The Lady and the Unicorn (24 page)

‘Give him a chance,’ Christine said without looking up. ‘He may surprise you.’

After a day of errors I began to improve, and at last Aliénor allowed me to work on the hem, though I sewed much more slowly than she. We didn't speak much at first as we worked, but sitting together for so many hours seemed to make things easier between us. Silence is always a tonic for her. Then, gradually, we began to talk — of the cold, or the hem we sewed, or the pickled walnuts we'd had at dinner. Little things.

We were almost done with the hem when I got up the courage to ask about something bigger. I looked over at the enormous bump in her lap that she rested her hands upon like a table, with the tapestry pulled over it. ‘What will we name the baby?’ I said quietly so the others wouldn't hear.

Aliénor stopped sewing, her needle paused over the cloth. Because her eyes are dead it's hard to know what she's thinking by looking at her face. You have to listen for her voice. I waited a long time. When she answered her tone was not as sad as I'd expected. ‘Etienne, for your father. Or Tiennette if it's a girl.’

I smiled. ‘
Merci
, Aliénor.’

My wife shrugged. She did not begin sewing again, though. She threaded the needle through the seam and left it there. Then she turned to me. ‘I would like to feel your face, so that I will know what my husband is like.’

I leaned over and put her hands on my cheeks. She began rubbing and squeezing my face all over. ‘Your chin is pointed like my cat's!’ she cried. She likes her cat — I have seen her sit with it in her lap and stroke it for hours.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Like your cat.’

A week before Candlemas Georges finished the last curve of the lion's tail. Three days before Candlemas first Christine, then Luc reached the edge of the tapestry. Georges was still working on a rabbit — his signature, of a rabbit holding its paw to its cheek — while Georges Le Jeune finished a dog's tail. Aliénor joined her father and brother on the bench to sew slits then, though her belly was so huge it kept her far from the tapestry. As I watched, she stopped for a moment, hands pressed against her belly, her brow furrowed. Then she began to sew again. Several minutes later she did the same thing and I knew the birth was beginning.

Unless she said something herself she would not want me to say anything about it. Instead I drew Christine aside and quietly showed her. ‘We weren't expecting this for a few weeks yet — she's early,’ Christine commented.

‘Shouldn't she be in bed?’ I said.

Christine shook her head. ‘Not yet. There'll be plenty of that later. It could be days yet. Let her work if she wants — it'll take her mind off the pain.’

And so Aliénor sewed for many hours that day, long after it was dark and the weavers had stopped. Even when everyone was asleep she kept sewing. I stayed awake, lying on a pallet and listening to her shift and tense on the bench. At last, very late in the night she moaned, ‘Philippe, get Maman.’

They put her in bed in the house, and Georges came to sleep in the workshop. In the morning Christine sent Luc for the midwife. Soon he burst back into the workshop. ‘Jean Le Viste's soldiers are here!’ he cried. ‘I heard when I was out. They've gone to the Guild in the Grand-Place to ask after you.’

Georges and Georges Le Jeune looked up from their work. ‘It's not Candlemas for two days yet,’ Georges said. He looked down at their hands. ‘We'll be done today but there's the hemming yet to do and the women are busy.’ He glanced at the house — from inside came a long groan ending in a shout.

‘I can hem it,’ I said quickly, pleased to be of use at last.

Georges looked at me. ‘
Bon
,’ he said. For the first time since Aliénor and I married I felt I was a useful part of the workshop.

‘Don't fret, lad,’ Georges added to Luc, who was hopping from one foot to the other. ‘The soldiers will wait.
Tiens
, go and tell Joseph and Thomas to come this afternoon for the cutting-off — they'll want to be here. We can't wait on the women.’ Another moan from inside made him and Georges Le Jeune duck their heads over their work and Luc run from the workshop.

She was screaming by the time we cut Sight from its loom. A cutting-off is meant to be joyful, but her screams drove us to cut as fast as we could. Only when we'd turned over the tapestry and seen it whole for the first time was I distracted from Aliénor's cries.

Georges looked at it and began to laugh. It was as if he had been holding his breath for months and suddenly could let it out. While Georges Le Jeune and Luc and Thomas began thumping each other on the back, Georges laughed and laughed, Joseph joining him. They laughed so hard they had to prop each other up, tears pouring from their eyes. It was a strange response to a long journey, but I too found myself laughing. We had indeed been travelling a long way.

Aliénor screamed again, and everyone stopped. Georges wiped his eyes, looked at me and said, ‘We'll be at Le Vieux Chien. Let me know when the baby comes, or the soldiers — whichever is first.’ Then, after almost two years of work that gave him a head of grey hair, a stoop and a squint, the
lissier
walked away from the tapestry without even looking back. I think he was glad not to.

When they were gone I studied Sight for a long time. The Lady is sitting, and the unicorn lies in her lap. You might think that they love each other. Perhaps they do. But the Lady holds up a mirror and the unicorn may well be looking at itself with eyes of love rather than at the Lady. Her eyes are crooked in her face, her lids heavy. Her smile is full of woe. It may be that she does not even see him.

That is what I think.

I was pleased that Georges trusted me with the hem. I got out the brown wool and a needle and thread, and carefully folded the warp threads under as I'd seen Aliénor and Christine do. Then I sat by the window and made a stitch, then another. I sewed as slowly as if I were counting the hairs on a sleeping baby's head. Each time Aliénor screamed I gritted my teeth and quelled my shaking hands.

I'd sewed half of one side of the tapestry when the screaming stopped. I stopped too, and simply sat and waited. Though I should have prayed, I was too frightened to do even that.

At last Christine appeared in the doorway with a bundle of soft linen in her arms. She smiled at me.

‘Aliénor?’ I said.

Christine laughed at the look on my face. ‘Your wife is fine. All women scream like that. That's what birth is. But don't you want to know? We have a new weaver here.’ She held up her grandson. His face was squashed and red, and he had no hair.

I cleared my throat and held out my arms for Etienne. ‘You've forgotten who his father is,’ I said. ‘He will be a painter.’

V
PARIS
Septuagesima 1492

NICOLAS DES INNOCENTS

I have never liked the weeks leading up to Lent. It's cold — a cold gone on far too long, a cold that has entered every part of my body. I am tired of the chilblains and the bones that creak, and the way I hold my body tight because if I let go I grow even colder. There is little food, and what is left is dull — pickled and salted and dried and hard. I long for fresh lettuce, for fresh game, for a plum or a strawberry.

I don't work much during Septuagesima — my hands are stiff with the cold and can't hold a brush. Nor do I find women to please me then. I am waiting. I prefer Lent, even with its rigours. At least it grows warmer and lighter with each day, even if there is still little to eat.

One bitter morning, when I was shivering under many blankets and wondering whether I should bother getting up, I had a message to meet Léon Le Vieux at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I didn't go there now, for fear of seeing Geneviève de Nanterre. I had little fear, and no hope, of seeing her daughter there. A friend who kept an ear out for me on the rue du Four — where I dared not show my face — said that Claude had been sent away the previous summer, none of the servants knew where. Béatrice too had disappeared.

I wrapped myself in all my clothes and hurried south, crossing the frozen Seine over the Ponts au Change and St Michel. I didn't stop in at Notre Dame — it was too cold even for that. When I got to Saint-Germain-des-Prés I looked around inside the church cautiously, wondering if I might find Geneviève de Nanterre on her knees there. But no one was about — it was between masses and too cold for lingering.

At last I found Léon out in the withered cloisters garden. Little was growing at that time of year, though there were a few snowdrops, and other shoots pushing through the mud. I didn't know what they would grow into. Aliénor had tried to teach me about plants, but I needed more than a green nub to tell me what it would become.

Léon Le Vieux walks with a stick in winter to help him over the snow and ice. He was using it now to poke at the lavender and rosemary bushes. He looked up. ‘I'm always surprised how hardy these are in winter, even when everything else is dead.’ He reached over and plucked some leaves from each, then squeezed them and put his fingers to his nose. ‘Of course they don't smell so sweet now — that comes with sun and warmth.’

‘Then too it depends on the gardener,
non
?’

‘Perhaps.’ Léon Le Vieux dropped the leaves and turned to me. ‘Jean Le Viste's tapestries have arrived.’

At the news I felt an unexpected surge of joy. ‘So Georges did finish them by Candlemas! Did you see him?’

Léon Le Vieux shook his head. ‘I refuse to travel on such roads in winter, even if the King himself asked me. At my age I should be sitting by the fire, not riding all night through snow and muck to bring tapestries back to Paris in time. I want to die in my own bed, not in a filthy inn on the road. No, I sent a message with the soldiers and had a Brussels merchant I know check on the work. And of course the weavers' guild there approved them — that is the important thing.’

‘Have you seen them yet? How do they look?’

Léon Le Vieux gestured with his stick and began to walk towards the archway leading out. ‘Come along to the rue du Four and you can see for yourself.’

‘Am I welcome?’

‘Monseigneur Le Viste has had them hung, and wants you to check them to make sure the height is right.’ He looked back at me and added, ‘
Écoute
, behave yourself there.’ Then he laughed.

Even in my drunkest fantasies during sessions at Le Coq d'Or, I'd never dreamed I would be invited to pass easily through the door of Claude Le Viste's house. There I was, though, with the sour-faced steward letting us in. If I had not been with Léon Le Vieux I would have gone for him, to pay him back for the beating he'd given me. Instead I had to follow meekly in his footsteps as he led us to the Grande Salle, then left us there to fetch his master.

I stood in the middle of the room, with Léon Le Vieux at my side, and looked back and forth from one Lady to another, my eyes darting about the room, trying to take them in all at once. I looked for longer than I have ever looked at anything. Léon too was very still and silent. It was as if we were frozen in a dream. I was not sure I wanted to be woken.

When at last Léon shifted his feet, I opened my mouth to say something and laughter came out instead. It was not the response I'd expected to have. Yet I kept thinking, How could I ever have worried about dog-like lions and fat unicorns and oranges that looked like walnuts when these Ladies were here? They were all of them beautiful, peaceful, content. To stand among them was to be part of their magical, blessed lives. What unicorn would not be seduced by them?

It was not just the Ladies who made the tapestries so powerful, but the
millefleurs
as well. Whatever faults there were in the designs got lost in that blue and red field filled with thousands of flowers. I felt as if I were standing in a summer field even in the midst of a cold dark day in Paris. It was those
millefleurs
that made the room whole, pulling together the Ladies and their unicorns, the lions and servants, and me too. I felt I was with them.

‘What do you think?’ Léon asked.

‘Glorious. They are even better than I ever dreamed I could make them.’

Léon chuckled. ‘I see your pride has not lessened. Remember, you were only one part of their making. Georges and his workshop deserve the highest praise.’ It was the sort of thing Léon Le Vieux liked to say.

‘Georges will do very well from them.’

Léon shook his head. ‘They won't make him a rich man — Jean Le Viste is stingy with his purse. And from what I heard, Georges may not be so quick to take on more work. My Brussels merchant said he only saw Georges either drunk or asleep, and he squints now. Indeed, it was the cartoonist who had to help Christine sew the hem of the last tapestry — Georges was drunk and the daughter was abed with a baby.’ He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Did you know of this?’

I shrugged, though I did smile to myself — Aliénor had got what she wanted from me. ‘I haven't been to Brussels since last May — how could I know?’

‘Not been to Brussels for nine months, eh?’ Léon Le Vieux shook his head. ‘Never mind — she has married the cartoonist.’

‘Ah.’ I was more surprised than I let on. Philippe was not as shy with women as I'd thought. It had helped introducing him to that whore, certainly. Still, I was glad for Aliénor. Philippe was a good man, and he was not Jacques Le Bœuf.

‘You haven't said what you think of the tapestries,’ I said. ‘You who want your women to be real. Have I — have we changed your mind, me and Georges, and Philippe too?’

Léon looked around the room again, then shrugged with a little smile. ‘There is something about them I have not seen before, nor felt before. You've created a whole world for them to live in, though it is not like our world.’

‘Are you tempted?’

‘By them?
Non
.’

I chuckled. ‘So we have not converted you after all. The Ladies are not as powerful as I thought.’

There was a noise outside the door, and Jean Le Viste and Geneviève de Nanterre entered the Grande Salle. I quickly bowed to hide my surprise, for I had not expected to see her. When I raised my head she was smiling at me as she had the day I'd met her, when I'd first flirted with Claude — smiling as if she already knew what was in my head.

‘So, painter, what do you think of them?’ Jean Le Viste asked. I wondered if he had forgotten my name. Before I could speak he added, ‘Are they hung at the right height? I thought they should be another arm's length off the floor, but Léon says they look fine as they are.’

It was just as well that I hadn't spoken, for now I grasped that he didn't want to talk of the tapestries' beauty or the weavers' skill, but rather of how they graced his room. I studied the tapestries for a moment. They came to within a hand's length of the floor. That put the Ladies just a little above us. Any higher and they would tower over us.

I turned to Geneviève de Nanterre. ‘What do you think, Madame? Should the Lady be higher?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘That is not necessary.’

I nodded. ‘I think, Monseigneur, we are agreed that the room looks very impressive as it is.’

Jean Le Viste shrugged. ‘It will suit the occasion.’ He turned to go.

I couldn't resist. ‘Please, Monseigneur, which tapestry do you like best?’

Jean Le Viste stopped and gazed about him as if he had only just realized the tapestries were to be looked at. He frowned. ‘This one,’ he said, gesturing at Sound. ‘The flag is very fine, and the lion noble. Come,’ he said to Léon Le Vieux.

‘I'm staying a moment to have a word with Nicolas des Innocents,’ Geneviève de Nanterre announced. Jean Le Viste hardly seemed to hear, but strode to the door with Léon Le Vieux at his heels. The old man glanced at me before he left, as if to remind me of his earlier warning to behave. I smiled at the thought. I was with the wrong woman for making mischief.

When they were gone Geneviève de Nanterre chuckled softly. ‘My husband has no favourite. He chose the tapestry nearest to hand — did you see? And it's not the finest — the Lady's hands are awkward, and the pattern of the tablecloth is too square and harsh.’

Clearly she had studied the tapestries carefully. At least she hadn't said that the unicorn was fat.

‘Which tapestry do you like best, Madame?’

She pointed. ‘That one.’ I was surprised that she chose Touch — I had expected her to prefer À Mon Seul Désir. After all, she was the Lady.

‘Why that one, Madame?’

‘She is very clear, that Lady — clear in her soul. She's standing in a doorway, on the threshold between one life and another, and she's looking forward with happy eyes. She knows what will happen to her.’

I thought of what had inspired me to paint the Lady that way — of Christine standing in the doorway to the workshop, pleased that she would be weaving. It was so different from what Geneviève de Nanterre had just described that I had to suppress the urge to correct her.

‘What about the Lady here, Madame?’ I pointed to the Lady in À Mon Seul Désir. ‘Doesn't she also leave one world for another?’

Geneviève de Nanterre was silent.

‘I painted her especially for you, Madame, so that the tapestries aren't just about a seduction, but about the soul too. Do you see — you can start with this tapestry, of the Lady putting on her necklace, and go around the room to follow her seduction of the unicorn. Or you can go the other way, with the Lady bidding farewell to each different sense, and end with this tapestry, where she takes off her necklace to put it away — to let go of the physical life. Do you see that I've done that for you, Madame? When the Lady holds her jewels as she does, we don't know if she is putting them on or taking them off. It can be either. That is the secret I've made for you in the tapestries.’

Geneviève de Nanterre shook her head. ‘The Lady looks as if she hasn't decided which she prefers — the seduction or the soul. I know which I prefer, and I would like to see her choice clearly made.
Tiens
, it's better that the tapestries are of the seduction of the unicorn — they will go to my daughter eventually. The seduction will please her.’ She gazed at me and I blushed.

‘I'm sorry you don't like them, Madame.’ I was indeed sorry. I thought I'd been very clever, but my cleverness had tripped me up.

Geneviève de Nanterre turned around, taking in all of the tapestries once more. ‘They are very beautiful, and that is enough. Certainly Jean is pleased, even if he doesn't show it, and Claude will love them. To thank you for them I would like you to join us tomorrow night for the feast here.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes, the Feast of St Valentine. The day birds choose their mates.’

‘So they say.’

‘We shall see you here, then.’ She gave me a look before turning from me.

I bowed to her back. One of her ladies peeked around the doorway, and joined her mistress as they left.

I was alone with the tapestries then. I stood for a long time in the room, looking and wondering why they now made me melancholy.

I had not been to a nobleman's feast before. Painters aren't usually invited to such things. Indeed, I wasn't sure why Geneviève de Nanterre had asked me to come. Quickly and at great expense I had a new tunic made — black velvet with yellow trim — and a cap to match. I cleaned my boots and washed myself, though the water was icy. At least when I arrived at the torch-lit house on the rue du Four, squires let me in without blinking, as if I were a noble among others. In my room I'd thought my new tunic and cap very smart — and had been cheered by the men and women in Le Coq d'Or — but as I walked towards the Grande Salle among the rich dresses of the ladies and men around me, I felt like a peasant.

Three girls ran in and out of the crowd. The eldest was Claude's sister Jeanne, who had been looking into the well in the courtyard the day I first met Claude. The second resembled her and must be the youngest Le Viste girl. The smallest came up only to my knee and looked nothing like a Le Viste, though she was pretty in her way, with dark red ringlets all in a mess at her neck. In the crowd she got tangled in my legs and as I set her straight she scowled up at me under a heavy brow in a way that seemed familiar. She ran off before I could ask her name.