Muse (14 page)

They began to chatter, the waterfalling talk of women schooled to reveal their rank with every phrase and gesture. I gleaned that they had been abroad when the auto-da-fé had begun and sought refuge in this church. Now, as they discussed whether it was safe to leave, a young woman came from the confessional in a pale green robe with extravagantly wide sleeves. She hovered in the cool light from the east window, lit a taper to Saint Clare, then crossed herself with delicate fingers. She was my age, with a pearl-studded cap, stitched white-on-white, pinned over her flaxen hair. The ladies swept her like a violet-scented bloom into their colourful garland.

Francesco was at my elbow, watching her. “She is from one of the old Avignon families. There is a coat of arms on her sleeve.”

I disliked the note of reverence in his voice. “That is likely the family nose as well,” I said, “since it would be better suited to her father’s face.”

The Avignonnaises passed us, with the maiden drifting a little behind. I was too full of malaise to care about her, but when she approached, Francesco bowed with an arm outstretched, as befitted his rôle as an aspiring poet. His hand grazed the stones, but somehow he managed to keep his head erect and his eyes on her while bowing. His boldness so astonished the young woman that she dropped her gold-trimmed gloves. Francesco picked them up and returned them to her with a few words I did not catch. Their eyes met—perhaps their hands did also?—before the maiden looked chastely aside and quickened her step to catch up to the women.

Francesco’s skin had greyed. It was as if he had worshipped at a shrine and I was a heathen intruding on a holy rite. Blackened by char, smelling
of smoke and burnt flesh, I was damp from the chase through the streets. My hair was blazing-bright beneath my hood, and in spite of my nightly applications of almond milk, my skin was freckled by the sun.

Francesco said, “She was probably praying for the friar’s soul, like many persons of good heart this day. Did you hear her voice? It was lark-song, high and clear. She floats above that common horde like a lark above pigeons.”

Hardly pigeons
, I thought, for the Avignonnaises had worn dowry belts encrusted with gems and medallions. However, when Francesco spoke like this, it meant he would write a poem, and when he wrote a poem he would read it aloud to ask my opinion of it. This ivory angel had done me a kindness, for her worship would bring him to my bed tonight.

Eighteen

A
YEAR PASSED
, enough time for my rash prophecy to be forgotten, or so I hoped. Outside the city wall, we had more to fear from brigands than from the Pope’s guards, who seldom came this far. And inside the wall, the Pope was rarely seen, only glimpsed on feast days in an opulent barge, which turned west before it reached our gate. Thousands now lived outside the wall—ten thousand, perhaps twenty. Even the city marshal could not keep an accurate count.

By August, my chamber in the Cheval Blanc was so hot that the ink dried on contact with the page. This morning, the cicadas had been whirring in time to my pen-strokes, but now I finished copying a letter for Francesco in a queer vacuum of sound. All at once, the sky darkened and the rain pitched down in a noisy torrent. An orage d’août—an August storm, which might last a few hours or a few days. There was no sense waiting it out. I left for Francesco’s house with the rain bouncing off the new wool of my robe. The water hammered the street, flew up, and chased the filth down the centre gutter. Citizens and courtiers were sheltering under merchants’ canopies. Handcarts stalled in mud
blocked my usual route, so I deviated to the east, my heels sinking in the cart tracks near the Bourg Neuf, a circle of dwellings where prostitutes clustered for their own protection.

The sky was the colour of lead, so profoundly sad it was more night than day. As I walked, a bout of dizziness attacked, brought on by the sudden storm. Shapes moved around me, barely visible in the mist and rain. Three figures raced past—two young boys in pursuit of a pale stag, a gallant creature of fine breeding—and I followed out of curiosity. The frightened beast skittered into the Bourg Neuf and came to a stop, ribcage heaving. When the children noticed where they were, they ran off. The rain was easing and the public women would soon appear. If they caught the stag inside their wall, they would slaughter him for meat. Exhausted, he could not find his way out, so I unhooked my belt, looped it around his neck, and laid my cheek against his chest to quiet him. As his heart slowed, my head cleared. I led him outside the bourg, unlooped my belt, and set him free. He stood motionless, looking towards me, then leapt to freedom, his hooves skimming the rain-washed grasses, as the first line of a poem flew into my head.

When I reached the house of the scholars, Francesco put out a hand for his letter. Instead of giving it to him, I shook the water from my robe, told him about the stag, and pushed aside the papers on his desk to record the lines I had been composing in my head. At last I dropped the pen and he snatched up the poem to read it aloud, beating out the rhythm with his hand.

“I cannot believe you wrote this so quickly.”

We sat on the cushions, side by side, to improve my Italian phrasing. This was the part of writing we enjoyed most—tossing verses back and forth, cozening the meanings from each word until the nuance was exactly right. We were developing a mutual language, caresses of vowel and consonant, a tongue that we were in no hurry to master. After an hour, we put the poem aside, having taken it as far as we could. In the weeks ahead, he would work alone, balancing the syllables and accents,
revising my verses, scoring out and rewriting, until they had a more literary turn. On the page, my poems were heart-simple, written to please him, whereas his were studied, solemn, with an eye to posterity.

He picked up the fair copy of the letter I had brought. “Today I must present this to Giacomo di Colonna, who admires my Latin writings. I am to help him study the church fathers. He is preparing to take orders and suggests I do the same, because he desires more of my company.”

“But surely you don’t wish …”

He was not listening, for eagerness had overtaken him. “His brother is Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, whose household has swept into Avignon like a whirlwind, taking over several grand houses. You must see what it means to me?”

Why was he speaking like this? After two years, I was no closer to marriage than I was in the chapel at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. When walking with me in the city, he had become scrupulous about keeping a formal distance from me so that people would not guess our relationship. At such times I felt more like his sister than his betrothed.

“Francesco, you have not forgotten that we are promised to each other?”

His eyes drifted away. Like me, he was probably recalling that we had vowed our love in a deconsecrated chapel with no lawful witnesses. I jerked on his sleeve. “Answer me! Why did you betroth yourself to me if you did not intend to keep your vow?”

“But I do intend to keep it! It was a covenant of love, written in sand and water and blown about the air.”

Had all the candles gone out, all the air been extracted from my lungs? My joy was mingled with regret that I had doubted him. He was my own Francesco and always had been.

“Our covenant,” he said, “has more validity than a contract between two people who are bound by their fathers’ wishes. My thoughts have been much occupied with this of late. Marriage has little to do with
love, and poetry has little to do with marriage. Think how the troubadours sang most sweetly to women who were not their wives.”

This was not what I wanted to hear, since I wanted him both to wed me
and
to write poems about me. As he checked the letter I had brought, I rubbed my thumb joint where it ached from copying. Satisfied, he poured on some green wax and pressed his ring into it, preparing it for Giacomo di Colonna.

“There is something else I have been contemplating.” He held up the letter to admire the Petrarch family seal. “Courtly poetry is never written to a social inferior. It is always addressed by the poet to a bella donna far above him in station.”

In the days that followed, I carried this pain delicately behind my eyes. The two words,
bella donna
, had fallen heavily upon me. Very happy he was with these bons mots, with no care for the barb he had inflicted, for there was nothing noble about my lineage. In spite of his plan to take minor orders, Francesco was no monk. In bed, he loved me well and truly, as I did him. To forbid him my bed would be to punish myself unnecessarily, for even when he was not with me I retired in joy each night and rose in remembered pleasure.

On the day before Michaelmas, I was using bâtarde to make splendid copies of Francesco’s poems, which he would give to seigneurs to win favour. As I transcribed the madrigal about my bathing naked at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, I observed that Francesco had changed the woman’s hair from red to flaxen. Strange things had happened to the poems since I had last set eyes on them. The poet could neither eat nor sleep from lovesickness, a disease that appeared to have robbed him of good sense as well as rest. Amongst the drafts, I found a sonnet in which he spelt the woman’s name for all of Avignon to see:
LAUdare et REverire
.

There was no point looking for this paragon in the city, for she existed only in the realm of poetry. Or so I comforted myself until I began to copy the sonnet,
Et se di lui fors’ altra donna spera, vive in speranza debile et fallace … If some other woman desires my heart, she lives in fallacy and feeble hope
. At this line, my heart plummeted. By this second woman, did he mean me? He had gone too far if he expected me to copy this without complaint. I cast it aside and picked up the final poem, the one I had written about the stag. I assessed the damage Francesco had done to it, then sharpened a goose feather to a wicked point with my miséricorde to strike out the worst phrases. However, I could not bring myself to harm the poem and had just begun to copy Francesco’s version, when Gherardo threw open the door, whistling a foolish tune. Why did he never knock?

“This looks like a real scriptorium now.” He drilled his fingers on the broadsides. “Are these the presentation copies?”

“I am just finishing the last one. Why didn’t Francesco come himself?”

Gherardo shrugged and I thought, not for the first time, of the difference between the brothers. Gherardo was a scapegrace, a princely flâneur. So good was he at avoiding any industry that he pursued none at all. He would always be a drain on Francesco. He lifted the lid on a skillet, dipped his finger to taste the sauce, then noticed the well-stoppered jug of ale. Beside it was a single cup. After a moment’s hesitation, he poured ale into the cup, and set cup and jug next to me.

This scrap of kindness undid me. My anger evaporated and I felt ill at Francesco’s betrayal. “Why does Francesco do this?” I asked. “He has changed my stag to a doe. It wasn’t daybreak, it wasn’t spring, and I was wet by a storm, not by falling in a river.”

“You don’t know?” he blustered. “You’re the one who’s been copying his concetti about a cruel mistress whose eyes burn, then freeze him.”

“This poem about the doe is different, more original.”

“Francesco is simply observing the conventions of courtly love.
Readers expect the lady to have skin of ivory, hair of gold, brows of ebony, teeth of pearl. Her lips are blood-red. And so it goes, down to her toenails, ad unguem.”

“So this one is about the woman also?”

I pushed the jug towards him to loosen his tongue. He took a draught and ran his sleeve over his mouth. Half the drink had landed on his shirt.

“Are you truly ignorant of who this Laura is? You saw her yourself on the day you predicted the downfall of the papacy.” He recited glibly,

Blest be the hour, the day, the month, the year
,

Blest be the season, country, and the sphere
,

The very moment and the very place
,

Where I beheld her perfect face
.

“Of course!” I reached for the jug and took a pull from it. “The girl he met in the church of Saint Clare, the ivory maiden who smelt of violets. So she is his bella donna!” I had copied the words, but had deceived myself, unwilling to see the truth before me. Francesco probably thought I had guessed long before. “She wore an Avignon coat of arms, so her father will have arranged her betrothal. Francesco would not be able to even see her.”

“Is that what you think?” For all his disaffected air, Gherardo was observing me with concern. “Come with me,” he said, rolling up the finished poems.

He struck out north towards the city gate with the broadsides under his arm. We cut through the stomach of Avignon, past fishmongers and poultry-men whose throttled chickens danced with flies, to the good quarter of the city, where the noble mansions felt the clean air descending from Doms rock. When we reached a mansion built of yellow stone, Gherardo led me through the servants’ gate into the rear of the courtyard.