In the night, Marie calls for her four most competent daughters.
The new prioress Tilde, twitchy and scrupulous, with the sweet, startled face of a dormouse. Oh how the girl loves god, hungers for god, believes in the goodness of all things with a kind of rigorous simplicity. Such knowing simplicity in this complex world takes great intelligence, Marie finds. She envies the girl, admires her.
And young eager Sister Asta, whose mind is clear and mechanical, seeing deep into the workings of things, who walks at a perilous forward tilt on her toes as if impatient to already be there, whose table manners are so atrocious it is counted a penance to sit opposite her at refectory.
And Sister Ruth, who had been a novice with Marie and whose judgment is large and fine.
Finally, Wulfhild, the lady-bailiff of the abbey, summoned out of her sleep from her house in town, where she has four daughters of her own, bright, strong little maidens, and a very fine house.
It is deep in the night when all are assembled in Marie's chambers. Marie's kitchener brings up cheese and bread and pies of fruit and good sweet wine carried over from Burgundy. With the arrival of the food, the women mind less missing their sleep.
Then Marie stands, huge, by the fire. Ruth thinks with wonder that she glows with a light that is not of fire. She tells them slowly of her vision in the fields that day, and of her plan.
Prioress Tilde bows her head in awe, there is no resistance; she is frightened of Marie, how swiftly her mind leaps and turns, and now she sees the light borrowed from the Virgin as it shines out of her superior.
In Sister Asta, the challenge of such a huge undertaking is thrilling, a puzzle to be attacked, and her small pointy face grows red with excitement, and she calculates swiftly and says that it can be done in two years, perhaps, if all hands inessential to the abbey's urgent needs are used and if they buy ten freemartins or draft horses to drag the felled branches to the burning piles.
In Sister Ruth, a great stillness of doubt takes place. She feels chilled and shivers. But then she thinks in the face of her unease of Marie as she had been a few months after she arrived as a novice: skinny rangy huge thing, silent with her sadness; how in the thirty years since that day of reckoning, the abbey has grown in its prosperity and comfort from twenty starving nuns until now there are nearly a hundred nuns and dozens of servants, and nearly as many villeinesses in their cottages with their children. And all these memories, all the weight of what the nuns owe Marie, her thirty years of control of the abbey and genius in the way she conducted the affairs of the abbey, pour through Sister Ruth. At last she thinks of the practical impossibility of the labyrinth, how nearly stupid it would seem if it were proposed by anyone else but the Virgin Mary through her firm enormous receptacle of Abbess Marie; and she at last arrives at the understanding that Marie's will is stronger than any practical impossibilities, and it will be done even if Ruth voices her objections.
She lowers her head and prays and raises it and says yes, though in a voice thick with worry when the vote is called.
Only Wulfhild resists the abbess. Twelve years now the abbey's bailiffess, in her strange leather tunic and skirt, shining with the tallow she rubs on to make them impervious to the weather. She is a dark-haired, sunbrowned woman who gives the impression of boiling turmoil held in check by willpower alone, smaller than Marie but like Marie holding a kind of natural authority in her shoulders thrown back. When she frowns, the real beauty of her high cheekbones and long lashes becomes a sudden grimness. It is this Wulfhild, with a strong spine to her, who now stands and tells the abbess no.
This, she says, is an insane plan. It is destined for failure.
Marie blinks slowly and the other women in the room hold their breath. The abbess repeats no, without emotion.
Wulfhild says that they have just recently saved enough for the abbess house, she herself has already had the workers begin the quarrying in the pits where all the abbey stone is cut, it is senseless to stop now. It will take ten more years to save enough all over again.
Marie asks very quietly if Wulfhild does not love her.
Wulfhild says she loves her so much that she dares to tell Marie when she is making a mistake and that not all even in this room can boast of such honesty when Marie puts on her murderess face, which she is wearing right now. But the abbess doesn't scare her, Wulfhild.
It is clear by the rapid pulse twitching in Wulfhild's neck that the abbess does in fact scare Wulfhild.
The silence stretches on and it is horrid.
In a voice so soft that all the women lean forward to hear, Marie says that when Wulfhild speaks, she speaks in the voice of Marie's own authority, which she has only lent to the bailiffess. But Marie herself speaks with the authority of the Virgin Mary who has bestowed upon her a great vision that very day.
Surely, she says, Wulfhild would not dare to contradict the Virgin Mary.
And so Wulfhild's resistance is overrun. She sighs. She adjusts. With burning eyes she bends over the table where Asta has already in excitement begun sketching her plans.
Outside the infirmary, the three ancient nuns are set out in the sun. One afflicted, one brainless, one who slides through time.
Estrid had died in her sleep, and has been replaced with Amphelisa, who stepped over a pair of copulating snakes and was cursed with a stroke in punishment; half of her body is set in stone and she struggles to speak.
Duvelina, who has the purest blood of any nun, of the greatest family in France, was born with a handful of words in her, a sly smile, a face as though she is squinting into a constant high wind.
And Wevua, who is becoming even more savage for being unmoored in time.
Prioress Tilde, run off her feet, has given them peas to shell, for now that the forests are full of the sound of breaking trees, the shouts of nuns, every hand must work, there is no leisure even for the aged and ill.
Wevua complains that since they started building the labyrinth, the dortoir stinks of sweat. Impossible to breathe enough to sleep. And nothing is clean anymore. The linens are atrocious. The refectory floor full of mud.
Amphelisa says with her slurry tongue that it is very hard with so few left to work here at the abbey. Poor Tilde.
They stop shelling for a moment to watch Prioress Tilde's headcloths flitting in the windows. The prioress was left with only twelve servants and nuns to do the work of the whole abbey, she weeps as she churns butter, she weeps as she runs to pull the bread from the ovens, she has succumbed in despair to letting the weeds take over the garden.
Duvelina bows her head. Because of her simplicity, she is perhaps the most perfectly faithful nun of all, the one with goodness shot through her, cloudless. She begins to shell peas remarkably fast, her hands blur, she is quite excellent at shelling peas.
Amphelisa says the word child, meaning how awful that the child oblate died yesterday, standing in the path of a falling oak. Just that morning was the funeral. Amphelisa still can smell the sap of lilies her good hand picked to lay on the body in its shroud.
Wevua snorts. She tells the others that all child oblates who are sent here die. What can one expect. Starvation everywhere. So much death. And that stupid servant eating a root that looked like a carrot but was not and frothing to death. Wevua's poor beautiful sisters going blue choking on their lungs, what horror. She herself dug their graves. The cold February rain. Her hands bloody. Wevua opens her hands and looks at her palms. She looks affronted to find her hands suddenly quite old.
With this gesture, Amphelisa knows Wevua has gone back to the starving time before Marie took the abbey in hand, a few years before she herself came to the abbey a novice of sixteen. She asks Wevua's opinion of the new prioress Marie, curious to know how Marie had been, so long ago.
Wevua scoffs and says that the new prioress Marie is a nothing. Weak. Still a child in her massive body. Barely knows even the prayers all Christian children know. It's shocking. Raised a heathen. True she took the cross as a child crusader but gave up her vows in frailty to come home without ever seeing Jerusalem. Failed crusader; worse even than those who went to Outremer only to enrich themselves. Wevua hears the girl Marie speak aloud in her dreams sometimes. At court she had a great love, it appears. The girl still murmurs for her love. Some nights Wevua wakes to find Marie's bed empty, who knows where she goes. Wevua predicts she will die soon of a broken heart. Good, she says. To let an unbeliever like her be a prioress of a community of holy virgins is a scandal, a sin.
Half of Amphelisa's mouth raises in a smile. Time has proved just how Wevua is wrong.
Wevua says reluctantly that still, the girl does learn quickly. Sing an antiphon once through and she has it by heart. But Wevua strongly believes Marie should never take the veil for, it is clear, she does not love god.
And Amphelisa laughs aloud at the thought of the abbess being anything less than radiant with holiness. Then she reminds herself in her head that they are all sinners, and none are perfect, even Mother Marie.
Prioress Tilde flies down the garden path, panting, crying out from a distance to ask if all the peas have been shelled yet, then nearly screaming when she sees the basket still half full. She pleads for her sisters to work faster and runs away.
Duvelina's nose almost touches the peas in her lap, she shells so hard.
The three nuns are silent while they finish; and they see Tilde darting to the chapel where she herself rings the bells for None. Wevua stands, takes the basket of peas for evening refectory under one arm and Amphelisa on the other, and carries both to the chapel. Her mind is slippery in time but her body is still strong, despite her crushed foot. Duvelina hums shuffling behind. At the door, Wevua leaves Amphelisa but carries the peas inside. Amphelisa waits, leaning on the warm stone. Wevua comes out and puts the basket of peas down on the ground and picks Amphelisa up and carries her in to her bench.
There are so few nuns left behind to sing None; the rest are in the chapel of the forest, all that sawdust and smoke and birdsong and sweat. There is Prioress Tilde, the three ancient nuns, Goda who is caring for the animals singlehandedly. Infirmatrix Nest returns to fetch some blister salve and bandages to the forest and she sits down impatiently to wait through the divine office. The light falls gently through the windows on the mostly empty wooden benches.
Prioress Tilde leads the service in the absence of the cantrix.