Hawkenlye Abbey was spectacular; both Eleanor and the Fontevraud community saw to that. The abbey church and the nuns’ house, up on top of the ridge, were designed by a French architect and built by French stonemasons; the piece de resistance of the master mason was the tympanum over the church’s main doors. In common with many of his fellow craftsmen, he requested, and was granted, permission to adopt the theme of the Last Judgement; few who gazed upon his creation remained unmoved by its power.
In the centre of the domed space sat Christ in majesty, pierced hand raised, expression a combination of sorrow and severity. The blessed ones advanced towards him on his right, the Holy Virgin Mary leading them, St Peter ushering them gently along from the rear, sun, moon and stars above them bathing them in the heavenly light of righteousness. Angels blowing trumpets played a fanfare, as if welcoming the good to the eternal reward of being in the presence of God.
On Christ’s left were the damned.
If the promised joys of heaven were not sufficient to persuade the sinful to mend their ways, then surely the picture of hell as depicted in the Hawkenlye tympanum would have done the trick. Satan’s kingdom, in the eye of the master mason, was a place of unbelievable torment, with a particular torture, chosen for its appropriateness, reserved for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride was personified by a king, naked but for his crown, being forced to walk on burning coals by two demons with pitchforks; Lust by a curvaceous woman whose breasts were being gnawed by rats whilst serpents slithered into her groin. Gluttony, rotund and fat-buttocked, was upturned into a barrel of excrement; Anger, face contorted with rage and agony, had his skull prised open and his brains sucked out by hunchbacked devils. Envy and Avarice, too busy coveting the worthless riches of others to look behind them, were on the point of being flayed alive by a quartet of demons with ropes and sharp knives in their long-taloned hands. Sloth, fast asleep on a pile of faggots, was bound by a fanged devil while another put flames to his pyre.
Tactfully, the Abbey’s founders also employed local workmen alongside the imported Frenchmen. English woodcarvers, working with sound English oak, beautified the abbey church interior with their craft, and, kept under lock and key in the Treasury, was an English-made carving in walrus ivory of the dead Christ supported by Joseph of Arimathea, said to have been a secret gift from Eleanor herself. The shrine down in the vale also received loving attention, and even the simple lodgings of the nuns and monks were made adequately comfortable.
The new abbey was to be headed by an abbess.
There was considerable opposition to this novel concept, not least from the monks in the vale. But the precedent had been set, and set, moreover, in the community at Fontevraud. Founded by the Breton reformer Robert d’Arbrissel, who, among other revolutionary ideas, believed in the supremacy of women, Fontevraud had fought for and won its right to appoint an abbess almost a hundred years previously. And d’Arbrissel had been proved right; were not women, because of their experience in raising children and running homes, far better organisers than men? Should it, then, have surprised anyone that the same skills required for a noblewoman in charge of her husband’s great estates adapted perfectly to running an abbey?
The Hawkenlye opposition did not stand much of a chance, and even that evaporated when Queen Eleanor herself paid a visit. A handful of senior nuns with the temperament and the experience to run her new abbey had been suggested to her, and she had made her choice with customary decisiveness and speed. Her first appointee was a success, so was her second. By 1184, when the need arose to select a fourth abbess, the precedent was established; Eleanor spared time from her busy schedule to return to Hawkenlye and view the shortlisted nuns, and she made her selection within minutes of meeting the successful candidate.
Helewise Warin, thirty-two years old, was as enchanted by Queen Eleanor as Eleanor was by her. From the moment of her appointment onwards, Helewise made up her mind that she would be the most efficient, most effective abbess that Hawkenlye had ever had.
This determination arose, to a large extent, from a laudable desire not to let the Queen down, not to make her, even for a moment, regret her choice.
But it also arose from Helewise’s pride.
Pride had no place in a nun, she was well aware. And was she not reminded of the penalty, every time she entered the church and looked up at the Last Judgement tympanum? But, reasoned her intellect — another quality which a nun ought to suppress, especially when it was at war with obedience and humility — I am no longer merely a nun. I am an abbess, with an immediate community of nearly a hundred sisters, fifteen monks and twenty lay brothers dependent on me, and, in addition to them, the secular population of this small but thriving little place.
If pride led to her doing the job well, Helewise concluded, then proud she would be. The good of the community would undoubtedly benefit from her resolve not to let either the Queen or herself down. And if that pride was a dirty stain on her soul which earned her prolonged aeons naked and walking on flames in purgatory, then that was a price she would just have to pay.
Perhaps some kind soul would remember her in their prayers or have a Mass or two said for her.
* * *
Josse obtained directions for Hawkenlye Abbey. They were fairly vague, but he realised as he reached the summit of the rise that they had been quite adequate; from there, he could see the tall sloping roof of the Abbey church, and from then on, it was easy.
Nearing the entrance, he looked about him. The forest crept almost up to the road on his left-hand side, but on the right, the trees and undergrowth had been cleared. Some of the land was under cultivation, some was pasture. A small flock of sheep raised nervous heads as he rode by, and he noticed a nanny goat tethered to a post, a well-grown kid running around her. In the distance, where the cleared land gave way once more to the surrounding forest, he caught sight of a huddle of dwellings, from one of which a thin spire of smoke rose up into the still morning air.
The pasture land fell away into a narrow valley, in which Josse could see the roof of a small building with a large cross rising from one end. Beside the building was another one, longer and lower. From what he had been told of the Hawkenlye community, he guessed these must be the shrine of Our Lady’s spring and the monks’ house.
He was nearing the imposing gates of the Abbey. As he drew level with the enclosing wall, a nun emerged from a small room let into a corner tower, and demanded to know his name and his business.
He was prepared for this. Nobody required to know your identity or your bona fides when you checked into an inn in a market town, but riding into a convent was different. Reaching inside his tunic, he took out the papers which King Richard’s secretary had issued. One of them bore Richard’s personal seal.
It was enough for the porteress, who bobbed a sort of curtsey and said, ‘You’ll be wanting Abbess Helewise, I shouldn’t wonder,’ at the same time pointing towards a cloistered courtyard adjacent to the great Abbey church. ‘You’ll find her in there. Get one of them to show you the way.’
Them, he realised, meant a group of three nuns gliding from the cloister in the direction of the church. Nodding his thanks to the porteress, he dismounted, and, leading his horse, approached the nuns, one of whom took his horse’s reins in a tentative and evidently reluctant hand, while another undertook to show him to the Abbess’s room.
Looking all about him while trying not to make it obvious, he followed.
His guide whispered, ‘Who shall I say?’
He told her.
Moving ahead of him with a small gesture of apology, the nun entered the courtyard under an archway, crossed the cloister and opened a door. She murmured something to the sole occupant of the room, but her voice was too quiet for Josse to make out the words. She beckoned Josse inside, then, her task completed, sidled past him and closed the door.