Women in the Wall Read Online Free PDF

Radegunda, we will die with honour!”
    “Honour!”
    “Listen, we needn’t die at all.” His breath was beery on her face. His eyes flickered like fish. Suddenly rigid, he listened for a sound at the door. Nothing there? “ Radegunda !” tightening his grip on her shoulder-bone, “we can saddle horses and escape to the court of Metz or Paris or Brittany. The three of us.”
    “Three?”
    “Agnes …”
    “Agnes?” Radegunda’s voice rose imprudently. “Little Agnes—you’ve been …”
    “No! I’m in—I want to marry her. She wants it too.”
    “She’s only … Agnes is only eleven! How could you? A child !”
    “Almost twelve: the canonical age for matrimony. We could get married now. An understanding priest …” The flickering eye. He was irresolute. She daren’t trust him. Soft lower lip and besides … No.
    Radegunda stood, gripping the arm-rest of the kneeler with fingers fierce as claws. “You’d take Agnes from me! You’d sully her flesh. Make her … into a … female! Chlodecharius, Agnes is my pupil. I was teaching her noble things. How to live alone! I spend hours with her every day, I trusted her and all the time you were insinuating yourself, worming in. How come she never spoke to me of you? Why was she ashamed?”
    Chlodecharius let go her shoulder, stepped away. “There’s nothing wrong with loving, Radegunda. Or being shy about it. You chose Agnes because you were lonely, because she is innocent, gay … We are brother and sister. Is it so odd we should have the same tastes?”
    “Taste!” Radegunda spat the word with contempt and a spray of spittle as though cleaning her mouth after it.
    “In friendship …”
    “ Friendship , Chlodecharius! Do you truly mean ‘friendship’? ‘Amicitia’? How come then that she is ashamed of yours and hides it from me. You’ve aroused her senses, haven’t you? You’ve made her ashamed? How far have you gone? Tell me.”
    The young man’s face was lean and pointed: a hound’s face. Now its pallor was unevenly suffused with pink. He stared angrily at his sister: “Radegunda, are you making a jealousy scene?”
    “Jealousy?”
    “What else?” He walked to the window, pulled back a shutter and peered out. “Dawn. I told you my life is in danger. There’s something going on in Thuringia. I’ve been waiting for news. But the roads are impassable. Maybe next spring—unless Clotair has intercepted a message? Listen, the matter of Agnes is unimportant. I wish to God I’d never mentioned … look, she’s just a child I’m fond of.” Chlodecharius spun round and hissed bitterly in his sister’s ear, “Don’t you suppose I get lonely in this court? I am kept under surveillance, spied on, expected to be in sight. Absence is interpreted to mean plotting, silence to mean bitterness. I must be seen to enjoy myself, to laugh, hunt, chase women …”
    “So you choose my pupil, a girl whose spirit I have been trying to protect …”
    “You are ungenerous, Radegunda! Maybe that was why I liked her. After all you brought me up too, remember ? You infused a little of your sadness into us both. We console it in each other. You don’t ask what I meant about Thuringia. Now that something’s finally moving, after all these years, don’t you care? There may be a war!” Snapping his fingers in front of her eyes. “Radegunda! Are you listening?”
    “Listening! Your mind stinks, Chlodecharius. I may have brought you up but you have escaped me! It stinks of sex and death: the double curse God inflicted on man when he threw him out of Eden. Fallen Man is subject to death and so must reproduce himself by sexual means. That is the meaning of the serpent that grows out of man’s loins and plunges itself into women: rot, Chlodecharius, puncturing, blood, pain! Our family is sensual, Chlode charius ! We must restrain our nature!” She licked the lathering anger on her lips.
    Chlodecharius shrugged. “Is it life or death you hate? Are you