The first order of business was to choose an abbess.

Radegund was the natural choice. But she had learned one thing from Chlothar: it was best to distract others from your power. Though her own goals were clear in her mind, she wanted to inspire, not impose, them in others. Agnes, with her innate kindness and practical nature, was better suited to the more mundane tasks of leadership; she, then, would be the abbess. The nuns of course had to elect her, but once Radegund made her wishes known, they were those of the community. And so Agnes became abbess, and occupied the cell closest to the convent office. Radegund’s was right by hers.

After morning prayer, the two met for hours before calling all the nuns together in the refectory and laying out the first rules. They were simple ones. Aside from prayer several times a day, each nun was to work for a week in the kitchen and to spend another doing various chores. Each was to spend an hour a day reading meditations, the lives of the saints, or passages from Scripture. Those who did not yet read, or did not do so well, were to be taught; it was important to Radegund that her nuns be learnèd. With this, each had her separate task: to sew clothes for the community and the poor, to embroider cloths for altars, to make candles, to do laundry, and to bake the convent’s bread. All were to take turns in the hospital, seeing that the sick were fed and cared for, and given spiritual comfort. The doctor was to train them in the simplest cures, in the nature of herbs, powders and potions.

They would take wine and bread in the morning, after Mass, and, for dinner and supper, simple meals, mainly of cooked greens and legumes, with a little bread and wine. But they were absolutely forbidden to eat between meals. Though most men could come no further than the refectory, the nuns themselves were not cloistered – with proper permission, they could do errands in the city or attend services at the cathedral.

Agnes did not yet speak of discipline or punishment, though both would no doubt be necessary. She and Radegund wanted above all that the nuns live in service, charity and devotion to Christ.

Radegund was the first to take on the chores. When wood was delivered, she went at once to bundle as much as she could in her arms and take it to the kitchen, then went back several times to get kindling to set before each cell. She swept the pavements around the convent, cleaning every nook and cranny as she went. Birds had left droppings, ants swarmed over a dead mouse, some small animal had gotten sick; none of this dismayed her. She wiped up the mess with a rag or swept whatever she found into a bucket and took it to a waste heap by the stables.

The latrines had been built with openings along the back. She cleaned them out with a shovel and a bucket, exulting in this ugly task as if it was human corruption itself she was clearing away. This bucket too she would empty by the waste heap. When her turn came in the kitchen, she scrubbed the greens and legumes and blew on the fire under the tripod. She happily ladled pottage out into bowls. After the meal, she would clean the whole kitchen, sweeping up stray beans or peas, hanging pots on hooks along the wall, scrubbing the tables and shelves until the whole space shone.

The sick soon filled the hospital and she eagerly looked after them, drawing water from the well at the center of the garden and heating it for their care. She mixed potions and compounded medicines, praying over all these to give them more power.

None of this was enough.

For Radegund found only momentary comfort in her dedicated efforts. When she was not working, when she was not praying, when she struggled at night to fall asleep on her straw pallet, the world’s horrors, in their multiple forms, rose again before her. A welter of screaming, weeping, bloody bodies, cracked skulls, pools of blood, spilling intestines rose before her. Her thoughts returned to the Goth women and children slaughtered by the Franks – by Christians, but in service to a demon. The fact that the demons still held sway, still threatened the Church, terrified her. And she blamed herself, though she had played no part in these events; she felt fervently that her own sinful nature was that of the world.

She looked forward to Lent, to the forty days of deprivation and atonement. When it finally came, she kept to her cell, eating only the roots of herbs or mallow greens, with no salt or oil. She only ate bread – flat barley bread – on Sunday. She drank so little water that her throat grew dry and she could barely chant the psalms. She did this dressed in a hair shirt, even as the other nuns wore linen. Despite her dry throat, she kept up her prayers and some semblance of song all day. At night, she did not lie on her pallet, but on a bed of ashes covered with the hair cloth.

Not that she slept much. The one time she left her cell was late at night, when the others slept, to take their simple leather shoes, scrub them clean and rub them with oil. It took her most of Lent to clean every nun’s shoes, but the stubborn, persistent effort eased her own enduring anguish.

Agnes too suffered, hearing the ragged sound of her beloved lady’s voice; her mother’s voice, as she now thought of it. Beneath all this frantic prayer, this relentless self-deprivation, she sensed a great pain, but one she was not privy to. Radegund had never told her of Erfurt, of her aunt’s slaughter, of all the other horrors which crowded her head with turmoil. And so, Agnes knew only that one she loved was suffering, and Christ Himself could not bring her peace.

The aging king -->