by Mary Novik
The Florentine backed me up against my writing desk. Every part of me was trembling now. Even if the nuns heard me scream and came running, they might misinterpret what they saw. After calling me a sorcière, the chapter could easily condemn me as a whore. He was now so close that I could see his bloodshot eye and smell his fœtid breath. Taking a blow from my elbow, he shunted a little to the side, then twisted my hair about his fist, wrenched me around, and slammed my face onto my writing desk. He groped at my tunic, pulled it over my head, and bent my wrist behind my back to pin me down. His hand gained strength, became a hoof, a claw tearing at my flesh. His thigh jammed me against the desk, lifting me and splaying my legs. He entered me from behind, as large and brutal as a bull.
Unable to move, I could only weep until it was over. I freed my arm and reached for my hem to wipe the vomit from my mouth. He withdrew and let out a burp of satisfaction. This small, strange act of rudeness brought me back to life.
Like the night, I was dark and cold. Like the rat, I was swift.
I was blind with rage. I could not see. I could not speak. But I could still feel.
I felt for the knife on my desk and turned towards him, his naked body sagging against the wall, his lips slack, his eyelids half-closed. With my right hand, I seized the sac that hung between his legs. Sensing the warmth of my fingers around him, he hesitated, hopeful. I readied my knife. I knew that when I jerked it through the layers of skin, his testicles would fall into my palm as cleanly as the calf’s.
But he caught on too quickly. At the knife flash, he grabbed for his scrotum to protect it and took the blade across his wrist instead. My knife scored deeply, severing tendon and bone, and the blood sprayed over his chest. He bellowed and fell like an ox onto the pavingstones, pressing his mutilated hand between his thighs to stop the bleeding.
The moon was high above the scriptorium, my only witness. He was in a raving fit. From the way the blood was spurting, I knew he would never paint on vellum again. I had to get out fast or he would kill me.
I could take no more. I was done. I must leave the abbey, but I meant to leave by my own power, not be driven out. Within minutes, I gathered a few belongings and was gone.
Avignon
1324–1341
Fourteen
BRACED BY THE STING of my injuries, I travelled behind a clutch of friars on the night path to Avignon—more men than I had encountered in ten years at the abbey. If they had turned to look, they would have seen a wandering friar with his head cowled and his hands tucked into his scapular. After two leagues, where the friars’ path met the Sorgue once again, we were joined by journeymen and artisans seeking labour in the city. Fate had directed my hand when I maimed the Florentine, for ahead of me were the well-built towers of Avignon, twice as many as when I had left. At cockcrow, I dropped further behind to discard my outer habit, then followed the river downstream past farmers’ fields, past dwellings and small bourgs, until it was tamed into a canal by the cloth-workers.
I entered the outskirts of Avignon just as the bell at Notre-Dame-des-Doms rang out to signal Pentecost, the day of my birth fifteen years earlier. Soon the folk would throng the streets to celebrate the feast day. Here, beside the busy paddlewheels on the rue du Cheval Blanc, where the dyers’ waste spilled into the canal, I recognized the Cheval Blanc with its ancient sycamore. The tree had been there before the canal was built, before the dyers and their wheels. Underneath it was a squatting beggar, her eyes vacant, her grin unmistakably Conmère’s toothless grin. When I greeted her with affection, offering her the remains of my food, she did not recognize me, but she would not let go of the cheese I gave her or the crust. Her joy was terrifying because it was the joy of greed, not of love.
“Look, I’m Solange!” I bared my thigh to show my birthmark and threw my arms around her.
Only then did she understand who I was. She muttered some words in the old tongue and led me up the stairs to our chamber, which looked unchanged. Someone lay in a heap on the bed, breathing loudly. I banged the shutters open in a spray of dust to let in the odour of the dye vats and the canal.
The bed groaned. “Go away. It is too early.”
“The bells have rung for prime.”
“What do I care for bells?”
A woman the same age as Maman when I had last seen her and just as brazenly dressed. When I told Perrette—for this was the harlot’s name—that I was Conmère’s granddaughter and that I had walked from Clairefontaine abbey, she was up, cursing, and I was in the bed with a cool compress on each foot. My courage drained and I felt the pain caused by the Florentine’s rough treatment. I slept all day, ate well, and slept again with my back to Perrette, soothed by the familiar creaking of the paddlewheel.
In the morning, Conmère rustled in the corner with her herbs and ointments, talking to herself. Perrette held out a handful of small coins, but Conmère went down the stairs without them.
“She’ll get bread at the Pope’s almonry,” Perrette said. “We won’t see her again until dark.”
“What happened to her?”
“She lost her daughter and her daughter’s child on the same day. Over the years her wisdom has turned simple.”
“That must be why she never searched for me.”
“This is your bed now, the only thing of value in the chamber.”
“I have no need of such a large bed.” I ran my hands across the wooden table to locate the childish letters I had carved, Le Blanc. My name, though I had not thought of it for years. “I will take this table instead, for it was also my mother’s. This is my métier.” I unrolled my knife, quill, and ink-horn, but she waved them off.
“The clerics need courtesans more than scribes.”
I showed her the bundle of Dante quires I had carried from Clairefontaine. “Where can I find a bookbinder?”
“North of the butchers, near the tanners. Take this for food.” She tossed me a coin.
I looked at the denier. “How much should I get for this?”
“Enough for a meal. Go to the rue de l’Épicerie near Saint Pierre. I suppose you remember where that is?”
“If not I’ll ask.”
She gave me a gat-toothed smile. “Cover your hair. And stay away for a few hours. I have a visitor coming.”
As I crossed the plank over the canal, she stuck her head out of the casement to yell at a boy, who withdrew his purple arms from a dyer’s vat. I walked north along the rue du Cheval Blanc, following the canal until it flowed into the moat around the wall. Once I was through the southeast gate and inside the city wall, I found people fighting for direction, no one willing to give way. For every woman wearing pattens to protect her shoes, I saw a score of men in colourful garments. Merchants or clerics? I could not tell the difference.
The buildings were blackened with smoke and unclean commerce, and the jutting overhangs cut out the sun. Past the turning, the street broadened to reveal newer structures faced in stone. Men in livery guarded a courtyard, from which clerics emerged, talking loud, stiff, schoolbook Latin. This was the first time I had seen a cardinal other than in a book of hours. The street narrowed and changed again. Dogs, pigs, men—all moved too swiftly and made too much racket. I rounded the corner to be hit with a horrid stench, and pinched my nostrils. I spotted the youth with purple arms leaning against a wall, a smile on his face.
“Did Perrette ask you to follow me?”
He nodded, falling into step with me. “You’ll get used to the smell. Today is not bad. It’s worse when it’s windy. Avenio cum vento fastidiosa sine vento venenosa.”
So he knew some Latin. Avignon—with wind terrible, without wind venomous. “Is this the street of the bookbinders?”
“Not yet. That stink is the butchers,” he said. “It’s carcass-burning day.” We jumped clear as a meat-cutter threw entrails into the centre gutter. “All the leather-workers are in this parish. Not that way.” He stopped me. “That leads to the goldsmiths. And not across, because buildings are bein
g linked for a cardinal’s household. They are taking over the houses of the old Avignonnais.”
I ducked after him into a workshop where parchmenters, bookbinders, and scribes laboured in near darkness, all the instruments and actions of their trades jumbled. No one was bantering with hand signals, no one decorating or illuminating, for their product was too crude to require it. My nose, so clever at picking out a single herb from the surrounding countryside, was defeated by the clashing odours. Swabbing brushes, animal glue, gelatine, book covers bent and burnt into shape, uncured parchment. At any moment, I expected to see the skeleton of the cow from which these by-products had been carved.
“Take me to a better place,” I said to the youth.
“All the booksellers are the same.” He tapped my elbow in warning. “Here comes Belot, the owner.”
Belot’s fleshy red face thrust up to mine. Hands scraped raw, a brace of knives on his belt. I unwrapped my bundle, and stacked the quires on his messy desk. He turned the leaves, rubbed the parchment with his thumb, checked the catchwords.
“La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri,” I told him. “Every word is there.”
“Where did you get it?” Suspicious. Loud.
I plucked a quill from his ink-pot, skewered some cheap parchment with my knife, and wrote Dante’s final sentence in Provençal, Latin, and Italian using increasingly elaborate scripts, then inked my colophon at the end, proof that I had apprenticed under a Benedictine master. Again that pause, that red face sizing me up, throughout which the dyer’s boy stood resolutely by my side.
“Ten sous,” Belot announced.
“La Vita Nuova is not for sale. I want it bound, plain leather, no tooling.” I did not tell him that I planned to make copies of it—for surely the Italians pouring into the city wanted to read their greatest poet, Dante. “Plus I need parchment, good ink, and a commission to take with me.” Before Belot could laugh, I added, “I was told there is a shortage of scribes in Avignon. When my colophon is better known, I will seek employment in one of the private libraries.”
Belot spat close to my shoes. “This is the only work you’ll get in this city. You’ll sit here.” He banged his fist on the only empty table. “One denier a gathering.”
I stood my ground. “That will not feed a dog! How much for Latin and Italian?”
“The same. You’ll use black-letter. The faster the script, the more we both earn.”
I looked at the cramped desk, without even a stool to squat on. I thought of my wide desk in the abbey, my cushioned seat, the fine parchment and oak-gall ink, and said, “I will do the copying in my own workshop.”
He leaned on the stack of Dante quires. “It’s still piece-work. And you must sell me the Dante outright.”
“I want it bound for my own use.”
“No one in the confraternity will bind it for you. We all worship in the same church and abide by the same rules. You deal only with me, not other booksellers or buyers. And if I hear of you selling your copying, bound or unbound, inside the city wall …”
The dyer’s boy wrested the quires from beneath Belot’s monstrous hand. For someone so young, his voice was firm. “I’ll return for the commission and the materials she needs to do the copying. Put them in a parcel for Luc.”
As we walked towards the rue de l’Épicerie, Luc pushed a leering monk out of my path. “How old are you?” I asked.
“Old enough to apprentice with you. I saw your colophon. In seven years, I want to have one myself.”
Fifteen
WITH MY FIRST COINS from Belot, I rented the chamber next to Perrette’s with a low window that opened over the canal, and moved in my table. Soon the base of my thumb ached from making ink strokes at top speed with Luc standing ready to run the gatherings back to Belot. It was hasty work and there was no time for rubricated capitals, or even a brushful of colour.
I bought an apprentice’s cap and gown for Luc and told him to put about that a scribe had come to the quarter who would copy documents for less than the going tariff. In the day, I could scarcely hear the hours ringing through the city noise, but at night, the nocturn bells broke through my sleep. I would rise, search anxiously for my night shoes, then remember that I did not need to attend the divine office. Missing Elisabeth’s back against mine, I would lie down again with the casement ajar and listen to the rushing of the Sorgue over the paddlewheels as I had heard it as a child.
By autumn Luc was bringing me a steady flow of copying from men outside the city wall who could not write for themselves. I taught Luc black-letter and before long he was doing enough plain work to keep Belot off our backs. Soon the quarter’s merchants were bringing longer documents and letters up the stairs for me to copy. While I worked, they studied my countenance, my speech, my scholarly gown, unable to deduce my status. Where has she come from? they seemed to ask. The French thought me Italian and the Italians, French. My skill at languages set me apart, but mostly I copied in the local Provençal, for I had not found anyone to pay me to copy La Vita Nuova in Italian.
I had been in Avignon over a year, when a message requested that I wait upon two students who had arrived from the University of Bologna. I found the run-down dwelling near the rue de la Change. A crooked, slender building, but better than one of the shanties that students had erected in the graveyard. My knock was answered by a tall, lanky gargoyle, whose stained tunic revealed him to be more of a gourmand than a scholar. His chin peppered with hair like a half-plucked capon, he stared at me until I shook my leather quill-box.
His Provençal came out in a rush. “I don’t suppose you speak Italian. My brother calls this city a god-forsaken Babylon, but I think it should be called a Babel for all the silly tongues that wag in it.” He led me down a corridor past a pail of slops and up a flight of stairs. “We are being robbed of a florin a month for this hovel. I am Gherardo and that“—he pushed me into a murky chamber—”is my brother, Francesco, who hopes to be a famous poet one day. Get out your quill to record the most execrable nonsense that ever man has composed to earn a soldo. Checco, here is your scribe!” Then, observing me bleakly, he asked, “I suppose you have a name?”
“Solange Le Blanc.”
I shoved the untidy pile of documents to one side so I could write at the desk. Gherardo sank onto some cushions and closed his eyes. Only then did Francesco, who had been gazing out the window, turn towards me, with the sunlight flooding his face. So this was what an Italian poet looked like: younger and more handsome than I had imagined Dante.
Francesco hovered as I arranged my tools. Once I’d uncapped my ink-horn, he began to dictate in Latin, addressing the letter to Cicero, a writer who had been dead for fourteen centuries. Francesco was already a seasoned orator, though he was only a few years older than me. His voice was a joy to listen to and he paced to the rhythm of his own sentences, his movements elegant, as spare as his brother’s were gauche.
After he had finished dictating, he looked at me to see if I had kept up. I allowed myself a final whiff of Paris ink and held the parchment out to him. He studied the text, nodded approval, and snatched the quill from my hand to sign his name, Francesco di Petrarca de Florentia. I noticed a glimmer of respect in his eyes. And why not? I had made his Latin appear more polished by recording it in a formal running script.
He began pacing again, dictating a second letter in surprisingly good Provençal to Guido Sette, a friend in Bologna who had written to borrow money so he could join the brothers in Avignon. For this letter, I chose a more familiar script. After Francesco had reminisced about shared pleasures, he turned the tables on his friend, for whom I began to feel sorry.
He prodded his lounging brother with his boot. “Gherardo, how shall I describe my financial state to Guido?”
“Like a nanny goat that hasn’t been bred,” offered Gherardo, rising on one elbow. “If she is bred, there will be an ongoing supply of milk and a kid to sell at market. The poet, likewise. Once bred by a little money, he can be milked of verse f
or years to come.”
“Perhaps I need a muse like Dante.”
“Even better,” Gherardo said. “He milked Beatrice of poetry for twenty years.”
“Dante did not think of Beatrice so vulgarly,” I protested.
Gherardo seemed surprised to hear this. “If Francesco does not get a patron, we will be sleeping in the cemetery, for we have both given up the law. We have already spent the patrimony our father left us and we need new cloaks and hose to make a showing in the city. I cannot strut in these ill-fitting shoes.”
I said, “I doubt that any patron will pay for a letter to Cicero.”
“You may be right. Is there a demand for poems here?” Gherardo asked. “Read her the one you are writing, Francesco.”
Francesco came over to the desk to shuffle through the array of documents, nudging my arm several times, most likely on purpose, before he extracted one. “At prime, the sun enters the power of Taurus,” he read. “Quickening the earth with heat and colour.”
“Now, that is subtle,” Gherardo said, “for Taurus is a lusty bull.”
“There are some more verses, equally silly, which I will spare you,” Francesco said to me. “I have crossed out more lines than I have kept. Tell me, Solange Le Blanc, what does an Avignon lady wish to hear from a courtier?”
“Put yourself at her mercy and beg for her love,” I suggested, a little too quickly. “Say you will die if she does not pity you.”
“Now, Checco,” Gherardo said, “here’s a young woman who can write love poems as well as you, like one of those figs that are sweet when green.” His thumbs split an imaginary fig, which he pretended to eat.