Chapter 23
Elsebeth
As I watch Ursula run into the convent, I do something decidedly sinful.
I curse.
I was taught that God knows better than I what is good for me, for all humans are ignorant and sinful. No matter how bad the things are that God sends our way, they’re for our betterment, even if we cannot see that, so we must try and submit with gratitude and grace.
But I am neither grateful nor graceful, so I curse, and I spit, for I have always found anger easier to bear than despair.
When I am done, I follow Ursula inside.
I find her on the threshold of what I think must be the infirmary, hands at her mouth as if to keep in a scream.
Inside are the bodies of her sisters.
Someone has laid them out; their hands are folded around their rosaries, and their jaws have been bound to keep them from gaping open.
They are all dried up and wizened like the apples my family and I would put on the windowsill to preserve them so we could eat them during the barren winter months.
On their faces and at their throats, they have black marks as large as eggs, and just as round and bulging.
There’s only one sickness I know that drapes a necklace of big black beads around its victims’ necks.
The plague.
I am not afeared to sicken with it, for I had it as a child and survived, but I know not whether Ursula has, so I move a little in front of her, ready to grab her if she should move closer to them.
Once she is calmer, and I can leave her alone again without fear, I shall catch a frog for her, kill it, and rub it on one of those plague spots, and then I shall put it on a bit of string and make her wear it around her neck so that it rests between her breasts.
It’s what the gravedigger in our village swore by, and he didn’t catch the plague when it sickened me, nor when it burned through Bavaria some years later and took my mother and grandmother.
For now, it’s best I stay close to her. Grief is its own kind of madness, and there’s no saying what we do when we catch it.
Ursula has dropped her hands, though what comes out of her mouth is no scream, but a whisper.
I lean in close to catch the words. “One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three…” she mutters, almost as if she’s compelled to it, like Nachzehrer are when you spill seeds, needles, or other small things at their feet.
I ask, “What are you counting?”
“The bodies. There are six of them, but there should be seven. We left seven sisters behind. That means one of them is still alive,” she gasps.
I feel as if I have gulped down a glass of ice water, all cold and sick.
I say with as much kindness as I can, “Just because we’re missing one body doesn’t mean she’s still living.
Please, Ursula, my little love, you mustn’t hope.
” It feels awfully cruel to speak to her so, but it’s better that she expects nothing, for hope can kill as surely as a sword.
But it’s too late already. Hope has possessed her, drawing the blood to her cheeks, making her eyes glitter all hard and brittle like glass. “One of my sisters is still alive. I can feel it, like an ache, in here,” she says and presses her hand to her breast.
I feel an ache there, too, but it’s for a different reason. “If she was alive, why didn’t she call out to us?” ask I.
“Maybe she’s sick. Maybe she hasn’t heard us. Maybe she’s frightened and is hiding. She doesn’t know you, and I am dressed as a laywoman. Or maybe she has left this place and is traveling to join Reverend Mother Regina.”
I want to tell Ursula that I don’t think that her fellow nun has gone away, for I don’t think any Christian, be they Calvinist, Lutheran, or papist, would leave someone to rot in the open air if they could help it, just like we didn’t do that with the Aufhocker and his family, but I can already sense that Ursula won’t believe me.
We’ll just end up talking in circles, so I say, “Let us look for her then.”
We decide to split up. It’s faster that way; if there’s one thing we never have enough of, it’s time.
Finding the first six nuns was easy. All I had to do was follow the open doors and then my nose; there’s a gentle stink to them, though mayhap it’s more their nightgowns and bedclothes that reek, having soaked up the sweat, piss, and other fluids that flow freely in both sickness and death.
I decide to go to the graveyard first. If there’s a fresh grave, we will know where the seventh sister has gone. If not, then we must look for her in every room, of which there are many.
The convent frightens me. I suppose it’s partly because I know it’s a den of papists, and that childhood fear is hard to shake, but there’s something else also, something in the air, something still and heavy.
Mayhap this place is haunted.
Ursula spent most of her life behind these walls of cool stone.
Was she often scared here, I wonder? Mayhap it’s different when there are nuns everywhere and you can be comforted by the sound of their slippers, the swish of their habits, and their soft breathing.
Indeed, as a girl, I sometimes thought secretly how nice it must be to become a nun, much better than marrying and having babies until you die or dry up, only Calvinists don’t have nunneries.
All those women together once. Not anymore, not now. They’ve been scattered across the land like a handful of seeds thrown carelessly, some of them claimed by the earth.
Somehow, the graveyard frightens me less than the convent, even though it’s fearful in its symmetry: all these dark crosses in neat rows. The markers are all the same. If you want to visit a certain grave, I suppose you must count to find it.
I walk between the rows looking for fresh graves, of which there are none. I turn back to the convent, so large and looming, and take myself back inside. I’ve not gone far when I hear Ursula scream.
We shouldn’t have separated, I think as I begin to run, my hand seeking out the little knife at my belt and clasping it tightly.
I run down the dark hallways, my heart wild as a bucking rabbit, that minnow of fear swimming up and down my spine again.
“Where are you?” I scream, for the convent does strange things to sound, strengthening it so that my feet hitting the floor are loud as gunfire, or swallowing it and spitting it out elsewhere, making it sound as if I am not alone.
Ursula doesn’t answer me.
I turn down another hallway, find there’s only a door at the end of it, firmly closed against me.
I growl in frustration, turn on my heel, blindly dash down some other way.
“Ursula!” I scream again, but she doesn’t heed me or, more likely, hasn’t heard me over her own screaming, so awful, the sound of something inside of her breaking.
This building is a labyrinth, and I know not what way to go.
I find the bell tower only by accident, when I stop my running and lean against a door to catch my breath, and it swings inward so that I tumble inside and almost fall onto my own knife.
Ursula’s screaming is very loud here, and it seems to go on and on without pause, because the walls don’t absorb it but throw it back so that it bounces this way and that.
I run up, up, up the stairs of the bell tower, my legs burning and sweat making my shift stick to my back. When I reach the top, I find Ursula on her knees and her hands clasped as if she’s praying.
But what she’s praying to is no plaster saint, no golden crucifix studded with gems, no wooden Christ painted with bold colors as if he’s an actor on the stage.
It’s the corpse of the seventh nun.
She has hanged herself, but she has made a poor job of it.
Looking at her hands, which are all bloody, I think she must’ve choked to death slowly.
Her face is all black. The tongue is swollen, as are her lips.
Her eyes have gone cloudy and are bulging something fierce, as if they’re ready to burst out of the sockets. A fly crawls over the right eyeball.
She twitches.
My heart leaps up my throat, and though my wild dash through this labyrinth of a convent has made me run hot, I feel all chilled now. She’s alive, I think, she’s alive she’s alive how can she be alive she’s alive…
But no. There’s a draft in here, and it makes the body swing slightly.
Ursula screams again, a shattering sound full of pain and rage.
I clap my hands over my ears, but I hear it still, and I wish I hadn’t come after her, that I hadn’t heard.
The scream goes on for a long time, until her lungs are all empty.
She’s quiet for a moment as she draws breath, then screams some more.
I put my arms around her. If I could draw out some of this hurt and feel it for her, I would.
She’s all taut, so that it is like holding on to a tree.
I hold her, I kiss her, I rock her, all these things she has done to me before to calm me, but still she sits hard and cold.
At some point, she ceases screaming. I think she has gone deep inside herself. Her eyes have that look to them.
It’s a danger, this retreating into oneself. The mind can be deep and dark enough to drown in.
“Please,” I say, “wherever you are wandering now, don’t go any further. Listen to my voice, and come back to me.”
Three times I have to beg. Then, Ursula blinks, and her eyes lose that hard, dull look as they focus on the body of the dead nun.
“Her name was Sister Junius,” Ursula whispers. Her voice is all hoarse. I heard of a man who screamed and screamed and screamed when he heard his wife had died in childbirth. He went on until something in his throat broke, and then he could never scream again.
“How can you tell it’s her?” I ask, for her face is so bloated and misshapen, I wonder if I would’ve recognized it, even if it had belonged to someone I grew up seeing every day.
Ursula points to the sandaled feet that dangle above the ground.
The nails have a strange blue color to them, and the toes are all black.
On the left foot, the two little ones are missing.
“A dog did that when she was a child,” Ursula explains.
“The wound festered, and she sickened so terribly that everyone thought she’d die.
Her parents prayed and prayed, and promised to God they would give her up to Him if only He spared her life, so when she lived, she was sent here.
She was our infirmarian, and she was training me to replace her, should she…
” Her breath hitches. She puts her face in her hands and moans, and that’s somehow worse than her screaming.
“You loved her, didn’t you?” I ask.
She doesn’t speak, and for a moment, I think she hasn’t heard my question, that she may be wandering again in her mind, but then she whispers, “Yes, I did. Of all my sisters, I loved her the most. I wasn’t supposed to.
Nuns must strive to love everyone equally, but we are only human, and so I loved her more than the others.
What she has done is unforgivable, and she shall suffer for it. ”
When Ursula looks up at me, her eyes are wet and round. “Why? Why did she do this?”
“Mayhap her mind was addled by the death of her sisters. God knows mine was when Margarethe died.” There are whole days I don’t remember, all these holes in my memory that I daren’t look into too hard for fear they’re not empty and whatever hides there will eat me alive.
That’s why I mustn’t let Ursula turn inward entirely.
Ursula takes a shaking breath, and I think she might finally cry, that she might finally let the wet fall from her eyes and let the sobs tear her apart till she feels a little better, but instead her face contorts in hatred.
She screams again, a harsh, awful sound, then jumps up and runs this way and that, smacking her hands against the walls, the floorboards, the door.
I make myself small, for there’s no telling what Ursula might do now that madness has gripped her.
Only it’s not madness after all, I realize as I sit all huddled in a corner trying not to cry, for this vale has had enough of my tears already.
Ursula is chasing after the flies that have gotten into the bell tower, drawn in no doubt by the stink of Sister Junius.
“I hate flies,” she hisses as her eyes dart around wildly looking for them.
“I hate them, I hate them, I hate them! I can’t understand why God made them.
What purpose do they serve other than to aggravate, to sully? ”
I’ve never heard the word “aggravate” before, but I can guess its meaning. “Mayhap the fly had a different purpose when in Eden,” say I. “Mayhap the devil recruited it, like he did with the snake.”
She hunts them some more, but it doesn’t take long for her rage to spend itself.
At last, grief takes over. When I draw her to me, she is no longer hard and distant as a piece of carven wood, but soft and pliant, and I think of the story my grandmother told me of an artist who couldn’t find a woman who pleased him, so he made his own out of wood, or mayhap it was stone.
The material doesn’t matter. Whatever she was made of, he loved her so well that she came alive one day, and he wedded her, and they lived together in married bliss till the end of their days.
Margarethe liked this story, but I never did.
I didn’t mislike it because it’s idolatrous to love a statue so, but because I thought a man who could find not a single woman he liked must never marry, for he must be bitter, vile, and small of mind, with a special kind of hatred in his heart.
The wife of such a man is marked for harm and hurt.
Ursula weeps for a long time. My leg goes to sleep where she leans on it, but I don’t move, for this pain is only very little compared to hers.
At last, her sobs peter out. Her face is hot, wet, and much swollen.
I fear her head must feel bruised and her eyelids cut; I know mine do after I have cried so fiercely.
I blow on her eyes to soothe them, trying not to ruffle the lashes, for the feel of an eyelash out of place is vexing at the best of times, which this is not.
Ursula blinks fast against my breath on her eyes, and some more tears slip out.
The ones from her right eye are tinged pink; I think she has burst a vessel.
I brush her tears away with my thumb. She puts her hand over my mouth to stop my blowing and locks eyes with me.
“We must get that skull back, Elsebeth, now more than ever,” she says.
I rest our heads together. “Yes,” I say, though my heart is chilled. “Yes, we must.”