by Mary Novik
Overnight, Elisabeth’s warts became enflamed. I was awake all night contriving remedies to treat her hand. Nothing—neither a hot poultice nor cool salve—would calm the itching. When the sun rose, I went into the pasture to pick Saint John’s wort to soothe the warts. I had no sooner cut a few stems than the stockbreeder called out to me.
“Is your knife sharp?”
At my nod, she hastened me to the cow-shelter, where Emmanuelle was struggling to give birth. “She will be calmer with you. Hold her head and talk to her while I try to get the calf out.”
I had assisted many times, but today my heart was uneasy. I did not wish to attend another difficult birth, and was shaky and out of sorts from lack of food and sleep. When Emmanuelle could not deliver on her own, we had to push her onto her side and tug out the calf by ropes tied to his ankles. As Emmanuelle licked him dry, I saw he was not brown like our herd, but white with black spots. I did not need to count them to know that there were seven. The stockbreeder gave Emmanuelle a pail of mash and measured a length of twine. Because the newborn was a bull-calf, she would castrate him so he would fatten quickly.
“Get your knife ready,” she said. “Your hands are steadier than mine.”
The stockbreeder tied a lace knot around the scrotum to lessen the bleeding, then held the calf’s legs apart while I went in swiftly. I cut cleanly with my knife and dropped the severed testicles on the straw, feeling unhappy about my part in it. Now that the calf was up, the stockbreeder was counting his spots, and I regretted telling her about my prediction. I shaded my eyes from the sun as I hurried through the ploughed field. I was not fast enough, for she spurted past me. Her skirts caught on a deep furrow, she stumbled, dropped to her knees, raised her arms, fell again, her shouts getting louder as she approached the abbey, the calf draped over her arms with its afterbirth dripping tissue and blood. The nuns emerged from the cloister, debating the cause of the stockbreeder’s fit, and soon her voice, shrieking that I was a sorcière, was joined by the dissonance and buzz of rumour.
It was true that the calf was not brown like Emmanuelle or the bull that had bred her, but spotted as I had foreseen. But how was this sorcery? I hid in my cell to order my thoughts. It did not take the abbess long to find me. She sat on the bed, speaking to my back, since my head lay buried in my arms.
“Some of the obedientiaries are accusing you of misconduct. They are demanding a meeting.”
No longer under her protective wing, I must answer to the chapter. For years, she had warned me this day would come. I had reason to fear their sting. Now that I was a novice, I had seen hardened nuns reduced to tears in chapter. Worse—it was the sixth week of Lent. The nuns were weak from eating lentil soup with only a few spices to enliven it. The quiet nuns had become more listless and the quick-tempered even more quarrelsome than usual.
“Can’t we wait until the nuns are eating meat once more?”
“The cloister has erupted in a fury of grumbling, Solange. There will be no end to it until you take the stand.”
The abbess entered the chapter house as Agnès de Clairefontaine. Moths had attacked her fur-trimmed robe, and the toes of her pigaces were bent and tired, but her brother’s sword rested proudly on her hip, with Saint Peter’s toenail shining in its pommel. Behind the abbess came the sacristan, the librarian, the other obedientiaries, and the choir nuns, who positioned themselves in tiers beneath the ribbed vault. Since it was Elisabeth’s first chapter meeting, she sat in the upmost tier, her hand tucked up her sleeve to hide the warts. My mouth was dry and tasted of copper as I took my place in the stand. According to the rule, I must listen but not speak. Each of the nuns had the right to testify.
The stockbreeder spoke first, her fingers knotting and unknotting. “Solange is in the habit of touching the wombs of ewes and cows. I have heard her talk to the unborn. I am convinced”—her voice climbed shrilly—“that she caused the bull-calf to burst out in spots by casting a spell upon it.”
My hands still smelt of the birthing stall, where we had brought a life into the world together. How long had she been envious of my ability to comfort her beasts? Her testimony had barely finished before Sister Raymonde rose. Large and solid, she rooted her feet on the pavingstones.
“This is not necromancy or a virgin birth. The calf is a product of its parents. The heifer did not conceive this calf by herself. The facts are clear. God bids us use our eyes. We must look about us for a spotted bull!”
This caused a stir amongst the nuns and the sacristan jumped up to respond. “I suppose we must look for a natural father for the Virgin Mary? And for Our Saviour? I have seen you consorting with Solange amongst your poppies and nightshade. You have taught your pupil well. You should be banished to practise your science amongst heretics.”
Raymonde’s thighs landed on the bench with a heavy slap. I steadied my thoughts. If I let them stray, I would become as overwrought as Elisabeth, whose eyes skipped from one nun to another, resting only a few seconds on each face. Next, one of the nuns might suggest striking me with reeds and driving me into the wilderness, or dragging me in a spiked box, then flaying me alive and hanging me from a post. Their common sense had taken flight on hooves of envy. Soon they would stampede towards the nearest bucket of warm mash.
The stockbreeder was still on her feet, in full cry. “Perhaps the spell Solange cast is part of a general maleficium she has caused. What if the other cows in our herd break out in spots? Emmanuelle and her calf should be taken to Avignon to be exorcized by Pope John.”
This allusion to her great enemy the Pope brought the abbess to her feet amidst much rustling of black taffeta. I smelt the faint odour of lavender, a sensible fragrance, and took heart.
“It was not a spell, but prophecy,” the abbess said. “Have you forgotten that Solange was accepted as a child oblate because she has the gift of clairvoyance? Since then, she has mastered the seven liberal arts and shown remarkable skill in the scriptorium. So much so that the abbot has just granted her a colophon as a master scribe, the youngest in the abbey’s history.”
I was not the only one knocked astride by this announcement. The librarian took a step towards the abbess, saying, “O prophecy, here is thy sting! Mother Agnes, you have always believed that honey drops from Solange’s lips. However, no honest scribe writes with her left hand, nor so accurately and well. Your favourite has a devil’s paw.”
In the highest tier, Blanche gave Ursula a push. As Ursula rose, her hand grazed the rail, flying out to command the room’s attention. I had never heard her speak in chapter before. “Mother Agnes, we are ten years older than Solange. Why have you given her a colophon before us? She already thinks herself superior because she knows Italian and we do not.”
The abbess made an impatient gesture. “She only copies it. She does not understand.”
“She converses in that language with the Florentine!” cried Ursula.
I stared at Ursula, whose eyes evaded mine. The abbess began to cough—violent, wrenching spasms—and now my eyes fled in remorse, for I had disobeyed and wounded her and was ashamed. Further quarrelling broke out amongst the nuns, who deserted their orderly rows to debate heatedly with one another. At last, the abbess managed to subdue her cough. She drew her sword and held it aloft to quiet the uproar.
“You bicker one minute and are tight as thieves the next,” she said. “With hysteria such as this, the holy Templars were hounded to their deaths, my innocent brother amongst them. Women accused of sorcery have had their tongues extracted with hot tongs. Would you wish this torture on Solange?” She paused to survey the shamefaced chapter. “There will be no talking in the cloister until Easter Eve. We will all be better for some medicinal silence.
“Listen to your abbess. Solange has had a vision, but not a simple one like her unicorn with his head in the lap of the Virgin. When Saint Hildegarde was a girl, she could also tell the colour of a calf inside its mother’s womb. This is a prophecy about the future of the Roman church. Our hei
fer is Holy Mother Church and her bull-calf is the French pope. The seven black spots are a blight on the papacy. This means there will be seven popes in Avignon, each afflicted with one of the seven deadly sins. Only when the last pope is hanged for a heretic will the church return to Rome.”
Mother Agnes had so amplified my prediction about the spots that it was unrecognizable, even to me. Yet an aura of startling truth illuminated it. Perhaps it was a prophecy. The serious faces of the nuns in their tiers, their awed silence, their transfixed eyes—this was more worrisome than any accusation they had levelled at me.
The chapter house began to swim and my legs buckled in a giddy heap. I knocked my forehead on something going down and lightning flashed across the vault. My eyes turned back into my head and the tiers of nuns became a choir of saints and cardinals, toiling upwards against the prevailing air currents in which seven French popes were spinning. From their mouths, banderôles unfurled with the words Superbia, Desperatio, Dolor, Discordia, Stultitia, Avaritia, and Luxuria. Angels with heaving bosoms and tiny legs hovered on rapid wings in an azure heaven dotted with gold-foil stars that must have cost a dozen florins. The illuminator’s true skill, however, was revealed in his portrait of hell, enriched with swirls of ebony, ormolu, and vermilion—colours I had been coveting in the Florentine’s miniatures. The faces of hell’s sinners were grotesquely familiar. The Florentine was positioned upside down in flames, his feet a lurid blue. The stockbreeder was in an ecstasy of swollen nudity, a hideous serpent writhing round her hips. Hell’s mouth gaped below, a scarlet orifice sucking the affrighted clerics towards it. It was a Last Judgement worthy of the Florentine’s own brushes.
Then the spectacle faded, leaving a dull ache in my skull. The numbness crept down my left arm into my fingers and the flying nuns reverted to a swarm of women buzzing about my ears. I found myself lying flat on the cold stone floor with my eyes closed. The abbess was beside me, giving an order to someone.
“Fetch my scarlet ledger. I must record what Solange is uttering.”
“No, don’t.” Even as these words—and more—escaped my lips, they sounded foreign. I stared at the infirmarian, who had pushed up my eyelid with her thumb.
“She is in delirium.”
“No,” said Elisabeth, shoving in. “She is speaking in the old tongue.”
The nuns edged closer. Several crouched to minister to me and I was relieved when Elisabeth elbowed them aside to gather me into her strong arms. My eyelid dropped as the infirmarian was thrust away. Elisabeth cradled my head, whispering, “Forgive me, Solange, I did not believe you had second sight until this day. Tell me what you saw.”
I babbled for some time, grateful that only Elisabeth could understand. “I must be light-headed from fasting. Say nothing to the others, for it was a foolish, hungry vision—a vapour that escaped as swiftly as it came.”
But I knew it was more than that. I had never had a vision so profound and the dark, intransigent power that had gripped me could return at any time. I did not wish to tell the abbess, for she would twist and transform my ravings into a prophecy that bore no resemblance to what I had seen. Soon she would be redrawing the map of Christendom on her study wall, making Clairefontaine-on-the-Sorgue equal in size to Hildegarde’s abbey at Bingen-on-the-Rhine. Elisabeth was caught up in the same excitement, translating far too eagerly, making my vision of the Last Judgement sound so rare and glorious that the abbess’s face became red and shiny with anticipation.
“Elisabeth, stop,” I said, but she was too wound up to hear.
“Do not strain yourself,” the abbess advised. “You will remember more in time. And you may tell us in whichever language springs to your lips, for Saint Hildegarde also spoke in tongues. From this day forth, you must dedicate yourself to cultivating your gift of clairvoyance. The time has come for you to embrace your destiny.”
Thirteen
AFTER NINE YEARS TOGETHER, the abbess had separated Elisabeth and me. I was as lonely as an anchorite in the guest-house, where the abbess had put me to have freedom to reflect. Elisabeth was faring better than I was. Her warts had shrunk and she was now the cellaress’s assistant, a fitting job for someone quicker with weights and measures than with words.
The inquisition in the chapter house had sobered me and the solitude had given me time to think. The animosity of the nuns had been replaced by indigestion now that they were eating meat and cream, but those who had called me a sorcière might do so again. What would the future hold now that the abbess had elevated me so far above the others? The nuns were already lowering their voices as they passed me in the cloister. The abbess had set me to reading the mystics, schooling me to be a visionary. Before long, she would send for the abbot to profess Elisabeth as Sister Martha and me as Sister Marie-Ange. Once we had taken our vows, we would be wedded to both Christ and Clairefontaine, yet I felt less fitted for this rôle than ever. Even Elisabeth seemed to have more of a calling than I did.
Each evening after vespers, the old abbey cat and I sought comfort in the empty scriptorium. I was staying late in the summer light to finish my own copy of La Vita Nuova and Ambrose was curled up on the warmth of my toes, too indolent these days to chase marauding spiders. In here, the soothing water clock still regulated time. The rising moon spilled through the glass window, giving me enough light to copy Dante’s final lines. The familiar words enfolded me, but the nib was flooding with ink and needed shaping.
I carried my knife to Ursula’s desk to sharpen it. Tomorrow, at Pentecost, I would use it to cut a fifteenth stroke into my thigh. I ran Ursula’s whetstone along the blade, noticing that she had begun to decorate a small book of hours. A nobleman astride a white stallion, a clerk in particoloured hose, a stocky tradesman with a hairy chest—youths she must have known before she entered the abbey. Why had she turned her back on the world of men? In one miniature, a tall, high-breasted girl combed her tangled hair in front of a mirror. On the girl’s bed, ready for her vows, lay a Benedictine habit and a pair of shears. A basin and chipped ewer, night shoes by the open door, worn stairs winding down to church—all had come skilfully alive without an extra stroke. I realized that when the Florentine finally took an assistant, it would be Ursula, not me.
But I was a better scribe. This was my vocation and I embraced it passionately. I intended to become a renowned scribe, one of the few Benedictines known across Europe by their signatures at the end of exquisitely penned manuscripts. I returned to my desk to copy Dante’s last words and ink my colophon for the first time. I drew it painstakingly, an act of love. As I blew it dry, I heard a curse. The Florentine had entered the dark scriptorium, banging into one of the writing desks. Deafened by his own noise, he did not sense me until I spoke.
“You will see well enough when your eyes adjust.”
“Ah, it is our new master scribe. I hear you are adept at changing the colour of calves inside the womb. Why don’t you try your charisms on me and see how you fare? I will be a willing vassal.” His big hand descended on my colophon. “Signing your work already?”
Why was everyone envious of me? When his hand shifted, I closed the folio, corked my ink-pot, and wiped my quill. His habit stank and he was more than commonly drunk.
“Stay and talk to me,” he said, “or I will tell the abbess that I taught you Italian.”
“She has found out already.” I placed my knife in its groove and squared my folios, then weighed them down with a piece of slate.
“And if I tell her of Elisabeth’s sin?”
“What do you mean?”
He spat out some vulgar Tuscan that disgusted me. So he was the one who had held Elisabeth down, causing the vicious welts. And I was caught alone with him, as Elisabeth had been. There was no use calling out, because the bells had rung for compline and the nuns would be singing lustily, drowning out all other sounds. I took a few steps backwards, away from him.
“You used her, then cast her off,” I accused.
He scraped some blue pigment f
rom the back of his hand. “She came to me, begging for companionship. Her thighs fell open readily.”
I knew this was a lie. Perhaps Elisabeth had gone to him one time, hoping for affection, but she would only have returned if he had threatened to report her to the nuns. “You made her big with child,” I said, regretting my words instantly.
“If that is so, where is it? Her belly is no bigger than it always was.” He considered this almost meditatively. “I suppose you two got rid of it. What coin will buy my silence now? Will you pay as Elisabeth did, opening her legs at my bidding?”
My knees almost buckled beneath my habit. “So you admit you forced her?”
“Once a woman has tasted a man, she hungers for him. I will be gentle if you do not anger me.” One hand fumbled inside his scapular near his groin and the other pushed against the wall to block my way. “I hear that your mother had a talent in this also. All the monks in our monastery knew of her—one of the best whores in the Cheval Blanc.”
Everything I had eaten was jostling and heaving inside me. “I have had enough of your lies!” I shouted.
“It is no lie. You told everyone in the refectory yourself when the abbot attended the feast of All Saints. Do you forget? You said that when you were still inside the womb, you saw a priest lying on top of your mother in her bed in the tavern.”
So I had, but I had not realized what my vision meant. Nor did I wish to think about it now—all I wanted was to get past him to the door.
His words trickled out, oily and black. “The abbess has the wrong idea about your destiny. It is in your blood to be a whore.”
I spat at him, unable to speak two angry words together. This seemed to excite him, rather than the reverse, and he stepped towards me. He dropped his cowl and his scapular, and loosened the cord at his waist. Then he stripped off his robe and posed naked, bold with drink. He plunged his hand into the librarian’s almond oil to grease his phallus. He was lecherous and hell-bound for it, and I grew weak with fear. Ambrose rubbed against his leg, as if trying to distract him, but the Florentine kicked him aside and the cat hit the stone wall with a lifeless thud.