The Lady and the Unicorn

by Tracy Chevalier

  ‘Madeleine is out,’ I whispered to Aliénor, who quickly handed me the wool she'd been winding and went to help her mother. Rogier Le Brun's eyes followed her as she crossed the workshop, belly straining at her dress. When she was gone he looked at me for a moment, as if trying to guess how a shy man like me could have managed such a thing. My face went hot with shame.

  ‘Ripping out work, eh?’ Rogier Le Brun said, turning to the oak Georges had been unpicking in the tapestry. ‘The apprentice make a mess of things as usual, hmm?’ He tapped Luc's head lightly. Luc glared up at him but mercifully did not deny it. He is a bright boy and knows when to keep quiet. Rogier Le Brun narrowed his eyes and turned back to Georges. ‘I sympathize, Georges. There is nothing worse for a lissier than pulling out work. But for tapestries like these, every bead must be good, eh? It won't do to have weavers who can't weave well work on it. The Guild wouldn't pass the work, would they?’

  The room was silent. ‘Luc has made very few mistakes,’ Georges mumbled.

  ‘Of course not — I'm sure you've trained him well. But this will put you back, n'est-ce pas, just when you need the time most. When must the tapestries be done?’

  ‘Candlemas.’

  ‘Candlemas? How can you finish by then?’

  Before Georges could answer, Christine had reappeared with mugs of beer. ‘Don't you worry about us, Rogier,’ she interrupted. ‘We'll manage. Look, the other tapestry is almost done, and then the weavers can move across to this one.’

  Thomas snorted. ‘For more pay, perhaps.’

  Rogier Le Brun was barely listening. I could see him considering the work left to do, the number of weavers — would he count Christine among them? — and the time there was left to do it in. We all watched him do his figuring. The bench the weavers sat on creaked as they shifted about. I shuffled my feet. Despite the cold, Georges' brow dripped with sweat.

  Christine folded her arms across her chest. ‘We will manage,’ she repeated, ‘as I expect you will manage when Georges pays you a visit on the Guild's behalf.’ She smiled at him.

  There was a short silence as Rogier Le Brun took in her reminder of how Guild men help each other. He gazed at her, and I could see his Adam's apple move as he swallowed.

  Aliénor came out then and stepped lightly to his side. ‘Please, Monsieur, try one,’ she said, and held a plate of cakes in front of him.

  With that Rogier Le Brun laughed. ‘Georges,’ he said, biting into a cake, ‘you may have problems in the workshop but your women make up for it!’

  When he had gone Georges and Christine looked at each other. ‘Georges, I think St Maurice must be watching over us,’ she declared, shaking her head. ‘If I hadn't woven that oak poorly, I'd still have been weaving when Rogier came. And if he had caught me at it outright, he could not have turned a blind eye.’

  Georges smiled for the first time in many weeks. It was like ice cracking on a pond after a long winter, an evil spell breaking. The boys laughed and began mimicking Rogier, and Christine went for more beer. Myself, I stepped over to Aliénor and kissed her brow. She did not lift her head, but she did smile.

  Two weeks before Candlemas, the weavers finished Touch. The cutting-off from the loom was not the drawn-out ceremony Georges Le Jeune, Joseph and Thomas might have liked, but quick and cursory. When the tapestry was unwound and turned over, Georges nodded and praised the work, but his thoughts were in his fingers, and his fingers wanted to be weaving. Christine saw their disappointment, however, and after her nudge Georges gave them his last sous to drink away at the tavern.

  Georges Le Jeune moved over to join his father and Luc at the loom of Sight, and Christine left it to make the hem of Touch. She and Aliénor folded the ends of the warp threads under, then began to sew a piece of woven brown wool around the edges to finish it. As I sat near Aliénor, watching her and Christine sew, I said suddenly, ‘Show me how to do that.’

  Christine chuckled and Aliénor wrinkled her brow. ‘Why? You're a painter, not a woman.’

  ‘I want to help.’ You're my wife — I would sit with you, I wanted to say.

  ‘Why don't you find your own work?’

  Then I had an idea. ‘If you teach me I can help you with the hemming and Christine will be free to work with the others.’

  Christine looked at Georges. After a moment he nodded.

  ‘All right,’ she said, poking her needle through the wool and getting up. ‘Aliénor will show you how to do it.’

  ‘Maman,’ Aliénor said then. She sounded annoyed.

  Christine turned to look at her. ‘He's your husband, girl. You'd best get used to that and be grateful for it. Think of the alternative.’

  Aliénor bowed her head. Christine gave me a little smile and I thanked her with my eyes.

  Aliénor wouldn't let me sew the hem straight away, but made me practise on a scrap of cloth. It was simple enough sewing, yet I couldn't get the stitches as even as hers, and kept pricking my fingers till Aliénor laughed. ‘Maman, we'll never finish this if you let Philippe work on it. I'll be always ripping out his work and starting again. Or he'll bleed all over it!’

  ‘Give him a chance,’ Christine said without looking up. ‘He may surprise you.’

  After a day of errors I began to improve, and at last Aliénor allowed me to work on the hem, though I sewed much more slowly than she. We didn't speak much at first as we worked, but sitting together for so many hours seemed to make things easier between us. Silence is always a tonic for her. Then, gradually, we began to talk — of the cold, or the hem we sewed, or the pickled walnuts we'd had at dinner. Little things.

  We were almost done with the hem when I got up the courage to ask about something bigger. I looked over at the enormous bump in her lap that she rested her hands upon like a table, with the tapestry pulled over it. ‘What will we name the baby?’ I said quietly so the others wouldn't hear.

  Aliénor stopped sewing, her needle paused over the cloth. Because her eyes are dead it's hard to know what she's thinking by looking at her face. You have to listen for her voice. I waited a long time. When she answered her tone was not as sad as I'd expected. ‘Etienne, for your father. Or Tiennette if it's a girl.’

  I smiled. ‘Merci, Aliénor.’

  My wife shrugged. She did not begin sewing again, though. She threaded the needle through the seam and left it there. Then she turned to me. ‘I would like to feel your face, so that I will know what my husband is like.’

  I leaned over and put her hands on my cheeks. She began rubbing and squeezing my face all over. ‘Your chin is pointed like my cat's!’ she cried. She likes her cat — I have seen her sit with it in her lap and stroke it for hours.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Like your cat.’

  A week before Candlemas Georges finished the last curve of the lion's tail. Three days before Candlemas first Christine, then Luc reached the edge of the tapestry. Georges was still working on a rabbit — his signature, of a rabbit holding its paw to its cheek — while Georges Le Jeune finished a dog's tail. Aliénor joined her father and brother on the bench to sew slits then, though her belly was so huge it kept her far from the tapestry. As I watched, she stopped for a moment, hands pressed against her belly, her brow furrowed. Then she began to sew again. Several minutes later she did the same thing and I knew the birth was beginning.

  Unless she said something herself she would not want me to say anything about it. Instead I drew Christine aside and quietly showed her. ‘We weren't expecting this for a few weeks yet — she's early,’ Christine commented.

  ‘Shouldn't she be in bed?’ I said.

  Christine shook her head. ‘Not yet. There'll be plenty of that later. It could be days yet. Let her work if she wants — it'll take her mind off the pain.’

  And so Aliénor sewed for many hours that day, long after it was dark and the weavers had stopped. Even when everyone was asleep she kept sewing. I stayed awake, lying on a pallet and listening to her shift and tense on the bench. At last, very late i
n the night she moaned, ‘Philippe, get Maman.’

  They put her in bed in the house, and Georges came to sleep in the workshop. In the morning Christine sent Luc for the midwife. Soon he burst back into the workshop. ‘Jean Le Viste's soldiers are here!’ he cried. ‘I heard when I was out. They've gone to the Guild in the Grand-Place to ask after you.’

  Georges and Georges Le Jeune looked up from their work. ‘It's not Candlemas for two days yet,’ Georges said. He looked down at their hands. ‘We'll be done today but there's the hemming yet to do and the women are busy.’ He glanced at the house — from inside came a long groan ending in a shout.

  ‘I can hem it,’ I said quickly, pleased to be of use at last.

  Georges looked at me. ‘Bon,’ he said. For the first time since Aliénor and I married I felt I was a useful part of the workshop.

  ‘Don't fret, lad,’ Georges added to Luc, who was hopping from one foot to the other. ‘The soldiers will wait. Tiens, go and tell Joseph and Thomas to come this afternoon for the cutting-off — they'll want to be here. We can't wait on the women.’ Another moan from inside made him and Georges Le Jeune duck their heads over their work and Luc run from the workshop.

  She was screaming by the time we cut Sight from its loom. A cutting-off is meant to be joyful, but her screams drove us to cut as fast as we could. Only when we'd turned over the tapestry and seen it whole for the first time was I distracted from Aliénor's cries.

  Georges looked at it and began to laugh. It was as if he had been holding his breath for months and suddenly could let it out. While Georges Le Jeune and Luc and Thomas began thumping each other on the back, Georges laughed and laughed, Joseph joining him. They laughed so hard they had to prop each other up, tears pouring from their eyes. It was a strange response to a long journey, but I too found myself laughing. We had indeed been travelling a long way.

  Aliénor screamed again, and everyone stopped. Georges wiped his eyes, looked at me and said, ‘We'll be at Le Vieux Chien. Let me know when the baby comes, or the soldiers — whichever is first.’ Then, after almost two years of work that gave him a head of grey hair, a stoop and a squint, the lissier walked away from the tapestry without even looking back. I think he was glad not to.

  When they were gone I studied Sight for a long time. The Lady is sitting, and the unicorn lies in her lap. You might think that they love each other. Perhaps they do. But the Lady holds up a mirror and the unicorn may well be looking at itself with eyes of love rather than at the Lady. Her eyes are crooked in her face, her lids heavy. Her smile is full of woe. It may be that she does not even see him.

  That is what I think.

  I was pleased that Georges trusted me with the hem. I got out the brown wool and a needle and thread, and carefully folded the warp threads under as I'd seen Aliénor and Christine do. Then I sat by the window and made a stitch, then another. I sewed as slowly as if I were counting the hairs on a sleeping baby's head. Each time Aliénor screamed I gritted my teeth and quelled my shaking hands.

  I'd sewed half of one side of the tapestry when the screaming stopped. I stopped too, and simply sat and waited. Though I should have prayed, I was too frightened to do even that.

  At last Christine appeared in the doorway with a bundle of soft linen in her arms. She smiled at me.

  ‘Aliénor?’ I said.

  Christine laughed at the look on my face. ‘Your wife is fine. All women scream like that. That's what birth is. But don't you want to know? We have a new weaver here.’ She held up her grandson. His face was squashed and red, and he had no hair.

  I cleared my throat and held out my arms for Etienne. ‘You've forgotten who his father is,’ I said. ‘He will be a painter.’

  V

  PARIS

  Septuagesima 1492

  NICOLAS DES INNOCENTS

  I have never liked the weeks leading up to Lent. It's cold — a cold gone on far too long, a cold that has entered every part of my body. I am tired of the chilblains and the bones that creak, and the way I hold my body tight because if I let go I grow even colder. There is little food, and what is left is dull — pickled and salted and dried and hard. I long for fresh lettuce, for fresh game, for a plum or a strawberry.

  I don't work much during Septuagesima — my hands are stiff with the cold and can't hold a brush. Nor do I find women to please me then. I am waiting. I prefer Lent, even with its rigours. At least it grows warmer and lighter with each day, even if there is still little to eat.

  One bitter morning, when I was shivering under many blankets and wondering whether I should bother getting up, I had a message to meet Léon Le Vieux at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I didn't go there now, for fear of seeing Geneviève de Nanterre. I had little fear, and no hope, of seeing her daughter there. A friend who kept an ear out for me on the rue du Four — where I dared not show my face — said that Claude had been sent away the previous summer, none of the servants knew where. Béatrice too had disappeared.

  I wrapped myself in all my clothes and hurried south, crossing the frozen Seine over the Ponts au Change and St Michel. I didn't stop in at Notre Dame — it was too cold even for that. When I got to Saint-Germain-des-Prés I looked around inside the church cautiously, wondering if I might find Geneviève de Nanterre on her knees there. But no one was about — it was between masses and too cold for lingering.

  At last I found Léon out in the withered cloisters garden. Little was growing at that time of year, though there were a few snowdrops, and other shoots pushing through the mud. I didn't know what they would grow into. Aliénor had tried to teach me about plants, but I needed more than a green nub to tell me what it would become.

  Léon Le Vieux walks with a stick in winter to help him over the snow and ice. He was using it now to poke at the lavender and rosemary bushes. He looked up. ‘I'm always surprised how hardy these are in winter, even when everything else is dead.’ He reached over and plucked some leaves from each, then squeezed them and put his fingers to his nose. ‘Of course they don't smell so sweet now — that comes with sun and warmth.’

  ‘Then too it depends on the gardener, non?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Léon Le Vieux dropped the leaves and turned to me. ‘Jean Le Viste's tapestries have arrived.’

  At the news I felt an unexpected surge of joy. ‘So Georges did finish them by Candlemas! Did you see him?’

  Léon Le Vieux shook his head. ‘I refuse to travel on such roads in winter, even if the King himself asked me. At my age I should be sitting by the fire, not riding all night through snow and muck to bring tapestries back to Paris in time. I want to die in my own bed, not in a filthy inn on the road. No, I sent a message with the soldiers and had a Brussels merchant I know check on the work. And of course the weavers' guild there approved them — that is the important thing.’

  ‘Have you seen them yet? How do they look?’

  Léon Le Vieux gestured with his stick and began to walk towards the archway leading out. ‘Come along to the rue du Four and you can see for yourself.’

  ‘Am I welcome?’

  ‘Monseigneur Le Viste has had them hung, and wants you to check them to make sure the height is right.’ He looked back at me and added, ‘ Écoute, behave yourself there.’ Then he laughed.

  Even in my drunkest fantasies during sessions at Le Coq d'Or, I'd never dreamed I would be invited to pass easily through the door of Claude Le Viste's house. There I was, though, with the sour-faced steward letting us in. If I had not been with Léon Le Vieux I would have gone for him, to pay him back for the beating he'd given me. Instead I had to follow meekly in his footsteps as he led us to the Grande Salle, then left us there to fetch his master.

  I stood in the middle of the room, with Léon Le Vieux at my side, and looked back and forth from one Lady to another, my eyes darting about the room, trying to take them in all at once. I looked for longer than I have ever looked at anything. Léon too was very still and silent. It was as if we were frozen in a dream. I was not sure I wanted to be wo
ken.

  When at last Léon shifted his feet, I opened my mouth to say something and laughter came out instead. It was not the response I'd expected to have. Yet I kept thinking, How could I ever have worried about dog-like lions and fat unicorns and oranges that looked like walnuts when these Ladies were here? They were all of them beautiful, peaceful, content. To stand among them was to be part of their magical, blessed lives. What unicorn would not be seduced by them?

  It was not just the Ladies who made the tapestries so powerful, but the millefleurs as well. Whatever faults there were in the designs got lost in that blue and red field filled with thousands of flowers. I felt as if I were standing in a summer field even in the midst of a cold dark day in Paris. It was those millefleurs that made the room whole, pulling together the Ladies and their unicorns, the lions and servants, and me too. I felt I was with them.

  ‘What do you think?’ Léon asked.

  ‘Glorious. They are even better than I ever dreamed I could make them.’

  Léon chuckled. ‘I see your pride has not lessened. Remember, you were only one part of their making. Georges and his workshop deserve the highest praise.’ It was the sort of thing Léon Le Vieux liked to say.

  ‘Georges will do very well from them.’

  Léon shook his head. ‘They won't make him a rich man — Jean Le Viste is stingy with his purse. And from what I heard, Georges may not be so quick to take on more work. My Brussels merchant said he only saw Georges either drunk or asleep, and he squints now. Indeed, it was the cartoonist who had to help Christine sew the hem of the last tapestry — Georges was drunk and the daughter was abed with a baby.’ He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Did you know of this?’