Silence stretched between us, and it was not the familiar, companionable silence of our early days; rather, it was tinged with a sadness I had not known since the night my parents had left me at St. Disibod. It began to fill the corners of the workshop with premature darkness, even though the sun was still high in the sky.
Volmar’s face was drawn, and his fingers squeezed the wine cup so hard his knuckles had gone white. “I know you want things that other women don’t care about,” he said at length, “but there is only so much you can achieve in this place.” He made a motion with his hand to encompass the workshop and the abbey.
“Even at St. Disibod, monastic rules give women more freedom that the obligations of marriage,” I countered.
“The prior nearly succeeded in enclosing you already. I heard him say to Brother Fulbert that it is an outrageous violation of nature for women to pursue activities of the intellect.” He paused to let it sink in—Fulbert was the abbey librarian. “Do you expect it to get better when you have taken the veil, or when Abbot Kuno is no longer at the helm?”
He was right. Everybody knew that Bother Wigbert brought me books from the library, and as long as Kuno was alive, my access would be assured. But afterwards? I had no idea, and I preferred not to contemplate it. “I am needed in the infirmary,” I said instead, feeling on firmer ground. “My skills will be enough to grant me sufficient liberty.”
“They will never give you what you want.” He shook his head. “You will be an assistant, a herbalist, always at risk of being replaced by the first monk who comes along with any medical training. They will never call you a physician, even though that is what you are.” Despite everything, indignation colored his final words, and I felt the familiar comfort of having him on my side. Would I be able to do without it?
Suddenly, the notion of leaving the abbey, of sharing my life with Volmar on our own terms, stood in my mind as a possibility. I would be a doctor, I would write, I would not stay at home to supervise cooks and maids. And he would accept it. But even as I let myself entertain this fleeting fantasy, I knew that it would not work. The world would not allow it.
“My place is here.” I said, and each word was like a knife thrust into my own heart.
Volmar lowered his head. When he lifted it again, I saw acceptance in his face but also deep pain. It was all I could do to stop myself from embracing him, from holding on to him for a little longer. “I am sorry,” I said, my words distorted by a sob I could not suppress. “I really am.” I covered my mouth, feeling the wetness on my face work its way between my fingers.
He rose from the table. “I should go.”
I nodded, unable to speak.
A moment later I listened to his footsteps outside. When they faded, a silence that had an awful finality to it fell on me with a crushing weight. Unable to bear it, I ran outside and followed Volmar, but when I arrived at the crossroad outside the infirmary, something stopped me again. I watched his lithe figure until it disappeared through the arched doors of the church.
Then I turned and pressed my palms to my eyes, pausing one more moment before I returned to my duty—and my truest calling.
22
June 1123
I became ill again. As the pain pierced me to my core, a vision of the Church as a great nourishing body, a nursery and a refuge, stood before my mind’s eye. I still wanted to enter the consecrated state but was forced to acknowledge that it was not my only desire, and each day threatened to take me before Sister Jutta to announce my decision to leave the convent for a different life. When my headaches finally subsided, it was in St. Augustine, ironically, that I found solace, rereading the account of his own struggle against temptation.
I also began to compile my notes into a medical guidebook. I first sat down to it the week before I was due to take my vows, during one of those sleepless nights when my resolve seemed to be at its weakest.
My hand moved quickly, the pent-up emotions finding a channel at last.
“Et ut mundus in prosperitate est, cum elementa bene et ordinate officia sua exercent sic etiam, cum elementa ordinate in homine operantur, eum conservant et sanum reddunt.”
As the earth prospers when the four elements exercise their offices properly, so when they work properly in a person, they preserve and return him to health.
The soft scratch of the quill on the parchment, reassuring and familiar, quieted my mind, and a sense of clarity descended on me.
I wrote for hours until the sky blushed pink with the first hint of dawn. I put the sheets aside and went out into the courtyard to find the disk of the sun, still tinged with the pale red of the early morning, rising above the eastern wall of the convent to the trill of a nightingale, a lonesome fanfare. In that moment, I longed to have Volmar with me to welcome the new day.
If I took the vows, that would never happen, and right then it seemed an unfathomable loss. What if this was not a temptation but a gift, and I was refusing it? Was I any different from Jutta squandering her health, another divine blessing?
I stood there as the battle of two contradictory elements inside me—fire and earth, choler and melancholy—rendered me miserable. I was being forced to question everything for which I had strived and in which I believed, and I had nobody to share that burden with me. If Griselda had not left, I would have someone to confide
