Muse (38 page)

“We will all die,” I said, “and I will die before you, for I am older.”

“I will wait for you to fetch me as you did in the priory of Saint Clare.”

I kissed her wet lashes. “My soul will fly to yours like an arrow.”

“Like a mother to its baby?” She rubbed her nose against mine.

“Yes,” I said, rubbing back. “The perfume bottle was my mother’s. If you look carefully, you will see dried traces of her tears.”

She held it beneath her eyes, then mine, for both of us had begun to weep, then hid the tiny bottle beneath the other treasures in her alms-bag.

“Now you must come to get your tears,” she informed me. “And your mother must collect hers. What is it called again?”

“The last busy day, when we will all be together again. Now, that is enough seriousness for one day. Let us make you a book of delights of your own.”

Perhaps she had inherited Raymonde’s love for science. Or mine for poetry—befitting a child conceived in the finest library in Christendom. Upon her thigh, a shadowy mark was growing, similar to mine. It might yet turn into a thimble or a chalice, even the mark of Venus. In good time, her destiny would be revealed.

All Saints’ Day was almost upon us. Our haymaking was over and we were gathering and crushing the vintage. Soon it would be blood-month, the time for slaughtering. When our harvest was done and our salt, fish, and spices laid by, I would put each Poor Clare to apprentice with one of the Benedictines. After the lady nuns were trained, they could choose to stay or return to their own priory, though I hoped they would remain so I could guide and watch over them.

My new scriptorium would rise on the bank of the fast-running Sorgue, where our labours would be soothed by the rush of the river chasing stones. It would be built from the best limestone, with a glass window, not oiled parchment, for each scribe. I intended to make the scriptorium as active as it had been at the height of Benedictine learning, with the finest library along the branches of the Sorgue. Angière had consented to be my first apprentice, for even now she had a good black-letter. When Félicité and Anne-Prospère were older, I would train their stubby fingers to love copying, as mine had done.

The little girls were never to be found when I wanted them. Everything was new to them: hives guarded by stinging bees, green apples that hurt their bellies, a hedgehog darting out of cover, swallows skimming over the corn, the scent of wet hay after the rain. Glad as I was that Félicité was no longer so frail and that Anne-Prospère was no longer la petite misère, I must still lay down rules for them to follow. It was enough to ask the disciplined Benedictines to put up with the disorderly Poor Clares, for they were like salt and sugar. To ask the Benedictines to indulge my daughters, as well, was unfair. They skipped about the abbey, causing havoc wherever they went. They let the goats into the gourds and stole eggs from my henhouse to tame a wild dog. They mimicked the nuns’ hand signals by sticking their hands between their legs and giggling when they wanted to make water. And they could not comprehend the rule of silence—even in the refectory where it was sacrosanct while the sacristan read the saint’s life from the falcon’s nest above our heads.

Such mischief could not go on. It was time for them to learn the daily routine of the abbey. I was forced to that conclusion while we were singing an antiphon during sext. The choir-mistress was leading.
Unde lucet in aurora flos de Virgine Maria
, she sang. The last note wavered, miraculously drawn out as if held by a martyr with perfect pitch, a sacred note too high for profane ears. Was this the music of the spheres, the ineffable harmony of planets in their orbits? As the antiphon resounded from the groined vault, the note heightened into a scream. The choir-mistress clutched her head and clawed off her veil to see what had fallen on it. The flash of two dark heads above the singers told me that the little girls had been playing in the upper stalls and amusing themselves by dripping hot candle wax onto the choir nuns below. They ran out the door, dislodging the wild dog that was lying in the sun. As they escaped, a shaft of sunlight illuminated Félicité, piercing me with dread. No longer thistledown, her hair was as bristly as a hedgehog’s. What if she had inherited, through Francesco’s seed, some of his brother Gherardo’s rapscallion nature?

This reminder of Francesco was my undoing. As the choir-mistress resumed her angelic singing, my thoughts drifted in a more carnal direction. I recalled the pleasure of lying with Francesco thigh to thigh, spinning to the world’s swift tune. I prayed that in the general resurrection, in that great synthesis of blood and bones when bodies reassembled, Francesco’s soul would be drawn to mine so we would taste the transporting joy that we had known in our youth. Just as destiny had divided us, it would bring us together, joining us in one another’s arms for the rest of time. I imagined a laurel wreath clinging victoriously to my brow as I embraced him in the ecstasy of our resurrected flesh.

When the office was over, I found the little girls in the cellar, sliding back and forth on the floor. Elisabeth did not look up from recording the stores in her ledger. Why had she been avoiding me since I returned to Clairefontaine? She was wasting away, but I could not make out what was wrong with her other than too much piety. She had insisted that I become the abbess, but after I had taken on the rôle she had woven a hair shirt of privacy around herself. Was she still bitter that Mother Agnes had favoured me? The names we had been given, Marie-Ange and Martha, separated us even more. A kitchen Martha should be fat and merry, but she was taking after Saint Elisabeth, who had delusions and died from fasting. Where had the Elisabeth of the frogs and insects gone? Where was that whimsy, that fire that had warmed our cell when we were children?

I felt unwelcome in her cellar, but I was the abbess, after all, and I could see that the sack of rice was almost empty. “I will need to inspect the levels for winter,” I told her. “All our supplies must be stored by Martinmas.”

Still Elisabeth did not say anything, only turned her back to pry up the lid of a wooden box with a crowbar. The nails shrieked, the little girls shrieked louder, and the cellar vaulting amplified the noise. Why had I been so high-handed? Perhaps if I trusted Elisabeth to do her job, she would warm to me in time.

“Come away, mes petites. Sister Martha has work to do.” I grasped Félicité’s hand to lead her off. Wherever she went, Anne-Prospère would follow. “If you wish to yell, you must go into the fields where the nuns cannot hear you. After Martinmas, I will give you both some duties around the abbey.”

“Don’t worry, Maman. Sister Martha likes us. Her name is really Elisabeth.” Félicité extracted her hand to skid across the floor. “Watch this.” She danced on her high toes, then squealed again.

“Look, Fée,” said Anne-Prospère, holding a fig by its stem. “Look, Maman.” She plunged the fig into the last of the honey and ate the dripping fruit.

My pleasure at being called
Maman
was brief because I was puzzled that Elisabeth had not objected. It was normally as hard to get honey from a cellaress as it was to get blood from a turnip. Félicité dipped in a fig also, smiling like a gargoyle. I gathered the girls’ sticky hands in mine, led them to the door, and set them free outside. I came back into the cellar, expecting an explanation, but Elisabeth continued to ignore me. She finished inspecting the box and noted the entire contents in her ledger, without a single look back in the box. Only now did I remember her prodigious memory for the words of the psalms.

At last, she straightened up, wiping her hands on her scapular. “You will be shown the list of supplies when it is ready. I will take the mule cart to Avignon before the weather changes. I will be gone three days.”

Such a flood of speech! She wasn’t asking my permission, but she was opening the door a little. We were sisters once and perhaps could be again. “I will draw you a map of the friars’ path so you can follow the safest route.”

“I have a better map in here.” She tapped her head. “When the abbess travelled to Avignon, I accompanied her, and when she became too weak, I went on my own. Sometimes I saw you there, but you did not recognize me.”

I could not control my face, a mixture of surprise and dawning shame. “Even when I resided in the palais des Papes?”

Another crate shrieked as she dug the crowbar under the lid of a box and forced it down. “Especially then.”

Forty-five

T
HE BRANCHES OF
the Sorgue had begun to flood the Vaucluse basin. Our cellar was full for winter and our firewood stacked in cords to season. In the comfort of the abbess’s house, between compline and nocturns, I had time for reading and casting back over memories. I had lived fully, loved and been loved, borne children both live and dead. Here at Clairefontaine, within hearing of the bell of Notre-Dame-des-Doms, I would remain, nurturing my daughters until I died in my great bed, with my nuns kneeling around me and my familia of servants mourning.

But death must wait, for I had much to do. One of my duties was to answer letters that came from afar. Addressed variously to the abbess of Clairefontaine, or the Countess of Turenne, or la Popessa, they found their way to me, begging for scraps of prophecy. I drew my lantern close, for earlier that day a letter had arrived in the hands of a passing friar, who had carried it from Italy for a fee. I had slipped it into the inner layer of my habit so that Elisabeth, who was lingering with curious eyes, would not see the wax seal. All day long, I had felt the
vellum picking up my skin’s warmth beneath my shift. I retrieved it now—translucent from the heat and moisture of my flesh.

The letter was addressed to me in Francesco’s lively hand. What did he want from me after so many years? I imagined him writing the letter in Parma, swathed in his coronation gown, with a well-bred hound sleeping loyally beside him. I cut the stitches eagerly, then slid my knife beneath the green wax to unfold the sheet.

To Solange, in your hermitage,

Now that you have come to rest in the Vaucluse as you once hoped, I return to you in spirit to recall old pleasures and discover new ones. You will be happy to learn that I am writing poetry again. At first, Laura came back to me in dreams to dry my tears with her hair. Unworthy of the parchment I wrote them on, I scraped off the words. Then, one night, I dreamt of Laura as I first saw her in the church of Saint Clare. These fresh poems, now scattered across my table, have remarkable new conceits. I will send a handful today and will convey more by trusted couriers as I finish them. If you find infelicities, do not spare me, for I trust your eye and ear more than my own.

You will be surprised to know, after all the pain I have caused you, how often I caress you in my thoughts. As I fall asleep, I see you bathing naked in the fountain of the Sorgue. I dream of returning to you, but fearful of being roused by your great beauty and becoming a thrall to lust again, I content myself by writing poems about Laura, hoping posterity will share your approval of them.

I write this at prime as the moon angles in its descent towards the earth. How many winters are left to us? How many summers? Take up your pen and write with me, for the future is in our hands. Remember your prediction that I would be
crowned by laurel leaves in Rome? Prophesy for me once more, my love—will men still read my poetry when you and I are dead?

Your own Francesco

My own Francesco, returning to me in spirit. My longing for him flooded back and the zeal of love reclaimed me. He was caressing me in his thoughts, thinking of me as he fell asleep, succumbing to my power even at this distance! But when I reread the letter, I saw something more: his fantasy of Laura, so resilient that it now embraced her death. Anger swamped me, black and red waves striking at the very core of sanity. Poisoning her with wormwood had only made him cling to her morbidly. Worms were battening on her decomposing flesh, but it was no good to tell that to a poet. Could I never loosen Francesco’s grip on his rotting prize? I grasped the hilt of the Clairefontaine sword with Saint Peter’s yellowed toenail and felt my courage swell. But how could I smite my rival, when she was already dead?

I spread Francesco’s new poems across my table. In spite of the blottings, the poems were sublime, harvested from the deep imagery of grief. Here and there, he reached too far or dropped a syllable. Even as he was squeezing these drafts onto the free fold of the letter, he had crossed out and replaced words. He had much need of my help. Without it, he would be condemned to altering words, moving verses from one poem to the next, then poems from one place in the cycle to another, despairing of finding perfection.

I imagined how our letters would fly back and forth as I encouraged him to trust his heartbeats to pace the lines. No one had written of love so well, not even Dante. Francesco was purifying the Italian tongue—what did it matter in the long run of time that Laura was the inspiration? These poems would alter the way men wrote hereafter. By guiding him, I would claim this beauty for myself and for my children. When the songbook of Francesco di Petrarca de Florentia was complete, I would copy it in my finest hand. With my signature as a seal of
authority, it would make its way along the trade routes of Europe, earning admirers everywhere.