Muse (37 page)

A half-year had passed since I had tasted butter and cream, and twenty-four years since I had tasted a fat capon roasted over faggots from old vines. The obedientiaries at the high table plied me with all the goodness of their order: their olive oil, their wine, their dried fruits stewed in honey and fresh fruits preserved in spirits. The nuns’ deft
fingers signalled the merits of each dish to their guests, for they still observed the rule of silence in the refectory. They had silenced the Poor Clares by placing them between mute Benedictines, though the abundant food would have done that by itself. Even the two little girls were subdued. Although Elisabeth sat beside me, she guarded her words as if they were gold florins. She was listening so intently to the sacristan’s reading of the Life of Saint Hildegarde that there was nothing for me to do but eat.

After the funeral supper, the chambress assigned each of the Poor Clares a bed in the lay dormitory, which had space for my daughters as well. I was left until last, then told—to my dismay—that the only vacant bed was the one the abbess had died in. To postpone going to bed, I went into the church. The sculptured portal of the Benedictines, the graceful columns, the stained glass were like nectar after the spartan church of Saint Clare. My nostrils pinched with the familiar scent of beeswax mingling with damp stone. I ran my palm across an ashlar block to locate one of the masons’ marks that I remembered being there. I knelt before the wooden altarpiece to seek Our Lady’s counsel. Throughout my life, I had been a fair-weather worshipper of Our Lady, asking for favours but seldom begging forgiveness after I had sinned.

Black mourning stoles lay over the top of the icons and the wooden triptych. I had often stared at this triptych as a girl. In the left panel was the young Virgin with the angel Gabriel. In her, I had once seen my own mother. In the centre panel, the crucified Jesus was remote and skeletal. His mother was older here and smiling wisely because she was in on the secret of the resurrection. The right panel showed the jubilant risen Jesus in a garden. The woman holding the alabaster jar had dark blue eyes and wild, tangled hair, the colour an exuberant red. This was the other Mary, the flamboyant Magdalene.

As I looked at the three paintings, trying to make sense of them, I felt faint from the bleeding earlier. My lips became numb, then my tongue, then the numbness crept down my left arm into my fingers.
The skin on my forearms quivered into gooseflesh, as if feathers were sprouting, and circles jagged across my vision. The Virgin plucked one of Gabriel’s wing feathers, the feather turned into a suckling baby, the baby squirmed on the Virgin’s lap, and his chin grew wiry, black hairs. The two Marys blended into one gigantic female, gloriously big with child, who blotted out the tiny, pompous Jesus. I was talking aloud, saying only-God-knows-what. I had once spoken with the tongue of an angel. Perhaps I still had something of the gift. A door slammed and a draught sucked through the church, banging the side panels of the triptych closed. I wondered who had been creeping about in night shoes and what she had overheard me muttering in my delirium.

If this was a sign, what did it mean? Perhaps only that the rich dishes of the head table did not agree with me after the months of meagre food. I was ill all that night in the abbess’s bed, running a fever, clammy one moment, shivery the next. At daybreak, Elisabeth brought in an opiate to sedate me, but the sweet odour made me queasy and I pushed it away. The obedientiaries entered the bedchamber behind her. The sacristan took down the chain of office and held it out to me with a serene look, as if she knew the outcome, like the knowing Virgin.

“You are forgetting that I have not taken my vows,” I said. “Any one of you would make a better abbess than I would. Your chastity is a much finer thing than my belated celibacy.” In spite of my protest, they did not shift their feet towards the door. What could I say to dissuade them from this scheme? Far from condemning me for my sins, they were eager to hear more. “One of the children who arrived with me, Félicité, is my own daughter.”

Elisabeth muttered to the sacristan, “I told you the child was hers.”

What other rumours had reached Elisabeth’s ear? Certainly, she had guessed something of my past, more than the others, who were whispering almost as foolishly as the Poor Clares. I had no wish to itemize more sins to convince them of my unworthiness. Why should I name the great men I had lain with? I wanted to keep my past a secret.

When the bells called the nuns to vespers, I left the abbess’s house to watch them rising from their tasks, brushing earth and flour from their hands, deserting their handwork to go gladly to choir. I walked into the fields in the setting sun as the owl flew out of the pine’s yoke to scan the earth for mice. Burrs and foxtails and the thorns of trailing brambleberries caught at my hem. What business had I wandering about an abbey under the swollen mass of the rising moon?

That cool, wordless moon had plucked me out of the tinderbox of Avignon just as she plucked words out of tongue-tied lovers. Yet she was not as chaste as poets believed, for her pull on the blood was strong. Her power over the sublunary realm was fiercely carnal. Even now, she called me to her own offices. I was still fertile. Why should I become a celibate nun? I had no desire to become a barren sister barking at the full moon, chanting faint hymns and chafing at the abbey’s bonds.

“Why do you keep bothering me?” I yelled at the big yellow globe. “What do you want from me?”

Then I remembered that I was a mother and looked around to ensure that no one was creeping about in her night shoes. Ahead, wormwood moths were collecting in a pool of moonlight on a bough, then sparking off into the dark with an eerie phosphorescence. I had given birth to four children, two of whom had lived. I, too, had been born of woman. On the eightieth day of my life, my soul had entered my body. Now, beneath the moon, I was once again that luminous spirit inside a ball of flesh. Expelled in a river of blood, I had slithered out between Maman’s legs, slipping onto her great bed, gathering speed until I came to the end of her silken cord, which yanked me back like a palace bell summoning a truant servant. I was sniffed at by an impertinent snout, licked by a cat’s tongue, peered at by an old moon of a grandmother. I had begun the soul’s journey from bloody birth to bitter death. This was so docile I could scarcely call it a vision. My soul had simply fluttered to the surface to remind me that it dwelt within and that it had needs I could no longer ignore.

The abbey buildings had shrunk since I last surveyed them. The cracks in the infirmary had lengthened and the stones were green with mildew. The foundation had been laid for the new infirmary, but the work had halted. There was a whiff of feral stoat outside the scriptorium. It, too, was sadly tumbled, for discipline had not been enough to keep the walls well mortared. After a time, I gathered courage to go inside, where I found the desks knocked over and mouldy folios scattered across the pavingstones. The shattered window was letting in the draught. When I was last here, the Florentine had attacked me, propelling me outwards into the world of men.

I drew my miséricorde and squinted at myself in a piece of broken glass. I sheared my hair close to my scalp, letting the red hairs drop through my fingers onto the stone floor. The winter stubble left upon my head was as grey as a Benedictine veil. I walked to Sister Raymonde’s gardening shelter, my scalp cold and my eyes moistening with remembered love. Inside, I lit a candle and said an orison for her soul. Her last specimen, an unusual blue wort, had dried where she had left it on the workbench, but curiously, one of her brushes was still wet. Nearby lay cakes of madder and woad, along with pea-sized lumps of vert de flambe and saffron, brushstrokes still visible on them. What had Raymonde been drawing? There was no parchment to be seen.

In her old hiding place, I found a record book. Here, too, were others, strapped to the underside of the bench, a life’s work that awaited the return of a disciple who knew where to look. The last leaf of the last journal was marked
Midsummer Eve 1348
. On it she had drawn the blue-eyed wort with a note that it opened at night only when the moon was full. She had named it
belle-de-nuit
and written another name nearby,
Solange
. I leaned against her chest in memory and breathed in the scent of newly furrowed earth. I had so much I wanted to say to her. Why had she died just a few weeks before I returned to Clairefontaine?

I was not the only one who had visited this shrine. Indeed, someone was approaching even now. I heard the cry
who-looks-for-you, who-looks-for-you-all
, then a step, too soft to be Raymonde’s restive spirit. The candle guttered as a waif entered, her fingers tinged with saffron.

“Maman?” Félicité said. “Are you unhappy?”

“No, my sweet. You bring happiness with you.” I lifted her onto my lap to hug her, enjoying her stillness for a moment before she wriggled out of my arms. She weighed no more than an owl, and like an owl, she was fond of wandering under the moon. I kissed her ear. “From now on you must explore the grounds in the daytime, not by yourself at night. Hold my hand and I’ll take you back before Anne-Prospère wakes to find herself alone in bed.”

Forty-four

O
N THE SAME DAY
that I became a nun, I became an abbess, responsible for the health of forty souls. I professed my vows in the chancel and the abbot presented me with my crosier and seal of office. I was grateful to Mary Magdalene for taking this path before me. It was a comfort to know that I was not the only woman who had slept with powerful men en route to the veil. I had barely reclaimed my birth name, Solange Le Blanc, when life wrested it from me, for Elisabeth insisted that I take the name Marie-Ange, as the old abbess had wished.

Now the abbess’s chain of office swung from my neck and her ink-pot sat at my elbow. My motley scalp was warm beneath a grey veil trimmed in white. I counted the hours by the divine offices, not the hourglass, and the days by the saints, not the calendar of science. My only astrologer was that common astrologer, the barnyard cock, whose duty was to rouse me at daybreak. I wore my silver-and-ivory belt, because an abbess should show her power to the world, and on my finger I displayed the Pope’s sapphire ring. I was making plans, since I
had no intention of leaving my daughters’ fate—or the fate of any of my nuns—to less loving hands.

My first act as abbess was to draw my miséricorde to whittle a quill. I found Mother Agnes’s account books in better order than her properties. She had secured the abbey’s plate and lands by letting the buildings fall into disrepair, but with no honey to sell or commissions for the scriptorium, we had no ready income. To restore the abbey to its former prestige, I would need to twist a lion’s tail. I wrote a letter to Pope Clement VI, signing it vicomtesse of Turenne, abbess of Clairefontaine, in which I asked him for an endowment for the abbey that would surpass the worth of its ancestral lands. I asked for eight thousand florins, one-tenth the amount Clement had paid to buy Avignon from Queen Joanna. For less than it cost to make an honest woman of his beloved city, he could keep me at a distance from his palace.

I pressed the sapphire ring into the sealing-wax to admire the papal coat of arms. Once Clement had grasped that I was still alive, he would see the wisdom of paying the ransom I demanded. He would not wish his sleep disrupted by my ghost returning to Saint Peter’s short, cramped bed. What power had enabled me to escape the fire that had consumed me in my Gentilly robe? He was always eager to believe in the miracles and charisms of saints. Perhaps he would fear that I had reassembled my bones by al-jabr and clothed them, in an act of sorcery, with flesh.

Three days later, a horse galloped into the cloister, soaped by exertion, with the gatekeeper chasing after hotly. The Poor Clares swarmed and gossiped, while the Benedictines looked stern and kept their silence. The Pope’s emissary leapt down, as fatigued as his mount, and tied the reins of the huge animal to the pommel as the nuns retreated out of range of its hooves. The emissary’s purse rang with gold to buy me off and his saddlebags held the rare books I had demanded from the palace library. When I recognized the slim volume of Francesco’s poems that I had compiled, I gladly relinquished the papal ring and signed the release the emissary slapped onto his sweaty thigh.

My booty would restore the fame of Clairefontaine. If my daughters did not wish to take up vocations in the abbey, I would provide dowries so they could marry worthy noblemen. Perhaps one of my daughters would choose to live in Francesco’s house in Parma and avail herself of the great world offered there. When the time was safe, I would tell him who they were and their relationship to him. Anything was possible. My wingspan was broad enough to cover them wherever they went. But one daughter I would keep with me for all time, for each day I saw more of my beloved Francesco in Félicité’s dark eyes and hair. She was my heart—my Francesca.

After I had locked the new books in the armarium and attached the key to my belt, I took Félicité to dig up my mother’s perfume bottle and my garden of delights, my hortus deliciarum, which I had hidden so many years ago. She carried them to the pasture, where we lay on our stomachs to enjoy my abbey stories with the misshapen creatures I had drawn to illustrate them. The nuns with their habits soiled from tilling vegetables and herding cows. The sisters treading the grapes, tipsy from sampling last year’s vintage. A friar’s ribald tale curling into a nun’s welcoming ear. A dead Benedictine settling into rigor mortis in her coffin. The abbey as a world unto itself, a microcosmus. All the while, even when laughing at my childish drawings, Félicité kept a good grip on the perfume bottle.

When we reached the end, she asked, “Will you die, Maman?”

Not
when
I would die, but
if
I would—a startling question. Death was indeed hovering closer, although I was only half the age of Mother Agnes when she died.