice and yours alone. It mustn’t be forced or hurried. But
think,
my dear! Among the vows you must make are stability and fidelity to this abbey. Is this truly what you want, to live within these walls for the rest of your earthly life?” I squeezed her shoulders. “In your place, I would choose freedom.”

The girl smiled at me through her tears. “If you think the courtly life is a free one, Hildegard, you’re ignorant of it.”

She clasped her hands, glittering with gold dust, over her heart.

“The years I’ve spent here with you and Volmar and the sisters have been the happiest I’ve ever known! You yourself just said that if a religious life is
truly
my desire, then none may turn me away.”

“That’s correct,” I conceded. “But think of your poor mother.”

The girl spoke in a clear, decisive voice. “When she had no use for me, she cast me off and left me with you. But now she wants to drag me back into her world and use me as her pawn.”

How I hated standing on that battleground between mother and daughter. Not knowing what else to say, I stepped past her and gazed out on the Nahe, emerald green beneath the trees. In my silence, she took her place beside me, resting her hand on mine as I gripped the stone wall. She gazed shyly into my eyes.

“
You
are the one who truly cared for me, through good times and bad. You and Volmar and Adelheid. But
you
were there at the beginning when the rest of them didn’t know what to do with me. From the very first, you loved me for what I was.”

Not even Volmar had ever spoken to me with such fondness. My face was as hot as a brick within a kiln and my heart beat so hard that I thought she must hear it. The dear child. Was it right that she should cleave to me? What if God had sent her to me for a purpose, that my visions should be the channel for her unfolding as well as my own? Could it be that her destiny was inextricably linked with mine, this girl whom I had seen in a vision those many years ago, when I was as young as she was now? Deep inside me, pulsing light welled up in a fountain, cascading in brilliant white flame.

Regaining my self-possession, I began to admonish her on the waiting period she must undergo before entering her novitiate. She cut me short with a whoop. Dancing around the courtyard, she nearly knocked over our potted herbs before throwing her arms around me, covering me in gold.

The following year, upon July twentieth, the Feast Day of Margaret of Antioch, the abbatial church was transformed into a garden out of the Song of Solomon, the altars laden with roses of every color, their perfume mingling with the swirling incense. But that splendor faded into the background as the loveliest of brides led the procession up the nave toward the sanctuary, where Cuno and Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz awaited.

Walking behind her, bearing a lighted candle, I could not see Richardis’s face, only her cascade of black hair, loose and unbound to mark her maidenhood. Her gown of crimson damask swept the floor before my feet. Her joy seemed to illuminate the church like a thousand suns while the monks sang and her mother wept.

Wax from the dripping candle seared my fingers as she prostrated herself before the high altar during the Litany of the Saints, her body forming the shape of the cross. Under the archbishop’s gaze, I set the candle on the altar. Adalbert looked strained and ill. His men were arrayed around the chancel, my brother among them. My eyes slipped past him, for we hadn’t spoken since his last leave-taking, when he’d announced he had no choice but to abandon me to my fate at Disibodenberg. The scourge of Rorich’s betrayal still stung. Yet I could feel his eyes on me, as though he had something urgent to communicate. Was this a glimpse of the old Rorich, the one I had adored? I turned toward Richardis, who arose, her eyes radiant as she placed her hands in mine.

“Magistra,” she said. “I offer myself to God through obedience.”

Obedience.
The vow I had wrestled with all my days. Yet in her I saw no doubt, only surrender to the call. This woman of eighteen was more innocent than I had been as an eight-year-old. A shiver went up my back when I remembered how my mother had pushed me face-first into that bed of grave dirt.

Adelheid brought the wreath of white roses and lilies, which I placed on Richardis’s head as a sign of her consecrated virginity. Before the assembly, the archbishop praised Richardis, lauding her as a torch shining in the darkness, and prayed that her chastity and perfect submission might work toward redeeming the sin of Eve and womankind. With the agility of youth, Richardis plunged to her knees before him. More slowly, I knelt to her right while Adelheid knelt to her left.

“My daughter,” the archbishop said. “You have left the world and turned to God. What then do you ask?”

“The mercy of God.” Richardis’s breath touched my cheek as she held me with her sapphire eyes. “And the holy companionship of Hildegard and my sisters.”

After the monks had sung
Veni creator,
the archbishop admonished her.

“Do you, daughter, then desire to persevere in your sacred resolution?”

Tears of rapture shone like diamonds upon her face as she uttered the words of an ecstatic bride. “I do! I do!”

Adelheid removed the garland from Richardis’s head while I held out the black veil of the Benedictines, which she kissed as passionately as though it were her Bridegroom. She closed her eyes in reverence as I draped the veil over her beautiful hair. When I removed the veil, she knelt again before the archbishop, allowing him to cut off those flowing black tresses that swept down to her waist. Unable to watch, I turned away, only to see the margravine’s face glazed with tears. Along with her grief and loss, I sensed a burning pride in all her daughter might become, her illuminations the glory of Disibodenberg. My eyes locking on to hers, I made my silent promise to safeguard her daughter’s happiness.

Richardis and I then withdrew into the sacristy where I unlaced her bridal gown, its crimson tumbling to the floor in a silken swoosh. Standing before me in her shift, she looked utterly transformed, her girlish giddiness given way to dignity and devotion. Humbled, I thought to myself that her vocation was true, that she embraced the vows with her entire being. She would be saintly, everything Cuno could ever wish a nun to be.

Richardis held out her arms to receive the black tunic.

When we had returned to the church, she knelt before me as I fitted the scapular over her and then belted it over her tunic with the cincture. Biting my lip, I arranged the wimple to hide her ravaged hair and covered the wimple in the white veil of a novice. My heart caught in my throat as I handed her the lighted candle, the symbol of the light blazing inside her.

After the ceremony, highborn well-wishers thronged around Richardis, her mother, and her brother Hartwig, Archbishop of Bremen, their many voices rising in a din. How Richardis glowed, one arm linked with Hartwig’s as she smiled at him, the brother who had been her childhood hero, as Rorich had once been mine.

Turning away from the festivities, I walked alone in the cloister garden, my thoughts clouded, wondering if one day Richardis would find this life too stifling. She would never see her North Sea again.

The sound of footsteps caught me by surprise. I swung around to find that Rorich had followed me.

Mumbling a formal greeting, I made a reverence to him, as though he were any other visiting cathedral canon and not my brother. There was a broken place inside me where my love for him used to dwell.

“Sister,” he said, “you bring honor to your abbey in gaining so promising a novice.”

The emptiness of his words grated on me.

“Indeed, I fear the abbey, and not Richardis, has the better end of the bargain,” I said. “Her dowry is even greater than the holy Jutta’s.”

Only then did I observe how unwell my brother looked. Rorich had dwindled, his cheek bones protruding, his eyes shadowed, his hair thin and gray. There was something dead and dull in his eyes. What had he suffered, my brother, who had once raced through the forest, beating down a path for me to follow?

“You must take better care of the tabernacle of your soul,” I told him. “Does the archbishop never feed you? Drink beer. That will put some color in your face.”

“Hildegard,” he said, ignoring my advice, “there is so much talk of you in Mainz that the archbishop wonders if you seek to steal away Jutta’s flame.”

With a sigh, I raised my face to the clouds chasing each other across the blue vault of heaven.

“I cannot touch Jutta’s saintliness. I seek nothing but to follow God’s command to write of my visions.”

“But is it truly God’s glory you serve?” my brother asked, a pale sweat blooming on his brow. “Or your own?”

A wave of white-hot anger shook me. How dare he speak to me this way? He who had every benefit of an education in the seven liberal arts, who ate at the archbishop’s table and lived in his palace. How dare he forbid me my humble writing, my one hope to offer some gift to God that would outlive my short existence?

“What glory do you think I could hope to find in Disibodenberg?” I asked him, unable to disguise my rage.

“Hildegard.” He reached for my hand, but I backed away out of his reach. “I’ve done my best to defend your reputation. But if you keep making a spectacle of yourself, I won’t be able to protect you.”

“Protect me from
what?
”

“If you don’t take care, the talk of you will wend its way to Rome.”

A laugh burst from my lips, as ugly and jarring as if I had broken wind. “You would have me believe that the men in Rome will trouble themselves over one lowly nun?”

“It’s because you write,” he said, an edge of desperation creeping into his voice. “Everyone knows that certain women are gifted with prophecy and foresight—even the ancients knew this. But they do not write books! Once you put your visions to parchment along with your name, some in the Church might find wickedness in them. Or even dispute that your visions come from God.”

“Are you saying my visions come from Satan?” I stared at him in such contempt that he held his hand over his eyes.

“I don’t. Others might. Hildegard, let this Brother Volmar pretend he is the author of your book. That would attract less attention.”

“And let him risk his reputation so that I might keep mine safe? A fine reward for his friendship.”

Rorich clasped my arm, his fingers burning through my sleeve. “All those years ago, when I tried to help you and you chose to stay. You never told me why. It was for the oblates, wasn’t it? You put their welfare above your own.”

I nodded, wondering why he should speak of this now.

“I could never have made such a sacrifice,” he said, still gripping my arm as though I might give him strength. “Of the two of us, you’re the better one, my sister. The most loving and courageous. I’m just one of Adalbert’s underlings, but you are as brilliant as the evening star. Just be careful, I beg you. Tall trees are the first to go down in the storm.”

Tears pricked at the back of my eyes to hear the tenderness behind his words. In the last moment before the bells rang for Sext, I wrapped my arms around my brother.

Rorich spoke the truth. By this time, I had become something of a local legend, as Jutta had been before me. Cuno, of course, chafed under the attention I drew to our abbey. What if it proved he harbored a heretic? But if he was tempted to silence me, he was also tempted by the pilgrims’ coins and by the new novices, drawn by my budding fame. My dead sister Roswithia’s daughter Hiltrud and a young girl named Verena enriched Disibodenberg with their dowries and so forced Cuno’s hand. Although Abbot Cuno and Abbot Adilhum before him had never intended this to be a double monastery, Cuno reluctantly gave permission for two new rooms to be added to our nunnery.

T
HREE YEARS PASSED,
during which time Richardis, Verena, and Hiltrud made their final vows as ordained nuns. Two further novices, Sibillia and Margarethe, came to join us. Meanwhile,
Scivias
grew into a great stack of pages.

The outermost room of our cramped nunnery with its large window had become our private scriptorium, the panes of horn now replaced with glass to allow the fullest flood of light. Outside the open door, the courtyard hummed with bees greedy for the nectar of those flowering herbs, their perfume holier to me than frankincense.

Adelheid sat at her desk, copying a text of Aristotle, while I sat with Richardis and Volmar. In the next room, its door open to let in the light and air, Verena and Hiltrud embroidered while Guda taught the new novices to play the psaltery, using the melodies I had composed for them. Their music provided the counterpoint to our studies. With the young women to guide and nurture, Guda had finally found her happiness, doting on those girls as though they were her daughters.

As I described my visions, Volmar made notations on his wax tablet while Richardis, now twenty-one, sketched on hers. To my joy, she didn’t appear to regret her vows, but seemed to rejoice in this life. That I would be blessed with so dear a companion! Though my youth had been harsh, these later years had brought me gladness and true friendship. Indeed, everything in my little world seemed right and good, everything flowing, as the purest waters flow from their source high in the Alps before joining the springs and brooks that feed the mighty Rhine.
For every thing there is a season.
And this was the late blossoming of my life when I unfolded like an autumn crocus.