by Mary Novik
I watched them from across the square, where a mob was gathering. Some people were ringing hand bells to dispel the deadly plague cloud. Others were accusing the flagellants of being Jews or Jew-haters or plague-carriers or, in a muddle of fear, all three at once. They were soon joined by other knaves, who had armed themselves with cudgels, clubs, and pikestaffs to give the visitors a thrashing. Every chamber-pot and close-stool was making it his business to take the law into his own hands.
The migrants’ scourges hit their chests then backs, their right shoulders then left shoulders, foreheads then thighs, with a nauseating whack-whack, whack-whack. By dawn, their whips were red and their blood was flowing from open wounds. One man fell on the ground, his tongue swollen like a dog’s. I approached to pick up his water flagon. A few drops remained, which I squeezed on his tongue. He had a pungent odour and black patches under his skin, but as far as I could tell, none of the carbuncles Gherardo had reported. Then, as he rolled over, I saw it—nestling in the pit of his arm—a black plague-egg. I ran the gauntlet of mocking knaves to get to the mercy barrel across the piazza, but when I attempted to fill the flagon, a rogue kicked the barrel and it rolled down the slope, breaking the spigot. Before I could say an Ave Maria, all the water sprayed out on the ground. The flagellants were now a stupefied mass staring at the wasted water with glassy eyes.
A steady drumbeat signalled the approaching men-at-arms. The new city marshal, one of the Pope’s nephews, was finally making an appearance with the captain of the palace, Aigrefeuille, in his star-studded armour. Their gauntlets flew this way and that, flashing their ancestral crests as they gave orders, until they had persuaded the flagellants to leave the square with promises of clothing, bread, and ale.
The plague-stricken friar I had touched leapt up as if resurrected, to join the flagellants who were snaking off. The city knaves now aimed themselves at me, making a great racket, in which I heard shouts of Saint Barbara! I saw how it must look to them: as if I had raised the friar from the dead. The coarser men taunted me, full of unspent energy and sour drink. One took a swipe at me with a knife, drawing blood. Another plucked some hair from my head and held his trophy aloft, swearing it would ward off the plague.
Some red-haired smiths collected around me to tug at my sleeves and hem. Instead of chasing off my attackers, they joined in, using their clumsy weapons to cut pieces from my robe. I was spun from man to man as a source of relics, and when my blood dripped on the earth, they mopped it reverently with scraps of my robe or filthy sponges. How had it come to pass that my life was no longer my own, but the property of such men? Those who had worshipped me as the miraculous bell-ringer on the tower, their own Saint Barbara who could drive off thunder and eclipses, were on the point of turning me into a martyr themselves. I clutched the hilt of my miséricorde, ready to plunge it into my flesh before they did it for me. My vision blurred into a delirium of pulsing reds and blacks. Was this a malfeasance of the earth, or the result of the surrounding horror and stink and noise?
How long had I held my knife before the sun rose from behind the palace? I hid it in the tongue of my belt just in time, for at my elbows were two Limousin knights in full armour, their weapons reflecting light and order. Never had I greeted them with greater joy. To my shame, I shrank from my dark roots and became, once more, a creature of the light.
Forty
THE TEETH OF THE inner portcullis bit into the earth behind me, and the knights’ fingers dug into my elbows. I was not so much being rescued as force-marched to a reckoning. Once I was dressed more cleanly, Hugues Roger collected me. He fell in step with me, showing his knees in a short hunting tunic. He must have ridden hard to get there, because his hose was streaked with dust.
“Why did you expose yourself to that jacquerie in the piazza? You should not have left the palace. And to touch a diseased friar? For a supposed clairvoyante, you are remarkably short-sighted.” He gave me a sideways jab into the salle de Jésus. “Here’s my brother waiting for you. Try not to cause him any more pain.”
Word of the mystery in the piazza had travelled quickly, for the new camerlengo’s robes flew out darkly as he stormed in, trailing Guy de Chauliac, the most recent court surgeon. More boots were scraping across the tiles. Advancing were Clement’s nephews, Nicolas de Besse and Guillaume de La Jugie, followed by the men who had married into the family, then the uncles, cousins, officers, and Limousin nobles. Nicolas de Besse wore his new cardinal’s mozzetta, but few of the others had been given time to put on their robes of office. Notwithstanding the haste, seven cardinals stood before their pontiff, all members of the family. The men talked in bursts about the need to protect the Pope, cursed and commiserated about the pestilence, and reached a decision quickly.
Hugues Roger spoke for them. “Clement—Your Holiness—we have decided that you must retreat to Châteauneuf-du-Pape until the disease abates.”
“I will not seek asylum while my city is blackened by contagion.”
Hugues Roger threw up his hands, then snapped them into fists. “You cannot come and go like a commoner!”
The surgeon steepled his fingers so that his thumbs grazed his heart. “If you will not retreat, Holy Father, you must keep to your private apartments and see only those examined by your doctors. Banquets and audiences must be postponed. For her own protection, the Countess will be sent into the country.”
Clement was brusque. “The Countess will remain here with me.”
The men were about to argue, when a herald came in at a run to report that the diseased friar and several of the flagellants had died in an almshouse outside the wall. More troubling, three of the city’s own Carmelites were dead and others dying.
“The Carmelites are hermits,” Captain Aigrefeuille said. “They cannot have been exposed to the flagellants.”
The runner said, “A few days ago, they accepted a novice from Aigues-Mortes.”
“Throw in bladders of wine, then nail the cloister shut,” Aigrefeuille said. “Let it become their tomb.”
Clement lifted his gloved hand to silence the captain. “There will be other plague houses. You cannot board all of them up. De Chauliac, how does it spread?”
“It is thought that the poisonous vapours enter by the mouth and nose.”
“Then we will build fires in the streets to drive the vapours off,” said Clement. “Where is the new city marshal? Tell him to bring me the parish maps. We will need to enlarge the cimetière des pauvres.”
Clement and his officers worked through the day to organize alms and relief. After the evening angelus, the Pope appeared at his new indulgence window to speak to the clerics, merchants, and guild-masters called to assembly in the courtyard below.
His final instructions were, “Every doctor in Avignon, from the Jews to my own physicians, must attend the plague-stricken at my expense. Each of my churches will become an infirmary. The priests must attend every man, woman, and child with the peste to give them the last rites.”
A man in a brown cowl hollered from the courtyard, “They are dying faster than they can be absolved!”
The Pope replied, “Then every priest from curé to cardinal must remit their sins without hearing their confessions.”
“How many cardinals do you see here?” the loud-mouth yelled. “Most are packing up their households! Sauve-qui-peut.”
Save yourself. Others picked up the cry, pushing a sea of cowardly flesh towards the bottleneck of the double portcullis.
On the morrow, when the herald returned, he was told to stay in the grande cour, so he would not breathe on anybody’s face. He broadcast his news from below. The refugees from the south were finally crossing the Durance. Half had died on the journey, but the survivors, who were coughing up black blood, would soon be at the city gates.
We never saw the runner again. Another replaced him, then another, as each was infected and succumbed. The wealthy Avignonnais fled to their ancestral houses in the country and Clement’s allies barricaded themselve
s at Villeneuve across the bridge, thinking more of their own selves than of the general doom. Soon everyone with the means to escape had done so, leaving the diseased and poor inside the city wall. Palace servants who fell ill were stripped of their livery and sent to their homes. If servants had the misfortune to die inside the palace, their corpses were shunted out at night or shoved into the largest mouth of the palace drain, the égout souterrain, to wash towards the Rhône.
Without Félicité beside me, the hours slowed and my food tasted flat and bitter. Each day, I climbed the corkscrew stairs to the palace roof to strain my eyes for the flag on the Poor Clares’ bell-tower: white, the agreed-on signal to tell me that Félicité was well and God was still capable of grace. The Poor Clares had barred their gate and cloistered themselves so they would not contract the plague. They were of noble blood and loved their comfort more than succouring refugees. For this I was glad, because the disease had been shut out also.
As the weeks passed, the Avignon death toll mounted. At first it was said that a thousand people died in a month, then a thousand a week, then a thousand in a single day. The sick and needy clung to the Pignotte, scooping up the hard loaves that the Pope’s bakers threw out the windows at them to avoid contamination.
Then, just before Shrovetide, the branches of the Sorgue flooded the alluvial plain to the east of the city. The mistral blew fiercely for three days, then six, then nine. I crept onto the palace roof and sheltered behind the parapet to watch the wind-lashed waters of the Rhône batter Saint Bénezet’s bridge, and push the waves into the moat. The dyers’ canal, now unable to feed into the moat, was running over its banks to swamp the dwellings of the workers. Some of them were already camped across from the palace on Doms rock.
What I saw next alarmed me even more. The white flag at the priory of the Poor Clares was hanging by a prayer. A gust flattened me upon the roof. When the mistral eased long enough for me to stand upright again, the flag was gone. I scrambled into the stairwell and down the steps, to find Clement’s stewards rushing between the garde-robe and bedchamber to clothe him in his amice, alb, stole, chasuble, and cope. I was in the procession when the Pope rode his white mule to the riverbank to consecrate the expanse of the Rhône, blessing it by breadth and length, so that the plague victims tipped into its currents would be remitted of their sins.
Having seen the bloated corpses for himself, Clement sat next to his fire, reading dispatches and giving free rein to his natural fears. His humours were out of alignment, veering gloomily towards melancholy. But who was I to belittle his terror, since it was as much for his people as himself? I lived with my own fear, for the Poor Clares had not hoisted their flag since the mistral.
One night in my own bed, I shook myself out of a paralytic state and went to Clement’s bedchamber. I emerged from the hidden staircase to find him propped on the short papal bed, his lips stained red by courage-giving wine. His jowls were grossly enflamed, his skull was bandaged, and his eyelids were bruised. He told me that waking alone and falling prey to apprehensions, he had sent for his old surgeon, Jean de Parme. I lifted the bandage to see what was beneath. Jean de Parme had drilled a hole, which now oozed fluid into the flimsy gauze.
Clement was enunciating more precisely than usual. “It is only a small hole to let the ill humours escape.”
I crawled beneath the fur coverings to comfort him. “Did the drilling hurt?”
“Very little. The vapours made a malevolent hiss as they shot out.”
We lay together, his hand idling on my thigh, going nowhere, until he fell asleep and I rolled to face the window. At dawn, a rare burst of sun penetrated the deep embrasure, exposing the much-scraped parchment of his skin. I was growing old as well and did not relish looking in the pier-glass as much as formerly. Soon I might wear the guimpe and mantle of a mature woman.
But not just yet. I was pulling on my azure robe when in came Hugues Roger with the surgeon de Chauliac, who seemed to have taken command of the fight against the plague. Hugues Roger was hitching up his belt as if he had dressed in haste. After them arrived Captain Aigrefeuille of the pointed stars, with the jailer Renaud de Pons. Five or six other men, all vital to palace operations, entered the room. The servants spilled out of curtains to begin the morning routine and the old steward threw a brick of antimony and arsenic on the fire. The odour was perverse, but Clement believed that it drove off any plague fumes that rose this high.
“Knot faster,” I told my maid, who was fastening my sleeves. I had very nearly been caught sleeping like a servant.
De Chauliac approached the bed. He surveyed the Pope’s tranquility and his puffy face, then peeled the gauze back to inspect the lesion. From this, I gathered that de Chauliac had encouraged the trepanning of Clement’s skull. He applied his fingers to Clement’s armpits and groin, searching for growths, then palpated his bladder for stones, a humiliating exercise repeated every morning before the surgeon proclaimed that the papacy was in good health. But why had de Chauliac brought the captain and the jailer with him?
The old steward robed the Pope while de Chauliac’s bony fingers examined me through my clothes, prodding along my collarbone, beneath my arms, and deep between my legs, where plague-eggs might be lodging. He pushed up my eyelids with his thumbs, looked at one eye, then the second.
De Chauliac made a smug bow, one hand at his navel, the other at his back. “Holy Father, observe how the Countess sweats. She is carrying the plague.”
This was absurd. “I have no symptoms,” I protested. “I may be moist, but so would any woman swathed in layers of linen, wool, and sendal.”
Again he spoke to the Pope, not to me. “When she went out amongst the flagellants, she drew contagion into her as a lightning-rod draws light. She is the source of the ill humours that have been unsettling you. The servants complain of a dark miasma issuing from her eyes. You must turn your gaze from her at once.” He snapped his fingers for Aigrefeuille to step between the Pope and me.
“If I had been infected by the flagellants,” I said, “I would have died several weeks ago.”
My maid threw herself at the surgeon helpfully. “On that night, she left the palace at the darkest hour. I followed her through the postern gate to a brothel.”
The words fell heavily upon my chest. She might have followed me into the alleyways behind the palace, even past a brothel, but no further. However, to prove my innocence, I would need to confess that I had gone to the Poor Clares’ priory and Aigrefeuille’s men would unearth Félicité. Since she was already thought dead, her life would be worth a toss of salt. Once Clement had taken it in, he would be forced to put me aside, as he had warned me years before.
Aigrefeuille said, “Your Holiness, the Countess has wilfully endangered your life.”
“What would happen to Holy Mother Church if you fell ill?” the camerlengo asked. “The death of the Pope would sink the city.”
Only Clement and his brother showed any pity for me. Hugues Roger was knocking the dust thoughtfully from his hose. “I have been talking to the ironmongers, that peculiar guild of red-haired men who are working on the palace. They used scraps of her garments to soak up her blood during the riot in the piazza and swear these devotos have protected them from the plague. What if there is some truth in this?”
Clement swivelled hopefully. “Then she has kept the disease from me, not brought it.”
“If this is true, Holy Father, it is necromancy,” the surgeon said. “Consider that she touched the dying friar, but did not die.”
“You also touched the plague-ridden and are alive,” I countered. “I am a prophet, not a necromancer.”
The surgeon’s rebuttal was quick. “A prophet who has not prophesied since the eclipse.”
But Clement would not be put off. “If tokens of her blood and clothing ward off pestilence, her charisms go beyond prophecy to the miraculous.”
“My dear Pope,” the camerlengo said, “you must stop looking for saints under every bed-sheet.
Think how much it cost us to canonize Saint Yves, yet nobody takes him seriously but you.”
The camerlengo and the surgeon gathered Clement into their conversation and walked him from the chamber. The other officers followed, circling him with their iron will.
Hugues Roger stayed with me in the bedchamber. “Clement has received another vicious letter by Francesco Petrarch. This time he signed it. He says that the Pope’s doctors are charlatans who are trying to kill him and reports a blow Clement took to his skull that sharpened his memory. You must have told Petrarch about the trepanning.”
“How could he have heard of it in Italy so swiftly?”
He looked at me sharply. “You were not aware? Jean de Parme drilled Clement once before.”
“Then Petrarch heard about it some other way. All the Tuscans know one another’s business. Any one of them could have told him.” Guido, I thought, though I did not say it, or any of the other Italian notaries.
He relented. “Yes, I see that now, but you cannot blame me for suspecting. You come and go too freely. Who can tell how many men you sleep with—where, or when?” His eyes lifted my hem to dine on possibilities. His pity gone, he planted his hand on my breast, his oily palm a lubricant to something more. When the back of my legs hit his brother’s bed, his knee spread them apart. “This is not the only ermine pillow in the palace.”
We had both been faithful to Our Lord, the Pope, but now that Clement must cast me aside, I saw what Hugues Roger was wanting: the right to claim the spoil. “No,” I said. “I will go to my estates in Turenne.” At his laugh, my gut knotted.
He twisted my arm to rip off the sleeve with the Turenne crest, and stuffed it into his shirt. “This will go to the Pope’s new consort.”