Muse (3 page)

The bells chimed slowly for the hours to give the sisters time to gather from the hives and the vines, the kitchens and the scriptorium. I watched them brush earth or flour from their palms, then hurry breathlessly towards the church, never running, yet never late, their feet moving invisibly under their black habits. In the dark of night, they stumbled down the inner stairs like sleepwalkers. At that hour they seemed to find chanting a penance, because they slurred words and sang out of tune. I trailed behind or escaped outside, alert to every night sound, hearing owls screech and pebbles shift under the feet of mice or squirrels. Sometimes, in the distance, I heard the deeper tones of the bell I had left behind at Notre-Dame-des-Doms.

Elsewhere in the abbey, speaking was frowned upon, but the church burst its walls with holy sound. It smelt pleasantly of cold, damp stone
and beeswax tapers lit for departed souls. Before long I was climbing onto a bench beside Elisabeth so I could sing when she did.

“O Lord,” I chanted. “You will open my lips and my mouth shall declare Your Praise.”

Though I sang lustily, I could not make my soul go where my mother’s had gone. My spirit spiralled upwards with the high notes to the vault, then tumbled to the pavingstones alone. After a time I began to lift my voice to the Virgin, but not to the bloodthirsty god who had taken my mother from me. In the triptych he hung like a skeleton from his wooden cross. I knew that the church wine was his blood and the bread his flesh, but to me he looked no different than the men who had climbed on Maman’s bed with their flagons and loaves. Each day I longed for her perfumed heartbeat and her kisses beneath my ear, but at night I missed the pungent odour of Conmère, who would have comforted me on my sparse bed of straw.

After my first mass the abbess allowed me to light a taper for Maman. I chose a tall one, which with luck would burn until day’s end. Though my eyes were wet, I held my head high, as Maman would have wished. I fingered the sponge in my pouch, waiting for the nuns to leave.

Elisabeth arrived to stand an even taller taper next to mine. “This is for my mother,” she said. “You can dry your eyes now if you want.”

I dabbed my eyes with the sponge and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Where do you think their souls are now?”

“Haunting the abbey somewhere. The stockbreeder says the souls of dead nuns come back to inhabit the heifers and ewe lambs.”

“Why not the new pigs?” I asked.

“Too ugly.” Laughing, she abandoned me, for she was old enough to have chores around the abbey.

That first summer I learnt to be content with my own company. I ran from one end of the grounds to the other and lay exhausted in the moist, fragrant hay, listening to the golden hum of bees mingling with cicadas. I
rested on the bank of the Sorgue to listen to it rush over rocks as it used to rush over the cloth-workers’ wheels. If the hens were laying, I dug my hands into the straw and ran with new eggs as a gift to the abbess. These were my territories—the hives, the vines, and the fields. I inspected my ewes and my calves, and my grapes ripening on the vine, and helped the stockbreeder carry pails of mash to the animals. The ewes trusted me to feel their bellies to see how many lambs they were carrying. When I told the stockbreeder that the black ewe was carrying three ewe lambs, she did not believe me, but after all three were born safely and named after dead nuns, she sent me to the beekeeper for a reward of honey.

By Pentecost, the day of my birth, my feet had so outgrown my shoes that Elisabeth gave me her old sandals. In return, I took her to see a wooden post dark with mildew, where the snails swarmed over one another, fighting their way to the top. We lay on our bellies, observing ants marching in an orderly row like Benedictines filing into church to say the hours. This reminded me of a trick that Conmère had played on me.

“Watch me bewitch them,” I said.

I polished a stone, uttered one of Conmère’s spells, and placed it in the ants’ path. When they scattered and knocked one another down, I told Elisabeth that I had the power to command hordes of insects—ants, beetles, whatever I wished. As we lay side by side, we picked the burrs and foxtails off each other and told stories about our dead mothers. Because Elisabeth was nine years old, she remembered more than I did, and since she was old enough to help in the kitchens, she had a knife of her own, which I coveted.

I folded up my tunic to reveal the age marks on my thigh. “Lend me your knife to carve a line.” I scored the sixth line so neatly it produced only a single bead of blood, which I licked off so she wouldn’t see it.

“Why didn’t you bleed?” She grabbed her knife back, unhappy with how it had turned out, since she did not wish me to have magic powers.

That night I dreamt of a butcher pinning down a lamb, then drawing his blade over the yearling’s throat. The lamb jerked, spurting blood
all over me. It ran over my toes, down the gutter, and into the canal, where the paddlewheels churned the writhing red pus towards the city moat. When I had wrenched myself out of the hideous dream, I prodded Elisabeth, who let me crawl beneath her blanket for the first time.

After I had related the dream, she said, “Tell me again. How long did the lamb jerk after it was dead?” She squirmed with pleasure as I described it once more.

“Is it a vision?” I asked hopefully.

“No, you are not important enough for that. It was only a dream about a butcher who slaughters animals for winter meat. You must have seen him at Martinmas before you came to the abbey.”

Upset with me now, she punched me in the belly—not too hard, because I had told her a good story, just enough to send me scuttling back to my cold pallet. Mindful of the lines waiting in the empty ledger, I took my tale to the abbess in the morning just the same. It must have been a real vision, because Mother Agnes bade me sit on the stool to tell it to her. When I was done, she reached for the scarlet book, dipped her quill into her ink, wrote some words, then dunked the quill again. From where I sat, I could not fathom how the ink got up inside the abbess’s pen. I walked the legs of my stool closer, but was too late to see. She made her flourish, blotted the page, returned the book to the shelf above my head, and gave me a pickled egg to chew on.

Four

I
N MY SECOND YEAR
in the abbey, the abbess ordered me to run errands for Madame de Fores, a widow from Les Baux-de-Provence, who had just arrived to take her vows and work in the scriptorium. Nothing about Madame looked like a nun, not even her fine cambric wimple. In procession on Ascension Day, she walked a step behind the abbess, who wore the crest of the Clairefontaines and a heavy chain of office to assert her precedence. Behind the two of them came the obedientiaries—the sacristan with her holy book, the librarian with her quill, the cellaress with her keys, the gardener with her shears, then the others in order of rank. After them flocked the familia: the lay sisters, Elisabeth and me, the servants, and the farm-workers.

One day I took Madame a piece of honeycomb dripping sweetness through my fingers. She surprised me by taking a bite straight from the comb. Afterwards her dainty tongue darted out to lick her lips.

“Are you not afraid of the bees’ sting?” she asked.

“They seem to like me.”

When the sacristan rang the bells for sext, Madame wiped the residue from our hands with a scented cloth and drew me close to read her book of hours. We bent over the book together, breathing on it while we turned the pages, and the parchment became warm beneath our hands. On each page were miniature paintings of a tiny, perfect world. Did God dwell in such a book? Surely a saint had created such glorious pictures.

“How did each one get so small?” I asked.

“The illuminator looks through magnifying glasses to paint with a brush of fine hair, even finer than yours. I copied this book for my own use and told the miniaturist to paint what I like best. See how each letter is perfect, yet alive? Each word is like a ripe fruit eager to be bitten into.” She showed me how to take the words and roll them in my mouth. “This is our language, la langue d’oc, which the troubadours used for their love songs.”

I touched her hand, fascinated by its pallor. If my mother had lived, would she have been so soft and fragrant? “My mother spoke like you, but not so sweetly.”

“Yesterday I heard you talking in the old tongue with Elisabeth. Do not let the abbess hear you, for it comes from a low, dark place.”

She combed the sticky honey from my hair, and I told her what I knew of my lady-mother, the little I could remember. “My mother died bearing a child. I do not know why she bothered, for my brother was dead when he came out. I have not lit a taper for her since Lent,” I confessed.

One hot tear dribbled from my eye, then another. Soon I was clutching Madame and sobbing. When at last I stopped, she rubbed the furrow from my brow with her scented cloth and asked me whether I would like to listen to her favourite book,
Le Roman de la Rose
. Over the summer, she read it to me. As we neared the end of the poem, I puzzled over the roses and bushes, gardeners and shears. The rose was a lady and the lady was a rose. Beyond that, I was
uncertain, for there was also a knight lurking behind the rosebush, wary of her thorns.

I fingered the coat of arms on Madame’s habit. “When will I be a lady?”

The leaves of the book fluttered shut. “How old are you now?”

I raised my tunic to reveal the newest mark on my thigh.

“You are seven years, like a page,” she said. “But next year, do not score your leg, for it hurts me to see your flesh so scarred.”

“When I am fourteen, will I be a squire?”

“No. You are of the nuns’ keeping. Here you are fed when you are hungry and physicked when you are ill. You will become a novice, then a nun. Or, if God wills it, you will marry and go to a fine estate as I did. I doubt you will make a good nun, for you love poetry too much, but it is better if the abbess thinks you will. She believes you will bring renown to her abbey.”

“I have visions like a saint,” I said stoutly.

“So I have heard, but when did you have your last one?”

A year had passed since I had dreamt of the slaughtered lamb. I inspected my dusty toes, now sticking so far out of Elisabeth’s sandals that they sometimes tripped me. “Will the abbess send me back to Avignon?”

“Not if you have another vision soon,” Madame advised.

That night, I dreamt of a lady and her lover in a walled garden with roses, peacocks, and the scent of mille-fleurs. Was this my own future spinning out before me, eager for me to catch up to it? The next day, while Madame wound wool from the skein I held across my hands, I told her my dream.

“That will do very well,” she said, when I had finished. “However, leave out the part about the knight. That will not do for the nuns.” She tucked the end of the yarn into the finished ball. “Now, go to the abbess and tell her as you told me.”

I went to the abbess’s house to recite my vision. When I came to the knight, I reluctantly gave his part to a unicorn, which rested its head in the lady’s lap. After I had described her wide fur sleeves, fine wimple,
and pleasing fragrance, Mother Agnes nodded with satisfaction and reached for the scarlet book with the prepared lines. She dipped her quill, tapped once, scrutinized the nib.

“Are you sure it was a unicorn?” she asked.

The unicorn was false, for I had added it myself. I did not wish to disappoint her, so I described the unicorn I had seen in Madame’s book in all its rich detail.

“It is well that we have taken you into our custody. The lady is Notre Dame and the unicorn is Our Lord. This is the story of how He took on flesh and was born to the Virgin. It is allegory, one of the figures of rhetoric.”

“Why can’t the unicorn just be a unicorn?”

“Because everything we apprehend on earth has spiritual meaning. Our microcosm is a pale double of the macrocosm.”

“Why does it have to be that way?” I rubbed my eyes, angry at myself, and at this double world, and at the abbess.

“The enclosed garden you saw is Our Lady’s womb, the hortus conclusus that has never been entered by a man. Now we must record your vision. You may hold the ledger steady as I write.”

I gripped the book with both hands while the abbess wrote laboriously, keeping to the lines. Each time the ink ran out, she dipped the quill and tapped it briskly. The letters appeared one after another in a squashed, unhappy row. At last she made her flourish. This time I was close enough to see that it was her Clairefontaine crest.

“That is a good start,” she said, “but it is only a single page. You must try harder to have visions.”

Having visions was too much trouble. I had just given her one vision and she was demanding another. But writing—that would be easier! As soon as she dropped the quill, I had my fingers on it.

Seeing it in my hand, she offered, “You may sign your mark next to mine.”

I wrote
Solange
with my left hand, then added
Requiescat in pace
.

“Why did you write that?”

“It is on the wooden cross by the cypresses, where the nuns are buried.”

“I see we have given you too much freedom. You have learnt too much of the wrong sort of thing. It is time for you to enter the work of the order. We have a new pope, John XXII, who will live in Avignon, which will bring many commissions to our scriptorium. Madame will need to assist with the copying every day.”

As Mother Agnes lifted the scarlet ledger back to its shelf, I slipped the quill up my sleeve where she could not see it.

“You must start the trivium with me at once, learning grammar, rhetoric, and logic. You may also help in the scriptorium,” she added in a kindly voice. “From tomorrow, Elisabeth will fetch and carry for the lay sisters.”

“She will not like it.”

“Elisabeth will do as she is bidden,” she said sharply. “She was kept out of charity when her mother, who was a kitchen servant, died.”

I sat on my stool with the quill stabbing my arm while the abbess told me the story of Mary and Martha from the Gospels. They were sisters who were as different as salt and sugar.