by Mary Novik
“Come away, mes petites. Sister Martha has work to do.” I grasped Félicité’s hand to lead her off. Wherever she went, Anne-Prospère would follow. “If you wish to yell, you must go into the fields where the nuns cannot hear you. After Martinmas, I will give you both some duties around the abbey.”
“Don’t worry, Maman. Sister Martha likes us. Her name is really Elisabeth.” Félicité extracted her hand to skid across the floor. “Watch this.” She danced on her high toes, then squealed again.
“Look, Fée,” said Anne-Prospère, holding a fig by its stem. “Look, Maman.” She plunged the fig into the last of the honey and ate the dripping fruit.
My pleasure at being called Maman was brief because I was puzzled that Elisabeth had not objected. It was normally as hard to get honey from a cellaress as it was to get blood from a turnip. Félicité dipped in a fig also, smiling like a gargoyle. I gathered the girls’ sticky hands in mine, led them to the door, and set them free outside. I came back into the cellar, expecting an explanation, but Elisabeth continued to ignore me. She finished inspecting the box and noted the entire contents in her ledger, without a single look back in the box. Only now did I remember her prodigious memory for the words of the psalms.
At last, she straightened up, wiping her hands on her scapular. “You will be shown the list of supplies when it is ready. I will take the mule cart to Avignon before the weather changes. I will be gone three days.”
Such a flood of speech! She wasn’t asking my permission, but she was opening the door a little. We were sisters once and perhaps could be again. “I will draw you a map of the friars’ path so you can follow the safest route.”
“I have a better map in here.” She tapped her head. “When the abbess travelled to Avignon, I accompanied her, and when she became too weak, I went on my own. Sometimes I saw you there, but you did not recognize me.”
I could not control my face, a mixture of surprise and dawning shame. “Even when I resided in the palais des Papes?”
Another crate shrieked as she dug the crowbar under the lid of a box and forced it down. “Especially then.”
Forty-five
THE BRANCHES OF the Sorgue had begun to flood the Vaucluse basin. Our cellar was full for winter and our firewood stacked in cords to season. In the comfort of the abbess’s house, between compline and nocturns, I had time for reading and casting back over memories. I had lived fully, loved and been loved, borne children both live and dead. Here at Clairefontaine, within hearing of the bell of Notre-Dame-des-Doms, I would remain, nurturing my daughters until I died in my great bed, with my nuns kneeling around me and my familia of servants mourning.
But death must wait, for I had much to do. One of my duties was to answer letters that came from afar. Addressed variously to the abbess of Clairefontaine, or the Countess of Turenne, or la Popessa, they found their way to me, begging for scraps of prophecy. I drew my lantern close, for earlier that day a letter had arrived in the hands of a passing friar, who had carried it from Italy for a fee. I had slipped it into the inner layer of my habit so that Elisabeth, who was lingering with curious eyes, would not see the wax seal. All day long, I had felt the vellum picking up my skin’s warmth beneath my shift. I retrieved it now—translucent from the heat and moisture of my flesh.
The letter was addressed to me in Francesco’s lively hand. What did he want from me after so many years? I imagined him writing the letter in Parma, swathed in his coronation gown, with a well-bred hound sleeping loyally beside him. I cut the stitches eagerly, then slid my knife beneath the green wax to unfold the sheet.
To Solange, in your hermitage,
Now that you have come to rest in the Vaucluse as you once hoped, I return to you in spirit to recall old pleasures and discover new ones. You will be happy to learn that I am writing poetry again. At first, Laura came back to me in dreams to dry my tears with her hair. Unworthy of the parchment I wrote them on, I scraped off the words. Then, one night, I dreamt of Laura as I first saw her in the church of Saint Clare. These fresh poems, now scattered across my table, have remarkable new conceits. I will send a handful today and will convey more by trusted couriers as I finish them. If you find infelicities, do not spare me, for I trust your eye and ear more than my own.
You will be surprised to know, after all the pain I have caused you, how often I caress you in my thoughts. As I fall asleep, I see you bathing naked in the fountain of the Sorgue. I dream of returning to you, but fearful of being roused by your great beauty and becoming a thrall to lust again, I content myself by writing poems about Laura, hoping posterity will share your approval of them.
I write this at prime as the moon angles in its descent towards the earth. How many winters are left to us? How many summers? Take up your pen and write with me, for the future is in our hands. Remember your prediction that I would be crowned by laurel leaves in Rome? Prophesy for me once more, my love—will men still read my poetry when you and I are dead?
Your own Francesco
My own Francesco, returning to me in spirit. My longing for him flooded back and the zeal of love reclaimed me. He was caressing me in his thoughts, thinking of me as he fell asleep, succumbing to my power even at this distance! But when I reread the letter, I saw something more: his fantasy of Laura, so resilient that it now embraced her death. Anger swamped me, black and red waves striking at the very core of sanity. Poisoning her with wormwood had only made him cling to her morbidly. Worms were battening on her decomposing flesh, but it was no good to tell that to a poet. Could I never loosen Francesco’s grip on his rotting prize? I grasped the hilt of the Clairefontaine sword with Saint Peter’s yellowed toenail and felt my courage swell. But how could I smite my rival, when she was already dead?
I spread Francesco’s new poems across my table. In spite of the blottings, the poems were sublime, harvested from the deep imagery of grief. Here and there, he reached too far or dropped a syllable. Even as he was squeezing these drafts onto the free fold of the letter, he had crossed out and replaced words. He had much need of my help. Without it, he would be condemned to altering words, moving verses from one poem to the next, then poems from one place in the cycle to another, despairing of finding perfection.
I imagined how our letters would fly back and forth as I encouraged him to trust his heartbeats to pace the lines. No one had written of love so well, not even Dante. Francesco was purifying the Italian tongue—what did it matter in the long run of time that Laura was the inspiration? These poems would alter the way men wrote hereafter. By guiding him, I would claim this beauty for myself and for my children. When the songbook of Francesco di Petrarca de Florentia was complete, I would copy it in my finest hand. With my signature as a seal of authority, it would make its way along the trade routes of Europe, earning admirers everywhere.
Let history worship at Laura’s sepulchre, if it chose, and choirs of nuns sing fruitless orisons. A great poet might have worshipped her, but only maggots enjoyed her now. Now that Francesco could not have me, his desire was flaming up. My body, too, hungered for more, but first we must endure this earthly fast. When I first lay in Francesco’s arms, I thought heaven well lost for mortal love, but I was learning the value of the immortal soul. Like Héloïse after she became a nun, I would enjoy an ardent correspondence with my Abélard. I had just settled myself at my table to begin a letter, when I heard Angière’s quick step. In her hand was a copper pan.
“May I share your fire? I’ve been helping Cook think up ways to use our surplus of apples. Apple confit, apple cider, apple butter. These are baked with cream. I brought a spoon for you as well.”
We sat side by side, passing the pan back and forth as we ate. “It is the winter solstice, an evening for contemplation,” I said. “The night hours are twice as long as the day’s. I feed on these silences in the Vaucluse.”
“Your thoughts seem to weigh more heavily on you here than they did in Avignon.”
“I have forty daughters now, not four. I do not w
ish to lose any of the souls in my keeping.”
“That is unlikely, since the Clarisses have settled in so well.” Her spoon clanged into the empty pot and her eyes met mine forthrightly. “Now, Solange, do not play abbess with me. When I came in, a smile was teasing your lips and I saw you hiding the letter that arrived today. I was the one who told the courier where to find you. Shall I guess whose seal was pressed into that green wax?”
My lips were curving like a child’s. “Francesco is asking for my opinion of his new poems. What harm can it do?”
“While I was waiting for the apples to bake, I remembered where I had last seen that coat of arms. It is on this.”
Angière laid a small object on my knee and peeled back the linen covering. I almost knocked it away in repulsion: a dried finger with an overgrown nail, such as sorcières used to curse their enemies or raise violent thunderstorms from the night air.
“Whose finger is this? Do you expect me to perform some necromancy with it?”
“Only if you wish to bring Petrarch back to you. Look more closely at the ring. Just before my mother was lowered into the de Sade tomb, my father opened her shroud to prove that the plague had not deformed her. He pulled off her glove to kiss her hand as a show for the funeral guests and was enraged to see this love-token from her poet. He could not wrench the ring over the swollen knuckle, so he cut off her finger in front of us all.”
We both stared at the finger, imagining Francesco presenting the ring to Laura, then Laura deceiving her husband by wearing gloves to hide it. Angière pointed out the dark strands twisted into the silver of the ring.
“Not only is that Petrarch’s coat of arms, that is his hair. This ring rightfully belongs to you, Solange. You are a better muse to him than my mother was. Now I will leave you to enjoy your memories of him in private.”
She left as she came, in a burst of quickness, our spoons rattling in the pot. When the wind banged the door, I rose to fasten it and shoot the bolt. I sat back in front of the fire to examine the finger. The ring would not come off because Laura’s skin adhered to the inside, gluing them together. At the resurrection, every soul would collect its body and any scattered parts thereof, even scraps of skin and hair like these. But I had no intention of letting Laura’s soul attract Francesco’s like a lodestone drawing iron. His verses had made her immortal—that was enough. I would not let them be united for eternity. I twisted the ring to loosen it, twisted and tugged until I freed it from the finger. Then I tossed the finger into the hottest part of the fire, watching with satisfaction as it shrivelled.
I scraped Laura’s dead skin from the ring and placed the ring on my own finger. In wearing it, I was guilty of no more than profane idolatry. When the last trump sounded, Francesco’s soul would be compelled to return to my corpse to collect his hair. But first, I must be patient until my eyes rolled in their sockets, the flesh fell from my finger, and the ring spun upon bare bone.
Forty-six
IN THE MORNING, I dressed in brilliant light, for the shutters had flown open before daybreak. The gusting wind had cleared the dark clouds and I inhaled the resin from broken pine branches. I put on my fur-lined cloak to inspect the abbey to ensure that the nuns were at their customary tasks. Then I carried my writing materials to the cloister and settled into my carrel in the morning sun. I dipped my quill to write my first letter to Francesco to advise him where the lines were clumsy in his new poems and how he might repair them.
But these fine thoughts were anchored to a scratchy quill running short of ink. The ink-pot itself was dry, for I had left it unstoppered overnight. I went down the cellar steps to hunt for the new bottles of ink and found them next to Elisabeth’s cellar records. The ledgers were all neatly labelled, except for an old one hidden behind the others, with covers so warped they had split the dark red leather. Elisabeth had left it unlocked. If she had been recording more than our inventory of stores, this book might bear a clue to her unhealthy piety. I unsnapped the tarnished clasp and the book swung open near the end. I began to read.
Now here is the true legend of Saint Marie-Ange, who saw visions when yet within her mother’s womb. The Holy Ghost descended at Pentecost to bless her birth in Avignon in the year 1309. Suddenly there came a joyful sound and the newborn saint stood erect, hair ablaze, and spake in tongues. Her prophecy confounded devils and delighted sages. While in her ecstasies, she apprehended not with mortal eye and ear but through the eternal soul. When not above five years of age, this glorious saint dedicated herself to the sacred Benedictines at Clairefontaine-on-the-Sorgue, called claire for the clarity of its waters and fontaine for the fountain of the Sorgue. Soon afterwards, she saw a unicorn, that is, Our Lord, resting his head in the lap of a lady in a closed garden, which is to say the Virgin’s intact womb. Thereafter, she had a vision of an unborn calf with seven black spots, a dread augury that seven popes would rule in Babylon-on-the-Rhône.
A saint’s life—an odd book for Elisabeth to keep in her cellar. Even odder, the words resonated sharply with details of my life. I had seen Mother Agnes bequeath this battered ledger to Elisabeth when she was on her deathbed. With a thundering heart, I recognized the scarlet ledger, darkened by years of handling, in which the abbess had recorded my youthful visions. For much of my childhood, it had sat on the abbess’s shelf as a symbol of her hope that I would bring renown to Clairefontaine. As I continued to read, the cellar’s creeping damp gave me a rash of shivers.
When the age of majority was upon her, Saint Marie-Ange did not take the easy way by becoming the virgin bride of Christ, but took the hard way through the mortification of this world. When the devil accosted her, she struck him down, her face aflame with just ire, saying, “Begone, sting of sting, dung of dung, poison of poison.” She saved the city of Avignon by driving back the artillery of thunderstorm and lightning, and forced the Pope called John, who was but a partridge trussed up in priestly spoils, to recant his heresy about the Beatific Vision.
Just as grapes are trod and crushed before they are brought to the barrel, so Saint Marie-Ange must needs be harried and threshed in this world before she is brought to the granary of heaven. She was examined in the presence of cardinals and princes, and the truth of her auguries upheld by Pope Clement. The poet laureate could not cast her down, though he blasphemed her as the Whore of Babylon, her cup overflowing with the lewdness of her fornication. With sagacious tongue, she drove back nail for nail.
Now as to her miracles and charisms, wondrous to record. She had a chalice on her flesh, which did not bleed when pricked. Never befouled, her immaculate womb conceived felicitously as did Saint Anne’s. She became the first amongst women in the city of Avignon for her wealth, for her beauty of form, and for the pretentious splendour of her attire. She commanded the moon, drove back the flood, and saved the Pope from the plague, which she miraculously repelled.
At last, rising in her volupty in the flames of martyrdom, this twice-born saint renounced the stew of Avignon, for she deemed all the joys of this life to be as excrement. When her feet stepped through the narrow gate of Clairefontaine, the abbess gave up the ghost, crying, “It is accomplished.” The chapter knelt and with one voice elected her their new abbess, but she pushed away the cup until the skin hung upon her bones and all the hairs fell from her head, like a whore penitent. She is now hailed far and wide as the Sibyl of the Rhône and is consulted for her miracles by pilgrims and for her apt prophecy by popes and kings and even poets.
At the end, she will be taken up in a column of fire, with body and soul intact, like Mary of Magdalene and Mary of Egypt. At the second coming, she will sit in glory in the Choir of Angels and Martyrs, far above the lowly corps of resurrected mortals, who will only gaze upon her from afar and never more defile her with their impure touch.
This was the last entry in the ledger, but many had preceded it. At the beginning, the handwriting was Mother Agnes’s, page after page of plain, workman-like lettering in stark contrast to the enflamed words. L
atin phrases twisted and embellished childhood events so that I hardly knew myself. Even when I escaped the abbey, the abbess did not falter. She never gave up her belief that I would be a saint like Hildegarde of Bingen. The more she heard of me from afar, the more she struggled to seek a purpose to my life.
This was not just the abbess’s work, for I could see Elisabeth in it as well. As the abbess had aged, Elisabeth had become her legs, travelling to Avignon more to fill her ears than to fill the abbey’s cellar. Towards the end of the ledger, Mother Agnes’s penmanship became shaky, then was replaced by Elisabeth’s heavy, black Provençal. Here was the Elisabeth of my childhood where I least expected to find her, the Elisabeth who had tried to capture souls in goblets. Certainly, her whimsy had been put to strange use, for she had written a Life of Saint Marie-Ange that had the power to destroy me. I had forgotten how hard her punches could hit. She had documented a case for my sainthood, turning herself into the advocatus Dei, God’s advocate, in a trial for canonization. The church’s most recent saint, Yves, had been as flawed as I was, but his worshippers were dogged. Led by a God’s advocate as zealous as Elisabeth, they drove back all contrary evidence until the devil’s advocate was crushed, and Yves, poor man, was canonized with gusto by Pope Clement himself.
Now I saw where destiny had been leading me. This was to be my final battle: not the fight against Laura, not even the bloody battle of death itself, but the fight for how the world would know me hereafter. Was I to be remembered as a bloodless saint having her Life read to nuns eating in the refectory, or as a woman who had lived and loved? If Elisabeth succeeded, I would be elevated to the choir of saints, where I would see the Blessed Face of God and be denied all human love thenceforth.