“I would invite him to walk with me in the garden, and sometimes we kissed. But then my father accepted a marriage proposal from a neighbor, a childless widower over thirty years older than me with an estate adjoining our lands.” She laughed bitterly. “With this dual obstacle between us, we did not stand a chance. When rumors began to spread of our affection, my parents moved quickly to try to conclude the marriage, but I found out their plans and swore I would rather become an anchoress than spend my life with an old man I did not love. Oh, the cries that followed, the threats, the implorations!”
She laughed again, but this time there was a note of vengefulness in it that chilled me. “But I never relented, no! I asked to be taken to the convent of St. Disibod because Sister Jutta’s reputation was already spreading. At first, I enjoyed the isolation—it soothed my pain—and before I understood the true burden of the anchorite life, I had taken my vows.” In the silence that followed, her mystifying demeanor—the lack of the zeal that characterized the other anchoresses and aversion to the extremes of austerity—finally made sense to me. “But at least I had Adelheid,” she resumed before her voice faltered again. She broke into a lament, “Now she is gone and I am left alone, sealed alive in this tomb!” Her chest heaved with a series of desperate sobs.
My heart ached for her, and I could find no words to comfort her in such depths of sorrow. “I am also here,” I said gently. “If you ever need to ease your mind, don’t hesitate to come to me.”
Juliana did not respond, but I felt her calming down. Soon she was quiet and her breathing became more regular. She had succumbed to her exhaustion.
I lay awake for a long while, pondering the irony and the injustice of Adelheid’s early demise; she had had such a desire to serve God through the rigors and privations of the anchorite existence. And I regretted even more the loss of the only vocation in that convent that had joy—not sorrow or duty—at its core.
Apart from Abbot Kuno and the lay brothers who lowered the body, I was the only mourner at the funeral. Anchorites were obliterated from the world in life as everyone was in death, so it was fitting that Adelheid should embark on eternity in that way. Yet it made me sad, for she had made great sacrifices, and even if her life had been spent in seclusion it was surely worth more than a pauper’s burial.
The freshly dug earth fell onto the shroud from the lay brothers’ shovels, the dull thuds providing a melancholy counterpoint to the abbot’s recitation of the Office for the Dead.
“I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, even if he die, shall live; and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”
I repeated the lines mechanically, then watched him sprinkle holy water on the grave. After he left, I reflected on the situation in the convent; it had a magistra who was all but unable to lead the community in mourning, and the other sister was in such a fragile state that she could not be relied on for much of anything. It was a ship without a captain sailing through turbulent waters, and there would come a time, sooner or later, when that responsibility would fall on me, even though I was the most junior of the crew.
The thought scared me. It would be tough under any circumstances, but it would be a particularly lonely task at St. Disibod. And yet this was my home now, and I would do anything to save it from perishing. If called upon, I would accept the burden, then steer the ship toward calmer waters where the warmth of the sun would give us hope not just for clinging on, but for happiness along the journey.
That promise should have been a consolation to me during that woeful season of illness and death, yet I was uneasy. Beyond the low wall of the graveyard, the green of the leaves had already faded, their edges crisping with gold. Down the slope toward the Nahe, the vineyards were bare of grapes, the joys of making new wine a memory. But it would happen again next year and the year after that, and that was reassuring. So what was that doubt that was lurking in my mind?
In that moment I became aware that even as my thoughts were on the convent, my eyes kept wandering toward the monks’ cloister, to the row of windows in the western wing. I caught myself wondering if it was the refectory or the dorter, and was jolted by the realization that the only reason I wanted to know was because Volmar lived there.
Confused, my stomach twisted into a knot, I looked down at my hands and saw that my knuckles had turned white from clutching the small wooden cross he had whittled for me after Adelheid’s death. I kneeled at the edge of the grave and dropped the cross into it.
As I walked away, the ache that had been lurking in the innermost part of my head all day began creeping out and spreading its crushing fingers around it.
15
September 1120
