Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen by Mary Sharratt Page B

crowned in majesty.
My name is Ecclesia, the true and hidden Church.
In her great arms, she cradled a company of consecrated virgins. They weren’t veiled, weren’t starving or frightened. They sported neither hair shirts nor scourges but were dressed like royal women, robed in crimson damask, crowned in gold, their unshorn hair flowing free. Faces alight with joy, they lifted their hands in prayer. The most beautiful girl with long black tresses smiled at me as though I were her dearest friend in all the world.
Have courage and endure. One day I shall come to you.
    As the apparition vanished, I sat bolt upright, my face burning, as though Jutta had caught me in some shameful act. My magistra regarded me with eyes as glittering and cold as frost.
     
    Awaiting my audience with the abbot, I hovered between dread and mad hope.
Let them toss me out.
I had prayed for this moment for so long. Oh, to be free of this place, free of the fog of Jutta’s pain, that poisonous vapor I was forced to breathe every living moment. I imagined myself staggering out of the monastery gates, an outcast left to find my own way in the forest. I’d set off like a lost pilgrim until Trutwib heard my cries and took me under her protection. Trutwib was a seeress—she would know how to find me. She would teach me how a free and masterless woman could embrace God.
Let the abbot come.
I would hurl my most heinous sins at Adilhum to force his hand.
I never desired this life. I hate this place. I hate Jutta. I hate
you.
    The meeting never transpired. After another week dragged by, I understood that Jutta had thought better of the idea. Why should my magistra draw attention to my visions? Why should she take my fancies, as she called them, the least bit seriously? Perhaps she feared that if she divulged my secret to Adilhum, I might be tempted to reveal hers—that the holy Jutta was in fact no virgin.
    The only thing Jutta said to me that week was one stark sentence.
    “Trutwib is no prophet but a fool.”
    What could Jutta do with me, then? The sullen truth dawned that there was no way she could be rid of me, for like my magistra herself, I had made my vows before God. When she knelt at the screen to chant the Holy Office, she left no room for me but blocked my view into the church, my only glimpse of the outside world. Crouched behind her, I murmured my psalms in a whisper too choked to disturb her.
    I turned my face to the wall, my head swimming, my entire body gone numb. My last chance of escape had turned to dust.
I will grow old and wither and die here.
This was my living death. I was but a ghost. I had become nothing.
     
    To further escape my presence, Jutta sank even deeper into her sufferings, haunted as ever by Meginhard, whose crime remained etched on her body, racking her. When she awakened screaming from her night terrors, she beat me away if I dared to comfort her. By day, she fasted, scourged herself, moved through the anchorage rooms on her bare knees until they bled and festered, as if this could finally purge her of her brother’s stain. If she couldn’t make him vanish from this earth, she would make herself disappear, starving herself until her skin went gray and her teeth were stained brown, till her shorn hair began to fall off her scalp and down grew upon her face. Until her eyes, as huge as medallions, were her only beauty that remained.
    Stirring inside my breast, the whisper grew into a roar until I was forced to admit that I mourned the Jutta I had loved. Once, like Eve, she had been as innocent as that white cloud full of stars, but then the serpent’s poison sank into her, sickening and corrupting her. Now I could only watch, powerless to plead or help, as she grew more and more distant, shrinking deep inside herself to a place where even Volmar could no longer reach her.
     
    “If only I knew what to do,” Volmar whispered from his side of the screen.
    Over and over again, he called Jutta’s name until his voice