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why should she, who felt her greatness hot in her blood, be considered lesser because the first woman was molded from a rib and ate a fruit and thus lost lazy Eden?
Goda has the affronted air of someone who lurks in corners to hear herself
spoken ill of so that she can hold tight a grievance to suckle.
There Marie and Ursule sat at the foot of the trees, letting their thoughts dissolve to make themselves more like the roots of the trees they sat upon and erase some of what was human in them.
Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability.
heads in their dark veils bowed over their food. She imagines the cold sun slanting in through the window and lighting up the faces of a row, pearls on a string.
the Amen to the prayer.
no one is less powerful than a woman religious,
but she cannot take this seething city into her anymore, being in the proximity of so many of the far worser sex is filling her with aggression and fret. She thinks she is taking evil into her very body with each breath. So she whispers to the sainted horse who holds her eyes closed against Marie’s chest in weariness for a time; then opens them and is ready also to go.
Perhaps in loving a sister as difficult as Goda, Marie can be more sure of her own goodness.
the small lusts and the special friendships—how many feel themselves polluted with an impious kiss!—these she sends off with small penance and there is a smile in her voice and they are reassured.
And when their sadnesses weigh so heavily upon her that she cannot sleep, Marie likes to go down to the scriptorium and change the Latin of the missals and psalters into the feminine, for why not when it is meant to be heard and spoken only by women? She laughs to herself as she does it. Slashing women into the texts feels wicked. It is fun.
The winter is a sheet of parchment that the small feet of birds, of vixens, of hares, write upon.
All around, her sisters are rising, praying, baking bread, she can hear she is not alone in the world. She is terribly alone.
over these years Nest has come to understand that if you minister enough to any adult body, you will discover the frightened child hiding within it. The greater the protestations of power, the smaller the child.
she had always thought this story very wondrous stupid, that in the story if the lady is beautiful she is punished for it, when, in life, it is far more true that if a lady is made unbeautiful she is the one who is punished.
She was given everything, not least a great blessing of ugliness, and she would repeat that Marie would right now be dust and rot with the grubs crawling through her rib cage if she hadn’t been so lucky to be born so ugly. The wind flicks and flicks Cecily’s white lock against the dark wool of her headcloth. Her cheeks are flushed, she is a girl again, frank and blunt. But now over her face there slides a confusion and she says with alarm that it couldn’t be true that Marie’s eyes have grown teary; she has said nothing so severe as to make such a venerable ancient abbess cry, has she? And
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She remembers over and over a night soon after she took the abbey in hand when she woke to restlessness and went out into the thick starless black. A calf had been separated from its mother that day. Both heifer and calf had lowed all afternoon and into the night, had lowed enough to put some tenderer nuns off their feed. When Marie had gently remonstrated, Goda had snapped that separating the cow and calf was necessary unless the nuns didn’t want their milk and butter. Marie went silent because she loved her milk and butter, and because she felt personally aggrieved that milk and butter
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