Matrix

In the middle of the night, Marie calls four confidantes to her apartments to discuss the vision that she had: Wulfhild, who came to the abbey as an oblate but since left it to marry and have children; Asta, who has a genius for mechanical construction; Tilde, the new prioress; and Ruth, who was a novice with Marie. Only Wulfhild challenges Marie’s plan as unrealistic, but Marie finally overrides her.

The nuns begin work on the labyrinth. The project involves most of the abbey, with only a few nuns and novices remaining behind for farming and domestic chores. Until winter drives the nuns back into the abbey, they take joy and satisfaction in their labor. They experience hardship and even a fatality, when a tree falls on an oblate, but they also share a new sense of holiness and purpose.

Marie has a second vision. She sees Eve and the Virgin Mary holding hands in the sky. She understands from her vision that these two figures, who are always presented in opposition to one another, are, in fact, united: “Thus they showed me that the war so often vaunted between them was a falsity created by the serpent to sow division and strife and unhappiness in the world” (116).

The vision also gives her a premonition that Eleanor will be visiting her soon, having been freed from her captors. When she receives word that Eleanor is arriving, she meets her at the abbey’s outbuildings in town. She sees that Eleanor has aged and lost her beauty. Eleanor tells Marie that a spy in the abbey told her about the labyrinth’s construction; she warns Marie that higher religious authorities have also heard about the labyrinth, and they are displeased. Once she leaves the following day, Marie discovers that she left her two gifts: an engraved heavy abbess’s staff and her own private matrix, or letter seal.

Once the labyrinth is completed, Marie tests it out. She rides her horse from town to the abbey one night and, at one point, nearly gets lost in the woods. She prays for deliverance and is relieved when she finds the trail again. She is left with a desire to create more fortifications for the abbey and fails to see that her constructions have already upset the delicate balance of wildlife in the woods: “What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, or badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes […]” (134).

Marie receives word that villagers are plotting against her and plan to attack the abbey. Through her network of spies in town, she learns the time and date of the attack. She and her nuns, novices, and servants set a series of elaborate traps in the woods to defend themselves.

There is a brief but bloody battle in the woods. Everyone in the opposing army either dies or is injured, while only one woman in Marie’s army is injured: a peasant mother of six. Afterwards, Marie delivers the injured members of the opposing army to the cathedral ossuary (repository of bones) for the night, intending to terrify them and teach them a lesson. She delivers the dead to their families to bury.

When she returns to the abbey, Marie learns that the injured peasant on her lands died, leaving her children motherless. Marie feels guilt, remembering the pain of losing her own mother. She tells herself that she will make the orphaned girls oblates and care for them as best she can.

Marie has a third vision. While walking in the abbey cloister, she sees a metallic tree coming out of a black hole in the ground. The flowers in the tree are women and girls. After writing down her vision, she understands it as an instruction to create a greater stone abbey. She tells her four main confidantes, and construction on the abbey begins. Wulfhild has the idea that male construction workers can help with the stonemasonry, provided they are kept apart from the women and are blindfolded when they are brought into the abbey.

A new novice named Avice is brought into the abbey. She is a distant relative of Tilde’s and has a wild reputation. Marie finds herself attracted to Avice because of her resemblance to the young Eleanor. Avice gets into constant trouble at the abbey and eventually becomes pregnant. The nuns decide that she will have her baby at the abbey and will be sent to live as a servant with a noble family once the child is born. However, both Avice and her child die during labor. They are buried in unconsecrated ground, but Marie cannot stop herself from blessing them during the burial. Many of the nuns in the abbey disapprove of this action.

The new stone abbey is finished. Marie receives a letter from Eleanor: “Her letter is an act of extreme delicacy: she writes about the abbey’s fruiting fields, how she had heard that blight was found on them” (171). Marie understands that Eleanor is alluding to the burial of Avice.

Eleanor’s son is kidnapped, and a huge ransom is demanded. The abbey must pay a part of this ransom. Eleanor goes to London to sell precious sacraments and jewels, including a ring that her grandmother gave her. She bargains shrewdly and receives enough money that some is left over for abbey improvements.

After a heavy rain, Marie and several other nuns are afflicted with miasma. Two nuns die in an infirmary, and Marie has a vision of death. She also dreams of being in a high tower that is under attack by the “four beasts of the apocalypse: the lion, the she-ox, the eagle, and the woman-faced one; all with wings and all their bodies covered in blinking staring eyes” (180). She awakens from the dream with an understanding that she and the abbey are one of seven fortresses in the world that will hold evil and apocalypse at bay.

A fire tears through the town near the abbey, killing many citizens and destroying many buildings, including several church buildings. As there are no longer priests to say mass, Marie decides that she must do so herself, against the law of the Church. While some nuns reluctantly take sacrament from her, many nuns choose to leave the abbey instead. These nuns include Goda, Tilde, and Ruth.

In her new role as priest, Marie receives confession. She recoils at the tales of abuse and sexual violence that she hears as confessor. At the same time, she feels that the ritual creates a new bond between herself and her sisters: “They cannot revolt now, she thinks. She knows too much of them” (185). As a private amusement, she changes the Latin of the sermons into the feminine: “Slashing women into the texts feels wicked. It is fun” (185).

Marie receives another warning letter from Eleanor. Eleanor tells Marie that she has heard what she is doing. She also tells her that Marie’s aunt Ursula now works as a cellatrix at the abbey where she retired. The bishop visits the abbey for a post-Lent dinner, and Marie is concerned that one of the nuns will tell him about her assuming the role of priest. However, no one does.

Eleanor is near death. Marie finds the queen more accessible in her weakened state: “Once she was radiant as the face of the sun, impossible to see; how Marie can see through her face and into her” (195). When she dies, Marie’s grief is intense and almost deranged.

A new novice comes into the abbey. She is a beautiful girl from a noble family named Sprota. She has a saintly but self-regarding air, and Marie suspects her of being a fraud and a usurper. She decides to send Sprota to care for lepers in an isolated house in town. Sprota escapes the house, and Marie believes that her family is sheltering her. Swan Neck, whose sister died of leprosy, goes to the house in Sprota’s place.

While riding out to the forest one day, Marie comes upon some marshland. Though the marshland is out of the abbey’s jurisdiction, Marie has a vision of how she might turn it into a reservoir. Wulfhild—whose husband dies, leaving her aged by grief—objects to this plan, but Marie overrides her. The reservoir is completed; however, an unknown outsider breaks its lock. The field where the abbey sheep are kept is flooded, and several sheep die. Wulfhild also dies from the effort of saving the sheep. Her four daughters mourn her while managing to find and take vengeance on the perpetrator.

Returning to the abbey from Wulfhild’s deathbed, Marie has a vision of a great stone eagle over the hills, dissolving into dust in a thunderstorm. She understands that in her effort to do good work, she was also prideful and rebellious. She has a sense of her own frailty and resolves to be more modest in her ambitions. She also has a sense of the earth’s frailty and intuits the apocalypse: “Marie suspects this fiery end would be the stone and the soil and the waters of the earth itself, through human folly and greed made too hot for it to be willing to bear any more life upon its back” (226). 

It is 1208, and England is under Pope Innocent III’s interdiction. No one is allowed to worship or to take communion, and the churches are under forced closure due to an argument between the pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Marie resolves to keep the nuns in her abbey ignorant of the interdiction, reasoning that she will better protect them by doing so. However, Tilde finds out about it by reading a letter from a church official over Marie’s shoulder. She challenges Marie about her authority to claim such a high spiritual role, but Marie ultimately prevails.

There are more deaths in the abbey. Sister Asta dies of a rat bite, and an escaping servant dies alone in the woods. Sister Gytha, a creator of wild religious murals, dies of “madness”. Marie reflects on the abbey as a refuge for souls who would otherwise be isolated: “For this community is precious, there is a place here even for the maddest, for the discarded, for the difficult, in this enclosure there is love enough here even for the most unlovable of women” (233).

One day, Marie is in her abbey apartments reading a letter about children being sent to the crusades. The letter makes her furious: “Once, she had thought a crusade the human fist of god. Now she knows it is shameful, born of arrogance and greed” (234). Sister Tilde then surprises Marie with a guest: an elderly woman who seems unfamiliar to her at first. Eventually, Marie recognizes Cecile, her former servant girl and first love. Cecile moves into Marie’s apartments.

Marie begins to weaken, afflicted with the same cancer that her mother and her grandmother had. She has a final vision of creation. She sees eggs cracked in the sky, each egg bearing some aspect of the world. She sees human beings as the final cracked egg, with the Holy Spirit breathing life into these humans “[..] like a midwife who kisses the birth from a babe’s mouth and frees the babe to breathing” (237).

She realizes that this is her last vision and that she has lost some of her will to live since Wulfhild’s and Eleanor’s deaths. One day, Cecile tells her a story about a beautiful woman who is relentlessly persecuted by men. The story irritates her, and she tells Cecile that ugly women suffer more than beautiful women do. Cecile tells Marie that she believes that it is Marie’s ugliness, as well as her unconventional family background, that inspired her to do great things.

Marie takes to her bed. She has memories of her childhood and early times in the convent. She remembers hiding with Cecile in a haystack when they were both girls, a prank that turned into a tentative sexual encounter. She also remembers consoling a cow separated from her calf when she was a young woman in the convent. She recalls that this encounter gave her a sense of selflessness, which she believes is more of an encounter with the infinite than preaching is: “Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity” (244).

As Marie dies, she has a vision of the apocalypse. She again sees the abbey as one of the last bastions against the darkness falling over the world. She understands that she can no longer protect her nuns and that she has done what she can. She has a final intimation of heaven as a gold-lit vineyard and of God as not a Holy Trinity, but a “singular |..] sole, female” (248)

During Marie’s funeral, the older nuns reminisce about how wretched the abbey was when Marie first arrived there. The younger nuns, used to a prosperous abbey, can’t imagine this and secretly doubt its truth.

Tilde prepares to take over the role of abbess. While she is praying alone in the chapel one night, she notices a light behind her. She understands the light to be Marie’s ghost. She is unnerved at first but reminds herself of Marie’s goodness as an abbess. Later, in the abbey apartments, she comes upon the book in which Marie wrote down her visions. She always secretly doubted the truth of these visions and struggles to reconcile the many sides of Marie’s nature. She ultimately decides to burn the notebook in her fireplace, fearing that Marie’s visions are heretical and might discredit the abbey.

In the convent kitchen, the cooks and servants gossip about Tilde’s abilities as an abbess, comparing her to Marie. They disagree as to whether Marie was a witch or a saint. The novel ends with the remaining nuns in the convent being summoned to chapel: “And the works and hours go on” (257).