Maman told her, “Go at once for Father Arnaud at old Saint Martial.”
I stroked Maman’s cheek until a blow sounded on the door, knocking it open. It was Papa’s friend in his priest’s cassock, with Conmère behind him. He did not sit, but stood swinging his arms at his sides impatiently.
“You agreed that this would be best, Madame,” he said. “It is better done quickly for her sake and for yours.”
I crawled onto Maman’s bed to lay my head against her middle, which now felt cold and dead. She drew me towards her and wept, her fingers tangled in my hair. When her silver bracelet caught my eye, I gave it a spin.
“May I have this, Maman?”
“No, little one, for I am dying. I will need it to bring Papa to my side.”
“Why must you die to make him come?”
“When you are older, you will understand.” She felt for the empty perfume bottle on a ribbon around her neck, caught some of my tears in it, then her own, then pressed my fist around the bottle. “When the last trumpet sounds, I will fly to you to collect my tears. Now leave with the good Father and do not look back. Mind the nuns and learn your letters as Papa wished. I will be well where I am going.” She squeezed the breath out of me, then released me so abruptly that my feet shot down to the floor. When Conmère lurched towards her, wailing, Maman grasped her hand. “The Virgin will take better care of Solange than either you or I can do. Let her go where she will be fed and clothed.”
Conmère uttered a charm in the old tongue as the priest swung me onto his hip. He carried me screaming down the stairs, through the tavern, and across the plank over the canal. When he paused on the other side, I squirmed out of his arms, but got no further than his broad palm allowed.
“Let me go to Maman!”
He pressed me against the earth so I could not kick him. “Avignon is a city of men. It is no place for a young girl. Your grandmother is herself no better than a child. If you stay here with her, you will both starve.”
With his free hand, he dug in his alms-bag for a dry cake. I bit off a piece, tasting white flour, honey, raisins, and almonds. I shoved the rest in my mouth with two hands before he could take it back. After I had choked it down, his iron grip closed around my wrist.
“There are more cakes like that in the abbey where I am taking you.”
He stood me on my own two feet and gave me his wineskin to suck on. The cake was making its way into my stomach, where it filled the hollow that had ached for days. As we walked alongside the canal, the great wheels of the cloth-workers turned in a frenzy, driven by a river enraged and swollen by the full red moon.
Two
W
E FOLLOWED
the angry river on foot as it left the city, and met the freedom of the paths and fields upstream. Slowly, the ramparts fell behind in the distance. As Avignon disappeared into a cloud, the night bell of Notre-Dame-des-Doms rang out.
The priest crossed himself. “Your mother’s soul has left her body now.”
I knew this meant that Maman was dead, but I hoped to see her before long. I clutched her perfume bottle in my hand so her soul would know where to find me. The priest entered a borie at a junction and reappeared with a sleepy donkey. He hoisted me on the front, then mounted, his legs almost dragging on the earth. As we left the river on a well-trodden path, the donkey’s swaying lured me into a half-sleep. After a while, the priest climbed off to make the going easier. Then he made me slide off to walk as well, so he could lead the donkey along a narrower track. My toes were raw from pushing against my shoes by the time I saw the church tower ahead. Soon the abbey itself appeared, like a walled city with outbuildings scattered in the fields around it. My
nose caught the scent of thyme—like Conmère’s skin, but bitten and sharpened by the frost—and I slipped my hand out of the priest’s to run towards the high gates. There were no sounds but a night bird calling and twigs snapping underfoot, until a nun came out of the gatehouse to greet us, her keys clanging at her waist.
The priest said, “This is the child I told the abbess I would bring.”
“Leave her with me. You will be fed in the almshouse.” The gatekeeper pointed him towards a shadowy building outside the wall.
A water kettle was steaming on a fire near the gatehouse and the gatekeeper threw on vine cuttings to build up the heat. Then, with only the moon for light, she took out her knife and sheared my hair close to my skull. I squeezed my eyes shut, but she did not nick me once. She left to fetch something and I dug a hole in the soft earth to bury the perfume bottle so she couldn’t take it from me. I had just covered the hole when she was back with two buckets of cold water, which she poured into a tub.
“Take off your clothes.”
Since I didn’t move, she stripped the clothes over my head and lifted me into the cold water. I looked down at my naked body with its ice-blue veins, wondering if I would die like my blue brother. Even the kettle of scalding water she poured around my ankles barely took off the chill. I bottled up my tears and cursed her as fiercely as Conmère would have done.
“That is the last time you will speak in the old tongue,” she said, running a brush over a soap cake to scour the words from my mouth.
The soap stung so much I was afraid to say another word. She scrubbed my body, dried me, and clothed me in a homespun tunic, which had been warming near the fire. Then she threw my old garments on the flames, sparing my shoes to put back on my throbbing feet. Only now, with the stink of burning wool in my nostrils, did she unlock the abbey gates to push me through.
As the sun rose, bathing the sky in gold, bells rang like hammer-blows and nuns hurried into the cloister, forming a black line that
snaked past me into the church. A large girl with flying hair skipped after them, leaving the door ajar for me. Some words were spoken by an important woman in the chancel, then the nuns’ voices lifted in song and I was fed with joyful sound.
The girl was at my side as soon as the chanting ended. “Your fingers are white. Do this to heat them.” She crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her hands into her armpits. “I will show you how to do everything. We must be seated before Cook finishes beating the gong one hundred times.”
My arms folded like bird wings, I followed her into a refectory with trestle-tables at which nuns sat in complete silence. The sweet aroma of the food drew me forwards in spite of my fear and I climbed on a bench beside the girl. With gestures, she demonstrated how to tip the pitcher and how to fill my trencher from the vessels of savoury food. I was an apt pupil, eager to learn. When my face was greasy, she wiped her lips with her hem and I did the same. I gestured towards the single abbey cake on our small table. She broke it in two and served herself the bigger portion, but I ate my part gladly, for there were raisins in it.
Once the meal was over, she led me back into the empty church. She told me that her name was Elisabeth and that the nuns observed the rule of Saint Benedict. The abbey was Clairefontaine, after Agnès de Clairefontaine, the abbess. The long words came out oddly from Elisabeth’s mouth. Perhaps she had never had her mouth washed out, for she spoke almost as roughly as Conmère. She showed me where the ashlar blocks had shifted in one of the chapels, making a crawl space for an animal to climb through on all fours.
“This is how I go out after curfew,” she said, “but you are not allowed to.” From the church, she went ahead of me up the inner stairs to the lay dormitory. We entered a cold, dark cell, where Elisabeth pointed out a small bench hewn from sturdy oak, which would be mine, and a bed that was hers alone. At last, she noticed that I hadn’t spoken.
“You can talk now. The nuns must be silent after compline, but here we can make as much noise as we wish.”
I took the coarse blanket she gave me and laid it on my bed, well satisfied with my small empire. The bed was low and hard, little more than a straw pallet in a wooden frame, but I would be safe here until Maman came for me. My stomach was full and I was warmer than I had been for months. Although Elisabeth pretended not to want me, I could see that she had prepared for my arrival. On my lopsided bench sat a new candle, shorter than hers but just as useful. Beside it she had stacked some garments she had outgrown. She showed me how to fasten my new cloak to ward off draughts, then tied the cap snugly beneath my chin for me. What did I care that the cloak dragged along the floorboards? It had a wide, deep pouch to carry abbey cakes in.
When I thanked her, she reached for something on a ledge. “The abbess told me your mother is dead, like mine,” she said. “I use this sponge to collect my tears when I am sad. Would you like one too?”
I could only nod because my tears were already unbottling themselves and spilling hotly down my cheeks. She held out a little sponge that was almost as nicely rounded as hers.
“This is how you do it.” She dabbed my eyes and cheeks. “We will be sisters, but you must do everything I say because I am three years older. One day I will be a Benedictine, but you will not, for you are too small to be given to God. The abbess took you as a kindness, since you have no dowry to give the abbey.”
It was true I had brought nothing of value, only the perfume bottle that I had buried in the soft earth by the gatehouse. All that long day, I spoke only to Elisabeth, but learnt fifteen useful hand signals, mostly for food. That night in our beds, I listened to Elisabeth sucking noisily on her tongue until she fell asleep. Then I crept down the inner stairs into the north chapel and wriggled through the gap in the tumbled ashlar into the darkness. I sought my hiding place near the gatekeeper’s fire and dug until my fingers hit glass, unearthing the perfume bottle.
Safe in my splendid new pouch, it climbed up the stairs and into bed with me, where we waited for Maman together.
In the morning, the abbess sent for me. I opened the door of her house to find her sitting on a cushioned chair, eyes closed and lips moving as she worked her fingers along her beads. She was the important woman who had led the singing in church. I looked for something to do until she finished her paternosters. On a stand beside her was a curious box covered in leather, which I managed to slide over the edge of the stand and catch just before it banged against the floor. The hasp was locked, probably by the key I saw hanging from the abbess’s belt. The noise had jarred her from her prayers and I shrank into myself, hoping she would not rebuke me.
“What do you think it is?” Her words were sharp and clear, like nothing I had heard alongside the canal.
I made my mouth as round and red as hers and spoke as crisply as I could. “A box of alphabet letters.”
“You are not far wrong.” She was smiling at me. “It is a book of words made up of letters. When you are older, I will teach you how to read them. You must address me as Mother Agnes.”
“You are not my mother.”
“My child, your mother is dead. You will never see her again.”
My lip trembled. “That is not true. I will see Maman when her soul comes back for this.” I took the tiny bottle from my pouch to show her.
She pulled out the stopper, sniffed, then held the vessel to the light. “Are these your mother’s tears?”
“Yes, and mine too. I waited all night, but she did not come.”
Mother Agnes was silent for a time. “She will not come for many years. First, you must grow old, much older than I am. Hide this in a secret place and think no more about it.” She tucked the bottle back into my pouch. “What did your mother call you?”
“Solange,” I said. “
Sol
, like the sun.” I saw that she approved, which gave me courage. “I was born at Pentecost and thus my hair is red.”
“And
ange
for angel. It is a good name, for you are said to speak with the tongue of an angel.” She stood up to examine a map nailed to her wall. Her wooden stick pointed to the walled city of Avignon, then tapped along the winding blue river. “Your reputation for clairvoyance has travelled upstream along the Sorgue as far as our abbey.” The pointer caressed a little abbey painted brown and green. “Here is Bingen in the north”—the pointer tapped on another painted abbey—“where Saint Hildegarde resided. When she was three, Hildegarde was given to an abbey as an oblate, as you have been. She was so famous for her visions that she became the abbess and was consulted for her prophecy by popes and emperors.” The pointer stopped. “Do you know what prophecy is?”
“It is second sight,” I said, but she wanted more from me. I tried to think of something worthwhile. “Before I was born, I had a dream about a bishop.”
“Tell it to me now.”
I scratched my head with both hands, without finding anything to tell. “It’s gone now. How can I remember what I see inside my head?”
Her tone sharpened. “When you have a vision, you must remember it.”
She was not acting like a mother now. I threw myself on the floor beside her, burying my face in my arms. “This abbey has too many rules and I am too small to learn them!”
The pointer reached over to tap my skull gently. “You will, my child, for it is your destiny. You have the gift of clairvoyance like Hildegarde.”
“I don’t want to have a destiny!”
“Do not worry. Your head will grow bigger to understand these mysteries.”
She put down the pointer and chose another book, this one with a scarlet cover. Then she sat on her cushioned chair, spread the book across her knees, and beckoned me closer. I slid across the floor and raised my head to see empty lines as neat as shelves. After a while, I stood up beside her to feel the small, even ridges with my fingertips.
“How did you make the rows so straight?”
“With a stylus. Each of these lines must be filled with words. This is where we will write down your visions.” She lifted the page to my nose so I could sniff it.
“It smells like a barn.”
“This is vellum, Solange. Never forget the scent, for only the rarest books are made from it.”
Three
I
DISCOVERED THAT
the nuns rose with the sun and retired when it set. Eight times a day the bells called them to the divine offices, first prime, then terce, sext, and none. Vespers were at sunset, compline at nightfall, and in the full of night nocturns and lauds.