Muse (31 page)

But I was different. Even in a modest surcot, my hair covered by a wimple, I was taunted crudely. Some shouted
la Popessa
and some
la poule
. Ahead, dangling from a gibbet, was an effigy—manifestly big with child—gowned in a scarlet robe. The effigy’s towering coiffure was a mockery of mine at Ceccano’s banquet. But at least I had not been strung up in the flesh. I hoped that Clement had not seen the coarse placard slung around her neck,
Whore of Babylon
. Petrarch’s words had a habit of spurting through this city like flames through hollow straws.

My guard retreated, the mob howled, and the lane became a mass of jumping flesh. A sow galloped between the legs of my palfrey, causing
her to shy. A bucket of slops flung from an upper window splashed over me. At last, someone acted. The papal almoner trotted up on a squat grey pony to scatter coins, which cleared the mob out of my path. One of my guards climbed to the effigy to cut it down and the rest chased down the three worst troublemakers, then dragged them into the crossing, where the points of daggers prodded them to confess. With the heat of the steel at their backs, they would not be long about it.

I spurred my mount forwards to close the gap between the Pope and me. Ahead, just inside the gate, stood the thirteen paupers, clad in their own rags, their feet and toenails filthy. Even at four paces, they had a ferocious smell, but Clement did not buckle. I heard him confess as he inclined his forehead, “I am a sinner amongst sinners.” If any man would bear God’s yoke, he would. He climbed from his mule without assistance, knelt before the paupers, and reached for the sponge to bathe their feet with his bare hands.

Thirty-eight

I
ALSO WAS FEELING
the heat at my back. Believing in my own powers, I had flown too close to the sun and been singed. I sought out Hugues Roger to ask what had become of the prisoners, wanting to forgive them and thereby gain forgiveness for my own excess. He took me to Renaud de Pons, master of the palace jail. His skin thorny and his breath foul, he was from hide to hair a complete villain. He whistled a cheery hornpipe as he walked us to the torture chamber. The knaves had been tortured to extract confessions, then killed because they had nothing to say. The leader had been dismembered first. His head, limbs, trunk, and bagged entrails sat in a river of blood, waiting to be nailed to the city gates to warn against further treason.

I pressed my forehead against the wall to blind myself. “Even if they made that effigy, it was no more than I deserved for my pride.”

De Pons snorted. “Do you want them to hang you from a gibbet?”

Hugues Roger guided me into the corridor, away from the butchery. “Henceforth, you must stay within the palace.”

“I would rather have the freedom of the city.”

For once, he did not growl at me. “Any attempt on you is, ipso facto, an attempt on the Pope. He is most secure inside the tour du Pape. That Florentine ambassador is spreading scandal about the counterfeit bridge—
le pont postiche
, he calls it—that dumped the guild-masters in the river. His confrère Francesco Petrarch has learnt that you are carrying Clement’s child and is dipping his pen in vitriol again.”

“At least my loyalty to Clement is no longer in doubt.”

His jaw twisted. “No, I’ll give you that. You’ve managed to convince my brother that the child is his. I will move you into the family apartments, where you will be better protected.”

My garments and jewels weighed on me like winter livery. What I most wanted was to choose my own companions, to go into the city at will, to buy my own goods in the marketplace. But that was not possible, and as long as Clement believed my child was his, she would be safe—and so would I.

My daughter quickened on the eightieth day, the day her soul entered her body. Fœtus animatus. In bed with Clement, I shifted his hand to my belly, but he could not feel the life inside. He now spent more time with his master mason than with me. His plans for the new wings were being translated to stone: firm, white blocks from the best quarries. As the tour de la Garde-robe rose, the Italian opposition grew. Every piece of masonry, every stone and nail, every fortification, was an insult to the Romans. Jean de Louvres and Matteo Giovannetti were imported to direct the work, but the hundreds of men who dragged the blocks on sledges, dressed them with mallet and chisel, then winched them into place were from our seven parishes, and soon Clement was easing back into their favour.

In the étuves at the base of the new tower, my sweat mingled with Clement’s in the aromatic steam. This caldarium was Clement’s idea and he sat next to me, counting the age marks I had cut into my thigh.

“Why did you stop at seventeen?”

Because I met Francesco. But I could not tell Clement that.

“This looks like a chalice,” he said, touching my birthmark. “You have borne one son and will bear another. Your new son will be a citizen by right of birth. When he is fifteen, I will appoint him bishop of the city.”

I felt a flat-footed blow inside my womb—the kick of a girl, not a boy. I moved his hand and this time he could feel it. “And if God chooses to give us a daughter?”

“I will make her a dynastic marriage. I was once betrothed myself. As a young clerk, I fell in love and fancied myself a troubadour. However, I could not get the girl with child, so her father voided the agreement and took his daughter back. That was when I espoused the church instead. Soon I was an impetuous young monk at the University of Paris, as sterile as a mule.” He gave me time to apprehend his meaning—that he knew he hadn’t got me with child—then tapped my belly. “I assume this one is Petrarch’s as well. I approved his petition to legitimize your son since Petrarch is a thorn in my side and it will hasten his departure. Does he know he fathered this second child?”

“No.” At least I could be honest about this.

“It must be kept that way. I do not object to being thought the father, for there is no greater fool in Avignon than a prelate who cannot get a courtesan with child. But if you divulge the truth, prophet that you are, countess that you are not, I must cast you out.”

He took me—in the heat and sweat of the caldarium, my back against the lead bathing tub, my eyes fixed on the clementine rose sculpted in the vaulting—more roughly than he had ever done. I had risked his affection and my life for a moment’s pleasure in his library and could not gamble on his forgiveness another time.

In the days ahead, Clement toiled at his sermons in his new study, soothed by his two gardens, the one outside his window and the
woodland fresco painted inside to remind him of his Limousin birthplace. When his sermons were too plain to suit his ear, he asked me to bring books from the library so he could steal from others, even Petrarch, to feather his texts with borrowed plumage. And now, more of Francesco’s writings were coming to light, in which he did not spare the Pope. In a new sonnet, he preached that
From this impious Babylon from whence all shame has fled, I too have fled to save my life
. It was as if each man wanted to be the other, for as Francesco’s poems soared into sermons about the cardinals’ vices, the Pope’s sermons slipped indecently into rhyme.

Félicité slid from me easily, embracing her destiny without complaint. The astrologer cast her horoscope, pronouncing her birth auspicious. Mighty planets, he told the Pope, had contested at her engendering. Her little heart beat wildly beneath my fingers, two beats for every one of mine. I kissed her fontanelle, and vowed to guard her better than I had her brother. One day, I hoped, we would both take up residence on our lands at Turenne, where the wind blew free of clerics’ perfume.

Clement presided at my daughter’s baptism in the small chapel, twelve royal feet by twelve royal feet, which jutted like a pious afterthought from the banqueting hall. A few canons attended, a few boy choristers, but it was no ceremony to speak of. Clement looked tolerantly at Félicité until she shrieked on being dunked into the font. My servant rushed her away and her cries diminished down the corridor. Behind me, the sound of velvet creeping against velvet: the niece with the tight brown curls, who had added ermine to her wrists and throat. In the boil of women in the palace, she was rising to the top like scum, eager to interpose herself between the Pope and me. Instead of following my child as I wished, I went to Clement, who was running his hand over the new coat of plaster.

“I must choose a subject for the frescoes,” he said. “Matteo Giovannetti is ready to paint this chapel.”

“Why not dedicate it to Saint Martial to rival Ceccano’s chapel at Gentilly,” I suggested, knowing he had a soft spot for French saints. “He was a Limousin like you, and if Saint Peter is pictured giving Martial his rod, it will vindicate the Pope’s residence in Avignon.”

He allowed himself a smile. “Your advice is both timely and political.”

“You could be the model for him.” I ran my hand across his stubble. “Yours is the chin of a saint, especially with those black hairs on it.”

He caught my hand and held it tightly. “Your laughter echoes in these stark corridors. I have missed you at my side, Countess.”

With each day, I found new ways to stay there. Although Clement had washed the paupers’ feet, he was still smarting, for reports of papal luxury were migrating along the trade routes of Europe. In penance, he pledged to increase the supply of grain to the Pignotte, and within six months the almshouse was giving away twenty thousand loaves a day. Even so, Clement’s banquets did not cease, for he did not want the dignitaries to take their appetites to enemy tables. The number of men residing in the palace grew to four hundred, four hundred and fifty, five hundred. Women navigated the corridors in garments with ties and clasps that served no purpose except to delight the eye. Their provenance as murky as my own, they crept into antechambers and forged alliances in bed. Even the new camerlengo left his door ajar to view the palace nieces, his counting board heaped with the wealth of spoil from prelates too spiritual to father heirs.

Before long, Félicité was begging words from me as other children begged sweetmeats, and thus she grew clever but thin, strong inside but frail outside. Each night she fell asleep in my arms, tickling her nose with a feather until her hand fell quiet. In the day, I mended rare books and commissioned new ones, parcelling out the gatherings to the scribes. To be near Félicité, I often worked in my chamber, where we listened to the steady chinking of the masons’ chisels outside. One by one, the old buildings were demolished, the rock was levelled, and the workmen shouldered away the debris in paniers. As the new wing rose, stone by
chiselled stone, Félicité learnt to recognize each man by his hat and girth and named him in a child’s fashion. Dust, mud, noise, and blocks of limestone—she re-enacted each day’s labour with pebbles and sticks inside our chamber. I now lived two lives, one as Clement’s consort and one in the labyrinth where I raised my daughter. The less seen of Félicité, the better. Although I kept her away from the public chambers, I took her frequently to the Pope’s ménagerie to feed the animals.

In summer, we found an orphaned crow in the garden. We mothered it, kept it warm in a woolly box, and dripped milk down a ribbon into its beak. Soon it was tottering about our chamber like a drunk bishop. When Félicité released the crow in the garden, one of Clement’s nephews caught its wings and pinned them under his feet. Félicité tossed a rock at him to make him stop, but hit the gargoyle on the Pope’s fountain instead, chipping its ugly flaring nostrils. As a result, the children had to appear before Clement in the audience chamber, who chose to make an amusing example of them to the day’s petitioners. Félicité was crying, for she was not yet four—too young to tell a genial Pope from a harsh one.

The boy chorister, who was twice her age, argued his own case against her. “Your Holiness, this girl is a sorcière like her mother. That crow is her familiar. So are the rocks, for she commanded them to take to the air to attack me.”

The ingenuity of this delighted Clement, who called his nephew to his knee to rub his hair, then forbade Félicité from entering the papal garden. As he gave his judgement, he scrutinized her tearful face, since I had allowed him few glimpses of her over the years. Was he looking for Francesco’s features, or plotting a betrothal between the nephew and Félicité? To secure titles and lands, Clement had made alliances between even younger children. When my daughter returned to me, I pushed her head into my skirts and ran her from the chamber.

I knew what he had seen. At birth, Félicité’s hair had been a papal gold like Clement’s, but it had now darkened. Her skin was cream
skimmed from the top of milk, deepening towards olive as each day passed. I started to wash her complexion with almond and her hair with camomile, which only made her eyes look blacker. Her maid began to comment on her appearance. Before long, our servants would whisper that a swarthy man had fathered my child, perhaps an Italian. Someone—the camerlengo, the French allies—would delve into Clement’s past, and unearth a series of mistresses without children. They would conclude the Pope was sterile and accuse me of whoring with another man. Clement would be forced to discard me. I might be jailed in a tower like Saint Barbara, or roasted in the hot baths like Saint Cecilia. And what would become of my sweet daughter?