Women in the Wall by O'Faolain Julia

Author:O'Faolain, Julia [O'Faolain, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571281541
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2011-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Agnes threw herself into her work as if she were throwing herself away. She had slipped once into the arms of human tenderness and they had not been reliable. She hoped the thing would not recur, avoided seeing the child, listened only reluctantly to Fridovigia’s accounts of how it was doing and half hoped it might die. What future had it at best? It was a girl: Ingunda. She had not chosen the name. Fridovigia had. The old woman’s starved motherliness fastened on it, leaving Agnes herself to a cold peace.

She let the old woman take all the clothes, food, vessels and remedies she chose from the convent store. It was the least the family who were raising Ingunda could expect and, being poor, their right to convent charity was unassailable. Agnes was relieved at being prevented by the Rule of her cloister from visiting them and did not encourage Fridovigia to bring the child to her. Here too the Rule alleviated responsibility. Children were not allowed inside the convent walls until they were seven and then only if they were expected to become nuns.

*

[A.D. 574]

Once, however, when Ingunda was four and another civil war had sent the forces of King Chilperic’s son, Theudebert, to gut areas around and even inside the city of Poiters, she judged it humane to permit convent serfs to come for refuge within the cloister. Among them was Ingunda’s foster-family.

While trestle tables were being set up to feed the refugees, Fridovigia caught Agnes’s elbow, drew her forcefully towards a gaggle of children and, picking up one blackberry-eyed, dirty-faced little girl, whispered:

“Look at her. Isn’t she a beauty? The spitting image of …” Fridovigia’s gaps and pauses could be more intrusive than speech. She gave this one its due, then: “I make sure she gets her share. She’s well fed, as you see. She knows me, don’t you pet? Don’t you know old Fridovigia?” Wagging her ecstatic old head and dodging mirthfully back and forth behind Agnes’s. The little girl laughed and Agnes felt a fossil hollow contract somewhere inside her.

“Yes,” she said reluctantly and with what might be fear. “She’s pretty.”

She walked off, her head swimming. She couldn’t cope with whatever she was feeling and didn’t want to know more about it. Later, when she was giving bread and pottage to the families, she found herself watching the woman who was Ingunda’s foster-mother. She was ordinary enough: a serf and the wife of a serf, strong-bodied, older-looking than she probably was. She seemed to have several other children as well as Ingunda and the little girl seemed comfortable with her. That was as much as Agnes could tell. She did not dare watch too long. Did the woman guess whose child she was raising? Fridovigia had sworn to be discreet but would have hinted at the girl’s noble blood. Her own contacts with the convent were obvious and public. Even a peasant woman could make the connection.

Agnes walked away. Fridovigia, however, was not going to let her off.

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