Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (8 page)

Muffled footsteps on the other side of the screen made me rip open the shutters and glare into Volmar’s face.

“Hildegard! You must be feeling better.”

“Did you expect to see Jutta instead? Shall I fetch her for you?”

“Don’t disturb her prayers, child.”

Child!
How that word rankled me.

“Do you like the book? I picked it out just for you.”

“For me?” I folded my arms in front of myself and glowered.
Not for her?

“Did you see the picture of Margaret of Antioch slaying the dragon? She looked so fierce and determined that she reminded me of you, little sister.”

His words fell on my bitterness like sunlight on snow, melting it clean away. I grinned at him. My favorite part of Saint Margaret’s story was when she was trapped inside the dragon’s belly and she crossed herself, causing the dragon to explode.

“Volmar, where do visions come from?”

“Holy prophecies are sent by God. Then there are delusions sent from hell, though I pray we will be delivered from such things. Why do you ask?”

“I
see
things,” I whispered, praying Jutta wouldn’t hear. “Jutta says I must confess.” In all honesty, I wondered how long I could stand to carry this burden alone.

“I’m not fit to receive your confession, Hildegard. I’m not yet ordained. Let me fetch the prior.”

“No,” I begged him. “Please. You’re the only one I trust.”

I wished the floor would open up and swallow me.

“Tell me if you must, but remember I’m only a novice and a scribe.”

“Are you my friend?” I dared to ask him.

“Absolutely.”

“Then promise not to tell a soul. Even Jutta.”

My lips to the screen, I whispered of my vision of the maiden at the center of the wheel of creation, all of life springing from her. God, on the outside of the wheel, contained her just as she contained Christ in her body.

Volmar was silent a long while. I was about to creep away in humiliation when he finally spoke.

“A powerful vision indeed for one so young. Are you sure you don’t want to tell Prior Cuno?”

“Don’t tell him, Volmar. You
promised.
”

“So I did and I’ll keep my word. But why can’t you talk to Jutta about this?”

“She’ll think I’m mad—or wicked. Do
you?
”

“No, Hildegard. Let me find you some more books. Maybe if your mind’s fully occupied, you won’t be so troubled by these things.”

I thanked him before quietly closing the shutters. Then I sank to the floor, my heart rattling sickly. Volmar possessed a heart full of kindness. He did everything in his power to help me, yet even he regarded my visions as trouble.

That Christmas Day we shared a rare feast of carp, quail, and apple cake. Bright-cheeked, Jutta spoke of the brand-new sewing needles her mother had sent her along with a letter filled with news of home. My magistra told me of every single thing that had transpired in Sponheim in her absence, yet she never once mentioned her brother.

“Did anything come from
my
mother?” I asked in a small voice.

Jutta shook her head. “Sorry, child. No.”

My tears splashed down on my half-eaten piece of carp. Mechthild—that was how I thought of her now—had truly washed her hands of me. I even wondered if Rorich still kept me in his heart.

“Come, child.” Jutta cupped my chin and raised it, smiling into my eyes. “This is no day for weeping. Tomorrow I want you to write the First Psalm in Latin. Do you think you can do that?”

Swiping at my eyes, I nodded. Mechthild had never learned to write even her own name.

That night after Compline, the golden orb came floating, bearing inside it that loving face I had beheld my first morning in the courtyard. The motherly face in the orb was different from the maiden I had glimpsed, but she was every bit as shining, as full of Living Light that flowed outward, wrapping around me until I quivered, hugging my knees to my chest.
Mother.
I wasn’t pining for the woman who had birthed me and then forsaken me; I was crying out to God. I turned to God and called her Mother, my true Mother who would cherish me as Mechthild never had.

She began to speak:
I am the supreme fiery force who kindled every living spark. I flame above the beauty of the fields. I shine in the waters. I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. With the airy wind, I quicken all things. For the air is alive in the greening and blooming. The waters flow as if alive.

V
OLMAR WAS MY SHINING
sun, my guardian angel, offering me the most precious gift of all, the outside world. He fed my undying hunger with the books that I gradually learned to read on my own without Jutta’s help. He also brought me tender young plants dug up from the forest floor, wet earth still clinging to their roots. In the spring of the year, he gifted me with seedlings of medicinal herbs. Woodruff that bloomed sweetly in a cloud of delicate white flowers. Lady’s mantle that gathered raindrops resembling liquid diamonds in her pleated leaves. Chamomile with its golden flowers that soothed the stomach. Motherwort that banished nightmares. Valerian that stank like something rotten yet had the power to quieten Jutta’s nerves when she was too overwrought to sleep.

Each plant I watered with care, shifting its pot by the hour to make the most of the sparse sunlight angling down into the anchorage courtyard. I prayed over the herbs, my voice ringing so fervently that Jutta accused me of loving those common weeds more than God. But I kept murmuring my psalms to the plants. If I couldn’t escape to the forest, I would plant this wild meadow inside our very enclosure, tend it as best I could. Such a miracle of greening unfolded before my eyes, seedlings shooting into full-fledged plants, moist and luscious, full of growing power that seemed to conquer everything empty and stale. Soon the plants outgrew their small pots, and I begged Volmar for more earth and bigger vessels, the largest he could squeeze through our hatch. How I adored the rich loamy smell of soil on my hands. How Jutta despaired of me, grubbing in the dirt like a serf. The courtyard became a lush grove with wild grapevine climbing the walls, feverfew and thyme growing between the cobbles.

Continuing my education, Jutta taught me the Latin prayers of the Divine Office and all one hundred and fifty psalms. I kept confusing
virgo
with
virga
until virgin and branch became one and the same. Almost every day the floating orbs appeared, but I had learned not to speak of them, for they were as unwelcome in the monastery as they had been in my mother’s house.

In August, only weeks away from the ninth anniversary of my birth, I made ready for the Feast of the Assumption. Dancing around my garden sanctuary, I prayed to Mary,
viridissima virga,
the greenest branch, who made my plants grow so tall and beautiful. In the floating orbs, I saw the shining maiden at the axis of a great wheel, sitting still and majestic at the center while the wheel spun around her. I smuggled precious crumbs to the courtyard. Holding them in my cupped palms as an offering, I hummed softly until a wild mourning dove flew down to peck the morsels from my hand, her feathers fanning my wrists. Part of me flew with her as she winged away into the forest. Part of me walked beneath those rustling woodland boughs and breathed that pure air, my soul blessed by so many living things.

The first summer of our captivity passed and then the second. Jutta seemed happy, or at least as content as a melancholy girl could hope to be. Her name, uttered with reverence, was on every monk’s lips. The glory of Disibodenberg, holy Jutta sat at her screen, otherworldly in her loveliness, and chanted her benedictions to the stream of pilgrims who eased the monotony of our days. Her reputation as a beauty remained undiminished, her new life as a recluse only adding to her mystique.

The magnitude of her sacrifice—interring herself alive to serve God and others through her prayers—seemed to prove that she wielded extraordinary powers and could work wonders on behalf of many, that her blessing and counsel were more potent than all the prayers and Masses offered by the monks. While men who became anchorites were usually priests or monks of many years’ standing before they made this final, irrevocable act of renunciation, female anchorites came straight from the world, pitching themselves into holy seclusion without first having had to climb the rungs of hierarchy. And so the pilgrims held us in awe as beings set apart.

Rumors spread that Jutta lived on water and air. So pure and undefiled, she was free of the shame of monthly bleeding. Pilgrims from as far away as Trier walked barefoot over hills and through forests, fording rivers and swamps to seek an audience with their holy woman. Wealthy supplicants heaped endowments on Disibodenberg to win my magistra’s good favor while the poor begged for her intercession and mercy, as though a few murmured words from her could protect them from famine and plague. Kneeling outside our screen, matrons and maidens poured out their hearts’ sorrows to Jutta as though she could cure their every malady and turn their woe to weal.

But saintliness was no easy yoke to bear. The more Jutta’s holy reputation flourished, the harder she struggled to embody it. It hardly mattered if it was Ash Wednesday or Easter Sunday—she ignored the feasts to embrace her fasts until her skin grew as translucent as the inside of a snail’s shell. Hunger lent her such a fragile, delicate grace, rarer and more refined than the ruddy glow of good health. But it left her chilled even on the most sweltering days of high summer. Clutching a blanket over her sackcloth, the holy maiden awaited her next lot of pilgrims.

Once a week Prior Cuno sought an audience with Jutta. He whispered to her in a voice so low and strangled that, as hard as I strained my ears, I couldn’t catch a word. Once, bringing Jutta a cup of water, I contrived to glimpse the prior’s face through the screen. As he gazed at my magistra, he seemed entranced—more like a lover than a monk, reminding me of the way the moon-faced village boys used to gawp at my beautiful sisters.

As I grew older, I would understand that before Jutta’s arrival, the monks of Disibodenberg had gone years on end without laying eyes on a living woman, let alone one so lovely. Even at that age, I knew without anyone telling me that Jutta was the most exquisite creature ever to grace this remote abbey: a lady of the high aristocracy who had renounced her fortune and every comfort to join the Benedictines, her crystalline voice soaring with the brothers in song. Even imprisoned in our anchorage, Jutta bloomed like a rare damask rose, her exotic fragrance inflaming every soul inside these monastery walls.

Cuno treated her with reverence, as though convinced that Jutta was indeed a living saint. My magistra’s life, I knew, followed the pattern laid out in the hagiographies. None of the celebrated virgin martyrs were born poor or ugly, but were, without exception, noble maidens of legendary beauty who had forsaken their wealth and privilege to follow God. As far as I could gather from reading the stories, no lowborn woman such as Walburga could hope to become a saint, even if she was twice as pious as Jutta von Sponheim. I pondered whether beauty, too, was a necessary ingredient. Didn’t Cuno preach that one’s outer features mirrored the inner soul, that a plain face and awkward figure betokened a coarse nature? All the more reason for me, a child born without the least gift of prettiness, to skulk deeper into the shadows.
You will never be a saint, never be anything the least bit special.
In deepest humility, I would have to resign myself to be Jutta’s handmaiden, a servant to her greater glory. Jutta was the shining pinnacle, the alabaster statue upon the pedestal.

When Countess von Sponheim visited and spoke to Jutta through the screen, my magistra shrank inside her veil, as if tales of worldly life now galled her. She no longer asked about family, old friends, or life at court, but only how her mare fared in her absence. Sometimes her voice caught when speaking of the horse she had loved so much.

After her mother retired to the guest lodgings, Jutta swept me up, hugging me tight. “On warm summer days, Silvermoon used to doze off with her head in my arms. I taught her to curtsey like a lady. She gave me kisses and took sweetmeats from my lips so delicately. She was always so good and brave on the hunt. Once, when we were cantering around a tight corner, I lost my balance and would have come off, only she slowed down so I could right myself again. She’s such a big, powerful creature, Hildegard, but so gentle. She looked after me.”

“Did your mother have any news of
my
mother?” I asked, but the answer, as always, was no.

Days and weeks, months and seasons dragged past in dull procession, but I received no visitors, not a single letter from my mother. At first I counted off a litany of spiteful excuses for Mechthild to ease the pain of that gaping silence.
She can’t write. She’s ignorant and unschooled.
But Mother could have asked her chaplain to write a letter, even a short one, a few sentences to tell me that she loved me and kept me in her thoughts. Was even this too much trouble for her?

I knew it was a sin to hate, to refuse to forgive, but the raw and hurting place inside me grew and grew until I feared it would swallow my heart. Just when I thought I would never hear another word from any of them at Bermersheim, those cold strangers whose blood I shared, who had abandoned me to these two dusty cells, a letter came from Rorich.

Ripping open the seal, I devoured his words as though they were bread. My brother’s essence filled the lonely rooms, his laughter and gibes, his smell of dusty summer leaves and healthy sweat. Two years had gone by since I’d last seen him. Now I was ten and he was twelve, only two years older than I was, and yet he no longer sounded like the boy I had known. Now he sounded older than Volmar and Jutta.

Hildegard, you must hate me for not writing earlier. Mother would not allow it. She said we must leave you in peace while you grew used to your life in seclusion. Any distractions from us would only make it harder for you and make you yearn in vain for what you could no longer have.