Muse (32 page)

In late autumn, the wind vibrated the waxed membranes over our windows and our door rattled. I woke one night to discover Félicité sitting up in bed beside me, chewing on the corner of her blanket because she thought that the nephews were breaking down the door. She huddled next to me until first light, picking apart the wool of her blanket while I read to her from our bestiary. She had never seen a pasture, or a sheep, or an old woman carding and spinning wool. The only animals she knew were the monkeys, lion, camel, and the other exotic beasts in the Pope’s ménagerie, which was now denied to her. That day, I knelt to the Virgin to implore her aid, then boiled a root of Our Lady’s Candle together with a small destroying angel to make a numbing potion. On this night, All Saints’ Eve, there would be merrymaking by the folk and my servants would not return until daybreak. Félicité and I ate a simple meal: a roasted beet, stewed celery stalks, and a basted fowl. Then I poured the potion into her goblet with the serpent handle.

“We will be sorcerers together,” I told her. “Drink this, and when your maid returns, you will have disappeared.”

Instead of drinking, she snapped my miséricorde out of my belt tongue to admire how neatly the ivory pieces fit together to disguise the weapon. “Will I need your secret knife?”

“No, my sweet. You will be safe where you are going.”

“What are the words?” She asked this question each time she looked at the phrase carved into the ivory.

“
Amor vincit omnia
. Love conquers all.” I held out the goblet and her small hands gripped the serpent.

“Will it hurt, Maman?”

“No more than a fever. This tastes sweetly of honey.”

She stirred after nocturns, breaking out into a sweat. I sponged her, then nestled her in my arms, rocking her to comfort us both. When her tremors worsened, I waited for her heart to slow. It was now safe to send for the old surgeon Jean de Parme, since he could do nothing to help her. Félicité was lying quietly in my arms when he arrived. Seeing the pain written on my face, he squeezed my shoulder to console me. Just as he bent to examine Félicité, she went into a spasm in my arms and he moved back. Then she fell motionless. He pronounced her dead of a putrid fever, because of her clammy skin and cloying breath, and ordered me to bury her at once. He scuffled away, afraid to touch her. My daughter’s face was the colour of béchamel. So was mine, for I had truly gone through hell and could no longer stifle the violence of my sobs.

I bundled Félicité’s tiny corpse into the contagion shroud I had made ready. The night watch raised the portcullis hastily, crossed themselves, and retreated in fear. I carried her through the dark alleys to the priory of the Poor Clares, where I laid her gently beneath the ancient Virgin in their church. I spared only a glance for the wooden Magdalene weeping at the foot of Christ, for I did not wish to be seen. If I took shelter here with Félicité, as my heart counselled, or lingered to weep over her even for an hour, I would endanger both of us. I removed the contagion cross from her shroud and loosened the top to reveal her sweet face. Inside the shroud, where I had told the prioress to look for it, I placed a purse with gold florins sufficient for an oblate’s dowry.

Thirty-nine

O
N
A
LL
S
AINTS’
D
AY
, I knelt in Saint Martial’s diminutive chapel to pray for my daughter, my eyes fixed upon Martial’s soul being borne upwards by two angels towards the azur d’Allemagne heaven that Giovannetti had just painted. Even though the tapers had melted into a lump of wax, Clement was still dry-eyed, as if Félicité’s death had solved a problem he was struggling with. The choir-master sang a lachrymosa—a single syllable hammered to vibrating gold wire, then another, then another. The boy choristers opened their lungs, their voices clean and pure, their hearts genuinely heavy, and then the brief service was over.

At midnight, when Clement had fallen asleep, I left his bedchamber by the circular staircase hidden in the wall. I was not returning to my own chamber, as usual, but leaving the palace by the postern gate, the one the servants used. When I reached the priory of the Poor Clares, I sought out the prioress, who was waiting for me. She had discovered Félicité in the church before prime as I had arranged. The shroud had kept Félicité warm and the potion had worn off, doing her
no harm. She had been sitting up with the gold florins in her hand, waiting to give them to the prioress, as we had planned. Now fed and fondled, Félicité was asleep in her bed in the lay dormitory. She had died to danger and been reborn to safety. My tears in the chapel had been crocodile, for I would never have harmed my beloved child.

Before giving Félicité the potion in the serpent cup, I had told her, “You must be brave. We will play a trick on the palace by pretending you are dead. When you wake, you will be in a sheltered place with kindly nuns.”

“Yes, Maman, it will be a good joke. We will be sorcerers together. Only, let me play with some new children, for I am tired of the Pope’s nephews.”

Now the prioress took me through the cloister and up the staircase to the dormitory, where I found Félicité in bed. After I had knelt to thank the Blessed Virgin for her aid, I tickled Félicité’s nose with a feather.

She stood on the bed and leapt into my arms. “Maman! I knew the serpent would protect me.”

My voice stumbled as I explained that the priory must now be her home. Her eyes stood out like coals and her hair stuck up like thistledown.

“What ails your throat, Maman?”

“Only a little frog.”

“Fais vite, let him jump out!” She pushed on my cheeks to expel the poor creature.

She was a wise little girl, older than her years, and knew there had been much to fear in the palace. She led the way into the garden in her night shoes. Here, under the fallen leaves, she showed me the late-bearing strawberry plants and picked the berry she had saved for me. When the bells rang for nocturns, we watched the Poor Clares walk in pairs past us to the church. Although they belonged to the Franciscan Order of Poor Ladies, their fine brown habits were trimmed in fur. The gossip trickled down the column as their eyes assessed me: a well-made robe without
blazons, a silver belt with a carved ivory tongue. A merchant’s wife who had borne a child in disgrace? Was she visiting at such an hour to evade her husband? As the prioress passed, she tapped my arm and laid her finger across her lips. My secret would be secure with the Clarisses.

Félicité and I listened to the psalms, then her soft hands clung to me as I took my leave. We kissed eyes, noses, ears, and mouths. She remembered her vow to be brave, saying, “Only, come again soon, Maman, and we will whisper in the night.”

In the priory of the Poor Clares, Félicité became as nocturnal as a black-eyed owl, sleeping only an owl’s sleep until I arrived from the palace to wake her. She fell happily from high to low estate for she was a sanguine child. Remembering how I had loved Clairefontaine, I asked that she perform small chores. Soon she had a plot of frost-bitten earth where she could sow poppies in the spring. Before long, she had a friend. The Poor Clares called Anne-Prospère
la petite misère
because she was of phlegmatic humour, but she was as welcoming a companion for Félicité as Elisabeth had been for me. Anne-Prospère told me that her father disliked her, so her mother had given her to the nuns to keep her out of his sight. In the day, when I yearned for Félicité’s hand in mine, I took solace that I was not the only mother who had chosen the priory as an asylum for her daughter.

After the frescoes of Saint Martial’s life were finished and the chapel had been dedicated, Clement turned his attention to the beatification of another of his favourites, Yves de Bretagne. It was soon after Yves had been canonized—for the devil’s advocate failed to vilify him in the canonization hearing—that a letter arrived for the vicomtesse de Turenne, palais des Papes, Avignon. A pilgrim riding hard from the south who sought urgent audience with the Pope had carried it. I recognized Gherardo’s bold hand at once.

My dear Countess,

I write to you as one much changed, whose day is filled with labour and singing the offices faithfully to Our Lord.

I have found refuge in this harsh order, with its fierce rule of silence. Here, our hands do the work of our mouths. I have prayed and slept and eaten in my solitary hermitage. I have worked in the fields until I have collapsed in exhaustion. Can you imagine how difficult this silence has been for me, for whom talking is life? I came to crave the offices of the day, when we opened our mouths to sing, more to one another than to God. My nostrils hungered for the censer, hungered for the sulphurous wick of a candle, hungered for the pungent smell of love denied.

For four years, I did not touch the flesh of another man except the novice I shaved. I caressed his head like a lover, learning every bump in his skull (and which body part it controlled) as if it were my own. I admired his ear as a sinner does the orifice of his confessor. When I was done, he shaved me, prolonging the exquisite torture. We spoke only with our fingers, yet this was the deepest love that I have ever known. When finally my hands strayed into forbidden paths, he could tell no one, since his mouth was stopped by vows.

For we were now monks. I had foresworn my past life (so far as it could be foresworn by one such as I) and had embarked on the long, penitential route up the mountain when the atra mors came north to punish us. The tale came to us through a sailor begging confession, who had been in Messina harbour when a plague ship arrived from the Crimea groaning with the dead and dying. His merchantman set sail on the next tide, putting in to Toulon with a diseased crew. He travelled north by land, to seek shelter with us at Montrieux. He was the devil’s man, for his tongue and urine were black. Near his genitals was a lump like an
apple, and rotten eggs lurked in his armpits. He died spitting poisonous blood into the prior’s ear.

Two days later, the prior died in my arms and I carried him on my back to his grave. Soon there were more monks struck down than monks to tend them. When there were only three left, we shrove one another, then dug a pit large enough for three. We tied a rope to a sling filled with earth and ran it through a pulley, so that it needed only tugging to release its cargo into the pit. We made a vow that the last one to die would climb in alive and tug the rope, to join his brethren under the rich, autumnal earth.

When the first man died, we dumped him in the gaping hole. We slept in one bed, unshaven. When my lover died, I dragged his body to the pit to roll it over the edge. I released the goat, the sheep, and our milking cow to forage in the fields and walked naked to my grave. I was not depressed in spirits, for my life had come to a just end. I climbed into the pit, lay down on top of my bloated, stinking brothers, and reached for the rope to drop the cradle of earth upon my head. The monastery dog sat by the grave, observing me with alarm.

To say that a vision stayed my hand would be an act of pride. Visions are granted only to the pure of heart like you, Solange. But for the first time in two score years, I thought of another first, myself second.

If I died, who would feed Fidèle? In his stupid loyalty, he would squat by my grave until he died of thirst. I climbed out and filled a kneading tub with water from the well. With Fidèle at my heels, I dragged it to the grave and climbed back in. He sat on his haunches, cocking his head at me, his tail wagging at this game. I lay down on my deathbed and closed my eyes to enjoy the blessed repose.

I could hear Fidèle’s soft, red tongue lapping the water. My hand reached for the rope, then hesitated. I had only postponed his death. Now he would die of slow starvation, not of thirst. It
flashed upon me that his wagging tail must be a Sign. I did not quibble that the medium was an unlikely one for God to use, for this Sign was followed by a Voice.

“Get up, Gherardo,” the Voice commanded. “You will not get out of work so easily this time. Get up, you lazy beast, to feed your hound. Your field needs tilling. Gather your livestock back into the fold and run this priory by yourself!”

And so I did, taking the quick, easy way out of my grave by scrambling up the steepest bank. I did not want to give God time to change His mind.

I tilled that field and another. Since then, God has vouchsafed to me poor wanderers, bereft in soul and body, speaking foreign tongues, who have walked over the hills to escape the plague cities. Here they have found a home, digging and hoeing in return for my vast stores of wine and foodstuffs.

I must go now and perform lauds in my out-of-tune way, for Fidèle and I keep the Carthusian offices here. He is all men to me and I all dogs to him. I would not trade him for the noble wolfhound that was once the pride of Cardinal Colonna. We have made a pact to die as brethren, but I trust that God will keep us alive until He has exacted a just measure of industry from me.