Muse

by Mary Novik

  Six

  AT NOON ON All Saints’ Day, the abbess entered the church in her full regalia as Agnès de Clairefontaine. She was limping slightly in her pigaces, the newest shoe fashion from the northern fairs. On her hip was the Clairefontaine sword, entrusted to her by a brother who had travelled east to fight for Christendom. The obedientiaries and choir nuns followed in order of precedence and took their places in the stalls, where their new Michaelmas shoes lined up precisely.

  Abbot Bernard emerged from the sacristy, tapping his crosier across the flagstones. His voice erupted into song, so deep and stirring that it roused the nuns. Their throats opened, their voices doubling and trebling as they competed for his ear. Stationed at the rear was the dark-skinned Benedictine who had arrived on horseback with the abbot. Even with his travelling cowl pulled over his forehead, he was unmistakable, the only monk in a sea of chanting women.

  When the office was over, the abbot struck the brass bowl with the mallet. In crept the pale novices from the scriptorium. He asked them the question—Voluntateque agitis? Are you willing?—and they prostrated themselves on the cold stones, their palms whiter than white, scrubbed clean of every ink stain. They professed their vows so quietly that only the abbot could hear whether they truly meant them. He sprinkled too much holy oil and gave them their new names jovially, Sisters Blanche and Ursula.

  Afterwards the abbot escorted the abbess to the refectory, talking to her loudly. Once they had sat down at the high table, the obedientiaries took their seats around them, their bottoms swathed in cushions and their backs supported by the wooden carvings of the virgin martyrs. His mouth resentful, his eyes as shadowed as an infidel’s, the monk carried in the abbot’s bulging saddlebag. The nuns gathered to look, forming a black curtain with their habits. I elbowed between them to see the abbot extract a book a psalter wide and two psalters thick, which he laid open in front of the abbess. As we watched, she fanned the pages, rich with miniatures, then scrutinized the coat of arms pressed deeply in the binding.

  The abbot pointed out a detail on the crest. “A bear—the blazon of Cardinal Orsini. Your scriptorium is to make his nephew a copy more splendid than this original.” He gestured towards his companion. “This is Tommaso Tarlati, a master illuminator, who will paint the miniatures. Master Tarlati will travel to Avignon to choose the folios for the copying, along with the gold leaf and paints that he requires for the illumination.”

  The abbess’s sleeves fluttered. “All this for a nephew?”

  “His son.” The abbot’s sotto voce was easily heard. “It is not a time of piety, Mother Agnes. This John, who calls himself Pope, is making his relatives officers and cardinals. He has moved into the bishop’s palace and is buying up all the buildings on Doms rock. Avignon has become a vassal of the Holy See. The spirituals call her a whore for welcoming so many men, five hundred in the papal court alone.”

  The abbess wet her lips. “And their libraries?”

  “Full of books that need copying for the young men in their retinues. There will be much work from Orsini if we please him.”

  The abbess’s fingers twitched as though she were counting the new commissions. She signalled for the meal to begin and said something to the sacristan.

  “The abbess wants you at her table,” the sacristan said, pushing me towards her seat at the end of the carved bench.

  The sacristan climbed up the stairs inside the wall and appeared in the falcon’s nest above our heads, where she opened The Golden Legend to read from the Life of Saint Cecilia. The words mingled with the sweet aromas of meat and piecrust, butter and garlic, salt and oil, and a peace fell upon the room. I put my knife on the cloth as the obedientiaries did. This end of the refectory was magnificently hot, but I would have been better fed in my regular place next to Elisabeth, since none of the bowls of food made it past the librarian, who steered them back to the abbot before they reached me.

  The sacristan had arrived at the part where Saint Cecilia was jailed in the public baths, withstanding seven times the usual heat. The neophytes dipped their sponges and veils into her blood. I normally enjoyed such bloodthirsty details, but the fire had overheated me and hunger made me dizzy. How long would I have to wait to eat? To get closer to the food, I ducked under the table to wriggle between the long black habits until I reached the abbess’s pointed shoes. The abbot had kicked off his riding boots and wore only his stinking buskins. As I squatted between them, he lifted the table covering to see who was treading on his toes.

  “This must be the child oblate,” he said to the abbess.

  “She has had few visions since coming to us. Perhaps we were wrong in taking her. Can a child lose her clairvoyance?”

  They dropped the cloth to cover me, muffling their voices. What if they turned me out to send me back to the Cheval Blanc? I was only a child—how could I find the friars’ path to Avignon on my own? What if I slipped from the muddy track and tumbled into the rushing Sorgue? In my cramped grotto beneath the table, the abbot’s dirty buskins brought back a little something from my past. Cradled in my mother’s womb, I had seen similar buskins, but they were clean and of a bishop’s purple hue. Now, crouched in this sweating caldarium on All Saints’ Day, I was as hot as that child inside her mother, awaiting birth. Surely, tested by being roasted like Saint Cecilia, I had earned a real vision. I pushed my fists into the hollows of my eyes and sat stone-still, expecting a revelation, but instead of a Voice from afar I heard a forlorn sob from right inside me. All at once, a long-forgotten vision popped out and I scrambled onto the bench between the abbot and the abbess to tell them.

  “When I was in my mother’s womb, before I was born,” I declared loudly, “I saw a priest like you on top of my mother in her bed.”

  The abbot reared up, his hands spread across the table. The obedientiaries looked from my face to his, anticipating a display of temper that would crush me. The abbess pressed her finger to her lips. She had drunk deeply of the wine—a deep, dark red, undiluted by a drop of water—and so had the abbot.

  I would not be silenced. “His eyes were not brown like yours, but as blue as the Virgin’s mantle, and from his belt hung two big rusty keys.”

  “Forgive her, she is yet small,” the abbess begged. “She was eight years old last Pentecost.”

  The abbot dropped back into his seat, his voice low. “She was born at Pentecost, you say? Eight years ago? Then the man she saw with the tarnished keys must have been Saint Peter warning of the Pope’s corruption, since he had just arrived in Avignon.” His tone was urgent now. “Mother Agnes, this girl will be the making of your abbey. The sacred wells up in some infants, then submerges itself for years, only to fountain up—like this—on solemn feast days. When she is older, men of rank will travel the breadth of Europe to consult her as a visionary. Think of the fame she will bring to Clairefontaine, the gifts of wine, the banquets!”

  This was all very well, but my stomach was empty now. I shouted, “I cannot wait that long to eat!”

  The abbot was startled. “My child, have they let you go hungry? Feed upon whatever you like best.”

  He gestured to the vessels of food spread across the board. I saw milk curds and honey, roasted almonds and chestnuts, a stack of honey cakes, and plump yellow plums well soaked in spirits. Standing on my knees, I seized an abbey cake, plunged it into a pool of cream, and shoved it into my mouth with both hands.

  “There is no need to spill, child, or to choke. Sit down and we will pass the dishes to you. Which do you wish first? I suppose the platter of stewed figs and fowl. If she is well fed,” he confided to the abbess, “she will grow rapidly and be of more use to the abbey. There is no sin in eating richly. Only eight years old, you say? Such zeal in one so young must be commended.”

  Seven

  WHEN ADVENT ARRIVED, so did a donkey cart with Master Tarlati, the Florentine illuminator, along with his spacious desk. In a second cart was a glazier with barrels of sand, which cushioned panes of glass for the scrip
torium’s first glass window. After the glazier was finished, the Florentine set up his desk in the flood of light, placing his tools on wooden rests near his right hand. The librarian spread her plan for the psalter-hours in front of her window of oiled parchment and the Florentine gave his approval, pleased that she had provided so much space to display his art.

  “When will you begin to paint?” the librarian asked.

  “Not until the scribes have copied the full year’s calendar.”

  “That will take weeks!”

  “Better that I spoil their work than that they spoil mine. You must do all the borders yourself to save me time. Like this.” He ran his pencil around the perimeter of January, adding bare branches with winter birds. “All the decorations must be done before you pass the folios to me.”

  The librarian pushed Blanche’s and Ursula’s desks together and strapped the Orsini psalter-hours between them. They would write side by side in scripts that had grown so alike one could scarcely tell them apart. As the two settled themselves, their joyful hand signals hung in the air like musical notes. I brought two pots of the new ink for them and placed a third one on my own desk.

  I asked the librarian, “Where shall I begin?”

  “Finish copying the breviary you are working on, but not with that,” she said. “Continue with the old ink and used parchment.”

  Disappointed, I whetted my knife, sharpened my quill, and practised working the same number of letters into each line as Blanche and Ursula were doing. The librarian would soon need to call on me to help.

  Over the winter, the rhythm became second nature—the scratching nib, the oaky scent of the ink, the parchment moving beneath my hand until it was warm and slippery. The ink flowed dark and alive from the well-cut quill. I was putting more words on each line, with grace and ease, but still the librarian withheld her praise.

  Instead, she danced attendance on the Florentine, doing the pen flourishes for him with a peacock quill and allowing him to go to the warming house as often as he wished. Even so, he complained that his fingers stiffened at night in the cold almshouse where he slept with the other monks. I was not surprised when the abbess gave him one of her own blankets and told me to bring him eggs, fresh from her henhouse, for his glair and glues. When he let slip how much he liked a good fat hen, she ordered seven preserved in an urn of grease for him. Soon he was eating as often at the abbess’s table as with the monks in the almshouse.

  As Dame Fortune spun him to the top of her wheel, Madame plunged. She no longer had any strength in her right side, not enough to stand or even sit. When the fasting began in Lent, I held a lamp while the strong-limbed gardener, Sister Raymonde, carried Madame from the guest-house to the infirmary, where she would be permitted meat. I stuffed straw into the cracks in the old wall to keep out the wind, but even so, she suffered from the draughts. At compline each night, I lit her lamp against the dark and lay beside her if she wanted company.

  Madame’s arm began to give off a sickening odour, which no amount of honey sweetened. One night I found the arm tightly bound and Madame in a fever. Falling asleep beside her, I became mired in a brightly painted miniature in which saints were displaying their amputated arms and toes as proof of being tortured. I was still there at dawn when Raymonde fetched me. She lifted me into the mare’s saddle with her to ride beyond the garrigue to forage for the morels Madame liked. Some hours later we rode back through the abbey gates. Cold, filthy, and out of sorts, I clambered down from the mare to charge into the infirmary, where I was terrified to find Madame in a death-sleep, her arm shortened to a throbbing, bandaged stump.

  I yelled at her and tugged on her good arm to wake her, but Raymonde caught me by the waist and removed me to the floor, howling like a wounded animal. Since she would not let me go, I bit her fist to get away from her. She twisted my arm behind my back and forced me to look at Madame. When I stopped howling, Raymonde’s grip slackened and she held my hand over Madame’s nostrils so I could feel her breath.

  “She is not dead, Solange. She is still breathing.”

  “Why did this evil attack her?”

  Her face closed in on itself. “You must ask the abbess questions like that.”

  “You took me out of the way on purpose!”

  “It would have been worse for you if you had stayed. I made Madame an opiate to drive away the pain so Cook could amputate the arm with her meat-saw. Madame will not know her arm is gone until the morning, unless you jolt her awake with your screaming.”

  How could Madame not know? My fists pounded at the stupidity, pounded, pounded against Raymonde’s stomach, until I fell upon the cold stone floor, my arms and legs flailing, and she grabbed my wrists to pin them together, my boots kicking helplessly against her solid legs.

  At my next lesson with the abbess, I leaned against the wall with my hands shoved up my sleeves and my head buried in my cloak. The abbess motioned me to my stool, but I refused to sit. She stood eye-to-eye with me and folded back the cowl to see my face.

  “Why was Madame’s arm sawn off?” I demanded.

  “It was putrid with infection. She is suffering less now than before.” Her fingers milled gently through my hair. “Whenever I need courage, as you do now, I take down the Clairefontaine sword.”

  She stood on the stool in her bare feet, the whites of her toes puffy from her ill-fitting shoes. She unhooked the sword, then handed it to me pommel first, so that I could see Saint Peter’s toenail gleaming like a jewel.

  “My brother was one of the Knights Templar who took flight from Philip the Fair and Pope Clement V, leaving this sword in my keeping. I sold some of the abbey lands to send him to safety—all the woods between the old quarry and the mill—but I could not send him far enough. He was killed not by the infidel but by King Philip’s men. My brother’s last sight was the cross-hilt of his common sword, a reminder of Our Lord’s martyrdom. We came from the same womb at the same time, but he died before me in a foreign land.”

  We balanced the weight of the sword between us, then she let me stand on the stool to put it back myself. Her tears glistened on the silver scabbard, making the sword feel lighter. My face was also wet, but my tears were for Madame, who scarcely recognized me anymore. The abbess drew me towards her map of Christendom with the pilgrimages and holy sites. The cathedral with the word Rome showed that it was the proper home of the popes, not Avignon.

  “Where did Hildegarde live?” I asked, though I knew it as well as the abbess did now.

  Her pointer tapped over to the little abbey labelled Bingen-on-the-Rhine, where popes as well as emperors had consulted the saint. I would never tire of hearing how she had been given to the abbey as an oblate, as I had been.

  “From the age of three,” the abbess said, “Hildegarde saw visions with her immortal soul. A Voice addressed her from the sky, O homo fragilis. O fragile man, ashes amongst ashes and dust amongst dust, say and write what you see and hear. One day, Solange, you will be as great as Hildegarde, the sibyl of the Rhine. I have decided that you will take the veil at fifteen, as she did.”

  The abbess arranged herself in her chair to begin the lesson and I moved my stool to its usual place beside her. Despite the abbess’s faith in me, I knew I was not living up to my promise. I was nine now, but had heard little from on high, only a faint croaking from inside her wall, where Elisabeth and I had trapped a frog. The abbess unlocked her great psalter. Together we marvelled at the miniature of the Last Judgement. The illuminator had well captured the rapture of the saved flying up to join the cherubim and the agony of the damned sinking into the murky depths of hell.

  A fear struck me like one of Elisabeth’s belly punches. “Will Madame die?”

  The abbess’s cheeks became red and shiny. “Per fretum febris. Through the straits of fever she will attain God.”

  But what about Madame’s arm? What if Cook had tossed it on the dung heap behind the kitchen? If so, the grey mongrel might have carried it off, with wasps still clinging on
it, to devour the flesh and scatter the bones. This dog was so desperate to get a taste of meat that I had seen him chewing on parchment shavings outside the scriptorium.

  “How will her soul know where to find her arm?” I asked.

  “The soul will know where to go, like the dove returning to the dovecot.” The abbess dipped a cloth in lavender water to cool her temples. “The soul will bring the arm to the body and Madame de Fores will be whole in paradise.”

  “But God said, Ashes amongst ashes and dust amongst dust. What if Madame turns to dust before her soul arrives?”

  “This is a good question,” she said, stroking my hair, “for the prophet Ezekiel wondered the same thing. Son of man, can these bones live? And lo, God breathed into the bones and they stood up and walked.”

  Still, she was not addressing the problem of how body parts could get out of a man-eating crocodile or a cannibal or a starving dog. Patting me on the head did not help. I was tired of being put off with flimsy answers. After all, my mother had not come to collect me, although I had slept with her perfume bottle for almost four years. I had added so many tears to that small bottle that my grief had run over the rim.

  “But what if it is only dust from worms or moles, not from Madame?” I asked. “How is the soul to know? What then?”

  “The soul will know,” she said, locking the hasp on the psalter. “That is enough for today. Do not trouble yourself any further, my daughter, for the health of your soul is in my hands. Since you appear to have mastered grammar and rhetoric, in the next lesson we will work on logic. I am persuaded you have much need of it.”

  Eight

  FOUR YEARS AFTER Madame’s death, the Orsini psalter-hours were finally completed. On the day the last quire was entrusted to the bookbinder, the nuns started the pruning of the vines and snow appeared on Mont Ventoux to the north.

  At Epiphany, Elisabeth dug her thumb into the hollow of my shoulder, urging me awake for nocturns. Now that I was twelve, our cloaks were the same length, though mine was new and made of finer wool. I flung it on to follow her down the night stairs into the church. The abbess began by consecrating the bound psalter-hours. She prayed that it would meet with Cardinal Orsini’s approval and acknowledged the toil of all the scribes and monks. Even I was thanked, though I had only ferried supplies to the scribes. After the first psalm had stirred and lifted me, I escaped into numb sleep until the sacristan’s roving lamp attacked my eyes.