Muse (18 page)

“Why was I brought here?”

“We need someone with the power of Venus to forestall the force of Mars, which is trying to dispatch the old man’s life. Try to have a vision to calm him.”

“Who is he? What family is the black falcon?”

“The Duèze from Cahors. Give him what peace you can since he is close to death.”

I returned to the bedside to hold the man’s frail hand. What had my mother said to me in parting? I conjured up her deathbed and spoke her final words aloud. “Go with the good father and do not look back. I will be well where I am going.”

This seemed to soothe him, but his ears and cheeks were feverish.
I called for balm-water, moistened an embroidered cloth, and bathed his forehead, neck, and chest to conquer the heat. At last he fell into a deep, nourishing rest. His palsy was gone and so were his attendants. It had been a long night and the strong drink was fermenting inside me. I wanted nothing more than to sleep, and must have said so, for the old man’s eyes sprang open.

“Climb into bed, my dear. Warm me, for I am cold.”

He drew back the blanket to show me bone-white feet that were knocking together like old teeth. He lay curled on his side because his bed was not long enough to accommodate him from head to toe. I entered the bed and tugged the curtains closed. What harm could come from comforting a dying senex, holding him as a mother would her child?

I woke sometime later to find out, for he was kneeling between my thighs. My skirts were pushed up and he was climbing on me with surprising agility for one who had been moribund a few hours before. Like Priapus, he had revived, his penis now as mighty as a crescent moon. I grasped his shoulders to roll his dwarfish body off me. He would hit the floor like an old jar crashing from a height. Before I could shove him off, a coarse hand parted the curtains and a leather nose appeared. I reached for my miséricorde, but the Falcon scraped his thumb across his Adam’s apple to warn me he could easily slit my throat. Clearly, I had been brought here to dispense not mother love, but the carnal kind.

In this room, evil held all the swords. As the old man sucked new blood from my marrow, I stained the ermine pillow with my tears. I tried to think of Francesco sharing Cardinal Colonna’s fine table, discussing literature with the great men of the city. What was my sacrifice to his hard work, his promise?

Now that the morning sun was invading the chamber, lighting up the bed-curtains from without, I saw that they were subtly woven with triple crowns. The papal tiara. This was no member of the Curia but the Pope himself: John XXII, whom all Avignon knew to be at death’s door.

His attendants drew the curtains and he climbed from the bed, well pleased with his recovery. The doctors saluted him with squat bows and shows of obeisance. They cared little for me now that they had used me, although I had driven back the force of Mars. The flaps on the Pope’s deathcap flopped like asses’ ears as he danced a little dervish jig, exposing himself beneath his nightshirt. All the hair had been scraped from the back of his legs where they had rubbed against clerical robes all his life. He pissed into the urine flask, splashing the médecin with the renewed force of his stream.

At least no one would accuse me of stealing his manhood with sorcery. I rose in shame—stiff and ill and queasy. I shook all over, humiliated and broken. I could not control my hands, which ran up and down repeatedly to smooth my robe, only serving to press the wrinkles deeper. I caught sight of myself in the pier-glass, as tousled as an overripe peony. I had worn Perrette’s robe and might as well have worn her cap with crimson ribbons to broadcast my whoredom.

I hammered on the chamber door with my fists, but it would not give, for the bar was down and the bolt was in the socket. The Falcon stood with his legs spread like a broad gate. He jerked his thumb towards a seat beside the old man. When I did not move, he gestured that he would hoist me up and carry me there if I did not use my own two feet. I sat down beside the Pope and was made to share the meal the minions had laid out, plate after silver plate mounded with nauseating dainties. The Pope fed me lewd purple figs from his left hand, and when my mouth was full of undigested pulp, he grasped my chin to draw my lips towards his greasy face. Full of disgust, I raised my head to look into eyes of lapis lazuli—eyes as bright and familiar as mine had been when they stared out from the Pope’s own looking-glass.

Twenty-three

W
HEN MY MOTHER
was a young woman, this Pope, then a bishop and even then an old man, had frequented her chamber in the Cheval Blanc. From inside her womb, I had seen his dark blue eyes and a face as foxed with broken blood vessels as if a painter had illumined it with carmine. The bishop had mounted her, engendering a child with eyes of costly lapis. At what cost, I finally understood, for as I had been trapped inside her body then, so I had a prisoner inside my own womb now.

Men of science taught that the child took the father’s colouring and that the father’s semen gave the child its soul. If this was so, my father was a left-handed man with red hair and eyes of lapis blue. Perhaps he was the Pope, but I would never know for sure.

Not long after the child in my womb began to show, Francesco found me sitting outside the Cheval Blanc. Under cover of dusk, we ran back and forth across the plank like children. Francesco did not appear aware that his brother had taken me to the palace and I did not wish to tell him. The fewer who knew of my bed of shame, the better.
Upstairs in my chamber, we opened the shutters to the humid night and rubbed our bodies with cumin oil. The scent collected in our elbow creases, at our collarbones, behind our knees, filling the dark room as amply as our yearning. I closed my eyes, sensing where he was by his heat approaching me, then receding. After we had lain together, Francesco’s fingers rested upon my rounded stomach and I allowed myself to wish that I might give birth to his son. At this wild hope, I began to weep. He guessed that I was with child, and snatched his palm from my belly as if it were a hot grill.

I said, “Surely we might have a child?”

“No!” He rolled up his hose so hastily that his thumb ripped it.

“You need a son to carry on the Petrarch name. Many clerics father children to secure their family lines—why not you?”

His back to me, he tied his points, a task I usually performed for him. “My reputation as a poet of spiritual love would be destroyed. What about Laura de Sade?”

With so little thought for me, he pulled on the rest of his garments and fastened his shoes. While he was pawing through the bed-covers for his new tunic, I picked it off the floor where it had fallen. I held it out the casement and, just as his eyes turned in alarm towards me, let it drop into the canal. He reached the window in time to see the expensive cloth, embroidered with the white columns of the Colonnas, churn into the paddlewheel on its way to join the filth in the city moat.

The rage that had boiled up in me simmered just as quickly down. One day I would cry and the next day I would laugh. Was this usual for new mothers? I no longer understood myself. As summer turned to autumn, I palpated my womb, hoping for a well-formed boy, but the mass grew daily, taking hideous shapes that shifted beneath my hands. Sometimes three feet kicked me at once. At other times, the infant’s head felt large
enough to be two. If only I could look inside my womb, as I had done for others. What if the child was born with eyes of lapis blue? I would be undone for sure. I prayed Francesco would never guess the child was another man’s, for such I now believed it to be. The evil of my palace visit had taken root inside my belly.

By All Saints’, Francesco’s fear of being seen in my company had grown to a deformed anxiety. He no longer visited and his letters were bursting with advice.
Do not venture out of your chamber. Write to me if you have need of anything, but do not on any account seek me out in person. Here are coins to have food sent up from the tavern. Read these books I am sending to divert you
. This was more than any other courtier would have done and I was grateful, in spite of missing him. His servant or Guido Sette brought the parcels, since even Gherardo kept his distance, probably afraid I would accuse him of tricking me. I could not dismiss his part in this affair, for he had used my love for Francesco against me. But how could I blame Gherardo when I had used it equally against myself? I had gone into the palace willingly.

Advent was upon us, plaguing the city with lashing wind and hailstorms. Although my lying-in was still some months away, I was awakened at prime one morning by biting cramps. My infant was coming early. The midwife arrived and tried to hurry me by rubbing my pelvis with a smelly ointment. She pricked my thigh to see where the blood was pooling and was startled that my birthmark would not bleed. Conmère told her it was a thimble, the sign of the cloth-makers, but the midwife thought her mad. Perhaps Conmère was, but she knew I was in pain and tried to ease it by opening the shutters to unlock my womb.

The midwife closed them just as quickly. “There is malice in that storm.”

Conmère cast salt into the fire, then huddled near the hearth. She warmed some wax, shaped it into a wax midwife, and stuck it with the midwife’s own pin. The midwife did not flinch, but my pains deepened and I cried out in fright, clamping my hand around her wrist to beg her aid.

“Will I die with the child crushed inside me?”

“Not if you bear down when I tell you.”

Seven hard pushes and the baby was out. For all my terror, it slipped out easily, for it was tiny and serene. After a short respite, a wave of sharper pains assailed me. The midwife dove her hands back between my legs to tug out a larger infant, which was kicking. I fell back, panting, relieved that I had borne twins, not the misshapen creature with the three legs and enlarged skull that I had felt growing inside me.

The midwife swaddled the two infants, laid them beside me, and wiped her forehead, smearing it with blood. “The boy is dead, but the girl is living.”

Then the midwife’s face changed and I knew the worst—the girl was now dead as well. I made the sign of the cross on their pale foreheads, though it was too late, for their limbs, though perfectly formed and still warm to the touch, lay motionless. The midwife rubbed salt in their mouths and was about to close their eyelids, when she took a jump back, shrieking, “Their eyes are different colours!”

She shot out of the room, leaving me staring at the tiny corpses. The boy’s eyes were brown, the girl’s deep lapis blue. Through the open door, I heard her voice ascending from the tavern, accusing me of being a whore who had slept with two men at the same time. She was not far wrong, for I had lain with both Francesco and the Pope that same night. The boy had been conceived under Venus and the girl under Mars. My son was a child of love who gave up meekly. My daughter had lived a few minutes longer. She fought for her life before she succumbed to the harsh wind of Avignon. I took them in my arms, feeling the weight of their small, pitiable forms. I soaked my childbed with bitter tears and slept cradling my infants, until awakened by Perrette binding my stomach to support it. My arms were empty and my children gone. I knew, without being told, that Conmère had taken them to the cimetière des pauvres.

“You slept for several hours,” Perrette said. “Drink this to kill any lingering pain.”

I downed the potent liquor in one gulp, stood up to test my arms and legs, and found that I felt better when I moved about.

“We must go downstairs to eat,” she said, “or the innkeeper will come up to demand the same rent from you as he gets from me.”

We ate what the innkeeper put before us. He looked at me oddly, but when I paid him generously, his curiosity faded, as it usually did. He told us that the rising storm had attacked the Pope’s towers, loosening the building-stones, and that some of the townsfolk had got it into their heads that God was blasting the Pope for his sins. The door rattled as one of the Pénitents gris entered, filled his jug with ale, confided something to the innkeeper, and hurried out.

The innkeeper collected our trenchers. “The city marshal’s men are searching the quarter. You’d better find somewhere to hide.”

“Who are they looking for?” I asked.

“The sorcières who caused the storm.”

We were too late, for the midwife had returned with two armed sergeants. She pointed at me, testifying that I was the malefactor who had given birth to monstrous spawn with many-coloured jewels for eyes.

Perrette knocked the bench over as she rose. “What do you want with her?”

“We have come to collect you as well,” one of the sergeants said. “The devil is at work in this mistral. All the harlots must surrender for the crime of storm-raising.”

Twenty-four

T
HEY TOOK
all three of us—Conmère, Perrette, and me. As we were paraded north, we were joined by other women suspected of sorcery, who were being routed from ale-houses by other sergeants. One of the ale-wives stood her ground until a punch split her lip and made her malleable. A serving-girl ran away in fright. A sergeant chased her down, stabbed her twice, and left her body where it landed. We were docile now and moved quickly when prodded.