Muse (4 page)

“When you have taken your vows,” she said, “you will be Sister Marie-Ange and Elisabeth will be Sister Martha. You have received the better part, Solange. Now strive for the obedience to play it well.”

The pain in my arm had somehow travelled to my belly, where it was taking root like a great hunger. The abbess seemed to have forgotten that I, too, had been accepted out of charity. If I did not produce more visions, I was in danger of being sent back to the tavern to starve with Conmère, who might be dead herself by now. I must learn to write as quickly as I could to help with the new commissions. Surely being a good scribe was more useful than having feeble visions?

Five

N
OW THAT
I
WAS
helping in the scriptorium, my life fell into a different rhythm. I outfitted my corner with useful things—like the stub of red ochre stolen from the librarian—for the day that I would become a scribe. If the scribes needed books to copy, I fetched the psalters, Gospels, and other manuscripts blackened by frequent handling. When the scriptorium was tranquil, I looked at them myself, tracing unknown words to memorize their lineaments and studying the playful woodcuts made by monks hankering for a fuller life. The big abbey cat often sat upon my feet. I named him Ambrose because honey-sounds purred from him like the honeyed words of Saint Ambrose. A working cat, not a pet, he kept the scriptorium free of mice, while I kept it free of dirt and insects. Whenever the copyists signalled—for talking caused mistakes—I ran for parchment, ink, and feathers, or swept quill-shavings out the door, chasing Ambrose off the porch-stone where he lay sunning his fat bottom. Soon he was back to pounce on the spiders I had flushed out.

In spring the mistral blew across the fields, whistling soil against
the scriptorium. I was tired of running for parchment when the scribes drew a rectangle in the air. Everyone else in the scriptorium had an important job. The librarian was the master scribe, who mapped out the folios for the others, though her decorations were simple and without taint of pleasure. Along the wall, the scribes were seated according to diminishing rank and window light, with Madame in the first position, followed by a pair of novices, both eighteen, who were apprenticing as copyists. Two grey-bearded monks from a kindred monastery worked in a shed at the rear, one as a parchmenter and jack-of-all-trades and the other as a bookbinder.

One day when the scriptorium had emptied for the divine office, I climbed onto the librarian’s chair to peer through her magnifying glasses at the merchant’s bestiary she was repairing. She came back early to find me touching the paint-strokes on the ferocious crocodile. I sprang down with her glasses still hugging my nose and she plucked them off me in such fury she almost crushed them.

“You’ve smudged the page with your fingerprints. You are no better than the merchant’s children, who tore this exquisite book.” She threw a fistful of scrubbing sand on the pavingstones at my feet. “Kneel on that until I tell you to get up.”

The scribes were now returning, stifling their conversation as they crossed the threshold, first Madame, then the novices, all three casting glances of pity my way. The coarse sand dug into my knees. At last, through red, stinging eyes, I saw the librarian leaving with the bestiary beneath her arm, probably to lock it in the armarium. Madame waved an empty ink-pot in my direction. I picked the sand out of my kneecaps, ferried the pot to the ink-well, and hobbled back to her.

“The librarian doesn’t want me here,” I said. The blood came back into my legs, attacking them with pins-and-needles.

“I will tell her I need an assistant.”

All of a sudden, the sand torture was worth it. “Will you teach me to be a scribe like you?”

“Yes.” She pulled me onto her lap to rub the stiffness from my legs. “I will keep your hands and feet busy. First, you must choose the best materials and treat them with respect.” She unstoppered the ink-pot beneath my nose so I could smell it. “This is made from oak-gall, with a trace of wormwood to discourage mice. The ink is thick enough to adhere to the quill but thin enough to slide onto the parchment. Ink should never drip or blot the page, or stain your fingers.”

She strapped her copybook to the upper half of her desk, placed the new quire below, then trimmed her quill and dipped it into the ink-pot not once but twice. Instead of tapping the quill, she let the excess ink run off the nib in its own time. With her left hand, she pressed her penknife against the margin to hold the parchment taut. I watched the line fill with delicate words, much easier on the eye than the abbess’s plodding script. She inked her family coat of arms at the end of the quire.

“I don’t have one of those,” I pointed out.

“Then you must earn a Benedictine colophon like the librarian’s.”

As the days shortened into autumn, the copyists began to skip the divine offices to make better use of daylight, since candles and lanterns—with their risk of fire—were prohibited. The librarian enforced absolute silence, for each scribe was copying one of the Gospels for an overdue commission. The librarian had completed Luke in her swift purposeful hand and the novices were on the last chapters of Mark and John. By Seven Sorrows, Madame was still labouring on Matthew. The librarian circled, her bony frame bent at the waist as she inspected Madame’s spidery letters, her stylus tapping on errors I had not detected.

Madame arrived at her desk late one morning, cradling her writing arm against her chest. “A stroke of apoplexy in the night,” she whispered to me. “It weakened the entire right side of my body.”

It frightened me to see the ink staining her skin because she was brushing her fingers instead of lifting them, as she had taught me. Worse, she did not appear to care. Each day, each quire, her arm became
more limp and disobedient and I did more of the work for her. When she was on the last page of the last quire, I pinched my fingers to warn her that she needed to squeeze in two more verses of Matthew. She did not compress enough to make both verses fit and had to rotate the quire to write the last one in the margin. She drew her coat of arms so ineptly that it leaked into the page, and left the scriptorium abruptly.

What should I do? I could not give the quire to the librarian, as was usual, for she would not have to squint to see its obvious faults. Instead, I ducked into the shed to entrust it to the kindly bookbinder. He took one look and put it into the sewing frame, placed the earlier quires of Matthew on top, added the other three Gospels, and tightened the clamps. He threaded his needle to begin stitching the quires together.

By the time the four Gospels had been bound in covers and the librarian saw the errors in Matthew, it was too late for her to demand corrections. She galloped towards me, her wrath so thunderous the water clock trembled, its escapement slowing almost to a halt, and I raced out of the scriptorium, cold with fear.

Some days later, I was chasing Ambrose through the cloister garden, his feet churning like a Benedictine late for prayer, when I ran into the abbess, who was inspecting the books in the armarium beside the church door. Her key made two
clinks
, one in the lock and the second as it fell back against the other keys hanging from her belt.

“Have you read your Latin psalm for this week?”

“Not yet.” I dug my toe into the soil to stir it around. “Why must I learn so many psalms?”

“You must know them all before you take the veil. When you are a choir nun, you will sing one hundred and fifty psalms every week, each with its own prayers and antiphons. I have explained this to you before.” Her eyes checked me up and down, from untied cap to dirty shoe-leather. “You are meant to be in the scriptorium at this hour. Instead, your laughter was echoing through the cloister, disturbing the nuns at their work.”

I hung my head, my fingers clasped behind my back. Surely she knew that the librarian was out of patience with me? If she didn’t, I was not about to tell her. I kept my eyes fastened on my shoes. “I am sorry.”

“Say it in Latin.”

“Mea culpa.”

“Have you been to the river again? As well as neglecting your duties in the scriptorium, you have soaked the new shoes you received at Michaelmas.”

“I swept the scriptorium floor this morning.” This was not a lie. I had done it before the librarian arrived, so she could not thunder at me again.

“And what else have you accomplished?”

“The librarian will not give me any other jobs.”

The abbess walked me out of the cloister into the scriptorium, past the novices’ flying hand signals, and up to the librarian, who was writing as if her commission had come from God Himself. “This child is now eight, old enough for useful work,” the abbess said. “She is tired of scouring floors. Give her a quill.”

Only the abbess dared speak so loudly while the scribes were writing, for errors with the pen were costly. The librarian’s face, when it rose from her quire, was the yellow of old tallow.

“A scribe cannot be left-handed,” she said. “The ink would smear as her hand crossed the page. Enough parchment has been ruined by Madame de Fores.”

“Madame’s arm is withering. I have put her into the guest-house, where she will have some respite from the rules.” The abbess squeezed the librarian’s elbow to stop the motion of her pen. Her voice lowered a notch. “This child has the gift of clairvoyance.”

The librarian was having none of it. “We have no use for visions here.”

“But with Madame gone, you do have need of an apprentice. There are three books in the armarium waiting to be copied,” the abbess said. “With so many new commissions, our abbey will soon be as well known for our books as for our honey. Teach this child good penmanship, for
she is quick to learn. Let her begin by copying a psalter for her own use. Give her a large quill that will be easy for her small hands.”

Before the abbess swept out, I was in my corner to collect my bag of pumice, the red ochre, a goose feather, and the dog’s tooth from a skull I’d found bleaching in the sun. Thanks to Madame, I also had a blade for shaping quills, since she had given me her penknife with the ivory handle. When I had visited her, she told me the knife was called a miséricorde, because it would protect a woman’s honour if a man attacked her.

I sat on Madame’s chair, arranging my tools and an old sheet of parchment where I wanted them. I pruned barbs from the shaft of the goose feather, sending out a spray of quill-shavings. But only when I took a sliver off my knuckle and slid to the floor yelping did the librarian take notice of me. She wrenched the bloody, half-whittled quill from my fist, grasped the waist of my tunic, and hoisted me back onto Madame’s seat, where my shoes dangled a foot above the floor. She trimmed my quill, then made a row of perfect letters, with the descenders barely clearing the ascenders below, all stopping precisely at the margin that the bookbinder had ruled.

She arranged my fingers around the nib. “Now, complete the page without a blot, or you will never touch parchment again.”

Each day I filled the same unforgiving sheet with letters, then scraped them off to write new ones, until the sheet was soft and ragged. I could read Latin thanks to the abbess and had long since learnt to write the paternoster and Ave Maria. I had watched Madame’s quill flash along the line, dispensing ink firmly but lightly. Now I learnt that each letter was penned with an exact number of strokes at precise angles—doubly hard to execute with my left hand. I wrote painstakingly, keeping my wrist straight and my fingers curled so I would not smudge the row as my hand passed over. I danced each page to the librarian, who inspected it before she let me scrape off the ink to move to the next letter.

When I reached
z
and she told me to go back to the beginning again, I protested. “I heard the abbess tell you that I could make a psalter.”

“First you must master black-letter.”

“My black-letter is as good as the abbess’s.”

Her mouth relaxed into a half-smile. “That may be true, but yours is too big. Come to me when your letters fit between the lines.”

Beneath her stool, in the pile of discarded scraps and threads, I spotted a punctured sheet—not just parchment, but womb-vellum. I carried it back to my desk to begin writing at once. To hide the hole, I created an ornate capital such as I had seen on the finest manuscripts and decorated it until it became the thicket of brambleberries near the river. Beside the capital, I began to write The Lord is My Shepherd, one of the Latin psalms the abbess had taught me:

Dominus regit me et nihil mihi deerit. In

loco pascuce ibi me collocavit. Super aquam

refectionis educavit me. Animam meam

covertit.

Alongside the verses, I drew the stockbreeder standing in the pasture with our grey mare and her new foal. I used the red ochre I had stolen from the librarian to put a blush of shame into the mare’s cheeks and to give the foal a rosy glow. To encircle them I drew more vines, thickly black over the cream vellum, with dramatic flourishes all round, until I came to the bottom of the page, where my mark should go. Since I did not have a colophon or coat of arms, I inked a design of my own: a big
S
with a crowned image of me holding my scale of justice and my sword aloft.

I waved my masterpiece in the air to dry, rattling the stiff new vellum so the novices would stop their copying to see what I had done. I had completed my first commission and I wanted everyone to know it. I jumped down to parade my psalm in noisy triumph around the scriptorium. The novices made approving signals and clapped each time I passed them, but the librarian kept writing. At last, she laid down her quill, threw out an arm to halt me on one of my circuits past her desk, and took the vellum from me. She scratched off a small blot with her fingernail.

“Your letters are still too large,” she said, “but they are well formed. Even more surprising, every word of the Latin is correct. Now, scrape off the psalm and write it again, only smaller. Tomorrow I will give you a quire so you can begin your psalter.”