But my mother would have none of it. “You like the prospect of a smaller endowment,” she said accusingly. “You think that Jutta’s anchorite ways and the humbleness of her convent will allow you to pay less to secure Hildegard’s entry.”
“That is not the reason,” he protested. “Our daughter has a gift that it is our duty to nurture.” Then his tone became irritable. “But there is nothing wrong with economizing. You don’t care for it because it is not your responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of this household. But you know as well as I do that salt prices have been falling for the past four years, and we are not earning as much from the Alzey mine as we used to. Meanwhile, the costs of educating Hugo at Mainz are higher than I expected, and the girls will reach marriageable age next year . . .”
The draft was making my feet cold, so I crept back to bed to take comfort from the warmth of my siblings’ sleeping bodies. Roric turned over, and Clementia murmured softly in a dream; then all was silent again. After a while, the light in the bedchamber went out, and I lay in the dark listening to the screeching of mice in the rushes. Normally this familiar sound would have put me to sleep, but not now. My head was filled with too many thoughts.
Leaving the family home forever would be difficult. There was a chance, of course, that my mother would prevail and I would remain at Bermersheim a little longer, but it was not likely. I knew very well that when my father made up his mind, there was no changing it.
Listening to the steady breathing next to me, I was sure that I would miss Roric, although his chief entertainment those days consisted of chasing us with lizards and aiming them squarely down the collars of our frocks. I might even miss Clementia and Margaret, even though I found the pastimes that absorbed their entire attention boring. Unlike my sisters, I had no interest in sewing or embroidering amid giggly, half-whispered conversations about neighborhood weddings, and I was mystified as to how the ability to make one’s chain stitch even and round would help attract a good husband. Instead—to their unending astonishment—I asked for reading lessons from our mother’s Book of Hours or helped in the vegetable garden, planting and weeding alongside the kitchen servants, heedless of the warnings that I would end up tanned like a peasant.
What I would miss most was the forest surrounding Bermersheim—full of ancient oaks and chestnuts and quivering with the droning of bumblebees, the song of the thrush, and the cuckoo’s calls on warm summer afternoons—and also the times when I would climb to our nurse’s loft to watch her sort and mix bunches of dried herbs for use in drafts or ointments.
Uda was the niece of a healing woman who lived in the woods outside the village and from whom she had learned the best times to pick leaves and roots so they were swelled with juices at the height of their curative powers. Uda taught me to love and respect herbs, and it was in the heady atmosphere of her chamber, warm and rich scented, that I had first begun to marvel at the unseen power that seemed to connect all things in nature, nourishing and sustaining them. I called it viriditas after a word I had found in my mother’s small gardening book. It means weed in Latin, but also greenness, vitality, and freshness, and it is the perfect way to describe the secret, life-giving force flowing through the world. The thought of leaving my beloved forest and Uda’s loft behind filled me with deep sadness, and I felt two tears roll down my temples.
Yet the prospect was also exciting. For one thing, abbeys ran schools; my brother Hugo had gone to one at Lorsch before moving to Mainz to train for priesthood at the great cathedral there. I had always envied him and now I would study too! The thought gave me a shiver of anticipation. Also, the idea of traveling away from the village where I had been born—and which I had never left, save for one trip with my father to Bingen with a consignment of salt from Alzey—seemed appealing. The occasional visitors to Bermersheim had brought news of the latest developments in the emperor’s long-standing quarrel with the pope about who should have the right to name bishops and of the emperor’s expeditions to Italy while his dukes schemed against him at home.
These tidings filled my imagination with castles and knights like the raven-haired, dark-eyed Rudolf von Stade with a battle scar on his cheek, who was part of Count von Sponheim’s retinue, or the heroes of Uda’s bedtime stories, Siegfried and Roland, who wooed princesses and vanquished enemies.
The Abbey of St. Disibod would be no royal court, of course, but still I imagined it full of pilgrims and visitors, certainly busier than the sleepy valley of Bermersheim with its ancient house and a cluster of peasant cottages hugging the small parish church. When considered that way, the prospect of moving to St. Disibod was quite intriguing, in fact.
The crowing of the first rooster filled the air, and the eastern sky became a shade less dark through the shutters. Before long, the guests would be rising to take their leave and continue on to Sponheim. With the arrival of dawn, I felt the turmoil in my head subside and the heaviness of sleep descend on me at long last.
2
November 1115
We moved slowly through the quiet countryside under an overcast early morning sky, my father riding at the
