Muse (8 page)

I retrieved the folio and lay back on the sweet hay, watching Ambrose, the big abbey cat, prowl for mice and feeling the sun-drenched earth through my novice’s habit. Two of the cows peered at me curiously, but I had seen enough of cows. When I waved a dandelion at them, they took flight. I was glad I was not as timid as a cow, though I regretted teasing Elisabeth for having udders. My fleurs had arrived, heralded by sore breasts, cramps, and shooting pains. Everything about me was changing. Even my hair was darkening to chestnut like my mother’s. What if I went into heat like Emmanuelle and courted suitors on the neighbouring farm?

The dandelion fell onto the folio and I licked the page to remove the stain. It tasted alive, like the side of a cow. It seemed unfair to calves to end up as leaves in books. I did not want to read a book made from the womb-vellum of Emmanuelle’s calf, not after what the bull had done to her today. Could I see inside Emmanuelle if I pressed my eyes against her belly? I was too lazy to try, but the more I ruminated and sank into myself, the more I fancied I could see through her hide like calfskin oiled for a window. Tiny but well formed, the bull-calf ripening inside Emmanuelle was not brown as she was, but white with black
spots. The spots inflated inside my head to merge into one terrifying blotch, until a carcass the size of a cow sat rotting on my legs, turning them green from toes to waist. The weight and the stench were pulling me downwards. Before long, I would be suffocated by earth. At last the foul odour penetrated my trance, and I sat up to find Ambrose squatting on my feet. Emmanuelle was grazing companionably nearby. The stink came from the fresh cow pie she had deposited beside me.

I could recall my trance clearly, even to the seven spots on the calf. All this time I had been waiting for a vision from above, when I had been seeing into bellies all along. I decided not to tell the abbess, since I did not know what good she could make of it. However, I would tell the stockbreeder in case it was a bad omen for Emmanuelle’s calving. Small for a heifer, she might have a hard time of it. In no hurry, I lay on the nymph hay, rich in clover and cat’s tail and smelling of midsummer, until the sun set and the bells sang out for vespers.

Autumn arrived, the nights became cooler, and the cicadas stopped whirring. One morning I stumbled upon an egg in the rere-dorter, where a wandering hen had sought warmth to lay it. I carried it to the scriptorium and cracked it on the edge of my desk to make glair. I separated the egg white and strained it into two shells, one for me and a larger one for the Florentine, which I glued to his desk. He had set out his Dante folios, cartooning on his left and illumination on his right, but had made little progress from the previous day.

I had been having strange dreams since I became a novice—dreams of Dante embracing me, dreams of a life beyond the abbey—which made no sense, for Fate had decreed that I would never marry. The end of my apprenticeship was nearing. I had completed the trivium and quadrivium and mastered the church fathers. I did not think I would make a good gardener, or beekeeper, or cellaress. I knew I would never
be a stockbreeder—I might as well have been born a cow—and I would never be as devout as the sacristan. Most likely, I would continue in the scriptorium. In time I might become a librarian, distributing Lent books to the nuns to read, mapping new folios, and doling out copy work to the scribes. However, my heart was set on something more. I wanted to be sought after across Europe as a scribe, to copy the finest commissions in the finest script, perhaps even to be a painter-scribe so I was not dependent on illuminators like the Florentine.

The librarian had been urging him to take an assistant to hurry his work. Hoping to be chosen, I was drafting my own cartoons, imagining the colours I would pick when I was allowed to dip my brush into the most costly paints—vert de flambe from wild irises and azur d’outremer. Each day, the Florentine found fault with my sketches, amused at a misshapen skull or a left arm longer than the right. He had not yet allowed me to illuminate even a hair of his divine Beatrice or a laurel leaf in Dante’s crown. But at night—at night I dreamt of gold and silver foil beaten to supreme thinness and the manuscripts that would spill from my pen in the years to come.

At Candlemas, the Florentine placed the last folio of
La Vita Nuova
before me with a smirk, opened to his final cartoon. An erotic triumph, it illustrated, far too carnally, Dante’s hoped-for reunion with Beatrice after death, a fitting wedding gift for Cardinal Orsini’s nephew. As soon as my work was done, a few more days at most, the librarian would assign me a more mediocre task, but I could not bear to part with Dante and his Beatrice.
La Vita Nuova
would be in the scriptorium for a few more months while the Florentine painted the full-page miniatures. While he painted, I decided, I would make a second copy of
La Vita Nuova
for myself, penning it at night when the scriptorium was empty.

Eleven

I
T WAS
S
HROVE
T
UESDAY
, it was cold, it was the middle of the night, and my stomach was queasy from the delicacies of the abbess’s table. I sprang awake to find Elisabeth on her knees on the floorboards, her face mottled and her eyes red. She was scraping all her belongings into her cloak. I stayed silent until I saw that she was fingering my paternoster beads.

“What are you doing with my paternoster?” I caught the string of agates flying past, just before they hit the wall.

“I took it to pray with, but it did no good.”

“Where are you taking those things?” At my question, she doubled over, head to knees, and sobbed. I got out of bed to see what was wrong, and discovered that her tunic was stained with blood. It seemed to be coming from between her legs, although it was not the right time for her fleurs. I tried to speak slowly, although my thoughts were racing. “The blood will slow if you lie down.”

“It cannot be stopped, for I have sullied Our Lord’s bridal chamber.” She showed me an ugly wart perched on her middle knuckle. “The devil’s mark.”

“You also have welts on your wrist, Elisabeth, but they are from the hot kettles in the kitchen, not the devil. Where do you get such ideas?”

She began to chant a crazy sermon. “The cow that leads the herd has a bell at her neck, so likewise the woman who leads the song and dance has the devil’s bell bound to hers, and when the devil hears the tinkle he says, ‘I have not lost my cow yet.’ ”

“The bell you hear is in Gadagne. It always rings before ours here.”

“Do you not see? I am with child! Enceinte.”

So that was why her back was bent and her hands pressed on her belly, why she had lost her chaste odour and smelt of a man. Over the past months, Elisabeth had grown so big from overeating that I had not noticed this infant taking root.

“Who has done this to you?”

She shook her head, refusing to answer. One of the travelling friars, I guessed. He had taken her roughly, given the welts on her wrist, which were not from a kettle after all. But why was she bleeding? Her raving had reached such a pitch that she might disturb the nuns—sound sleepers, but not
that
sound. She was on all fours when the next pain caught her. I crouched beside her, afraid that she might die, as Maman had done, in the agony of giving birth. My courage had turned hollow, a horrid, wretched hollow deep within me.

I got to my feet. “I am going for the infirmarian.”

“No.”

“Then the stockbreeder.”

“Not her, not anyone.”

For once, Elisabeth was wiser than I was. If she was exposed, she would be cast out. How many times had we been told that maidenhood had its fruit a hundredfold in heaven and that carnal love was licking honey from thorns?

She clutched my ankle to stop me leaving. “Stay with me. You help the stockbreeder bring forth young.”

“I have never done it by myself. This is a child—what if I fail?”

I held her as another pain seized then released her. I helped her lie on her back so I could pull her tunic up, applying my ears, eyes, and fingers to her womb. The infant was tiny, but it was coming now. Could a child so small live? At the next contraction, she braced her feet against me and we slid, clinging to each other, against the wall. The infant surged out between her thighs in a river of running blood, with solid chunks like chicken livers. I picked the infant up gently—one heartbeat, two—then it became quiet in my hands. I choked on my sobs, too affrighted to look closer.

Elisabeth curled on the floor, moaning. Her eyes closed, she was spared the pain of seeing her stillborn infant cupped in my blood-streaked hands. Before she could look, I swaddled the fœtus and shoved it out of sight behind me.

I choked out some words to comfort her and calm myself. “You have lost your child. It is quiet and at peace.”

The nocturn bells began to toll, mourning our loss. I had to think what to do. The afterbirth had been expelled cleanly, instead of staying inside to poison her. I suspected she had done more than climb over night fences to rid herself of this burden. Perhaps she had swallowed some ridding potion that had savaged her. I took her hands in mine to say the Latin of the absolution. Her mind was shaken, but her whimpering told me she had heard.

“I have been your confessor, Elisabeth. You will do three times forty days of penance. You will go faithfully to all the hours. Above all, you will remain silent. No one need know what has happened. Listen to me!” Her shoulders, when I put my arms around them, were wet with perspiration. “Your maidenhead is gone, but you may still be celibate. You must learn to read and write, and you must obey the abbess in everything.”

I hugged her tenderly. In me was a sadness, for this stillbirth had driven her where I could not follow. “These are now yours,” I said, twisting my paternoster beads around her wrist to hide the welts. “You will be a good novice and then a good nun, and you will forget the sad outcome of this night. I want your solemn promise.”

“Yes, yes, I will,” she said, as the agates dragged down her arm.

It was a honeyed lie, given as sleep claimed her, but this promise was all she had to give. I accepted it from her, the only sister I would ever have, knowing that even a lie could guide a life aright. I held her until she stopped shuddering, then sponged the blood from her legs and drew her blanket over her.

I was ill to my stomach waiting for nocturns to end, rocking back and forth as uncontrollably as if I had given birth myself. At last, I heard the nuns mounting the stairs to return to sleep and took grim courage for the task ahead. I could now carry the tiny corpse through the tumbled ashlar in the chapel. Outside, I would dig a grave with my bare hands so no one would hear the scrape of the spade or its bitter clang as it hit rock. The softest earth was in the abbey’s churchyard, but only hallowed corpses rested there, after their souls had been saved.

Had this infant been ensouled? I lifted the swaddled fœtus into my lap and touched it tentatively. It felt older than the forty days at which the soul entered a male child. If male, it had died without being baptised and would be eternally damned. But what if it was female? The soul would not arrive until the eightieth day. My tears had fallen on the bloody swaddling, moistening it enough for me to peel it from the tiny corpse. It was a girl, perfectly formed, with every limb exactly as it should be, as much a part of me as of Elisabeth, yet none of her looked fully human. I had seen animals born before time, but never had such fierce grief assailed me. She was the size of my trembling hand—certainly older than eighty days, a fœtus animatus. Even now, a soul was fluttering inside her, an anima preparing to take flight. I gathered the bundle to my heart to baptise her myself, saying every word of Latin I could remember from the liturgy—one wild, unstoppable, crazed word after another. Then I lifted my eyes to witness her soul’s escape. After I had swaddled her in clean linen, I cradled her in my arms and carried her outside, beneath the cypresses, to give her a home in the soft earth of the hallowed graveyard.

Twelve

A
T DUSK THE FOLLOWING DAY
, Ash Wednesday, I took Elisabeth through the silent darkness to the bathhouse after the nuns had bathed. When she undressed and I saw her still-swollen belly, I ached for her travail, knowing the agony she had gone through. I helped her climb into the barrel, soaped her, and poured rinse water over her. Then I took her back to our cell and made sure no one came near since her flesh was frail and her thinking unstable.

In the following days, her disquiet grew. She was sure that the wart on her finger was getting larger. Although I doused it with eau-de-vie to stop the oozing, two more warts sprang up and soon an army marched across her knuckles, broadcasting her guilt to the whole abbey, or so she believed. Elisabeth was attending all the hours to chant the Latin psalms almost word for word. Even more unsettling, she was haunting the church at other times, saying prayers tearfully for her dead. Why had I ordered her to do penance? Now she could not be stopped, and the nuns might guess the reason.