Muse (9 page)

Lent, with its rigour and deprivation, was a blow to our appetites.
By the second week, the nuns squabbled over what they might and might not eat. I was drawn in, and heard myself argue the merits of almonds over walnuts, for I was fasting for the first time and crossing off the days until Easter.

As the weeks passed, the chapter meetings became unruly, stirred up by papal letters warning against sorcery and malfeasance, for Pope John feared an attempt upon his life, a fate the abbess welcomed. Ever since her brother, the Knight Templar, had been despoilt and hounded, she had hated the French popes. On Palm Sunday, she reported, the Pope preached a sermon in Notre-Dame-des-Doms denying that the souls of the just saw God face to face, as former popes had promised. The Pope stood accused of heresy for this assault on the Beatific Vision and the abbess was not sorry for it. Such large transgressions had made her more attentive to the souls in her own keeping. Her eyes fell upon Elisabeth—her newfound piety, her surprising knowledge of the Latin psalms—and she announced that Elisabeth would be allowed to become a choir nun, as she had wished, instead of a lay nun.

Overnight, Elisabeth’s warts became enflamed. I was awake all night contriving remedies to treat her hand. Nothing—neither a hot poultice nor cool salve—would calm the itching. When the sun rose, I went into the pasture to pick Saint John’s wort to soothe the warts. I had no sooner cut a few stems than the stockbreeder called out to me.

“Is your knife sharp?”

At my nod, she hastened me to the cow-shelter, where Emmanuelle was struggling to give birth. “She will be calmer with you. Hold her head and talk to her while I try to get the calf out.”

I had assisted many times, but today my heart was uneasy. I did not wish to attend another difficult birth, and was shaky and out of sorts from lack of food and sleep. When Emmanuelle could not deliver on her own, we had to push her onto her side and tug out the calf by ropes tied to his ankles. As Emmanuelle licked him dry, I saw he was not brown like our herd, but white with black spots. I did not need to count them to
know that there were seven. The stockbreeder gave Emmanuelle a pail of mash and measured a length of twine. Because the newborn was a bull-calf, she would castrate him so he would fatten quickly.

“Get your knife ready,” she said. “Your hands are steadier than mine.”

The stockbreeder tied a lace knot around the scrotum to lessen the bleeding, then held the calf’s legs apart while I went in swiftly. I cut cleanly with my knife and dropped the severed testicles on the straw, feeling unhappy about my part in it. Now that the calf was up, the stockbreeder was counting his spots, and I regretted telling her about my prediction. I shaded my eyes from the sun as I hurried through the ploughed field. I was not fast enough, for she spurted past me. Her skirts caught on a deep furrow, she stumbled, dropped to her knees, raised her arms, fell again, her shouts getting louder as she approached the abbey, the calf draped over her arms with its afterbirth dripping tissue and blood. The nuns emerged from the cloister, debating the cause of the stockbreeder’s fit, and soon her voice, shrieking that I was a sorcière, was joined by the dissonance and buzz of rumour.

It was true that the calf was not brown like Emmanuelle or the bull that had bred her, but spotted as I had foreseen. But how was this sorcery? I hid in my cell to order my thoughts. It did not take the abbess long to find me. She sat on the bed, speaking to my back, since my head lay buried in my arms.

“Some of the obedientiaries are accusing you of misconduct. They are demanding a meeting.”

No longer under her protective wing, I must answer to the chapter. For years, she had warned me this day would come. I had reason to fear their sting. Now that I was a novice, I had seen hardened nuns reduced to tears in chapter. Worse—it was the sixth week of Lent. The nuns were weak from eating lentil soup with only a few spices to enliven it. The quiet nuns had become more listless and the quick-tempered even more quarrelsome than usual.

“Can’t we wait until the nuns are eating meat once more?”

“The cloister has erupted in a fury of grumbling, Solange. There will be no end to it until you take the stand.”

The abbess entered the chapter house as Agnès de Clairefontaine. Moths had attacked her fur-trimmed robe, and the toes of her pigaces were bent and tired, but her brother’s sword rested proudly on her hip, with Saint Peter’s toenail shining in its pommel. Behind the abbess came the sacristan, the librarian, the other obedientiaries, and the choir nuns, who positioned themselves in tiers beneath the ribbed vault. Since it was Elisabeth’s first chapter meeting, she sat in the upmost tier, her hand tucked up her sleeve to hide the warts. My mouth was dry and tasted of copper as I took my place in the stand. According to the rule, I must listen but not speak. Each of the nuns had the right to testify.

The stockbreeder spoke first, her fingers knotting and unknotting. “Solange is in the habit of touching the wombs of ewes and cows. I have heard her talk to the unborn. I am convinced”—her voice climbed shrilly—“that she caused the bull-calf to burst out in spots by casting a spell upon it.”

My hands still smelt of the birthing stall, where we had brought a life into the world together. How long had she been envious of my ability to comfort her beasts? Her testimony had barely finished before Sister Raymonde rose. Large and solid, she rooted her feet on the pavingstones.

“This is not necromancy or a virgin birth. The calf is a product of its parents. The heifer did not conceive this calf by herself. The facts are clear. God bids us use our eyes. We must look about us for a spotted bull!”

This caused a stir amongst the nuns and the sacristan jumped up to respond. “I suppose we must look for a natural father for the Virgin Mary? And for Our Saviour? I have seen you consorting with Solange amongst your poppies and nightshade. You have taught your pupil well. You should be banished to practise your science amongst heretics.”

Raymonde’s thighs landed on the bench with a heavy slap. I steadied my thoughts. If I let them stray, I would become as overwrought as Elisabeth, whose eyes skipped from one nun to another, resting only a few seconds on each face. Next, one of the nuns might suggest striking me with reeds and driving me into the wilderness, or dragging me in a spiked box, then flaying me alive and hanging me from a post. Their common sense had taken flight on hooves of envy. Soon they would stampede towards the nearest bucket of warm mash.

The stockbreeder was still on her feet, in full cry. “Perhaps the spell Solange cast is part of a general maleficium she has caused. What if the other cows in our herd break out in spots? Emmanuelle and her calf should be taken to Avignon to be exorcized by Pope John.”

This allusion to her great enemy the Pope brought the abbess to her feet amidst much rustling of black taffeta. I smelt the faint odour of lavender, a sensible fragrance, and took heart.

“It was not a spell, but prophecy,” the abbess said. “Have you forgotten that Solange was accepted as a child oblate because she has the gift of clairvoyance? Since then, she has mastered the seven liberal arts and shown remarkable skill in the scriptorium. So much so that the abbot has just granted her a colophon as a master scribe, the youngest in the abbey’s history.”

I was not the only one knocked astride by this announcement. The librarian took a step towards the abbess, saying, “O prophecy, here is thy sting! Mother Agnes, you have always believed that honey drops from Solange’s lips. However, no honest scribe writes with her left hand, nor so accurately and well. Your favourite has a devil’s paw.”

In the highest tier, Blanche gave Ursula a push. As Ursula rose, her hand grazed the rail, flying out to command the room’s attention. I had never heard her speak in chapter before. “Mother Agnes, we are ten years older than Solange. Why have you given her a colophon before us? She already thinks herself superior because she knows Italian and we do not.”

The abbess made an impatient gesture. “She only copies it. She does not understand.”

“She converses in that language with the Florentine!” cried Ursula.

I stared at Ursula, whose eyes evaded mine. The abbess began to cough—violent, wrenching spasms—and now
my
eyes fled in remorse, for I had disobeyed and wounded her and was ashamed. Further quarrelling broke out amongst the nuns, who deserted their orderly rows to debate heatedly with one another. At last, the abbess managed to subdue her cough. She drew her sword and held it aloft to quiet the uproar.

“You bicker one minute and are tight as thieves the next,” she said. “With hysteria such as this, the holy Templars were hounded to their deaths, my innocent brother amongst them. Women accused of sorcery have had their tongues extracted with hot tongs. Would you wish this torture on Solange?” She paused to survey the shamefaced chapter. “There will be no talking in the cloister until Easter Eve. We will all be better for some medicinal silence.

“Listen to your abbess. Solange has had a vision, but not a simple one like her unicorn with his head in the lap of the Virgin. When Saint Hildegarde was a girl, she could also tell the colour of a calf inside its mother’s womb. This is a prophecy about the future of the Roman church. Our heifer is Holy Mother Church and her bull-calf is the French pope. The seven black spots are a blight on the papacy. This means there will be seven popes in Avignon, each afflicted with one of the seven deadly sins. Only when the last pope is hanged for a heretic will the church return to Rome.”

Mother Agnes had so amplified my prediction about the spots that it was unrecognizable, even to me. Yet an aura of startling truth illuminated it. Perhaps it
was
a prophecy. The serious faces of the nuns in their tiers, their awed silence, their transfixed eyes—this was more worrisome than any accusation they had levelled at me.

The chapter house began to swim and my legs buckled in a giddy heap. I knocked my forehead on something going down and lightning
flashed across the vault. My eyes turned back into my head and the tiers of nuns became a choir of saints and cardinals, toiling upwards against the prevailing air currents in which seven French popes were spinning. From their mouths, banderôles unfurled with the words
Superbia, Desperatio, Dolor, Discordia, Stultitia, Avaritia
, and
Luxuria
. Angels with heaving bosoms and tiny legs hovered on rapid wings in an azure heaven dotted with gold-foil stars that must have cost a dozen florins. The illuminator’s true skill, however, was revealed in his portrait of hell, enriched with swirls of ebony, ormolu, and vermilion—colours I had been coveting in the Florentine’s miniatures. The faces of hell’s sinners were grotesquely familiar. The Florentine was positioned upside down in flames, his feet a lurid blue. The stockbreeder was in an ecstasy of swollen nudity, a hideous serpent writhing round her hips. Hell’s mouth gaped below, a scarlet orifice sucking the affrighted clerics towards it. It was a Last Judgement worthy of the Florentine’s own brushes.

Then the spectacle faded, leaving a dull ache in my skull. The numbness crept down my left arm into my fingers and the flying nuns reverted to a swarm of women buzzing about my ears. I found myself lying flat on the cold stone floor with my eyes closed. The abbess was beside me, giving an order to someone.

“Fetch my scarlet ledger. I must record what Solange is uttering.”

“No, don’t.” Even as these words—and more—escaped my lips, they sounded foreign. I stared at the infirmarian, who had pushed up my eyelid with her thumb.

“She is in delirium.”

“No,” said Elisabeth, shoving in. “She is speaking in the old tongue.”

The nuns edged closer. Several crouched to minister to me and I was relieved when Elisabeth elbowed them aside to gather me into her strong arms. My eyelid dropped as the infirmarian was thrust away. Elisabeth cradled my head, whispering, “Forgive me, Solange, I did not believe you had second sight until this day. Tell me what you saw.”

I babbled for some time, grateful that only Elisabeth could understand. “I must be light-headed from fasting. Say nothing to the others, for it was a foolish, hungry vision—a vapour that escaped as swiftly as it came.”

But I knew it was more than that. I had never had a vision so profound and the dark, intransigent power that had gripped me could return at any time. I did not wish to tell the abbess, for she would twist and transform my ravings into a prophecy that bore no resemblance to what I had seen. Soon she would be redrawing the map of Christendom on her study wall, making Clairefontaine-on-the-Sorgue equal in size to Hildegarde’s abbey at Bingen-on-the-Rhine. Elisabeth was caught up in the same excitement, translating far too eagerly, making my vision of the Last Judgement sound so rare and glorious that the abbess’s face became red and shiny with anticipation.

“Elisabeth, stop,” I said, but she was too wound up to hear.

“Do not strain yourself,” the abbess advised. “You will remember more in time. And you may tell us in whichever language springs to your lips, for Saint Hildegarde also spoke in tongues. From this day forth, you must dedicate yourself to cultivating your gift of clairvoyance. The time has come for you to embrace your destiny.”