Muse (11 page)

He nodded, falling into step with me. “You’ll get used to the smell. Today is not bad. It’s worse when it’s windy.
Avenio cum vento fastidiosa sine vento venenosa
.”

So he knew some Latin.
Avignon—with wind terrible, without wind venomous
. “Is this the street of the bookbinders?”

“Not yet. That stink is the butchers,” he said. “It’s carcass-burning day.” We jumped clear as a meat-cutter threw entrails into the centre gutter. “All the leather-workers are in this parish. Not that way.” He stopped me. “That leads to the goldsmiths. And not across, because buildings are being linked for a cardinal’s household. They are taking over the houses of the old Avignonnais.”

I ducked after him into a workshop where parchmenters, bookbinders, and scribes laboured in near darkness, all the instruments and actions of their trades jumbled. No one was bantering with hand signals, no one decorating or illuminating, for their product was too crude to require it. My nose, so clever at picking out a single herb from the surrounding countryside, was defeated by the clashing odours. Swabbing brushes, animal glue, gelatine, book covers bent and burnt into shape, uncured parchment. At any moment, I expected to see the skeleton of the cow from which these by-products had been carved.

“Take me to a better place,” I said to the youth.

“All the booksellers are the same.” He tapped my elbow in warning. “Here comes Belot, the owner.”

Belot’s fleshy red face thrust up to mine. Hands scraped raw, a brace of knives on his belt. I unwrapped my bundle, and stacked the quires on his messy desk. He turned the leaves, rubbed the parchment with his thumb, checked the catchwords.

“
La Vita Nuova
by Dante Alighieri,” I told him. “Every word is there.”

“Where did you get it?” Suspicious. Loud.

I plucked a quill from his ink-pot, skewered some cheap parchment with my knife, and wrote Dante’s final sentence in Provençal, Latin, and Italian using increasingly elaborate scripts, then inked my colophon at the end, proof that I had apprenticed under a Benedictine master. Again that pause, that red face sizing me up, throughout which the dyer’s boy stood resolutely by my side.

“Ten sous,” Belot announced.

“
La Vita Nuova
is not for sale. I want it bound, plain leather, no tooling.” I did not tell him that I planned to make copies of it—for surely the Italians pouring into the city wanted to read their greatest poet, Dante. “Plus I need parchment, good ink, and a commission to take with me.” Before Belot could laugh, I added, “I was told there is a shortage of scribes in Avignon. When my colophon is better known, I will seek employment in one of the private libraries.”

Belot spat close to my shoes. “This is the only work you’ll get in this city. You’ll sit here.” He banged his fist on the only empty table. “One denier a gathering.”

I stood my ground. “That will not feed a dog! How much for Latin and Italian?”

“The same. You’ll use black-letter. The faster the script, the more we both earn.”

I looked at the cramped desk, without even a stool to squat on. I thought of my wide desk in the abbey, my cushioned seat, the fine parchment and oak-gall ink, and said, “I will do the copying in my own workshop.”

He leaned on the stack of Dante quires. “It’s still piece-work. And you must sell me the Dante outright.”

“I want it bound for my own use.”

“No one in the confraternity will bind it for you. We all worship in the same church and abide by the same rules. You deal only with me,
not other booksellers or buyers. And if I hear of you selling your copying, bound or unbound, inside the city wall …”

The dyer’s boy wrested the quires from beneath Belot’s monstrous hand. For someone so young, his voice was firm. “I’ll return for the commission and the materials she needs to do the copying. Put them in a parcel for Luc.”

As we walked towards the rue de l’Épicerie, Luc pushed a leering monk out of my path. “How old are you?” I asked.

“Old enough to apprentice with you. I saw your colophon. In seven years, I want to have one myself.”

Fifteen

W
ITH MY FIRST COINS
from Belot, I rented the chamber next to Perrette’s with a low window that opened over the canal, and moved in my table. Soon the base of my thumb ached from making ink strokes at top speed with Luc standing ready to run the gatherings back to Belot. It was hasty work and there was no time for rubricated capitals, or even a brushful of colour.

I bought an apprentice’s cap and gown for Luc and told him to put about that a scribe had come to the quarter who would copy documents for less than the going tariff. In the day, I could scarcely hear the hours ringing through the city noise, but at night, the nocturn bells broke through my sleep. I would rise, search anxiously for my night shoes, then remember that I did not need to attend the divine office. Missing Elisabeth’s back against mine, I would lie down again with the casement ajar and listen to the rushing of the Sorgue over the paddlewheels as I had heard it as a child.

By autumn Luc was bringing me a steady flow of copying from men outside the city wall who could not write for themselves. I taught
Luc black-letter and before long he was doing enough plain work to keep Belot off our backs. Soon the quarter’s merchants were bringing longer documents and letters up the stairs for me to copy. While I worked, they studied my countenance, my speech, my scholarly gown, unable to deduce my status.
Where has she come from?
they seemed to ask. The French thought me Italian and the Italians, French. My skill at languages set me apart, but mostly I copied in the local Provençal, for I had not found anyone to pay me to copy
La Vita Nuova
in Italian.

I had been in Avignon over a year, when a message requested that I wait upon two students who had arrived from the University of Bologna. I found the run-down dwelling near the rue de la Change. A crooked, slender building, but better than one of the shanties that students had erected in the graveyard. My knock was answered by a tall, lanky gargoyle, whose stained tunic revealed him to be more of a gourmand than a scholar. His chin peppered with hair like a half-plucked capon, he stared at me until I shook my leather quill-box.

His Provençal came out in a rush. “I don’t suppose you speak Italian. My brother calls this city a god-forsaken Babylon, but I think it should be called a Babel for all the silly tongues that wag in it.” He led me down a corridor past a pail of slops and up a flight of stairs. “We are being robbed of a florin a month for this hovel. I am Gherardo and
that
“—he pushed me into a murky chamber—”is my brother, Francesco, who hopes to be a famous poet one day. Get out your quill to record the most execrable nonsense that ever man has composed to earn a soldo. Checco, here is your scribe!” Then, observing me bleakly, he asked, “I suppose you have a name?”

“Solange Le Blanc.”

I shoved the untidy pile of documents to one side so I could write at the desk. Gherardo sank onto some cushions and closed his eyes. Only then did Francesco, who had been gazing out the window, turn towards me, with the sunlight flooding his face. So this was what an Italian poet looked like: younger and more handsome than I had imagined Dante.

Francesco hovered as I arranged my tools. Once I’d uncapped my ink-horn, he began to dictate in Latin, addressing the letter to Cicero, a writer who had been dead for fourteen centuries. Francesco was already a seasoned orator, though he was only a few years older than me. His voice was a joy to listen to and he paced to the rhythm of his own sentences, his movements elegant, as spare as his brother’s were gauche.

After he had finished dictating, he looked at me to see if I had kept up. I allowed myself a final whiff of Paris ink and held the parchment out to him. He studied the text, nodded approval, and snatched the quill from my hand to sign his name,
Francesco di Petrarca de Florentia
. I noticed a glimmer of respect in his eyes. And why not? I had made his Latin appear more polished by recording it in a formal running script.

He began pacing again, dictating a second letter in surprisingly good Provençal to Guido Sette, a friend in Bologna who had written to borrow money so he could join the brothers in Avignon. For this letter, I chose a more familiar script. After Francesco had reminisced about shared pleasures, he turned the tables on his friend, for whom I began to feel sorry.

He prodded his lounging brother with his boot. “Gherardo, how shall I describe my financial state to Guido?”

“Like a nanny goat that hasn’t been bred,” offered Gherardo, rising on one elbow. “If she is bred, there will be an ongoing supply of milk and a kid to sell at market. The poet, likewise. Once bred by a little money, he can be milked of verse for years to come.”

“Perhaps I need a muse like Dante.”

“Even better,” Gherardo said. “He milked Beatrice of poetry for twenty years.”

“Dante did not think of Beatrice so vulgarly,” I protested.

Gherardo seemed surprised to hear this. “If Francesco does not get a patron, we will be sleeping in the cemetery, for we have both given up the law. We have already spent the patrimony our father left us and we need new cloaks and hose to make a showing in the city. I cannot strut in these ill-fitting shoes.”

I said, “I doubt that any patron will pay for a letter to Cicero.”

“You may be right. Is there a demand for poems here?” Gherardo asked. “Read her the one you are writing, Francesco.”

Francesco came over to the desk to shuffle through the array of documents, nudging my arm several times, most likely on purpose, before he extracted one. “At prime, the sun enters the power of Taurus,” he read. “Quickening the earth with heat and colour.”

“Now, that is subtle,” Gherardo said, “for Taurus is a lusty bull.”

“There are some more verses, equally silly, which I will spare you,” Francesco said to me. “I have crossed out more lines than I have kept. Tell me, Solange Le Blanc, what does an Avignon lady wish to hear from a courtier?”

“Put yourself at her mercy and beg for her love,” I suggested, a little too quickly. “Say you will die if she does not pity you.”

“Now, Checco,” Gherardo said, “here’s a young woman who can write love poems as well as you, like one of those figs that are sweet when green.” His thumbs split an imaginary fig, which he pretended to eat.

“Don’t mind Gherardo’s high spirits.” Francesco’s eyes were on me now. “Would a lady give away her heart so readily?” When I reddened, realizing what I had let myself in for, he answered for me. “I suppose no woman could resist the idea that she has such power over a man! I will give you whatever you wish in your sonnetto. I will be hot one moment and cold the next. Fevers and chills, whatever you command, but after my poem is finished, you must consent to write the fair copy for me. Your penmanship is exceptional and you are schooled in two languages.”

“She appears to like you, Checco,” Gherardo said in Italian. “Perhaps she is fond enough to do it for nothing.”

This was annoying. “You must pay me for the materials that I used today,” I said. “Coins, not on account, and the same again if you wish me to buy parchment.”

“
Three
languages,” Gherardo corrected his brother, “since she has just understood my Tuscan. Taught by an old husband, I wager.”

I forced my writing tools back into the leather box, damaging a quill. I should not have insisted on payment since I might have spoilt my chance to assist a man of letters, the only one I had met since arriving in Avignon.

“You are wrong, Gherardo,” Francesco said. “See how she lowers her eyes? She is no married woman. This maid was not raised in a city, but in seclusion. Her voice has a resonance, like a plucked lute.” Then to me, “Perhaps your father was a learned scribe who taught you all he knew?”

I made no answer, for he had arrived at one that suited me better. His skin, so close now that I could sense its warmth, had the bloom of dusky, ripened grapes.

“Why do you speak Italian in such a way?” he asked. “Even our grandfather was not so formal.”

“I learnt Italian while copying Dante’s work.
Da questa visione innanzi cominciò lo mio spirito naturale …
” My ears grew hot as I listened to myself. Why had I chosen to recite that intimate line?
From the moment of the vision, my natural spirit was enamoured by that most graceful lady
.

A dark, poetic eye met mine as he completed the passage, “… 
ad essere impedito ne la sua operazione, però che l’anima era tutta data nel pensare di questa gentilissima
. It is Dante’s description in
La Vita Nuova
of the effects of love. You have shown yourself to be wiser than I am. That is the kind of poetry I wish to write, not this.”

He crushed his poem in his fist and threw it on the floor. I had put my foot wrong again, for I had not meant to shame him. I retrieved the sheet and smoothed it so it could be reused.

He laughed. “Don’t pick that up. It’s only paper—something new for drafts and ephemera. You are delightfully archaic, Solange Le Blanc, but I believe I like you that way. You cannot say
no
to me! I am determined that you will be my scribe.”