by Mary Novik
The girl was at my side as soon as the chanting ended. “Your fingers are white. Do this to heat them.” She crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her hands into her armpits. “I will show you how to do everything. We must be seated before Cook finishes beating the gong one hundred times.”
My arms folded like bird wings, I followed her into a refectory with trestle-tables at which nuns sat in complete silence. The sweet aroma of the food drew me forwards in spite of my fear and I climbed on a bench beside the girl. With gestures, she demonstrated how to tip the pitcher and how to fill my trencher from the vessels of savoury food. I was an apt pupil, eager to learn. When my face was greasy, she wiped her lips with her hem and I did the same. I gestured towards the single abbey cake on our small table. She broke it in two and served herself the bigger portion, but I ate my part gladly, for there were raisins in it.
Once the meal was over, she led me back into the empty church. She told me that her name was Elisabeth and that the nuns observed the rule of Saint Benedict. The abbey was Clairefontaine, after Agnès de Clairefontaine, the abbess. The long words came out oddly from Elisabeth’s mouth. Perhaps she had never had her mouth washed out, for she spoke almost as roughly as Conmère. She showed me where the ashlar blocks had shifted in one of the chapels, making a crawl space for an animal to climb through on all fours.
“This is how I go out after curfew,” she said, “but you are not allowed to.” From the church, she went ahead of me up the inner stairs to the lay dormitory. We entered a cold, dark cell, where Elisabeth pointed out a small bench hewn from sturdy oak, which would be mine, and a bed that was hers alone. At last, she noticed that I hadn’t spoken. “You can talk now. The nuns must be silent after compline, but here we can make as much noise as we wish.”
I took the coarse blanket she gave me and laid it on my bed, well satisfied with my small empire. The bed was low and hard, little more than a straw pallet in a wooden frame, but I would be safe here until Maman came for me. My stomach was full and I was warmer than I had been for months. Although Elisabeth pretended not to want me, I could see that she had prepared for my arrival. On my lopsided bench sat a new candle, shorter than hers but just as useful. Beside it she had stacked some garments she had outgrown. She showed me how to fasten my new cloak to ward off draughts, then tied the cap snugly beneath my chin for me. What did I care that the cloak dragged along the floorboards? It had a wide, deep pouch to carry abbey cakes in.
When I thanked her, she reached for something on a ledge. “The abbess told me your mother is dead, like mine,” she said. “I use this sponge to collect my tears when I am sad. Would you like one too?”
I could only nod because my tears were already unbottling themselves and spilling hotly down my cheeks. She held out a little sponge that was almost as nicely rounded as hers.
“This is how you do it.” She dabbed my eyes and cheeks. “We will be sisters, but you must do everything I say because I am three years older. One day I will be a Benedictine, but you will not, for you are too small to be given to God. The abbess took you as a kindness, since you have no dowry to give the abbey.”
It was true I had brought nothing of value, only the perfume bottle that I had buried in the soft earth by the gatehouse. All that long day, I spoke only to Elisabeth, but learnt fifteen useful hand signals, mostly for food. That night in our beds, I listened to Elisabeth sucking noisily on her tongue until she fell asleep. Then I crept down the inner stairs into the north chapel and wriggled through the gap in the tumbled ashlar into the darkness. I sought my hiding place near the gatekeeper’s fire and dug until my fingers hit glass, unearthing the perfume bottle. Safe in my splendid new pouch, it climbed up the stairs and into bed with me, where we waited for Maman together.
In the morning, the abbess sent for me. I opened the door of her house to find her sitting on a cushioned chair, eyes closed and lips moving as she worked her fingers along her beads. She was the important woman who had led the singing in church. I looked for something to do until she finished her paternosters. On a stand beside her was a curious box covered in leather, which I managed to slide over the edge of the stand and catch just before it banged against the floor. The hasp was locked, probably by the key I saw hanging from the abbess’s belt. The noise had jarred her from her prayers and I shrank into myself, hoping she would not rebuke me.
“What do you think it is?” Her words were sharp and clear, like nothing I had heard alongside the canal.
I made my mouth as round and red as hers and spoke as crisply as I could. “A box of alphabet letters.”
“You are not far wrong.” She was smiling at me. “It is a book of words made up of letters. When you are older, I will teach you how to read them. You must address me as Mother Agnes.”
“You are not my mother.”
“My child, your mother is dead. You will never see her again.”
My lip trembled. “That is not true. I will see Maman when her soul comes back for this.” I took the tiny bottle from my pouch to show her.
She pulled out the stopper, sniffed, then held the vessel to the light. “Are these your mother’s tears?”
“Yes, and mine too. I waited all night, but she did not come.”
Mother Agnes was silent for a time. “She will not come for many years. First, you must grow old, much older than I am. Hide this in a secret place and think no more about it.” She tucked the bottle back into my pouch. “What did your mother call you?”
“Solange,” I said. “Sol, like the sun.” I saw that she approved, which gave me courage. “I was born at Pentecost and thus my hair is red.”
“And ange for angel. It is a good name, for you are said to speak with the tongue of an angel.” She stood up to examine a map nailed to her wall. Her wooden stick pointed to the walled city of Avignon, then tapped along the winding blue river. “Your reputation for clairvoyance has travelled upstream along the Sorgue as far as our abbey.” The pointer caressed a little abbey painted brown and green. “Here is Bingen in the north”—the pointer tapped on another painted abbey—“where Saint Hildegarde resided. When she was three, Hildegarde was given to an abbey as an oblate, as you have been. She was so famous for her visions that she became the abbess and was consulted for her prophecy by popes and emperors.” The pointer stopped. “Do you know what prophecy is?”
“It is second sight,” I said, but she wanted more from me. I tried to think of something worthwhile. “Before I was born, I had a dream about a bishop.”
“Tell it to me now.”
I scratched my head with both hands, without finding anything to tell. “It’s gone now. How can I remember what I see inside my head?”
Her tone sharpened. “When you have a vision, you must remember it.”
She was not acting like a mother now. I threw myself on the floor beside her, burying my face in my arms. “This abbey has too many rules and I am too small to learn them!”
The pointer reached over to tap my skull gently. “You will, my child, for it is your destiny. You have the gift of clairvoyance like Hildegarde.”
“I don’t want to have a destiny!”
“Do not worry. Your head will grow bigger to understand these mysteries.”
She put down the pointer and chose another book, this one with a scarlet cover. Then she sat on her cushioned chair, spread the book across her knees, and beckoned me closer. I slid across the floor and raised my head to see empty lines as neat as shelves. After a while, I stood up beside her to feel the small, even ridges with my fingertips.
“How did you make the rows so straight?”
“With a stylus. Each of these lines must be filled with words. This is where we will write down your visions.” She lifted the page to my nose so I could sniff it.
“It smells like a barn.”
“This is vellum, Solange. Never forget the scent, for only the rarest books are made from it.”
Three
I DISCOVERED THAT the nuns rose with t
he sun and retired when it set. Eight times a day the bells called them to the divine offices, first prime, then terce, sext, and none. Vespers were at sunset, compline at nightfall, and in the full of night nocturns and lauds.
The bells chimed slowly for the hours to give the sisters time to gather from the hives and the vines, the kitchens and the scriptorium. I watched them brush earth or flour from their palms, then hurry breathlessly towards the church, never running, yet never late, their feet moving invisibly under their black habits. In the dark of night, they stumbled down the inner stairs like sleepwalkers. At that hour they seemed to find chanting a penance, because they slurred words and sang out of tune. I trailed behind or escaped outside, alert to every night sound, hearing owls screech and pebbles shift under the feet of mice or squirrels. Sometimes, in the distance, I heard the deeper tones of the bell I had left behind at Notre-Dame-des-Doms.
Elsewhere in the abbey, speaking was frowned upon, but the church burst its walls with holy sound. It smelt pleasantly of cold, damp stone and beeswax tapers lit for departed souls. Before long I was climbing onto a bench beside Elisabeth so I could sing when she did.
“O Lord,” I chanted. “You will open my lips and my mouth shall declare Your Praise.”
Though I sang lustily, I could not make my soul go where my mother’s had gone. My spirit spiralled upwards with the high notes to the vault, then tumbled to the pavingstones alone. After a time I began to lift my voice to the Virgin, but not to the bloodthirsty god who had taken my mother from me. In the triptych he hung like a skeleton from his wooden cross. I knew that the church wine was his blood and the bread his flesh, but to me he looked no different than the men who had climbed on Maman’s bed with their flagons and loaves. Each day I longed for her perfumed heartbeat and her kisses beneath my ear, but at night I missed the pungent odour of Conmère, who would have comforted me on my sparse bed of straw.
After my first mass the abbess allowed me to light a taper for Maman. I chose a tall one, which with luck would burn until day’s end. Though my eyes were wet, I held my head high, as Maman would have wished. I fingered the sponge in my pouch, waiting for the nuns to leave.
Elisabeth arrived to stand an even taller taper next to mine. “This is for my mother,” she said. “You can dry your eyes now if you want.”
I dabbed my eyes with the sponge and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Where do you think their souls are now?”
“Haunting the abbey somewhere. The stockbreeder says the souls of dead nuns come back to inhabit the heifers and ewe lambs.”
“Why not the new pigs?” I asked.
“Too ugly.” Laughing, she abandoned me, for she was old enough to have chores around the abbey.
That first summer I learnt to be content with my own company. I ran from one end of the grounds to the other and lay exhausted in the moist, fragrant hay, listening to the golden hum of bees mingling with cicadas. I rested on the bank of the Sorgue to listen to it rush over rocks as it used to rush over the cloth-workers’ wheels. If the hens were laying, I dug my hands into the straw and ran with new eggs as a gift to the abbess. These were my territories—the hives, the vines, and the fields. I inspected my ewes and my calves, and my grapes ripening on the vine, and helped the stockbreeder carry pails of mash to the animals. The ewes trusted me to feel their bellies to see how many lambs they were carrying. When I told the stockbreeder that the black ewe was carrying three ewe lambs, she did not believe me, but after all three were born safely and named after dead nuns, she sent me to the beekeeper for a reward of honey.
By Pentecost, the day of my birth, my feet had so outgrown my shoes that Elisabeth gave me her old sandals. In return, I took her to see a wooden post dark with mildew, where the snails swarmed over one another, fighting their way to the top. We lay on our bellies, observing ants marching in an orderly row like Benedictines filing into church to say the hours. This reminded me of a trick that Conmère had played on me.
“Watch me bewitch them,” I said.
I polished a stone, uttered one of Conmère’s spells, and placed it in the ants’ path. When they scattered and knocked one another down, I told Elisabeth that I had the power to command hordes of insects—ants, beetles, whatever I wished. As we lay side by side, we picked the burrs and foxtails off each other and told stories about our dead mothers. Because Elisabeth was nine years old, she remembered more than I did, and since she was old enough to help in the kitchens, she had a knife of her own, which I coveted.
I folded up my tunic to reveal the age marks on my thigh. “Lend me your knife to carve a line.” I scored the sixth line so neatly it produced only a single bead of blood, which I licked off so she wouldn’t see it.
“Why didn’t you bleed?” She grabbed her knife back, unhappy with how it had turned out, since she did not wish me to have magic powers.
That night I dreamt of a butcher pinning down a lamb, then drawing his blade over the yearling’s throat. The lamb jerked, spurting blood all over me. It ran over my toes, down the gutter, and into the canal, where the paddlewheels churned the writhing red pus towards the city moat. When I had wrenched myself out of the hideous dream, I prodded Elisabeth, who let me crawl beneath her blanket for the first time.
After I had related the dream, she said, “Tell me again. How long did the lamb jerk after it was dead?” She squirmed with pleasure as I described it once more.
“Is it a vision?” I asked hopefully.
“No, you are not important enough for that. It was only a dream about a butcher who slaughters animals for winter meat. You must have seen him at Martinmas before you came to the abbey.”
Upset with me now, she punched me in the belly—not too hard, because I had told her a good story, just enough to send me scuttling back to my cold pallet. Mindful of the lines waiting in the empty ledger, I took my tale to the abbess in the morning just the same. It must have been a real vision, because Mother Agnes bade me sit on the stool to tell it to her. When I was done, she reached for the scarlet book, dipped her quill into her ink, wrote some words, then dunked the quill again. From where I sat, I could not fathom how the ink got up inside the abbess’s pen. I walked the legs of my stool closer, but was too late to see. She made her flourish, blotted the page, returned the book to the shelf above my head, and gave me a pickled egg to chew on.
Four
IN MY SECOND YEAR in the abbey, the abbess ordered me to run errands for Madame de Fores, a widow from Les Baux-de-Provence, who had just arrived to take her vows and work in the scriptorium. Nothing about Madame looked like a nun, not even her fine cambric wimple. In procession on Ascension Day, she walked a step behind the abbess, who wore the crest of the Clairefontaines and a heavy chain of office to assert her precedence. Behind the two of them came the obedientiaries—the sacristan with her holy book, the librarian with her quill, the cellaress with her keys, the gardener with her shears, then the others in order of rank. After them flocked the familia: the lay sisters, Elisabeth and me, the servants, and the farm-workers.
One day I took Madame a piece of honeycomb dripping sweetness through my fingers. She surprised me by taking a bite straight from the comb. Afterwards her dainty tongue darted out to lick her lips.
“Are you not afraid of the bees’ sting?” she asked.
“They seem to like me.”
When the sacristan rang the bells for sext, Madame wiped the residue from our hands with a scented cloth and drew me close to read her book of hours. We bent over the book together, breathing on it while we turned the pages, and the parchment became warm beneath our hands. On each page were miniature paintings of a tiny, perfect world. Did God dwell in such a book? Surely a saint had created such glorious pictures.
“How did each one get so small?” I asked.
“The illuminator looks through magnifying glasses to paint with a brush of fine hair, even finer than yours. I copied this book for my own use and told the miniaturist to paint what I like best. See how each letter is perfect, ye
t alive? Each word is like a ripe fruit eager to be bitten into.” She showed me how to take the words and roll them in my mouth. “This is our language, la langue d’oc, which the troubadours used for their love songs.”
I touched her hand, fascinated by its pallor. If my mother had lived, would she have been so soft and fragrant? “My mother spoke like you, but not so sweetly.”
“Yesterday I heard you talking in the old tongue with Elisabeth. Do not let the abbess hear you, for it comes from a low, dark place.”
She combed the sticky honey from my hair, and I told her what I knew of my lady-mother, the little I could remember. “My mother died bearing a child. I do not know why she bothered, for my brother was dead when he came out. I have not lit a taper for her since Lent,” I confessed.
One hot tear dribbled from my eye, then another. Soon I was clutching Madame and sobbing. When at last I stopped, she rubbed the furrow from my brow with her scented cloth and asked me whether I would like to listen to her favourite book, Le Roman de la Rose. Over the summer, she read it to me. As we neared the end of the poem, I puzzled over the roses and bushes, gardeners and shears. The rose was a lady and the lady was a rose. Beyond that, I was uncertain, for there was also a knight lurking behind the rosebush, wary of her thorns.
I fingered the coat of arms on Madame’s habit. “When will I be a lady?”
The leaves of the book fluttered shut. “How old are you now?”
I raised my tunic to reveal the newest mark on my thigh.
“You are seven years, like a page,” she said. “But next year, do not score your leg, for it hurts me to see your flesh so scarred.”
“When I am fourteen, will I be a squire?”
“No. You are of the nuns’ keeping. Here you are fed when you are hungry and physicked when you are ill. You will become a novice, then a nun. Or, if God wills it, you will marry and go to a fine estate as I did. I doubt you will make a good nun, for you love poetry too much, but it is better if the abbess thinks you will. She believes you will bring renown to her abbey.”