Lady Isobel German was walled into a cell for 28 years of solitude and prayer in the 15th Century. An Anchoress, she had no direct contact with other humans except through a squint (small window), and lived within the tiny space of her self imposed prison in All Saints Church, York.

Her skeleton was discovered during excavation in 2007. It was riddled with venereal syphillis.

He comes to me. Oh, He does. Just there, with His cheeks sunken deep like the plague pits outside. His hands are spread wide open. Open wounds, mine, his, syphilis, stigmata, we press our hands together as blood brothers.

He comes to me but I’m not telling anyone.

“Anchoress!” and “Isabel!”

Her mouth, agape like a catfish, at the squint. Her mouth, red and wide as sin, at my pious cell. 

My niece Isabel, named after me.

“Love your window as little as you possibly can” Demands the guidance book ‘Ancrene Wisse’.

I do indeed.

I shuffle over to the hole, my bandaged feet start to unwind when I move. It is 3 steps with my feet close together, from the stone bed where I lie with Him, to the squint where I must suffer the attention of the world. The squint is more than a chink, wide enough for a chamber pot to be emptied into the gutter, cleaned, returned. Wide enough for parcels of food. Or for items to be blessed. In and out. When my niece was born, my sister passed the baby through to be kissed. Wide enough for the World to view my whole face when I answer its cry. So wide it is like we are barely alone. After the first ten years here I placed a curtain across the hole. My followers believe it for piety,my detractors gossip it is to protect the world from my hideous sores . I do not openly dispute anyone’s understanding. 

Isabel, named after me, is my only living relative left. It is not just my family taken – a third of our townspeople are gone because of the Plague. Though there are still many ways to die. I can see her form through the curtain. Isabel, once passed through that squint, is a bigger woman now than she was 3 months ago. By the grace of God I will soon have more living relatives. 

She brings me bread and cheese and stories of Richard Bly whom she lives in sin with. I bring her my chamber pot to empty and my good counsel. She talks at length of the marriage she longs to have, of the bastard she is bringing into sin. 

“Isabel.” I admonish at last, I have stopped looking at the shadow through the curtain and am gazing upon Him while he waits patiently for these sinners to leave us. “Jesus gives you his blessing.” And as I speak I feel filled with a love like a fire. For Him not for her.  “And His Word. You are protected by God.” I rush.

“But what does that mean?” She sobs.

“It means leave it to me!” I snap at last, the pull toward Him and away from her pains me worse than the abscesses around my nose, my womb, my feet. “I will make him marry you. Now leave us alone.”

She thanks me profusely, blows into a handkerchief, begins to make off.

“Us?” She questions.

I hesitate. I look back at Him. His eyes hold all manner of promises and warnings, like a groom on his wedding night.

“Me.” I correct, a small lie, a minor sin.

Because He comes to me, but I am not telling anyone. 

He is a Jealous God.

He was the first I told of my calling to a holy life. After that I told my sister. 

“I am in love and I am to be married.” I declared. We were sitting outside by the old Hazel tree near the well, resting awhile in that happy Summer place between quenched  thirst and having enough in the pail to take back to please everyone. 

“To Roger?” She shrieks

“No!” I shout ferociously, and I hit her so hard I spill my water and split her lip.

“To Jesus.” I fix her with a look. “If you tell a living soul you will go to hell. For sure.” 

I was ten and it was some years before I was to marry Jesus. Now I tell Him of my childhood while he strokes my hair. I rest my head on his lap, and the agony of my wounds and the agony of His brings us ever closer. I tell Him of my sister and then of when I told my parents and how my Mother wept and of the last human touch which was the Bishop and his holy hand on my forehand before he sealed up the door in the church with me inside.

19 years and 10 months ago.

“And what, “ I croon to Jesus, His blood and flesh against mine, “ what loss is human touch, when I am your Bride?”

“When i was a child” I confess to Him, “I found it hard to sleep, with the snoring of my Grandmother in bed next to me and the fighting of my parents downstairs. My sister had a piece of filthy rag to suck to get her through this squabbling and squawking. Now she is dead from the plague, God Have Mercy. I didn’t need a rag to sleep, I needed a vision.

At night, with the screams of Mother, the roars of Father and the throttled breathing of a Grandmother soon to die, I found release in a half-dream that came to me as sweet as a secret. I would comfort myself by imagining entombment – buried deep in rubble, all tight against me like the swaddling of an infant. This vision calmed me immensely, more than rags or milk ever could.”

According to the congregation who come for my blessings, marriage is a curious path. I am a woman unencumbered by a human husband, but I know a lot about marriages from near twenty years of my ear being bent by the masses. I can tell you this. The more a man and his wife cleave together, the more they cleave apart. The years render hostility not closeness. Every child is not just a tooth lost, but love lost. I have seen blushing brides at the squint turn into pot throwing rage-filled crones within a few years. Their husbands come too, oh yes, turned from anxious boys driven with one desire to lost men swollen with liquor and licentiousness. The bickering couples are not the only confessions of course. There are other ones who come to me, usually more moneyed, the tight backed ladies and cruel faced huntsmen who take a while to break into tears at the hole they plead for mercy from. And some bound by propriety who display none of the Seven Sins but within burns a torturous malice desperate for the demise of the other. They politely say their prayers together, on knees, at bedtime, yet nothing is well and no matter of things are well. 

And it is they with their tight smiles and their little to confess I feel sorry for the most. What life is it? Trapped in a prison like that. In those moments when I bless them I thank my Lord that I have my own freedom. In my 12 by 15 cell I am unfettered. 

My niece, I tell Him, is fevered with the common fires of desire. She is not to be blamed for her earthly needs, she is not like us. We know of course that in a few years she will be bothering God still and there will be a riot of snotty nosed children bothering her. If she has survived the sure hell that is childbirth, God Willing. But with the child already ferment in her belly – and no chance now to shake it loose – a life of marriage and misery is her best chance. 

“Give her want she wants,” I plead, “But save me from hearing about it.”

And I touch, one by one, the scabs and abscesses that replace my face, my stomach, my womb. The Doctor called it syphilis but I call it saintliness. Every worsening, deepening wound takes me closer to God. I try not to bother myself, my fingers as impatient as the visitors at the squint, but it’s hard not to when they itch so and when each aggression takes me closer to Him.

The sacrament comes through a different window. This hole faces into the church, and is smaller and sealed with a grate not a curtain. The priest is the only one who can come to the sacrament hole and it is the third priest since I was sealed in here. One died of a weakness of the body and one left due to a weakness of the soul. This one has seemed uncertain since he arrived with a pose and a pallor as wretched as a plague diagnosis. But he has surprised me and the rest of the congregation and is here and standing over 9 years now.

“Who are you talking with, Anchoress?” He lisps to me through his beard and the grate. It is my evening sacrament and I am to partake of the body and the blood of Christ. Yet I have been partaking all day. 

“I am conversing with Christ.” I admonish. 

“Child,” he stutters, “ I have His body and His blood for you”. He is nervous of me. I hear his voice in Church and he does not tremble there in the way he does now. I am not his congregation though, I am not the living seeking salvation, I am instead – almost – a saint. Sealing me in with bricks the Bishop declared me dead to the World. And I rot like the dead too, my toes have turned black and my face is disappearing as my mouth rots into my nostril and my nostrils into each other. I know by the incense burned at the squints that the smell of my living death is difficult for mortals to suffer. 

I take of His body.

I take of His blood. 

“Father” I begin, sighing with the crudeness of my request. “My niece, Isabel. She is showing now, it is not concealable to any of your congregation. Especially not Richard Bly, the cause of these troubles who attends every Sunday and comes to confess to you.”

“I see.” He replies.

“Sometimes a man needs firm guidance from those of us who are close to God, Father. Thank You. I will remember your kindness in my prayers.”

He bows to me, as if I were a Queen.

I do remember the priest in my prayers, I am, as you can see, a woman of my word. But mostly that night I pray for peace, to be less intruded upon by the outside world. I am ready to leave it. And my niece is not the first woman to have been misled by a man. Childbirth is just one death men can bring. When I finish praying I read my favourite passage of “Ancrene Wisse”.

“Stretch out your love to Jesus Christ.  You have won him!  Touch him with as much love as you sometimes feel for a man.  He is yours to do with all that you will. . . . So exceedingly does he love that he makes her his equal.  I dare to say even more  — he makes her his sovereign and does all she commands, as if from necessity”

I trace those words with my finger, keeping my hands from picking at my own wounds. The text feels like a map, a path I am travelling along. The script has firm contours that my fingers follow, solid as firm young hips, and back, the tantalising curve of a spine. The words flex under my hands as supple as a future yet stay as bold and brazen as a memory. A memory of once upon another life and a man who wounded me. A memory heavy and righteous. As if the man who bore down on me, as insistent as Gabriel, blessed me with my own cross to bear. 

---